LogFAQs > #952785489

AvantgardeAClue posted...

No 15 year old will realistically be willing to sacrifice themselves on a "maybe" which is all the Fireflies were offering, c'mon now.

Riley was the first to die....then Tess...then Sam... Im still waiting for my turn.

Ellie explicitly tells Joel she has survivor's guilt and still feels like she should be dead. She then reaffirms that stance in the flashback at the end of TLOU2 where she says she was supposed to die in the hospital. Ellie is a character absolutely wracked with survivor's guilt and on top of that feels robbed of her purpose in life, to "be the cure."

You can definitely argue Ellie, as a 15 year old, is not really of sound mind to make that call. You can also argue that maybe when it actually came time for her to say "yes, I'm ready to die" she wouldn't have been able to muster it up. Aside from that, I've got absolutely no idea where you got this confidence that Ellie would never be willing to sacrifice herself. That's kinda like... her whole thing. The Left Behind DLC went out of its way to hammer home how central this is to her character. What you're describing as a "common theory" that she just accepted Joel was lying and it was for the best was simply never the case and is a fundamental misreading of the scene and the character.

Ashley Johnson even said at the time seven years ago that Ellie didn't believe Joel. "Ellie through the game has a really good bullshit detector... so when Joel says that 'oh, you know, yeah, the Fireflies, it didn't end up working', she KNOWS he's lying." Say what you will about Word of God as a source, but I think that's simply supplemental confirmation of what's already obvious in game.

Darmik said a lot of this too, and said it very well. Yes, TLOU was "ambiguous" in its morality but a lot of the people claiming that TLOU2 ruined the ambiguity seem to be referring to things in TLOU1 that were NOT actually very ambiguous and were just not paying terribly close attention. To be so confident that Ellie would definitely not sacrifice herself to the Fireflies that you're like "c'mon now" to anyone who suggests otherwise only serves to make it look like your memory of the first game is fuzzy or that you willfully ignored things it told you to headcanon your interpretation.

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-Shred