This article contains spoilers
This is a rebuttal of “The Last Of Us Part 2’ Review (PS4): Dig Two Graves” article from Forbes. To say that I find it completely wrong in every way is an understatement.
The author begins his moral philosophy by saying:
I also remember that Joel did something that could easily be considered monstrous, murdered an entire hospital of people looking for a cure for the virus so he could save Ellie.
How is saving your adopted daughter by killing those who want to take her life a monstrous murder? It’s the clearest example of justifiable homicide by every law I know of, especially when considered that all killed in that building were part of an organized group.
Lets not forget those doctors tried to kill a child. I repeat. They were trying to kill a child. Hello?
The only alternative here is for Joel to walk away and let them do to Ellie whatever they want.
Now that would be monstrous.
It’s incredible that some people don’t see the clear line here, which naturally leads them into moral relativism, a place where all the confused end up.
Some people just want Ellie to be John Wick and murder everyone who wronged her without a second thought. But The Last of Us 2 wants to see that Ellie’s “minibosses” are actual people, Abby’s friends. And if we’re going with the John Wick comparison, Abby’s the one whose dog gets murdered. It is not easy to confront the idea that the characters you have grown to love may not be good people. That was pretty clear in the last game with Joel’s hospital murder spree. Whether you want to justify that or not, it’s still brutal and highly debatable, given that it’s not just the Fireflies he killed, but potentially millions who could have benefited from a potential cure.
The John Wick’s dog wasn’t preparing to kill a child. Those doctors did. You are willing to turn a blind eye because “the doctors tried to develop a vaccine and potentially speed up the recovery of the human species”.
Don’t you see you’re only postponing its doom when you do that? A species that’s willing to sacrifice a child for its own salvation will not get far. It may escape one extinction event, but another one will surely come if that’s how we operate. We must be better than that to survive.
That doctor is everything that’s wrong about us today. Everything is about the collective. But you can’t build the collective by treating individuals as expendable, especially when that individual is a child. A collective like that will be rotten from the bottom up. Whenever you put the society above the individual, you end up harming the both in the long run. It’s a bad road to walk and it always leads to hell.
By the end of the game, you should at least be able to appreciate the perspective that in Abby’s story, Joel and Ellie are the clear villains.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. See, the difference is, Joel killed to save his adopted daughter. Abby killed just to get her revenge. Joel didn’t needlessly torture people he killed just to satisfy his rage and thirst for vengeance. Abby did.
From the objective point of view, it’s clear who’s the real monster.
There is no moral relativism here when you put all the parts on the table and look at them from the distance. The difference between the actions of these two characters can’t be any clearer, which is why I categorically dislike the story that tries to muddy the waters and blur the lines.