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fullroundaction posted:I didn’t even know there was supposed to be a moral quandary just watching the show. Any parent would have done what Joel did in that scenario (though likely not as successfully). To me it was him just finally going “okay I am finally ready to let go and be her dad” or whatever. This. I see that it's supposed to be a huge moral quandary but at the same time I kind of shrug and go "any parent would do the same." Even in a way out there hypothetical where the cure is going to immediately work and turn back all the zombies into humans and wave a magic wand, I'm still rooting for Joel to go save Ellie.
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Mar 16, 2023 10:36
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toggle posted:Is the game fun to play? Yeah, definitely. I haven't played it myself but some friends are big fans, and then they got to be extras in the TV show. A lot of people are about to have the experience of playing the game after having seen the show.
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Mar 16, 2023 11:00
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toggle posted:Is the game fun to play? No. Just watch the cutscenes on Youtube. The fighting and stealth gets old really fast.
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Mar 16, 2023 11:33
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Just watching the cutscenes is a horrific idea because it will be missing an immense amount of storytelling and conversation made in between the cutscenes, as part of gameplay. Just as cutscenes act as the connective tissue between gameplay, the gameplay acts as interstitial space between cutscenes. At it's worse, you'll completely end up misinterpreting the storyline. That's literally what happened with The Last of Us 2, the cutscenes got leaked, huge sections got taken out of context, and it was used as the casus belli for an alt right movement to try and blockade the game.
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Mar 16, 2023 12:22
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So watch a playthrough with no commentary, then.
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Mar 16, 2023 13:06
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toggle posted:Is the game fun to play? Imo, yes. Tons of fun. If the game play starts to bore you, switch to an easier mode and you can still get the full flavor of the story.
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Mar 16, 2023 13:09
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I'm replaying it currently and it's a good time. The gameplay can get repetitive but new weapons & locations help keep it fresh. I do feel like its biggest strength is the story though, and if you've seen the show you know the story almost word for word. You can probably find the remastered version for cheap and beat it in 12-15 hours.
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Mar 16, 2023 13:12
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Hobo Clown posted:You can probably find the remastered version for cheap and beat it in 12-15 hours. Yes, it's a great game with a great story. The PS4 Remastered version still looks and plays good on a PS5, though the new PS5 version looks even better (a LOT more overall detail) and has a number of minor tweaks (and costs a lot more), but they're essentially identical in terms of gameplay.
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Mar 16, 2023 13:29
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bucketybuck posted:I don't think they are incompetent because they are fireflies, I think they are incompetent because they are killing the only immune person mere hours after meeting her for the first time. Meeting her for the first time? Marlene has known about Ellie almost since the moment she was born, and they had her locked up and were probably doing experiments on her for a while before Joel and Tess got recruited to transport her. It has taken months to get to the hospital - you think no one would have discussed or theorized about how the cure would work in all that time? I'm pretty sure they already knew it wasn't as simple as using her blood - they probably tested that out in Boston.
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Mar 16, 2023 14:04
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TyrantWD posted:Meeting her for the first time? I think the issue most people complaining about the ending have with this is that there's zero indication that they were running tests before, you have to headcanon almost all of that. This kind of writing can work but here in this show I thought it hurt the story.
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Mar 16, 2023 14:30
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isn't a huge part of the game and show's thesis is that all the characters (or NPCs) have lives just as complex and deep as the protagonists? Wouldn't that being drilled into the audience's head every episode imply that Marlene & the Fireflies have done a lot of thinking / debating on how best to approach the extraction of the mutated fungus? Like, it's not a huge stretch given the writing that there's a lot going on that just isn't told to the audience because everything is from Joel & Ellie's perspective, and so we only know what they know. I guess I'm just saying that the debate over whether or not the cure would work, or how medically accurate the idea is, is really missing the forest for the trees on what the story actually wants you to think about. I do agree that the show could've been a bit more concrete with it just so we could avoid yet another decade of rehashing this same pedantic line of argument
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Mar 16, 2023 14:40
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It usually goes into their perspectives though. Bill, Frank, Sam, Henry, Kahtleen, Tommy and even David get scenes from their own point of view. In this last episode though Marlene and the fireflies' side is completely absent (other than the flashback of Ellie's birth), we get all the information from Joel's.
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Mar 16, 2023 14:59
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Even the Fireflies think that the Fireflies are incompetent. Just ask the doctor leaving voice recorders around the university. I’m putting this in spoiler tags because it’s exposition that was only given in the game, in case people wish to play it and appreciate the game for its own sake but to be clear this is not season two material. This is stuff that would have been in episode six. Office recorder posted:We lost two more guards to infected attacks. They're about to go have another goddamn meeting about the safety of this lab. All of our equipment is here. All of our data is here. All the personnel have gotten used to living here. I'm gonna run another test... otherwise this incompetence will drive me insane. Lab recorder posted:That's four pallets of lab equipment all packed up and ready to go. Now - big question is what do we do with all you guys. They say the tainted batch needs to be put down. You know what I say? I say screw that. Who made a bigger sacrifice than you, right? If anyone deserves to run free out there it's-- Hey, easy. Agh... poo poo. Oh no. It bit me. Oh my god... Platystemon fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 15:04
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Frionnel posted:It usually goes into their perspectives though. Bill, Frank, Sam, Henry, Kahtleen, Tommy and even David get scenes from their own point of view. In this last episode though Marlene and the fireflies' side is completely absent (other than the flashback of Ellie's birth), we get all the information from Joel's. in order to show that the side characters also have complex lives, yeah. But it's important to only stick with Joel & Ellie's perspectives in the climax & end of the story, otherwise it's not as emotionally resonant
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Mar 16, 2023 15:11
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Hobo Clown posted:I'm replaying it currently and it's a good time. The gameplay can get repetitive but new weapons & locations help keep it fresh. I do feel like its biggest strength is the story though, and if you've seen the show you know the story almost word for word. It's on one of the PS+ plans too. Definitely worth playing, I'm going through it again and it's interesting to see what's changed and what hasn't. Plus the violence keeps it nice and fresh, lotsa satisfying crunchy heads to stomp in. Chello De Don posted:isn't a huge part of the game and show's thesis is that all the characters (or NPCs) have lives just as complex and deep as the protagonists? Wouldn't that being drilled into the audience's head every episode imply that Marlene & the Fireflies have done a lot of thinking / debating on how best to approach the extraction of the mutated fungus? Like, it's not a huge stretch given the writing that there's a lot going on that just isn't told to the audience because everything is from Joel & Ellie's perspective, and so we only know what they know. The second game is brutal about letting you know the people are killing had lives, the NPCs call out for their friends and get real upset when they find them all bashed up. XboxPants posted:I have a legitimate question for doubters. When Joel said "cordyceps grows in the brain", despite him having absolutely zero neuroscience or mycology background, and despite that real cordyceps specifically does not grow in the brain, did you accept that as being true? That you should just assume that was one of the premises of the world that the writer wanted you to accept? Well, the world hasn't actually ended in real life but the show is post-apocalyptic in setting but nobody is even pointing that out! For real though, I am not against debating the details of a show or anything, but I think the show is fairly clear that while the Fireflies are not the most well-oiled of machines, the possibility that Ellie could be the key to a cure/vaccine is real. I don't really see the problem in accepting scientifically "unsound "things when it's in the context of a fictional world like here -- like yea in reality cordyceps doesn't infect ant brains but they got little itty-bitty stupid brains anyways, I'm cool with it being a more complex human infection here. Tumble fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 15:21
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XboxPants posted:I have a legitimate question for doubters. When Joel said "cordyceps grows in the brain", despite him having absolutely zero neuroscience or mycology background, and despite that real cordyceps specifically does not grow in the brain, did you accept that as being true? That you should just assume that was one of the premises of the world that the writer wanted you to accept? The show & the game present a lot of environmental lore like FEDRA posters, X-rays, documents, etc. where one can extrapolate that the mechanisms of the fungal infection are well known at this point by most survivors (like how everyone now knows that cancer is essentially mutated cells). So it's not unrealistic for Joel to at least know the basics of how the fungus works, even as a layman.
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Mar 16, 2023 15:26
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The Last Of Us Part 1 (the PS5 total remake) is coming to PC at the end of the month as well. Play "Part 1" instead of "Remastered" for the best experience, they really did a good job making a 10 year old game current gen.
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Mar 16, 2023 15:32
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It'll be $50 though. If you have a PS4, the remastered game can be had for  probably. Part I is prettier but I don't know if it's $40 prettier. I bought it for a third time on PS5 and will do so on PC (when it goes on a steam sale) but I'm a huge fan so that's a little different
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Mar 16, 2023 15:38
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smoobles posted:The Last Of Us Part 1 (the PS5 total remake) is coming to PC at the end of the month as well. I was bummed when they only put it out on PS5, it's just remade in the second games engine and it's not like basically every other game isn't still getting released on PS4 still since they haven't been able to get as many PS5s sold as they wanted, but I get why they wanted some exclusive stuff to help them sell too. I'm still deciding whether to get a PS5 or build a PC (probably PC) but I do wish I could get the remakes in the meantime. Ah well. The remaster is good still, but the stuff Naughty Dog can do with even last-gen console horsepower is crazy, they manage to pack their games full of detail - I spent so much time just fiddling with the rope physics in TLoU2. Chello De Don posted:The show & the game present a lot of environmental lore like FEDRA posters, X-rays, documents, etc. where one can extrapolate that the mechanisms of the fungal infection are well known at this point by most survivors (like how everyone now knows that cancer is essentially mutated cells). So it's not unrealistic for Joel to at least know the basics of how the fungus works, even as a layman. Especially since the infection was known for a while before things collapsed. It makes total sense that people would know the basics about how it worked just because it would have been like... the biggest news story and event in world history by the time poo poo kicked off. Tumble fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 15:53
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TyrantWD posted:Meeting her for the first time? She immediately pawned her off to Fedra instead of finding her a family like her mother wanted. She then only comes back into Marlene's vision when the 17 year old new recruit they stupidly leave alone with no supervision gets herself and Ellie bitten by loving around in a mall. what experiments do you think Marlene was doing in an empty Boston apartment building? One that is being visited by local drug smugglers and scumbags. As far as we see their method of determining she was immune was lock her in a room for a few days and ask her to count to 10. And yes, they did think about how her immunity might work, and then without doing any more tests to confirm their theories they immediately decide to kill her.
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Mar 16, 2023 16:08
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does the show or the game ever give any explicit mention of how long Joel & Ellie are unconscious before the hospital segment?
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Mar 16, 2023 16:11
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WoodrowSkillson posted:She immediately pawned her off to Fedra instead of finding her a family like her mother wanted. Do we know that for sure? Its certainly possible Marlene placed her with a family inside the Boston QZ and then something happened to that family. I don't recall them giving any detail of her life between Marlene taking her as an infant and her being in the FEDRA boot camp.
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Mar 16, 2023 16:24
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i mean sure yes but that is not shown and all we know is Ellie is an orphan like the others in the fedra military school
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Mar 16, 2023 16:30
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spacing in vienna posted:This. I see that it's supposed to be a huge moral quandary but at the same time I kind of shrug and go "any parent would do the same." Even in a way out there hypothetical where the cure is going to immediately work and turn back all the zombies into humans and wave a magic wand, I'm still rooting for Joel to go save Ellie. yeah. to be honest my feelings on TLOU were never as glowing as they were in those precious few days between when i finished the game and when I went online to read other people's thoughts about it and found out that for apparently everyone else "Joel's choice" didn't refer to the authentically emotionally nuanced climax where a father chooses to withhold a painful truth from his daughter and we're left to grapple with the complex ambiguity of her reaction to this and the unknown future of how it might shape their relationship as father and daughter, but instead referred to the previous sequence where he chose to rescue her from the obvious villains trying to cut her head off in a dirty basement because they were convinced they could use her brain to save the world, rather than leave politely like they asked him it's not just that it's not a very interesting moral quandary because it has an obvious right answer for me personally. it's that even if it doesn't for everybody (still a wild take 10 years in), if that's the big engaging Question of the game/show, it's incredibly loving boring and immediately diminishes the story for me from interesting meditation on parenting and responsibility, sacrifice and loss to a standard zombie movie/video game trolley problem scenario with prestige window dressing. it's boring. people talked about TLOU as elevating game storytelling, and to me at least for a few days that felt true for how it culminated in such a mundane but relatably mature human drama of a parent and child, in such a small moment that I now get the sense druckmann's intent was in line with that as well rather than how I had experienced it just sort of sapped any interest I had to engage with the material at a level of seriousness beyond whole foods brand walking dead Mandrel fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Mar 16, 2023 |
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Mar 16, 2023 17:11
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overall i appreciate the nihilism and message that nothing matters and don't try and love again cause it just ends in tragedy for everyone involved
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Mar 16, 2023 17:20
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Mandrel posted:that I now get the sense druckmann's intent was in line with that as well rather than how I had experienced it just sort of sapped any interest I had to engage with the material at a level of seriousness beyond whole foods brand walking dead This and in the sequel Ellie is legit mad at Joel which I don't think boils down to simply general trust issues after learning the truth. Otherwise what you wrote would be like the people who liked The Dark Knight until they learned other people were slobbering over the choices Joker threw Batman's way.
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Mar 16, 2023 17:24
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Chello De Don posted:does the show or the game ever give any explicit mention of how long Joel & Ellie are unconscious before the hospital segment? No I mean intuitively you would think it's a few hours but maybe they drugged him and kept him out for a month 
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Mar 16, 2023 17:32
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Game 1 ending spoilers below that match season 1 ending spoilers - not sure what the current rule is about that and will put behind a tag (or remove if need be) The first time I played the game I remember being vaguely spoiled on its ending, in that there was a choice the player makes and there was a lot of online discussion of "what did you choose?" I had assumed the choice would be "save Ellie" or "save humanity" and wondered what I would pick as I played through the final levels. Turns out the only ending is to save Ellie, and the "choice" I thought I had heard about is whether or not Joel kills all the unarmed doctors in the room with her. It's not even presented as a decision point, it's just a thing you can either do or not do and has no consequence either way.
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Mar 16, 2023 17:40
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Bright Bart posted:This and in the sequel Ellie is The spoiler thread is that-away.
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Mar 16, 2023 17:56
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Khanstant posted:I'm not being deliberately obtuse. While I wouldn't doubt they my intend for that to be the source of the immunity, and that's fine for this fiction, in reality that's dangerous and how we end up with so much bullshit medicine and quack cures. The fun question is can Ellie meaningfully consent at all at given her age and with the alternative being living life as a pariah to the only group of people with power over in her life? I'm not sure asking her would make them that much better people
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Mar 16, 2023 18:10
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TyrantWD posted:Meeting her for the first time? The only tests done on Ellie in Boston were to see if she had shaky hands or could count to ten yet. There is absolutely nothing on screen that indicates anything else was done in that lovely apartment block by those 4 fireflies. Its insulting to my intelligence to fanwank that they had done all the scientific research there already and and that the only thing left to do was the brain scooping.
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Mar 16, 2023 18:17
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Chello De Don posted:I guess I'm just saying that the debate over whether or not the cure would work, or how medically accurate the idea is, is really missing the forest for the trees on what the story actually wants you to think about. People keep saying this, but the problem is that what they want us to think about is step two, and we cannot reach that point because of how badly they bungled step one. I call it the Greater Doughnut Theory. There are two doughnuts placed in front of Joel, one of them is a mint chocolate doughnut. Now the writers want us to know and understand that Joel loving loves mint chocolate, the taste of it inspires deep joy in him and triggers some precious memories. The writers point is that he was always going to choose the mint doughnut and we should appreciate the implications of that and move onto what the story actually wants us to think about. Unfortunately the other doughnut is a poo poo doughnut. Its literally a turd, a poo poo log in a circle with some sprinkles on top. So when Joel chooses the mint doughnut we don't think, "Joel loving loves mint chocolate and was always going to choose mint", no, instead we think, "Of course he choose that one, the other is literally a turd with sprinkles". The writers hosed up their own story by presenting a choice that was no choice at all.
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Mar 16, 2023 18:29
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Blasmeister posted:The fun question is can Ellie meaningfully consent at all at given her age and with the alternative being living life as a pariah to the only group of people with power over in her life? I'm not sure asking her would make them that much better people Yeah she can meaningfully consent to be sacrificed here lol especially if they can just not ask and still do it, children aren't like, free resources for anyone to use. Asking definitely doesn't make them that much better people, they are incapable of being good people that's not a possibility or consideration. Asking just establishes an absolute bare minimum floor of "hey, given the opportunity to do what we were always going to do no matter what, if given an easy path to not do it in an evil way, we'll go ahead and take it, why not?" Instead they don't ask why not, they just do it. So even giving the writers all the benefit of the doubt and 100% if Joel walks away they have some new medicine immediately and magically mass produce it and everyone can start butt chugging it en masse -- them never even doing the most weak ineffectual attempt to even sit down, have a meal and shower, and loving talk to the kid for any time at all, they throw a flashbang and dr nick cracks his knuckles and gets to work -- gently caress em all, throw em in the trash I also don't think if they had asked it's enough of a lesser-evil to make me really care if Joel kills them, but it might make me consider it briefly which is closer to the moral dilemma I think they wanted to make, and both the show and game don't do a good enough job of presenting it. Joel is also obviously a bad person and I'm not going to cry a river if any of the people he's killing try to kill him either, or if one of those nurses take up hunting Joel down and killing him.
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Mar 16, 2023 18:32
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Yep the Greater Doughnut Theory checks out to me. The Fireflies as portrayed are barely more than your average raiders. So Joel murking every single one of them feels no different than all the other times. Doesn't really feel like a climax. If the Fireflies had their poo poo together and idk the doctor sat down and walked it through with Joel, that would be different. But they just kick him out at gunpoint. At that point you have to wonder why they don't just kill him, and now you're making contrivances.
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Mar 16, 2023 18:37
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bucketybuck posted:So when Joel chooses the mint doughnut we don't think, "Joel loves mint chocolate and was always going to choose mint", no, instead we think, "Of course he choose that one, the other is literally a turd with sprinkles".
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Mar 16, 2023 18:46
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Substitute the poo poo donut with a piece of used toilet paper marked with Sharpie that says "IOU one DONET (tastees gud)"
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Mar 16, 2023 18:48
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LividLiquid posted:Can you explain why saving the whole of humanity is a poo poo covered in sprinkles? there is no credible method to do this and taking ellies brain out wit ha circular saw from home depot is not it
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Mar 16, 2023 18:48
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Okay, but the show telling you a thing and you not liking it isn't the same as the show not saying it.
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Mar 16, 2023 18:53
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The point is, unless you establish that the Fireflies are good guys making a difficult but necessary choice, there's little weight to Joel murdering them. It doesn't tell us anything new. And the show rushed things and didn't do a good enough job of making the Fireflies look like trustworthy good guys. So the hospital scene doesn't hit as hard. We've already seen Joel killing bad guys to save Ellie. It would hit in a totally different and interesting way if we saw Joel killing good guys to save Ellie.
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Mar 16, 2023 19:16
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I think it's a fair criticism that the Fireflies being so firmly established as bumbling dipshits takes away from the moral and emotional implications of Joel deciding to slaughter the idealistic revolutionaries who were fighting for a better world. I also see why it's frustrating for people who want to engage with the thesis of the show without a bunch of pedantic technocratic nitpicking. It's like if you're trying to set up a trolley problem and someone keeps interrupting to point out the safety features on trolleys and how they can jam that thing or signal this other thing. But for me the sheer comedy value of the Fireflies being such garbage at everything is just where my mind floats to every time. Like imagine in a rare moment of intelligence they had shot Joel the second he made it absolutely clear with his crazy eyes that he was going to turn on them. There are so many potential points of failure for them to dive into dick first before they roll out a global vaccine. I can just picture them piling into that SUV with a cooler labeled CURE and then smashing right into a wall, getting gunned down by raiders, blown up by FEDRA, trying to distribute it and starting a riot... These are the guys who tried to buy a battery and lost 10 men, an ear, and some intestines.
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Mar 16, 2023 19:28
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