this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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You might not have played the game but you are spot on. No other piece of media is as guilty of this as TLOU2. Ellie literally travels hundreds of miles and kills hundreds of people on her path to revenge, then I'm supposed to believe she has some epiphany during the final fight and she decides to not kill her target??? That target being the whole reason the game exists??? Totally ruined it for me.
You might be sympathetic to a recent video essay from Door Monster's Kyle who definitely has a bone to pick with TLOU2 (and other recentish pop culture hits)
"Some epiphany" is a brilliant way of indicating you had no idea what the fuck was going on.
Let me ask a different question: How does letting Ellie kill her improve the story?
So, hour zero: Ellie says "I'm gonna kill that bitch."
Hour 40: Ellie says "I have killed that bitch. Damn, that was tight. Like a cold Pepsi, that was hella refreshing."
What message is this communicating to you? What can we learn from such a story?
It's just a video game, dude. Video games are entertainment, not where you should be drawing lessons from.
As a corollary to this, yes there are some learning games, but TLOU series is not Mavis Bacon Teaches Typing.
Okay, my guy, you need to read more books. I mean this in the strictest terms possible. Your country depends on you. America is stuck at a 6th grade reading level, and you're not giving me much hope.
Why are the curtains blue, sepi? Why are they blue?
What is a Dutch angle? Why do films use them?
Why is The Matrix so green? Please!
I would not have Ellie kill Abby. I'd keep the ending the same but have Abby be the one with the upper hand at the end of the fight, then she decides not to kill Ellie. It makes more sense to me that Abby would see that killing Ellie will just perpetuate the murder cycle, as Abby did when she killed Joel. That's something Ellie can't admit to herself because she lets her anger guide her actions, even when it hurts her friends and loved ones. By letting Ellie go you are robbing Ellie of her vengeance, making her sacrifices pointless, which would hopefully show her that her violent ways only lead to violent ends for her and everyone around her.
I feel like that would be a better ending because Abby seemed more like the hero of the story than Ellie did. Ellie is definitely the villain to me because at a certain point in the game I stopped sympathizing with her. I think that is why Ellie having a change of heart at the end felt so off to me. We just helped her kill hundreds of people without shedding a tear. That person would not stop when they finally had their chance for revenge, especially with what it cost them to get there.
This more or less happens in the middle of the game, and it does not stop her. She's not ready to stop then, so she just invents new reasons to keep going.
I don't think this is true. I think you're looking for a simple way to understand why she did what she did, but in doing so, you're kind of reducing her to a cartoon character.
When Ellie found Abby, she was already strung up, starved thin, possibly victim of a lot worse, and in the middle of being executed. And now Ellie's come to beat her... more? There's very little satisfaction to be gained from this. There's very little to do here that would feel like victory.
When Ellie cut Abby down from the pole, she was already having doubts. When Ellie moves to the other boat, the way the camera follows her almost feels like she's about to get in and paddle away. She doesn't start on Abby until after looking at her own blood, as if it had to remind her why she was even there.
In that moment, I think Ellie had already given up. It was only through inertia that she continued. She might've been thinking, as you are, "if I'm not going to kill her, what was the point of all this?"
If Ellie were so focused on the uncomplicated style of revenge I feel like you're suggesting, you might ask why Ellie cut her down at all. Why not just stab her on the pole right there? Why threaten Lev to make Abby fight back? Ellie had plenty of opportunity, but she chose something approaching fairness instead.
This comment is already long, so I don't want to burden you too much further. But I don't think the deaths from elsewhere in the game don't weigh on Ellie either. I think she's fine with it in a "you gotta do what you gotta do" kind of way—if I remember, she was rattled after she tortured what's-her-name. And when she let Abby go, I don't think this is because she suddenly adopted a moral stance against killing people in general, I think it's because the weight of what she was doing, the weight of everything she had lost, and the deeply unsatisfying nature of her victory finally got to her.
And just a final note, none of this is a defense of Ellie as a good person. I agree with you that Ellie was a villain by the end. I liked her character more, but if only one of them could live, I did not think she deserved to; the game knows you have an emotional attachment to her from the previous game and tests the strength of that feeling very heavily.