Okay, here we go. The most controversial person in this game, the biggest reason for the divide in opinion. The source for a lot of the 0/10 ratings. Abby.
SPOILERS AHEAD!
For those of you who don’t know, the biggest complaint about Abby in this game is that Naughty Dog is trying to force you to like her, or that they’re trying to make you think that Ellie is bad, and that Abby is good. But if I’m being entirely honest here, I have trouble understanding where either of these arguments are coming from. The game never tries to force me to like Abby. Quite the opposite, in fact. They WANT me to hate Abby. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have made me watch as she murdered Joel in cold blood. As for Ellie being bad and Abby good, I don’t see where the game is implying that at all. Again, I believe the game is, in fact, implying the opposite.
Before I get into both arguments, let me explain my one big criticism with the game, the only real flaw I noticed with the pacing: Switching to Abby.
After everything comes to a head in Ellie’s story, we abruptly switch over to Abby’s perspective. This is where I personally find a flaw in the pacing of the game. Not necessarily having to switch to Abby, but where we switched to Abby. Ellie, Jessie, Tommy, and Dina are about to leave the theatre, deciding that it’s for the best to let Abby go and return to Jackson, mostly because Ellie’s attempt to find Abby’s location failed. Suddenly, we hear a struggle in the next room, and Ellie and Jessie rush out to see what’s happening. Jesse is shot dead and drops like a brick. No goodbye, no speech, no nothing. Just one moment he was there, the next he was gone. As I said in part one, there are no heroic deaths in this universe.
Abby stands over Tommy, holding him at gunpoint. Ellie tries to defuse the situation and convince her to let Tommy go. Abby only reminds Ellie that she let them live, and that they wasted it, pointing the gun at Ellie. It is at this point that we switch to Abby. This is a good cliffhanger, but it creates a big problem when we have to play three days as Abby afterward. On top of initially not wanting to play as Abby, which I eventually got over, I found myself having trouble immersing myself in her story at first because I kept thinking, “What happens with Ellie at the theatre?” That question plagued my mind, and as a result, it took much longer to get into Abby’s story than it otherwise would have. Personally, I think it would have been better if they rewound that scene a minute or two, to where Ellie and Jessie hear that sound in the next room and rush to see what it is, only for the screen to fade to black. It leaves enough mystery to wonder what happened, but it wouldn’t entirely plague my mind and bring me out of Abby’s story.
Returning to the arguments against Abby, I don’t feel like Naughty Dog is trying to force you to like her. Even though we play as Abby for half of the game, this is still Ellie’s story, and we are meant to look at the game through Ellie’s eyes. And through Ellie’s eyes, I hate her at this point and want her dead, WHERE’S THE NEAREST CLIFF I CAN THROW HER OFF OF?!
But the game doesn’t try to force you to like Abby. It simply asks that you follow her on this journey and figure out why she is the way she is and what made her kill Joel. They’re also trying to show you the consequences of her revenge and the hope that finding a new purpose brings.
We get a flashback where we meet Abby’s father, who turns out to be the doctor from the first game. You know, the one that was supposed to perform the operation that would have killed Ellie and saved humanity? Abby goes down the same hallway Joel went down in the first game, alarms blaring, and we walk into the room to see the doctor dead on the floor. I still hate Abby at this point, but now I know why she did it. Now I know why she is so filled with anger and hatred. She not only lost her father, but she lost her entire life. Father dead, cure gone, humanity doomed, fireflies disbanded. All that Abby could do was join the WLF with a few of her former firefly friends. This was more than just the loss of a parent, this was her entire life turned to hell by one man. One man that, for all Abby knows, just went on a rampage. She doesn’t realize the relationship between Joel and Ellie, so it’s easy to simply think this madman decided he was going to go on a killing spree.
From then on, the flashbacks with Abby reveal that at every pivotal moment, she blows off fun, romance, and excitement, just to train and prepare to find this man. Not only did Joel’s actions ruin her life, but the ripple effect from that carried over into adulthood. Abby’s romantic moment with Owen when they were teens was ruined by training. We get a Christmas flashback with a beautiful view, and Abby can’t enjoy it because she found Joel’s brother. Abby is consumed by this hatred and she is slowly losing her humanity. The final straw in Abby’s journey to darkness is when she commits to the final blow that kills Joel. As the breath leaves his body, Abby’s humanity leaves her. All of those years, all of those wasted moments, all of that anger released into that last strike, and… nothing. No satisfaction, no relief from the anger. Abby’s nightmares still relentlessly plague her. It is that realization that she spent her whole adult life training to kill Joel, pushing away every good thing that came her way for revenge, and it was all for nothing. THIS is what Naughty Dog is trying to show you. That this journey of revenge can ruin your life more than being wronged did. It also serves to show what Ellie will become if she continues down this same path.
As far as we know, Abby feels no remorse. All we’re given so far is that her nightmares have not gone away. Most of her team is shaken by Jackson, and Abby seems mostly unbothered, at least initially. She even attempts to reclaim Owen after losing him years ago. She tries to grasp at any moment of happiness she lost in her revenge quest, but even after her and Owen’s scene on the boat, Abby still isn’t satisfied. It is only when Abby meets Lev and Yara that her journey begins to turn. She has reached rock bottom, lost her humanity as I said, and she is nothing but an empty vessel who has nothing left to fight for. But as they usually do, once Abby reached rock bottom, she had no direction to go but up.
Later in the story, Abby agrees to find materials to help Yara, who has compartment syndrome from a hammer to the arm. Lev asks Abby why she is helping them, and Abby says, “Guilt.” The only hint we have at Abby’s regret is either her admitting that she feels guilty about something, or that she ‘had to help them’. What else could she be talking about besides killing Joel? She regrets what she did after realizing his death brought her nothing, and she’s trying to atone. It is only after Abby has found a new purpose in life –helping Yara and Lev – that her nightmares go away. This moment holds so much weight, but I still didn’t like Abby. Yet, even as I grasp firmly onto my hatred for her, I empathize with her. THAT is the key word. Not to like her, but to empathize. We didn’t have to like Joel’s decision to doom humanity by saving Ellie, but we empathized with it, because we knew we would do the same thing in his position. Despite our hatred of Abby, we cannot deny that if we went through everything she went through, we would probably do the same thing. In fact, we already are doing the same thing through Ellie, because we’re going on this revenge quest for Joel.
Even as we play as Abbie, I’m still looking at her through Ellie’s eyes, just as intended. And when Ellie makes ‘that’ decision at the end of the game, which I’ll cover later, I also made the same decision. This game, from beginning to end, is through Ellie’s perspective. You are always meant to be on her side, even when you aren’t playing as her. And once I finished the game and had time to think about it, I looked at Abby differently. The fog of hate I stared at her through disappeared thanks to Ellie’s choice, and I realized just how much she changes as a person. I still hate the Abby that killed Joel, but the Abby at the end of the game is a different Abby. An Abby that has finally gotten her humanity back, almost like Joel did with Ellie. I can assure you that if we saw the things Joel did to survive before the events of the first game, we would hate him. But we saw Joel’s journey to reclaiming his humanity, and by the beginning of this game, he’s an entirely new person from those awful years we never saw. He’s mellowed and become what he was before he lost Sarah. It’s a beautiful transition.
The next argument covers the accusation that Naughty Dog is trying to make you think Ellie is awful and Abby is good, and this couldn’t be further from the truth. In the entire game, Ellie truly only kills one person in cold blood. Nora. She beats information out of Nora, and when we see her return to the theatre, she is physically shaking from what she did, barely able to speak. She is traumatized by what she did, but Abby showed none of these symptoms when she did the same thing to Joel. When Ellie kills Alice, it is in self defense. When she kills Owen and Mel, it is in self defense. When she kills that guard playing the PSP, it is in self defense. As for all of the “Wolves” Ellie kills on the way to her main targets, these people attack her on sight. As brutal as she can be, these Wolves would kill her if she didn’t kill them first, because they believe she is a Seraphites. When Ellie meets the Seraphites, they believe she is WLF. So Ellie has no choice but to kill these people.
The moments where Ellie kills Abby’s friends is not painted as a villain getting their revenge, as it was with Abby. It is painted as tragic, as Ellie putting herself through trauma for Joel’s sake, even trying to be like Joel. Ellie is a compassionate person, she always has been, ever since the first game. Killing these people gets to her, because she only planned on killing Abby. What Naughty Dog displays is a good person – Ellie – making bad choices that endanger her and her friends. She is going down a dark path, the same dark path Abby went down. With Abby, Naughty Dog is displaying a bad person realizing that her quest for revenge did nothing for her. She ultimately changes as a person and moves on, even after all of her friends are killed, which was a consequence of her revenge against Joel.
So the argument that the game is painting Ellie as bad and Abby as good doesn’t make sense to me, because Ellie isn’t heartless. She is emotionally and physically suffering from what she is doing, but she continues for Joel’s sake. There is more to it than just revenge, but we’ll get to that later. Ellie is not meant to go on the kind of revenge that Tommy does, that Joel would have, and that Abby already did. We’re slowly watching Ellie turn into Abby, getting so caught up in anger and hatred that she ignores Jessie’s wishes to return to Jackson for Dina’s sake. Ellie is going on the same journey Abby did, and already we can see how destructive it is.
This doesn’t make Ellie a bad person or a villain. It makes her real. It makes her human. It makes the story of The Last of Us Part II as realistic as it is. Every decision the characters make is a decision we as people would make today.
In the third part, we’re going to discuss the final point of controversy in this game. The ending.
A.K. Rohner 