The Last of Us Franchise - Because it's apparently a franchise now. This thread has been double-DMCA’d by Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Special Agent Punchy said:
I hate to say it, but I think a lot of you are being naive about transness in media.



I wish I could say you were right about "ciswashing," but I know you aren't. Here are the reasons why:
  1. Clocking a trans person is a big no-no. This is a holdover from when the popular stance was "When a trans person gets reminded of their birth gender, they fall into suicidal dysphoria!" which evolved into "deadnaming a transperson is telling them to kill themselves." I'd even argue that this is where "being rude online is literal violence" came from. If ND really wanted to do this, his options are limited.
    • ND would have had to write a bigoted character who hates transwomen. In the prologue, ND makes it very clear that he doesn't think this type of character is worth writing about. (Ellie dismisses a sweet old man as a bigot even though he made her and her girlfriend "bigot sandwiches." This man is never seen again.)
    • ND would have had to somehow weasel Abby's HRT regimen into the narrative. Not only would this have derailed a game that already has a tenuous sense of pacing, it would have taken time that Naughty Dog's crunch schedule wouldn't allow. If there's any hope for a smoking gun, I'd expect it to turn up in the environment design. Any estrogen bottles lying around? Soylent?
  2. Abby's model is flat out hideous. This is more important than people give it credit for. She isn't real. There is no reason for her to be ugly except that it evokes a certain feeling upon looking at her. In ND's self-aggrandizing little mind, I'm sure he wants you, as a player with eyes, to confront that feeling. He turned her into a bigotry litmus test. If you dare point out that she looks trans, you are bigoted. If you ignore the obvious, you are a Good Person. It's queer baiting, but nobody wins by talking about it. If they had any intention of confirming that she is trans, they wouldn't have had to make it so obvious. She never had to be ugly.
Just take a look at the Instagram bodybuilder Abby is supposedly modeled after:
View attachment 1389715

Yes, she's muscular, and her attractiveness will obviously come down to taste, but she is by no means as hideous or unfeminine as Abby.

I want to believe that a smoking gun is hiding in some uncompleted datamine, but I won't hold my breath.

The only other way to determine ND's authorial intent is to look at whether or not the idea of transness is baked into any other parts of the game. I'm not going through the game with a fine-toothed comb, but I did find some evidence of exactly that:

View attachment 1389793

When Ellie infiltrates the Wolf den, she has to duck inside this bookstore. Not only is there a rainbow road leading to the door, there's an LGBT pride flag and a Trans flag (circled red) hung outside. It sure looks like someone hung them up recently. I think the center flag is an American flag, but it's in significantly worse repair than the the other two.

View attachment 1389792
Another Trans flag hangs on a bookshelf inside. It's definitely the same as the one outside.

Conclusively, this game uses the visual iconography of transness.

I hear you already: "It's set in Seattle, of course they have the flags!" I think the fact that the flags are looking brighter and in better shape than the American flag is extremely evocative, but sure. I see the point.

But when the idea of sex characteristic dysphoria pops up in notes, it's harder for me to dismiss.

View attachment 1389768

Sure, maybe we've all doodled a page that looks like this, but I'd like you to take in the imagery of a dick blasting off together with the imagery of dicks stretching, ballooning, becoming breasts, as well as the the words "Still no Scars four more hours on this shift fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuk" The Scars in question are later revealed to be a rival group, but I posit that ND had a very different interpretation in mind when he decided that THIS should be the first mention of the Scars.

Lastly, the group Abby belongs to is a bunch of furry antifa awoos who took over a portion of Seattle from a government-sanctioned enforcement group. They literally call themselves "wolves." I think everyone who's visited the CHAZ/CHOP thread knows what the gender identity demographics of that group look like.

In short, ND has played us all and he'll be laughing all the way to the awards.
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It's funny to me because LGBT shit is praised up and down from western game devs but then you have something like Haurchefant from Final Fantasy XIV who got censored for being "too gay." This wasn't even known by the JP team until someone brought it up in a Producer Live Letter for the Korean verison of the game:
Q.Why is Haurchefant a completely different character in the cutscenes in the Korean version?

A.Haurchefant's character was different in the Japanese and english version back in 2.xx and we only noticed 2 patches later when the players from NA informed us something was wrong about the localization. Now the korean version is based on the english version so that's why he seems like a totally different character.

Video below shows the differences:
 
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Übertroon said:
Was Dina the village harlot or something?

View attachment 1389927
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so let me get this straight, she leaves a man for ellie, has a baby with him while she's with ellie, and the baby turns out a different color than any of them. is that the right sequence of events? am I missing something here? this reads like some low effort /pol/ meme.
 
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Cod of War said:
Can't wait for Dartigan EWW for this shit and that faggot E;R better resurrect and do a video too.
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Leave E;R alone the avatar remake broke him.

mandatorylurk said:
I bet they were going to make Abby trans after the game sold well, thinking the story would be well received and the only criticism would be the body model so they could point out the bot bigot sandwiches on twitter. But the story is getting so shit on that they can't hide behind the bigot angle and can't get the asspats for declaring Abby trans, instead it would look like Kevin Spacy attempts of deflecting.
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Give it a few weeks after the fires die down they'll dumbledore it or they may just come out and say it this week to act as a shield if things go to badly.

Übertroon said:
Was Dina the village harlot or something?

View attachment 1389927
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Yes, her boyfriend was chineese, she's jewish and that baby is blacked. Also we need to give Ellie a reward "the first lesbian cuck."
 
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Special Agent Punchy said:
I wish I could say you were right about "ciswashing," but I know you aren't. Here are the reasons why:
  1. Clocking a trans person is a big no-no. This is a holdover from when the popular stance was "When a trans person gets reminded of their birth gender, they fall into suicidal dysphoria!" which evolved into "deadnaming a transperson is telling them to kill themselves." I'd even argue that this is where "being rude online is literal violence" came from. If ND really wanted to do this, his options are limited.
    • ND would have had to write a bigoted character who hates transwomen. In the prologue, ND makes it very clear that he doesn't think this type of character is worth writing about. (Ellie dismisses a sweet old man as a bigot even though he made her and her girlfriend "bigot sandwiches." This man is never seen again.)
    • ND would have had to somehow weasel Abby's HRT regimen into the narrative. Not only would this have derailed a game that already has a tenuous sense of pacing, it would have taken time that Naughty Dog's crunch schedule wouldn't allow. If there's any hope for a smoking gun, I'd expect it to turn up in the environment design. Any estrogen bottles lying around? Soylent?
  2. Abby's model is flat out hideous. This is more important than people give it credit for. She isn't real. There is no reason for her to be ugly except that it evokes a certain feeling upon looking at her. In ND's self-aggrandizing little mind, I'm sure he wants you, as a player with eyes, to confront that feeling. He turned her into a bigotry litmus test. If you dare point out that she looks trans, you are bigoted. If you ignore the obvious, you are a Good Person. It's queer baiting, but nobody wins by talking about it. If they had any intention of confirming that she is trans, they wouldn't have had to make it so obvious. She never had to be ugly.
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Thing is, all your arguments have plenty of counter-examples. Plenty of examples of trans' characters who out themselves as trans' for browny points without having to craft an external avenue to find out they're trans'. In fact your argument about ND not wanting to write bigoted characters to make a point is contradicted by your own example, the "sweet old man" who made Ellie sandwiches called her and...huh...whoever is her girlfriend dykes the day before, that's why he makes sandwiches, as an apology (That is then graciously spat on by Ellie, obviously).

And your argument about Abby being hideous and masculine also has plenty of similar examples, Shera being a pretty good one; Most of the time she looks like a boy in a dress, but overall, extremely feminine characters seem to be a soft no-no to the woke crowd. There's also another character who is significantly less feminine - in that case mostly losing a lot of breast - than the person she's modeled after. Like, obviously, yes, Abby is extreme in regards to all this, but seeing as plenty of people are still arguing "Muscular women just look like that !", it doesn't seem absurd to me to think that this is the studio's justification for her appearance.

Your arguments about the Wolf HQ don't convince me much, because it just sounds like the Wolves chose some sort of LGBT association's buildings as their HQ and that's it. The rainbow on the road is at least years old - especially seeing as vehicles should now be extremely scarce - and the inside flag (Which by all accounts should be the least dilapidated) is in a sorry state; I can't see that as coming from the Wolves, it had to already be there. And sure, that should have meaning, but considering the crowd, this meaning simply being "See, they're the good guys, they choose LGBT places as their HQ!" wouldn't surprise me. And the note honestly sounds like a Freudian stretch.
 
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Shqueefa said:
It's funny to me because LGBT shit is praised up and down from western game devs but then you have something like Haurchefant from Final Fantasy XIV who got censored for being "too gay." This wasn't even known by the JP team until someone brought it up in a Producer Live Letter for the Korean verison of the game:
Q.Why is Haurchefant a completely different character in the cutscenes in the Korean version?

A.Haurchefant's character was different in the Japanese and english version back in 2.xx and we only noticed 2 patches later when the players from NA informed us something was wrong about the localization. Now the korean version is based on the english version so that's why he seems like a totally different character.

Video below shows the differences:
View attachment 1389944
Click to expand...
Looks like they made him a more tolerable character, imo. The aloof, perverted male characters commonly found in Japanese anything are so poorly-written and completely overused. That is interesting though since that same dialogue would be used regardless of your character’s gender. I’ll give it credit, the text is mildly amusing and the best part of it is that it’s completely skippable - everything in FFXIV as far as story goes is skippable. You can find (some? I don’t know, story seems to be a huge part of the game and I don’t particularly like it) enjoyment just bashing shit and doing dungeons. If you were able to skip the drivel in TLoU2, you’d be left with a game with weird, clunky controls and decent visuals - absolutely nothing to write home about.
 
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Salubrious said:
This is why pandering never works.

They put an entire story arc about Lev being trans in the game, but because the evil bigots deadnamed her, the entire game is bad.

If you are wondering why all characters in WOKE media are Mary Sues, there you go. Even the villains aren't allowed to deadname someone without reeeing.
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Reminds me of the fundies who REEEEEd over the use of Satanic imagery in Doom in the 90s. They're so opposed to depictions of things they don't like that they don't care that said depiction is not meant to sympathetic.
 
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