ひげ
I gave Grok a plot synopsis of The Last of Us and then asked what the most ethical decision would be at the ending: saving Ellie or letting the Fireflies perform the surgery on her to potentially get a vaccine?
I felt like it didn't quite understand what "fight through the hospital against armed guards" meant, so I gave it additional context. So the first picture is without that context, and the second is with. There were much larger descriptions since it goes through its entire thought process before the summary at the end, but I included just the summary for brevity's sake.
I LOVE how it mentions that there may be another way to a vaccine that doesn't involve killing Ellie. That's something not a lot of people bring up whenever I see discussions about it. These doctors who think it is the only way, and that only this ONE GUY can do it correctly, are extremely short-sighted.
I also asked ChatGPT this same question and it gave mostly the same result, but it did bring up another thing I've somehow never thought of before. Why the hell do they have to remove so much that it would kill her? I looked around a bit and found this post.
My answer is a resounding NO. I think it is pretty clear that the people writing The Last of Us and especially Part 2 really did not fully grasp what they were writing and tried to push things a certain way for plot convenience.
>it is the only way, and only this ONE GUY can do it correctly
it's an apocalyptic setting, so it's not weird to only have one guy who says he can do it, and who wants to do it in a way that gives the most margin to him not having to find another Ellie if his attempt fails.
It'd be even less weird for there to be zero guys to do it. With more time, the least weird option is for Ellie to be sacrificed on an altar to a god of disease, to no effect.
The contradiction in the first game is that a cure justifies a bloody trek across the company that constantly requires you to come into conflict with and kill the last humans alive, and constantly put yourself and Ellie in situations that could very easily kill the both of you - but at the end of the game, that context is forgotten. The canon path is that you survive the trip, so the danger of the trip is irrelevant and you weren't constantly betting Ellie's life against the need for a cure. Everyone you killed is just an obstacle in a game so their blood doesn't weigh against Ellie's in the final calculation at all.
The interesting conflict is the Fireflies': it should be a pretty easy sell, to tell Joel and Ellie at the very beginning that this guy intends to kill Ellie to cure the disease. But because it's an apocalypse, the Fireflies won't accept anything but certainty: a 98% chance that Ellie says she'll go along with it and convinces Joel and hugs him for the last time and has a tearful send-off - this is, because it's not 100%, too risky of an option, so they take the forceful approach and then lose everything when Joel kills everybody and leaves with Ellie.
The second game is still completely irredeemable garbage, and I think it's fine for Joel to kill a bunch of crazy and ideological strangers to save his new daughter, and fine for Joel to pick saving his daughter over the cure - because saving his daughter is certain, and within his power to do, but nothing else is. Tomorrow the fungus could die off completely on his own. The next five hundred years' human population could have the exact same curve with and without a cure. Or a 'cure' could even be very bad in the long run, delaying necessary adaptations and prolonging the apocalyptic conditions. For Joel this is not even an interesting moral dilemma, just a character check.
For the Fireflies it's a little bit interesting, and it's bad writing for the game to not highlight that at all. And it's still stupid for them to not try harder to get Joel to accept the plan at the end AFTER they have some idea of what Joel went through to get Ellie to them. I think an interesting answer there is that they don't know: that the decision-makers in the Fireflies are these remnant scientists who are completely in an armed cocoon and not thinking much of how bad things are.
>For Joel this is not even an interesting moral dilemma,
the way it's done, I mean. He'd have a moral dilemma if the Fireflies told him what to expect at the beginning, or convinced Ellie in the end, but as it's done Joel gets the "a guy in a white robe says he's killing your daughter and you should fuck off now", which is a character check instead of a moral dilemma.
@apropos yeah that's a good point, it isn't really a dilemma for Joel at all. If it was, they would have given players a choice. For him, it was what he had to do. He even says in part 2 that if God put him back in time to do the whole thing over, he would make the exact same decision. So it isn't even something that's a moral dilemma for him later.
The question isn't really for Joel, it's for the player to decide whether or not Joel made the right decision.
