Why yes, he does have a dark past. His daughter died in his arms at the very start of the outbreak, turning him into the world-weary cynic we see when the game begins proper.
In all seriousness, this is just stupid. It feels as though the second game is doing everything in its power to completely alienate Joel from the player after the player had spent an entire game getting to know him. And they're doing that by saying, "Oh by the way, that guy you spent 20-odd hours with who you sympathized with after seeing him lose his daughter and find a new one in Ellie? He was really an asshole all along!" It's fucking lazy. If you really want the audience to dislike Joel, have him go off the deep end after rescuing Ellie. He's already shown he's willing to go to extremes to protect those he loves, just build off of that instead. You don't need to arbitrarily add details to his past.
Also, how much you wanna bet this "dark truth" might have something to do with the wife we never see or hear about?
If it's not the wife, I guarantee you it'll be something with him killing a woman/women during/post-apocalypse in a really brutal way.
They're fighting a losing battle, though. Unless they make him a rapist or a pedophile, people on the whole are not gonna stop liking Joel just because he's done some dark shit. I mean fuck me, the Far Cry series is built on the backs of its villains: People love them even though they are literal murderous monsters, so I'm pretty sure Joel will be fine.
Unless- again- they decide to really
fuck themselves in the mouth and make him a pedophile or rapist. Those are the ones that will make people draw back, and it would be the literal
worst possible decision the devs could make with his character.
The
worst.
All men are rapists, even Joel.
A source close to development did confirm that ‘men’ was the main story focus in The Last of Us Part 2,
and that the whole story revolves around the controlling nature of the patriarchy.
The story was reportedly inspired by LGBTQ people working at Naughty Dog and it touches upon the controversial opinion that ‘all men are rapists.
’The theory suggests that all men, especially ones with power and influence, will betray the trust of those who look up to them. This topic has been largely discussed and pushed by the mainstream media and is even taught in gender studies in Universities today.
Emphasis mine.
Once again, I am
so fucking glad that I have enough distance from this game to not give a shit how this unfolds. If the devs are actually embracing the un-
fucking-speakably sexist idea that "all men are rapists" then this is going to turn into an absolute nightmare shitstorm, far beyond the one we've already seen.
If the company and developers are
actually running with this ideology in the process of making their game, they will absolutely push away players with opposing views, as well as moderate/centrist players. BUT, they may also start to push away people who generally agree with their politics, but disagree with the extreme nature of the ideology that they're pushing. There are left-leaning feminists who are mild enough or reasonable enough in their views that they will not approve of an "all men are rapists" narrative and denounce it as sexist (or at least, they will if they're not fucking cowards and hypocrites). I could so VERY easily see this being turned on the developers as a "men are all rapists, which means that women are all victims, and portraying women as victims is sexist" trap.
God. If there is even an
ounce of truth to this leak, the developers need to be overhauling this fucking game ASAP. It will tank so
goddamn hard if this is the sort of insulting ideological fuckery they're putting into it.
