I'd like to ask Grok about the moral dilemma present in the second game as well with Ellie's decision to not kill Abby at the end. I personally think the whole "revenge bad" thing is stupid because in the end Abby gets what she wanted and Ellie loses everything, despite both of them participating in revenge.

Then there's the trans dude or whatever, who I think solely exists as a way for the kind of people Naughty Dog wants playing their games to attach to Abby in order to justify her being a good person. Just like how they showed Abby's dad freeing animals from hunting traps. The whole thing just felt so fucking cheap man... but that's a different topic.

Personally, I wouldn't take the writers lack of research or understanding of the procedures they're talking about as indicating a lack of skill or knowledge on the character's side of things. There's some level of suspension of disbelief that needs to be given to these kinds of things, and it's best to assume that the diagrams depicting something that should be easier than the writing implies was just a mistake with art assets. I mean like, they're making a vaccine, for a fungus, it's obvious the writers don't know the specifics of what they're talking about.

@Alex it's probably a case of the last of us writers exceling in emotional narrative but not logical narrative, and so the logical narrative affects the emotional narrative in a way they didn't intend. this isn't the only example of that either, it's extremely evident in the first game too. the difference is that the first game's emotional narrative is something that a much wider audience can identify with and it was very sincere.

@Alex there is a reason that one of the most common pieces of advice for fledgling writers is "write what you know" though. i once was proofreading a friend's book and the whole premise was based upon taking a trip to russia that turned out poorly. the plane crash lands in an abandoned tundra and they have to find out how to survive. the plane ride was only 2 hours because this dude had never been on a plane and so didn't really understand how long it would take to get somewhere. then, at some point they find a village and it is thematically closer to a scandinavian village rather than a russian village. it's things like that where, sure you can suspend disbelief, but at a certain point it breaks the immersion.

Yeah, I get that. Suspension of disbelief only stretches so far. I was only responding to the bit about the diagram because that's something that is, imo, relatively easy to suspend disbelief for - I doubt any of the writers or artists are neurosurgeons, and even if they consulted a neurosurgeon, it's easy to have some minor details slip through the cracks, have things change at a later date after they were initially consulted, have something get rushed, etc. A writer just needs to make things believable enough that people are able to accept it, but, every mistake adds up, and eventually it becomes too much to bear.

@Alex it's also a problem where the emotional narrative isn't compelling enough and it also devalues the impact of the first game's. because of that, it's a lot harder to gloss over issues in the logical narrative. your attention isn't drawn to the emotional aspect of it, or if it is then it isn't in a way that distracts you from other mistakes. it amplifies them. kind of like how if you're watching a movie and the story just isn't good, you start nitpicking things harder and not just with the story, but things like the shot continuity too.

@beardalaxy
>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.

@beardalaxy
>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.

@tomie that's actually really funny lol maybe you're right xD

@Hephaestic I was watching a video where an AI was asked about ethical situations and got curious about this situation, that's all. I'm not retarded enough to let an AI dictate my opinions.

@beardalaxy
Oh, okay. I guess I'm also tired of the novelty value of poking an AI chatbot for a response, but if you got something out of it then that's good.

@Hephaestic I mean, I usually end up learning something I didn't know before when I do it. I had no idea there were all these schools of ethics for instance.