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some dogs are good. other dogs are bad. dogs trained by fascists are bad. this is not hard.
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Aug 30, 2020 19:28
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Mandrel posted:wow way to victim blame K9 can't be rehabilitated 
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Aug 31, 2020 02:10
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I'm sure you'll just have to finish and see.
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Sep 5, 2020 21:12
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I think you can agree with Joel's choice, recognize how that choice would have consequences, and recognize that both Ellie and Abby are complex characters who make good and bad decisions and engage with the world in sometimes contradictory ways. It doesn't make any of them particularly evil, just flawed and rather human. I think all those things can be true. I feel for all three characters even if they mostly just end up hurting each other and doing bad things.
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Sep 6, 2020 10:08
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if anything, WLF encounters with Jackson types kind of end up portraying people from Jackson as  Worth Being Afraid Of™, and it's kind of awesomeboth the Tommy scene and the encounter with Ellie are incredibly nerve wracking and intense
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Sep 7, 2020 02:22
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why would anyone ever read vice or base their opinions on anything that comes out of that shithole
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Sep 7, 2020 05:12
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Why are his politics gross? He's using some abstract childhood experiences growing up adjacent to Israel/Palestine conflict to tell a story with a backdrop of American socio-political division and strife.
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Sep 7, 2020 05:42
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...with a backdrop of American socio-political division and strife.
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Sep 7, 2020 05:50
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:Because the Seraphites are completely unsympathetic murderous fascist cultists. It's a game that forces you to sympathize with antagonists, except the Seraphites, they're just unqualified evil. Which was the origin of my complaint about the writing, which the only plausible answer anyone's given so far is that they're a Palestinian allegory. Which, imho, is gross. You don't see their entire civilization burning down as sympathy? Or the nuance of the martyr's depiction, the way the game comments on the success of their naturalistic living methods? Just curious, because hosed up religious poo poo happens in Iran, too, but Iran is not a fascist society. Are people unable to comprehend nuance?
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Sep 7, 2020 05:56
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:
Recent story about a father 'Honor-Killing' his 14 year old daughter has upset a lot of people, but would not be the type of thing I would indict an entire culture for. Get my drift?
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Sep 7, 2020 06:10
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looks like the druck man knows how to get under all y'all skin pretty easy, a job well done
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Sep 8, 2020 02:47
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:pshaw you guys like care about the world and other people and poo poo. that's like so gay you guys whatever you never wanna play warzone anyway gaywads 
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Sep 8, 2020 04:37
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Mandrel posted:yeah dude I played the game why are you still here then, chop chop get to it
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Sep 9, 2020 02:09
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Bust Rodd posted:Anyone else get a patch last night? Wha happen? performance fixes apparently
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Sep 11, 2020 19:41
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Sassy Sasquatch posted:I'm really confused by his point equating Joel's "change of mind" at the end of TLOU and Ellie's at the end of 2. They have nothing in common. Joel doesn't change his mind at the end of TLOU, he makes a decision when presented with the consequences of Ellie's earlier choice to keep looking for the fireflies. The whole point of it is he goes against her wish. There's nothing at the end of TLOU2 justifying Ellie's change of heart besides a convenient flashback. The point is that both games present narratives about traveling for a long time through harsh circumstances in order to accomplish a certain goal only to end up not accomplishing that goal at all, leaving the characters to wallow in the fallout of ambiguous emotional quagmires...and maybe faint hopes of catharsis.
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Nov 8, 2020 22:07
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Sassy Sasquatch posted:
They're both pretty slow. I don't think there's a need to close any threads, they can just die naturally if they need to. I'll be keeping the other thread maintained for when Factions 2 surfaces, and if that brings in more discussion then so be it.
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Nov 9, 2020 20:37
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2LOU pr good, it makes dull people get freaky mad
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Jul 8, 2021 03:13
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the games take many hours and many opportunities to demonstrate that people/characters can be more than one thing. this is not hard.
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Jul 9, 2021 07:28
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It's a lawless world, the context of everything changes. Only the boomers were alive in the beforetimes.
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Jul 9, 2021 07:45
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blackguy32 posted:Except, Ellie did save Abby's life. Also considering the whole story, I don't think that is the takeaway at all. Fair, though I think the museum scene situates and contextualizes the world of 2LOU pretty well as a lawless one divergent from the living context of our own, and what that entails for humans AS part of the animal kingdom, which I don't think entirely forecloses on an understanding of how morality between groups would play out in such a scenario. We are as distant from the complex moral interweaving of 2LOU's world as the character's themselves are from rocket ships and dinos. One of the reasons laws themselves formalized amid human civilization was to end cycles of retributive violence. Each of these realizations lends weight to the idea that people in such environments would not necessarily act as we'd expect from our domesticated vantage point.
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Jul 10, 2021 20:59
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don't get what's so bad about owen tbh 
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Jul 13, 2021 20:09
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RareAcumen posted:Two biggest things I have against him are his voice acting is weirdly robotic and stiff when you first meet him and are playing as Abby i know goons are bad with emotions but it's called playing coy op RareAcumen posted:and also you can't be loving other people when you've already got someone pregnant and in love with you. loving lmao BeanpolePeckerwood fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jul 13, 2021 |
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Jul 13, 2021 20:17
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when ellie says 'just take him' at the end she sure as poo poo ain't talking about lev, and only her sudden fingerstumps served to jailbreak her mind
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Jul 14, 2021 21:50
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RareAcumen posted:Yeah, I definitely didn't think that when I beat it. it's kind of the whole point of the ending shot, and the entire reason she lets abby live, and the whole theme of the game
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Jul 14, 2021 22:47
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snoremac posted:Another thing I liked was the brief shot of Joel on the porch flashing before Ellie that leads her to spare Abby. That's where I could feel her grief transcending the moment, where she comprehends that Abby has nothing to do with the loss she's feeling. It's very nice. That flash happens right after her fingers get bitten off, the guitar being her last remaining emotional connection to joel. It's a real nice touch and someone deserves a gold star for thinking it up. As a player it's pretty much the one thing you've been waiting 25 hours for and been kept in the dark on, that insight into whether or not they patched things up, and it just hangs over the entire story in this dreadful sort of way where you almost come to think the devs missed something...but they didn't, they've simply been loving with you for that long.
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Jul 15, 2021 04:31
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christmas boots posted:What I like is that it casts her whole crusade in a new light. It's not just that she wants revenge for Joel's death, and it's not just that the potential to mend their relationship one day is gone; it's the fact that they just started mending that relationship the night before and suddenly the rug is pulled out right from under that reconciliation in the worst way. So somehow, for me, it hits way worse than if they'd patched things up months earlier or if they hadn't even started. Yeah, to be able to string the player along for that long, building substance and symbolic interconnectivity for so many hours and have it all hinge on such a subtle moment at the very last breath that recontextualizes almost everything...really not an easy task to write a narrative with that many moving pieces that comes together so completely.
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Jul 15, 2021 05:25
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RareAcumen posted:I don't know if I'm shadowbanned or something but I've been saying for the last 3 pages that I enjoyed the game but I'm not actually sure if I actually understood it. Sorry, maybe I'm just being a butt. I haven't kept track of posts itt very well.
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Jul 15, 2021 09:17
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veni veni veni posted:I will never get how people actually come to this conclusion. Like, people have been doing this take for years and I will never understand it. They literally attack and subdue Joel and Ellie the second they reach their destination, plan on killing Ellie without her knowledge, all on some hope they can make a vaccine they don't know would work and probably could never even mass produce. The Fireflies are sadder, more desperate, and more amoral than Joel ever was. Well said, and agreed.
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Jul 19, 2021 07:13
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Whatever the case, what IS supported by the narrative is that the Fireflies are at the end of their rope as an ideological organization and that 'Ellie-as-cure' has become a sort of flashpoint within the group leadership to maintain control of whatever organizational structure the current leaders have. Marlene's notes confirm that the rest of the leadership is very nearly overriding her authority and has almost lost faith in the original Firefly mission statement to the point of complete dissolution of the movement, hence why the remainders seem almost like religious zealots rather than freedom fighters. In this, her choice (successful vaccine or no) is revealed to be more about keeping a crumbling organization together, and 2LOU shows the further disintegration of factional efforts to maintain control over now blighted former urban centers and how misguided that notion is, while other factions demonstrate a sort of harmony with nature that accepts those dead civilized zones as irretrievably lost. Whether the surgical operation would've been a success or not, the Fireflies original mission statement doesn't realistically fit the picture of what has become of civilization, the damage is done and even though Marlene might be doing the 'right thing' by killing Elllie she's doing it for the wrong reasons. There is no way to turn back the clock, and similar to our own very real human predicament of living on the verge of total climate collapse in the next decade or two...the only way out is through.
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Jul 19, 2021 14:10
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Arist posted:That is, again, one of those bits of fan headcanon justification that serves only to flatten the moral dilemma at the core of the ending and make the entire game worse in the process. I...doubt it? Maybe making a joke on a stream chat? I overwhelmingly view the Fireflies as a pseudo-religious cult at the point in the story where we encounter them, and that view is supported by the documents and voice recordings from the original game, so definitely not headcannon. Feel free to revisit them at your leisure. My own personal cli-fi/climate fiction read of the environmental storytelling that is so front and center in 2LOU is, I feel, well supported by both games, but feel free to make your own judgements.
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Jul 19, 2021 14:28
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Nothing about TLOU/2LOU is straight forward, and all of it can be interpreted/reinterpreted symbolically, allegorically, and topically in dozens of ways at the very least.
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Jul 19, 2021 14:34
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Arist posted:That's not the point. I'm saying TLOU isn't telling a story where that stuff matters. You might as well ask why all the gasoline hasn't gone bad. It's a plot contrivance. It actually is the point and it does matter, because it's an interactive medium where all kinds of things can be sought, heard, traversed, and inspected. Everything matters within the context of story, all the details which the devs painstakingly added to paint a broad and complex picture of a world and social tapestry [not entirely unlike our own] matter, regardless of how many times you energetically tell people in any of these threads that they don't. Both games are engaging in a variety of storytelling techniques through mechanical design, performance, and art direction that ultimately converge and funnel into more confined yet ultimately ambiguous conclusions. If certain things don't matter to you it's because you are omitting them from the record by choice.
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Jul 19, 2021 14:50
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snoremac posted:Yeah. If there are shades of grey in the morality of Joel's choice, he's less interesting. The entire narrative momentum behind 2LOU's story is that there are shades of grey in all of the choices that everyone makes.
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Jul 19, 2021 14:53
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Arist posted:I'm gonna bow out here because this argument makes me want to walk into the ocean 
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Jul 19, 2021 14:58
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It certainly feels like a coming up for air moment in 2LOU's story because they've kept the player from any sort of resolution for almost the entirety of the game's length.
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Jul 19, 2021 15:13
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snoremac posted:I'd like to know about the shades of grey behind the pedo cannibal's choices I mean, how else is the whole family gonna eat thursday night chili-mac?
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Jul 19, 2021 15:16
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roomtone posted:As for the differences between how 1 and 2 present the state of the world of the importance of the vaccine - I think, putting the actual timescale aside for a second, in 1 the game really needs to flesh out how hosed everything is so they focus almost entirely on that to sell Joel's dilemma. In 2, that dilemma isn't the story anymore, Ellie's immunity is pretty much irrelevant, and it's a different story about a group of people that live in a world scarred by cataclysm. Yeah, this is why I'm always yammering on about it not being the end of humanity but rather the end of civilization, I think it's an important distinction and an interesting read re: the narrative intent of the devs. Look, I know we all exist within a cultural context that is hard to imagine parting ways with, that feels immense and all-consuming and invincible and forever, but the very nature of climate fiction calls forth that little spectre in the back of our heads to remind us that humans once existed without civilization, that we were not always the apex godkings usurping and demolishing the natural lifecycle, and that many of our finest nurturing traits as a species were honed during a murky past that predates the sort of extractive hedonism of the anthropocene.
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Jul 20, 2021 09:01
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roomtone posted:I've been thinking lately about post-apocalyptic fiction in general. I've seen the phrase 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism' often enough to know this isn't remotely original, but I think it is clear that beyond the power fantasy of being totally free in a world without institutions, I think there's also an abandon and relief component to the appeal of this setting. The idea being that not only is our cultural existence suffocating and monotonous, but it's also so lopsided in terms of equality and excessive in consumption that having the problem being removed from us by force of disaster is enticing of itself. Almost feels deserved. People blow up their own lives to escape them all the time, this genre is just that on a civilization scale. It's not even worth untangling; just blow it the gently caress up and we'll start again. Yeah, as far as our immediate future goes I'm a bit of a climate doomer, so climate fiction in all of its forms is almost a coping mechanism for me, something that helps me feel like I'm not completely crazy and that yes, this world is in fact completely out of whack. Humanity itself is so much more than the last 10, 000 years of organized extraction, conflict, and biosphere rape, and yeah, we've got some dark poo poo within us, too, but this whole geological era is like one huge physical and psychological trauma injury that we just can't get over. If you want to read a fiction book that speculates about the longform future of humanity post-climate change check out Dale Pendell's "The Great Bay"
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Jul 20, 2021 18:07
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