The concept of revenge for a faceless character could work. The problem is the framing, I mean if Ellie was the only playable character and the player went about on a random adventure for a cure during first third of the story. Helping people on the way. You meet Joel, hang out and have a comfy time. The player then visits characters from the first game just to see how they are. After the adventure, Ellie and Joel rest at a home base of sorts. They get ambushed by Abby. Ellie and Joel get separated. Joel fights Abby and is initially on the offensive. Abby mentions the firefly incident and how Joel killed her dad. This stops Joel for a second which Abby uses to take the advantage and kill him.
Abby should then run away with a confused or not-satisfied look on her face. The second third should be you as Ellie rampaging through America to find Abby. A lot of innocents get hurt. The good you did previously gets undone. Someone Ellie loves dies to clickers because she was focused on revenge rather than living. This all combinates in a final confrontation with Abby at her "camp" where a lot of families that are connected to the fireflies stay. Ellie destorys the place, letting clickers run wild. Abby and Ellie fight. Partway through Abby should slowly lose the will to fight whenshe realises that she's like the man she hated. This causes Ellie to be in an advantageous position to kill Abby. Just as Ellie is about to kill Abby, a clicker finishes the job for her. Alone, in a dangerous infested camp, Ellie escapes with the same look Abby had when she killed Joel.
The final third should be about Ellie visiting the places she messed up and trying to fix them again. Only for people to either attack on side or push her away. This causes Ellie to segregate from everyone else. The final confrontation of the game should be Lev coming for revenge against Ellie. Ellie wins, but feels empty and let's Lev go.
While this is a good idea, however, I just don't think a cycle of revenge plot is appropriate to the theme of the game. It was more about finding your family and people who can help you get over loss. The second should be stresses on that family dynamic. How bonds can break or be strained with a single lie. That's really what the set-up was about. The first one is finding yourself again after loss. The second is to see the stress on that bond and if it can recover. The 3rd one would be recovering that bond, keeping hope alive even through misery and suffering. I wouldn't kill off Joel, maybe at the end of the third game. Neither would I kill off Ellie at all, because she's the dynamic. She's thematically relevant to the story in every way. She's Joel's redemption. Kill Joel too early, and the story gets fucked. I'd never discuss her sexuality, because its not important. Let it be whatever you want. This isn't the point. Its all about bonds forged through adversity and how that can bring hope.
The real message is the dynamic of that bond in the harshest conditions imaginable. Its all about finding hope through strife. Even the Road, one of the harshest post-apocalyptic stories, had this message. The ending wasn't nihilistic, it was hopeful. That in even utter misery, hope shines. It is utter sacrilege to compare TLOU 2 to 'The Road'.
The real crime is to fundamentally misunderstand the thematic arc and the natural way its supposed to play out. The first one is about getting over loss, the second one....is receiving loss and going Charles Bronson? It makes no sense. You could only kill someone Ellie cares about besides Joel. And still, I don't think it works. Because TLOU is essentially a story about these two people. You want to explore that bond they develop, to test it, to strain it. To push it to its very limits. This just ignores that fact. If you want to introduce a love interest they should be a negative influence on that bond, something to strain it. Maybe including betrayal, her lover jealous of Joel's strong ties with her, and her lover consistently tests those ties. And she gets angrier and more jealous of it and sets Joel up. Maybe the lover reveals the lie, or exaggerates it. This tests the bond. It really should have been something like that. The relationship should be more than window dressing. But of course, this would be problematic if it were a proud woman of color. Which is why we can't have good stories anymore. Or just make Ellie bi or something and its a dude this time around. Its the apocalypse.
The concept is thematically inconsistent. I'm not saying these ideas are bad, even I cooked up a few that dealt in the same vein. But still, I don't feel they're the right direction the series should take. Ideally, you want to continue to build on the themes of the first work and make them more complex and intricate, expand and play with them in new ways.
I think this is what boggles my mind the most, this whole cycle of revenge plot bullshit started by the death of a character that we never saw and most likely won't be able to see in the game except for flashbacks.
Look, religious Zealots are an eye roller, way over done in these scenarios, but you can roll with it. And shoving over-long Lesbian kisses or even the super tranny are groaner for sure, but whatever, It isn't hard ignore these progressive tryhard bullshit, and if someone feels more confortable with themselves by watching trans or gay people in their entertainment in the way people like to champion representation, power to them I guess, no skin off my back either way.
But to base a sequel over an event that held no water in the original, makes no sense. The original game had a pretty strong finish and it was clearly intended to be a singular story.
So, of course they weren't going to introduce a new doctor character at the very last hour of the game and have him spout exposition so we can get to know him, as in: " I sure hope we can cure this fungus curse, so I can go back home and see my little boy who loves to play with dolls that I'm so proud and supportive of".
So, this begs the question, why build this new story around a tragedy that holds no water in the original game? killing people in last of Us comes to Joel and Ellies as impactful as sneezing, more so when the story already has a spine, the fungal infection. Sure, the main theme is about a Father and Daughter relationship, but without the backdrop of a fungus apocalypse, the whole thing is meaningless.
So... what does the infections has to do with a tiny lesbo and a huking tranny interlocked in a cycle of vengence? Of course we can argue that a sequel having Joel and Ellie being hunted for the cure is easy to see it coming... but at least it is grounded in the world that has been set in the first game, like Secret Asshole said, who the fuck cares about this doctor that was wacked by Joel?
This whole thing feels very weird, and these ideas seems like the sort of ideas that get wacked in the cutting floor or worked on in some other way. to me, it seems that the person who was supposed to say "NO" to this sort of thing (AKA, a producer) either was absent or had no power, and TLOU2 is probably going to serve as yet another prime example that very self important and very self satisfied people shouldn't be able to do as they please without a strong push back.
By the time this happened, everyone who was a decent writer at Naughty Dog was gone, and Druckman took the sole reigns. Everyone in a position of any authority bent the knee to him. Or it was basically just a job to cash a check, so they simply didn't care. Druckman made the game this way, because he's stupid. There's really no other reasons for it. He's an idiotic, egotistical, narcissist who thought he'd fool people by prominently placing Ellie on the cover. The work wasn't his own, was made by people who didn't share his line of thinking and whom he had to cooperate with, so he decided to destroy their legacy and everyone else who worked on the first one. I truly believe his motive was that petty. He can gussy it up however he wants, its just a petty move by a coward who got into power by annoying everyone better than him out of the studio. So that's the first one. He's a petty, egotist. The second reason, is he feels he can write better than everyone who left. But Druckman is obviously a simpleton, so he relies on cliched bullshit. Revenge. Done to death in many different ways. Completely inappropriate. But easy to use. Nihilism. Easy to use, and he's an idiot so he thinks using it makes him look smart. It doesn't. Shock value by playing as Joel's murderer. He thinks this is a good twist to his story that will capture the audience, since he's a good writer, they'll easily fall in love with his character. Because he's a complete narcissist, he truly believes Abby is better than both Joel and Ellie. She isn't. She's a card-board cut out. Her only character trait is 'kill Joel'. She trained her entire existence for this. Then she's already an empty shell no human being can relate to. Again, delusional thinking, arrogance and stupidity. Again, he doesn't care about the zombies or the fungus or the relevance for the first game. He doesn't care because it wasn't truly his and he wants to ignore that as much as possible.
Druckman's concepts are extremely infantile, poorly developed and defined and run counter to everything. From the first game, to the fundamental rules of storytelling, to relying on common, well-used ideas and making them as cliche and simple as possible. It all just speaks of him being a petty, simple-minded idiot with too big of an ego who thought he was a true artist.
Instead, Druckman is just another hack with a massive inferiority complex. Abby has to be better than Joel and Abby because she's his creation. You have to play as Abby because you will play as his character. You have to fight your favorite character, because his character is better written and has better motivation (she isn't and doesn't). The cycle of revenge crap is his simplistic ideas and incompetence mixed with his narcissism.
So all in all, this was a petty move of someone considering themselves an artistic genius, using extremely simple themes and making walking cliches out of them. Its hard to grasp, because most people aren't fucking morons.
In the end, the only real unique thing about Druckman and his writing is the magnitude of how much it destroys, ignores, belittles and renders the previous work meaningless. Not even his destruction is unique, just the magnitude of it. Because its clear Sony didn't care or didn't know, and he had full control of the studio.
This is what happens when you let a petty, small man, who thinks he's smarter than he is, given free reign over a property.
Joe Vargas ust came out against naughty dog. We are one step away from the apocalypse and Jim Sterling coming out against it too.
DSP came out against them and said something logical and coherent. That's literally how bad this is.
