Before I played The Last of Us Part II I was prepared for disappointment. I enjoyed the first game when it released in 2013 but found the level of praise it received far in excess of what it deserved. Many game critics were pulling out the tired “Citizen Kane” comparison, far too heavy a label for a game that I felt did not advance gaming as an art form in any significant way. Ultimately, it was a third-person shooter with some stealth elements and a heavy story focus. Further, it felt like a big-budget echo of 2012’s The Walking Dead, except with far less player choice, a less interesting protagonist, and themes I found far less compelling. To me, Joel Miller, the main character, felt like yet another dime-a-dozen middle-aged cranky dude who was gifted at killing people, a representative of an increasingly tired cliché in gaming.
Spoilers ahead!
What Joel Miller hath wrought.
But, for some reason, lots of gamers loved Joel. Absolutely loved him. I can’t claim to relate. Much was made of Joel’s extremely selfish choice to save Ellie, his surrogate daughter, from the Fireflies, who were trying to cure the fungal infection that had destroyed civilization. Ellie was special because she was immune to the infection. The Fireflies believed that Ellie could provide the source for a cure… at the cost of her life. Now, the Fireflies did not give Ellie a say in the matter, which is pretty terrible and unethical. But Joel’s response was far worse. He literally murdered the doctors who were going to perform the operation along with nearly every Firefly in the building. And you, as the player, only had the choice to decide exactly how many Fireflies he would kill. No matter what you decided to do, the lead doctor most capable of actually creating a cure would be one of your victims. Then, as the icing on the cake, Joel lies to Ellie about killing the Fireflies.
Cue the release of the Last of Us Part II seven years later. Game critics were again effusive with high praise and making absurd, over-the-top cinematic comparisons, this time to Schindler’s List of all movies. As a Last of Us skeptic, I ultimately only played the game because it was whipping up a lot of controversy and I wanted to develop my own opinion of it. And, against my expectations, I ended up loving the game. Indeed, I wasn’t prepared for quite how much I would love it. One of the main reasons I loved the game was one of the main reasons so many people hated it: Abby Anderson, the daughter of the doctor Joel murders at the end of the original game, and the woman who kills Joel at the beginning of its sequel.
Now, it’s difficult to explain just how much people hated Abby, but, just to provide a few examples, there are numerous videos on YouTube dedicated to showcasing as many different ways as possible Abby can die. Many commenters on game sites were saying that Ellie should have killed Abby at the end of the game because they didn’t want her to get away with killing Joel. Most heinously, Laura Bailey, the actress behind Abby’s voice and motion capture, received threats of death and violence for simply doing her job as an actress. Bailey is more than this one character. Odds are, if you play video games or watch English-dubbed Anime, she probably voiced a few of your favorites, yet, some people seemed to think that Bailey deserved death for voicing this one character.
That is incredibly intense hatred. And, being a non-fan of Joel, I could not relate. Indeed, once I learned Abby’s motive for killing Joel I kind of agreed with her. I mean, he stopped her father from saving the world and murdered who knows how many of the people who helped raise her. If we were in her shoes, if the first game never happened and our first interaction with the franchise was Abby spending her final day with her father, Joel would come across as the single worst person in the world. While Abby getting her revenge might feel hollow in the aftermath of losing her father and seeing the world’s hope die, at least Joel would’ve had it coming.
Joel rescues Abby.
But The Last of Us Part II holds back who Abby really is for a long time. A very, very long time. We do see Abby early in the game, very briefly, during the game’s tutorial phases. During that time Abby gets mobbed by Infected (The Last of Us’ word for “zombie,” since there seems to be an unwritten rule that the word “zombie” can’t be said in a work about zombies). And who saves her life? Joel Miller. A few minutes later Abby, seemingly out of nowhere, is blowing his leg apart with a shotgun and beating his head in with a golf club, with Ellie, his surrogate daughter, watching the last fatal swing. If I’m someone who genuinely likes Joel, I’d see Abby as an ingrate murderer.
The next 12 to 15 hours or so of the game are spent as Ellie, seeking to kill Abby and her accomplices and having flashbacks of times good and bad with Joel. In many of these flashbacks, Joel is at his most charming, giving her an amazing birthday at a science museum and giving her a guitar while singing a tear-jerking rendition of “Future Days.” The later flashbacks aren’t so nice as Ellie unravels Joel’s lies about the Fireflies and seems to cut him off. But, assuming that the player is a Joel fan, they’ve likely forgiven Joel for his actions years ago and want Ellie to forgive him, too.
After spending three days hunting down Abby, Ellie finally confronts her in a theater where she and her friends from Jackson had been hiding out. In a few quick seconds, Abby shoots Tommy, Joel’s brother and Ellie’s surrogate uncle, permanently disabling him, and murders Jesse, a perfectly nice guy who came along to help Ellie out. Both Tommy and Jesse are quite likable and seeing Abby shoot both of them, both better men than Joel by my standards, hurts. A lot. Immediately after this, the game flashes back to Abby’s last day with her father. At this point, we are about halfway through the game, but we’ve spent all that time mourning Joel and learning to hate Abby.
If looks could kill…
Now, there are reasons people hate Abby that are based in straight-up bigotry and don’t deserve serious consideration. One is that Abby isn’t conventionally attractive because she is built like a truck and has a small chest. A second is that Abby’s storyline is largely about her saving a trans boy named Lev from the Seraphites, a violent religious cult that has declared him an apostate for coming out and is seeking to murder him. These arguments are both unworthy of discussion and, frankly, I’ve given them too much space already. But to the people who hate her for reasons due to the way the game presents her character? I can sympathize. The game wants us to care about her, or, at the very least to respect her point of view. But after spending half the game teaching us to hate her on sight is that really likely to happen?
Interestingly, Neil Druckmann, the game’s director, originally intended to go a different route with Abby’s introduction. Initially, she was supposed to show up in Jackson, Wyoming and be playable through several sequences, her backstory revealed, and her showing indecision about whether to kill Joel before finally going through with it. And, in my opinion, this would have made for a vastly superior and more engaging story that played with our sympathies and made the game’s central theme, that revenge is a selfish choice that comes at the expense of our bonds with the living, far more powerful. But, as the game is constructed, it’s incumbent upon the player to make that decision themselves, with no help from the game’s narrative or gameplay until we are as hellbent on killing Abby as Ellie and Tommy.
In the interview, Druckmann states that the reason Abby wasn’t fleshed out at the beginning of the game was because he wanted to get to the inciting incident more quickly, in this case, Joel’s murder at Abby’s hand. I believe this is a fundamental mistake. I agree with Druckmann that it’s a good idea to get to the inciting incident quickly. Indeed, a popular rule for screenwriting is that a writer should establish a movie’s main conflict by page 15 of a screenplay, roughly 15 minutes into a story. And while video games can often afford to take a bit more time before getting to the meat of the story than movies given their interactivity and the frequent use of tutorials, holding back the story for too long in a narrative-driven game can, indeed, slow the game’s momentum to a crawl. I understand his reasoning. But he is wrong about the game’s inciting incident. Joel’s death isn’t what sets off the plot, it’s what he did to the Fireflies at the end of the previous game.
Abby is more than just a killer.
The Last of Us Part II is a true sequel, not merely an installment in a franchise. The Last of Us Part II’s plot cannot stand alone. It is built entirely on consequences of what happened in the previous game. I can pick up just about any Call of Duty game without understanding the plot of the previous entry, especially given that the series operates in a series of sub-franchises and likes to set different games at different points in time including the past and the future. Most Final Fantasy games take place in completely separate worlds from each other, with only the occasionally crossover game bringing characters and settings from different titles in the name of fanservice. But if I were to pick up, say, Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, without having played all the previous expansions I would be utterly lost and quickly, because everything that drives initial interest in its plot has already happened in a previous Final Fantasy XIV expansion. The average player of The Last of Us Part II already knows what Joel did at the end of the previous game and is almost certainly aware that such a choice is unlikely to occur without consequence. Abby is that consequence made brutally, violently real.
Fundamentally, the reason many players have problems connecting with Abby isn’t so much what’s in the game itself, but in the sequence in which they occur. The first time we see Abby in the game she is waking up from a nightmare. We learn much, much later in the game that Abby has recurring nightmares reliving when she first returned to the hospital to discover that her father and the other Fireflies had been murdered. What if we had seen that nightmare instead of just Abby waking up from it? Even just her showing her running down the hospital corridor and not showing the bodies would be enough to introduce intrigue to her motive.
If Abby’s motive is introduced at the beginning of the game, it gains a level of dramatic irony. What is she going to do? Will Joel find out? Will Ellie find out? As the game is right now, Abby is a mystery for the entire first half of the game, and in that time, the player is given every reason to hate her.
In addition to introducing Abby’s motive earlier, it would also be more effective to alternate her gameplay segments with Ellie’s. Instead of playing through Ellie’s three days in Seattle, building to an intense climax where Ellie and Abby finally meet each other in the theater and then jumping back to play through three long days to get back to the climax, alternating Ellie and Abby’s days would only require the player to go through Abby’s third day before getting back to that climax. More importantly, we would learn more about Abby’s friends and the WLF and appreciate the complexity of their situation instead of learning to hate them on sight like we do through Ellie’s route.
Abandon All Hope Ye Who Don’t Live Here
The way the game works right now, our first encounter with the WLF is getting Ellie’s horse Shimmer blown up and Ellie waking up in a basement with two men arguing over whether to kill or torture her. Three days of this follow. If we’re supposed to feel bad about any of this, the game doesn’t give us many clues other than the occasional shout of someone’s name or the more realistic than usual gore. Instead, the WLF are impossible to reason with and shoot on sight. Compare Jackson where Joel and Ellie settled, where visitors are merely required to announce themselves at the gate and refugees are actively sought and rescued by the community. The place feels comparatively unwelcoming and, frankly, evil. Understanding a bit more about why the WLF might be so paranoid given their war with the Seraphites might add to the complexity and create more mixed feelings about the WLF and Abby’s group within it. What’s worse is killing Abby’s friends doesn’t have any impact because we don’t know who they are. Ellie breaks down a bit after killing Mel because Mel is pregnant, but she literally killed them out of self-defense when Owen went for Ellie’s gun and Mel tried to stab her. None of these people feel real to us because they barely register as real to Ellie. It’s only after spending time with them as Abby that they start to become real people. Killing Owen and Mel would feel a lot worse if we knew who they were. The cost of Ellie’s vengeance on other, real, developed characters would intensify.
If the game doesn’t want you to hate Abby, with the current sequence of events, it doesn’t act like it. And it’s a shame, because Abby is a very strong character. She’s headstrong and can act without thinking, but is also loyal to her friends, giving them a chance to explain themselves when they mess up and owning up to her own missteps. She is also fiercely protective of Lev, repeatedly risking her life and struggling through disabling vertigo to help him survive the war between the WLF and the Seraphites, even if it meant betraying the WLF in the process. And, when given the chance to kill Ellie, she spares her. Twice. It’s Ellie who continues the vendetta, not Abby. Abby even spares Ellie after she killed her friends, albeit at Lev’s behest. It’s Abby who learns and grows first and tries to create a new life for herself. It’s Ellie who refuses to walk away.
Abby Choosing To Walk Away
So much of my enjoyment of the Last of Us Part II came from Abby’s scenario. It’s not simply because she had many excellent gameplay segments, though the Rat King fight and the escape from the Seraphites’ Island were certainly among my most gripping moments in gaming this year. It’s because she is an interesting character in her own right with an arc that has more plot than Ellie’s more straight-forward kill ‘em all scenario. It’s because the war between the WLF and Seraphites shows that the sorts of cycles of vengeance that trap Abby and Ellie can also trap entire societies, turning them into violent shells of their original selves. Abby walks away from that larger conflict and smaller conflict at virtually the same time, right after sparing Ellie and Dina, and goes to search for the remaining Fireflies, to try to create a future for the people who are still alive, even if it’s just the two of them. Ellie has that with Dina and J.J. and throws it away because she can’t let go.
In Ellie’s last conversation with Joel she tells him that “I don’t think I can ever forgive you for that… but I’d like to try.” She briefly thinks of the night of that conversation as she is about to kill Abby and changes her mind. Ellie’s mindset when she begins to drown Abby is probably the same as most players who loved Joel. They can’t forgive Abby. I think that, with just a few tweaks to the story, more players might have been willing to try.
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