Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
-- Abby's Dad is a total jerk. He openly admits he wouldn't have done the operation if it was Abby instead of Ellie. Abby then hears this, commisserates with Dad and therefore becomes complicit in the Fireflies' "cut open a 14 year old for a distant chance at a vaccine" stunt. So to me these two characters are total hypocrites. They understood why Joel did what he did. So to me their entire revenge was unjustified and without any moral righteousness. They understood and knew they were doing something morally wrong and when they suffered consequences they never reflected once on what they did, or take responsibility. I mean at the end of TLOU-1, Joel saving Ellie and then lying to her was definitely supposed to be ambiguous and dark, and murky in a human way. This game seems to out-and-out say that "Joel should have let Ellie die". That's going way too far in the other direction. Especially if you are going to take the perspective of the people who wanted to kill her without telling her.
-- It would have worked in my view if Abby's Dad insisted that they conduct more tests and take the slow road while Marlene prioritizes getting the vaccine out quickly for the sake of the Firefly cause which is losing and about to be crushed (and for whom the vaccine means total victory). Abby's Dad had to be the one to say, "We don't need to kill her. We can wait. We can take this slowly" but then Marlene puts a gun on Abby's head and says "Your daughter or Ellie, make your choice". IF they had done that, or if the doctor says he will do his best to save both Ellie and Abby, then Joel killing the doctor would have that sense of miscommunication and tragic futility that the story wants to convey, where in a sense both Joel and Abby's Dad are right and Ellie and Abby are right. Instead the game humanizes Marlene and makes the doctor into a jerk. Abby's motivation to killing Joel would make sense if her father was the moderate voice of reason in an impossible situation and that he and the Fireflies died anyway. The choice they made was an inexplicable story choice. It nullifies the entire revenge theme.
I think if they found ways to address these issues then maybe the story they were trying to tell would have made sense. Abby and her Dad absolutely had to be innocent in some sense for their actions to even be concievably forgivable. If they are complicit child murderers without any remorse or second doubts then the story falls apart. Likewise, Ellie forgiving Abby needs the heaviness and guilt of her knowing and experiencing Joel's actions and confronting it, not a revenge story which happens a year after she lived through it.