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I just got around to playing this and I'm at the point where I'm now playing as Abby (day 1). I kinda get the feeling I'm supposed to be developing sympathy for her and that the game is designed around me doing heinous poo poo to people who are "bad, no wait they were just normal people all along". However, I can't. She murdered Joel because he protected Ellie from getting murdered. Like, Joel and Ellie were never given a choice IIRC. Sure Ellie would have probably gone along with it (and might have been able to convince Joel) but they straight up didn't get a say in it. So gently caress Abby and gently caress her dad for trying to murder Ellie for "the greater good". gently caress her for living in what looks like what passes for luxury in this world yet still hunting down and murdering Joel. gently caress her friends too, as they've been nothing but assholes for the first half of the game. I'm pretty sure I killed them all in self defence of myself or someone else. Am I weird for thinking that?
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Sep 7, 2020 00:31
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 03:13 |
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Just finished it and I'm kinda meh on the end. Maybe I'm quite straight forward but I just don't think Abbey deserved to live. I mean it pretty much felt like ND did everything they could to forcibly humanise her with nothing but situational things, right down to her being tied up and starved at the end. But none of that feels like there was any redemptive character arc. She was still a self serving murderer right up to the end where she was about to DELIBERATELY slit the throat of an unconscious pregnant woman. She only stopped because she was caught by here new buddy. Let's not forget that she also shot Jesse before that (granted that was a lucky headshot), but her head shot of Tommy while he was on the ground defenceless was not. You can bet your arse that if she hadn't been caught by the rattlers she'd likely have been the same horrible person she was before when facing Ellie. The more I think about it the more it seems like the game is forcibly designed around making you empathise with Abby. Right down to trying to make us forget about what she did to Joel so that it doesn't seem out of place for Ellie to let her go at the end. Like Ellie was having constant nightmarish flashbacks about Joel being brutally murdered right in front of her. She even had one briefly at the end. But because its been at least however long since we last saw that and we've absorbed so much more poo poo since then, it's less raw to us as players. Like if we replayed the full Joel death scene again right before that fight (as it was presumably running through Ellies head) then Abby dying would have felt fitting.
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Sep 11, 2020 22:52
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Bust Rodd posted:Whether or not you feel like Abby deserved to die feels somewhat couched in how much you value her fighting to save Lev and his sister throughout the game. If that doesn’t change your mind, what Abby does to save this perfect stranger she would have just as easily no-scoped 6 months from now, then that’s ok, but that’s the humanization in journey Meh, as far as I'm concerned, they're no strangers to Abby. From the moment they first save her in the forest, they become part of her "pack" who she then readily fucks everyone else over for with horrible actions. If she'd just bumped into them in the street and they hadn't done something to save her she'd have given zero shits about them even if she knew their plight. Or worse, hypothetically, if she'd found out one of them had killed one of her other pack members from earlier in the game you can bet she'd have put a bullet in them without thinking.
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Sep 12, 2020 00:31
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bobjr posted:I feel like Ellie killing a pregnant woman loses the point a little when she's unaware she's pregnant and is actively trying to kill her. But overall that scene is Owen being more dumb than anything else. Exactly. Ellie is the good one here because that was accidental/self defence. She even fell apart after it. Don't forget that Abbey's friends are all as lovely as she is. Hell I'd even go as far to say that Mel was horrifically negligent to her baby given how pregnant she was and yet she insisted she go out and about fighting scars and leaping about warehouse rooftops trying to ape Nathan Drake. Abby, on the other hand, was going to outright slit the throat of an unconscious woman who she knew was pregnant. If you wanna talk about humanising. Any humanising/growth you might have felt in her should have pretty much been wiped away by what she was about to do there until she saw that Lev was going to see her do it. That was her real character and while the game doesn't cover it the immediate aftermath, given everything we saw of her, I doubt there was any sleepless remorse over what she was about to do.
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Sep 12, 2020 08:28
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Dan Didio posted:'the good one' Relatively speaking to Abby, i'd say yeah.
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Sep 12, 2020 12:50
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This was my take on it too. If the Abby crew had maybe been more compelling or likeable then yeah i'd have had conflicting feelings about dealing with them. Instead we're supposed to just kinda get over how they mashed Joel's head in for keeping Ellie alive from a murder surgeon. Folk also rag on Joel for what he did at the end killing the leader of the fireflies and the surgeon, but seem to want to apply real current world societal norms to that situation. The game's set in a post apocalyptic world where there's no more rule of law. A person that's out to get you can and will get you with little to no repercussions save the potential of revenge. So killing them after all the lies seems like a totally pragmatic thing for Joel to have done in that situation to try and draw a line under it all before disappearing. That's also why i think Ellie should have killed Abby. Given Abby's track record, her "redemption" probably won't mean poo poo long term and she'll be back on the hunt for Ellie the moment something pisses her off enough (like if anything happened to Lev).
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Jul 13, 2021 20:41
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 03:13 |
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christmas boots posted:Even when Ellie shows up right in front of her she does everything she can to avoid a fight until Lev is explicitly threatened. This is why I put redemption in quotation marks. I don't think she had really changed. She just shifted her rottweiler like devotion from one group of people to another. If anything happened to Lev, (just like when something happened to her dad or when something happened to her friends), I'm sure she'd go on another psycho spree, irrespective of the reason something happened to Lev.
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Jul 14, 2021 00:43
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