Current Events > Was Joel right in TLoU? *spoilers*

(+) Yeah! (+)

sabin017 posted...

It was an act of selfishness.

So was what the fireflies wanted. Just to the other side

Also I think the more realistic "cure" would be for Ellie to have kids and those kids to have kids and create a new immune breed of human. But she's gay so.....yea

JoCrazy posted...

Kill a child so a handful of people won't turn after a bite?

That's the point of the question, yes. 1 child or the potential to save an unknown number of people (potentially including children).

AndyReklaw posted...

That's the point of the question, yes. 1 child or the potential to save an unknown number of people (potentially including children).

as i said people cant actually morally complex stories so they always try to remove the complexity and just side with the prtoagonist

Of course he wasn't right, but he was understandable. That's what makes it a compelling dillemma.

I mean he probably singlehandedly doomed humanity, because he loved someone too much.

AceMos posted...

ok so you think what joel did was wrong but rather than just say that you need to make him into a hero when that is not his character at all

just an FYI you can think what joel did was wrong and still agree you would do the same thing in his shoes

but this is why people cant handel morally complex stories

they have to find a way to make the protagonist a hero when ever things like this come up

what joel did was wrong and its also a thing any sane and normal person would do

Joel was right. That doesn't make him a hero. Him ( and Tommy and Maria, etc.) have done several morally questionable ( at best) things to survive as long as they have.

I don't think he was right for what he did but a lot of people would have done what he did if they were in his position

He wasn't some hero that was saving a girl from some senseless killing (as far as he knew), he was just some guy that would rather watch the world die out than lose another daughter

AceMos posted...

as i said people cant actually morally complex stories so they always try to remove the complexity and just side with the prtoagonist

Yep and it really sucks with how strong of a story it was and instead of fun meaningful discussions it just led to a bunch of people whining "strong lady kill hero, strong lady bad (me send death threat to strong lady voice actor who has no say in the story)".

Obviously that's not everyone here and I totally believe there is an argument to be had (as has been mentioned, that's what makes this so compelling). But like you said, so many people can't or just refuse to grapple with anything more complex that "this is the protagonist, which means he is the good guy".

AceMos posted...

as i said people cant actually morally complex stories so they always try to remove the complexity and just side with the prtoagonist

It's funny that to develop these morally complex stories we have to oversimplify the scenario. In real life there's rarely only 2 options and outside the box thinking is often the solution to a difficult choice. The moral choice would be to work on developing a vaccine without killing her. When they failed that test, Joel made the right response.

We'd see this argument a lot less often if Joel wasn't a white man.

I don't get why it was so hard to not make Ellie unconscious and have her voluntarily choose herself

Whenever this comes up people always confuse "right" with "justifiable"

Just because you can understand why someone did something and empathize with them doesn't mean what they did was right. He doomed the human race for one person.

And yeah, most people with kids wouldn't choose to sacrifice their kid. I'd certainly do the same thing for my niece that Joel did in that situation. And we'd all be wrong for it.

ArchNemo posted...

Whenever this comes up people always confuse "right" with "justifiable"

Just because you can understand why someone did something and empathize with them doesn't mean what they did was right. He doomed the human race for one person.

And yeah, most people with kids wouldn't choose to sacrifice their kid. I'd certainly do the same thing for my niece that Joel did in that situation. And we'd all be wrong for it.

I am against removing safety precautions on clinical testing in the real world in an effort to save more lives faster in the long run. Just because it saves more lives doesnt make it the right thing.

bfslick50 posted...

I am against removing safety precautions on clinical testing in the real world in an effort to save more lives faster in the long run. Just because it saves more lives doesnt make it the right thing.

It's not a matter of saving lives faster, it's a matter of humanity literally going extinct without the cure.

Right and wrong are not the best ways to look at it honestly.

Was it understandable that Joel would do literally anything (including literally murdering dozens of people) to save Ellie from taking an action she was choosing to do? Understandable yes. Was it understandable that Joel would lie about the circumstances of it all to Ellie because he knew she would not agree or understand? Understandable yes.

Is it understandable that Ellie was furious and sick to her stomach that a man she grew to love as a father would murder dozens of people and then lie to her about it AGAINST her wishes? Understandable yes.

It all comes down to a couple major points. Is it right to sacrifice the good of the many for your own selfish desires? (Remember that Ellie was in FAVOR of this sacrifice to some degree, I don't remember if she was aware it would lead to her death). Is it right to cover up your own actions and lie to someone to avoid the consequences of your selfish acts?

On a larger scale, is there really a place FOR morality of this type at the end of the world? Civilization is largely failing... is it inherently wrong to respond to this new world with a sense of tribalism and taking care of your own first?

My personal take on it all is that I cannot fault anyone at the end of the world for becoming "tribal" and putting that responsibility first and foremost in their mind. That isn't inherently wrong, but it does mean that the laws of tribalism exist for everyone. Joel, to protect his "tribe", killed dozens of people and lied to his own basically adopted daughter, all to protect his tribe. In that process, the remnants of that tribe he nearly killed off are entirely justified in coming for him.

You can't have it both ways. You can't justify it for Joel on one end to be tribal and "take care of his own" first and morally be allowed to take revenge, but then point to someone else doing the same thing and be like, "WTF that's not fair!"

Right for the wrong reasons. It's hard to agree with the Firefly side given what we know. But Joel didn't care about any of that. He didn't care if the Fireflies could or could not make a cure. He didn't care about anyone's feeling on the subject. He just didn't want to lose Ellie, Damn the cure, damn the fireflies, and damn Ellie's feelings. Joel was a piece of shit, and his motivations were completely self serving.

chris1001_the_sequel posted...

and damn Ellie's feelings

To be fair Ellie was a 14 year old girl with survivors guilt and just wanted to die.

I think the whole "people can't handle morally complex stories" argument is reductive and just as asinine as the people pretending Joel was a hero.

The fact is, no matter what Druckmann intended, he didn't end up writing a scenario where it was as simple as "the cure is guaranteed to work, choose to save your daughter or save the world."

The Fireflies are bad people. Like, that's literally just reality. We see the organization doing morally repugnant shit throughout the entire game. In yhe end, it doesn't MATTER whether the cure was guaranteed to work or not. For you hand a little girl over to the goddamn Taliban for vivisection? Do we really trust the goddamn Taliban to save the world, even IF they have a guaranteed cure? Does it actually matter of the little girl WANTS to be vivisected by the goddamn Taliban?

Moreover, what exactly was the rush? If everyone is SO confident that Ellie would WANT to sacrifice herself to save the world... why not wait for her to wake up and ask her? Answer: nobody actually knows whether she wants to, and the Fireflies either dont want to risk her refusing, or don't care. Probably both.

Now, did Joel actually consider all of that when he went in guns-a-blazing to save her? No. He was a damaged man who didn't want to lose his surrogate daughter.

But, on the other side, he also KNOWS how bad the Fireflies are. He's seen and experienced it first hand. Again, if a father is confronted with "sacrifice your daughter yo the goddamn Taliban so they can harvest her brain tissue to save the world," does it really MATTER whether the cure would work? Step 1 is still "sacrifice your daughter to the goddamn Taliban" and step 2 is still "trust the Taliban to save the world." Does it really matter whether the father was only thinking of "selfishly" saving his daughter in that scenario? Does the Utilitarian "greater good" argument even still hold up in that scenario? The father is still arguably doing the morally correct thing in not letting the Taliban vivisect his 14 year old daughter.

The whole point of TLOU is that there is absolutely no way back. We spend the whole game confronted with total societal collapse. We are confronted over and over again with abject moral depravity that there is no walking back from. The opening scene of the game has our institutions gunning down a wounded child rather than trying to help anyone. And our only actual hope of a cure comes from a terrorist cell that's arguably worse than the remnant fascist military towns. Repeatedly, the message is that the people and things we love that are close to us are the only things worth saving and fighting for. It's an exploration of what it means to be "the last of us," and the answer is that it means protecting "the last of US."

To write that off as "Joel selfish and just wanted to help himself instead of save the world and if you dont think so that means you think he's a hero" is a massive disservice to the story being told. Joel isn't choosing himself over the greater good. There IS no greater good, anymore. Regardless of whatever Druckmann wanted, that's the story he wrote.

I couldn't have said it better. Well done.

dezeree posted...

I don't get why it was so hard to not make Ellie unconscious and have her voluntarily choose herself

Because she might have said no, and Marlene did NOT want that.

People call the Fireflies evil but technically if they were as super ultra bad as suggested they'd have just shot Joel dead on the spot. He was of no further use to them once they retrieved Ellie. They could've easily tied up the loose end and went on with their lives.

The fact that he was alive to rebel at all shows that to some extent they really were trying to be decent.

SecretBase posted...

People call the Fireflies evil but technically if they were as super ultra bad as suggested they'd have just shot Joel dead on the spot. He was of no further use to them once they retrieved Ellie. They could've easily tied up the loose end and went on with their lives.

The fact that he was alive to rebel at all shows that to some extent they really were trying to be decent.

While I'm on the Joel is bad side, I'm just gonna be fair: the Fireflies absolutely wanted to kill him. Marlene is the only reason they didn't.

They asked me to kill the smuggler. I'm not about to kill the one man in this facility that might understand the weight of this choice. Maybe he can forgive me.

pegusus123456 posted...

While I'm on the Joel is bad side, I'm just gonna be fair: the Fireflies absolutely wanted to kill him. Marlene is the only reason they didn't.

They asked me to kill the smuggler. I'm not about to kill the one man in this facility that might understand the weight of this choice. Maybe he can forgive me.

Fair point, but she is the leader so even if 99% of the group has zero morals independently as long as they obey then the organization technically retains some humanity. >_>

SecretBase posted...

as long as they obey

There's another one where she says they'd have done the surgery even if she said no lol

joel was wrong, but he wasnt there. he was back there when his real daughter was killed

he was back in that moment and saw a way to change it. he was wrong, but look at where he was

Ellie is tied to the tracks, and a trolley is going to run her over. Joel is too far away to help her, but he is standing near a switch that will redirect the trolley toward the entire future of human civilization. Should he pull the switch?

Though that say Joel was in the wrong, assume the fireflies were 100% going to make a cure. Don't know about y'all but I don't trust them period. Could have? Maybe, but it wasn't a guarantee and I ain't sacrificing my surrogate daughter for a a chance with people I don't fucking trust. It ain't happening.

HeWhoHasNoShadow posted...

Ellie is tied to the tracks, and a trolley is going to run her over. Joel is too far away to help her, but he is standing near a switch that will redirect the trolley toward the entire future of human civilization. Should he pull the switch?

The Trolley Problem has been analyzed waaaaaaaaay too much to ever apply to anything tbh. At best, you'd be working with a custom variation of a variation.

Maybe it's the oval track with the fat man (Ellie) on a shortcut, when the fat man's mother (Marlene) has already switched it to hit the fat man from its original course, and the fat man's father (Joel) has the opportunity to pull the fat man off the tracks.

SecretBase posted...

People call the Fireflies evil but technically if they were as super ultra bad as suggested they'd have just shot Joel dead on the spot. He was of no further use to them once they retrieved Ellie. They could've easily tied up the loose end and went on with their lives.

The fact that he was alive to rebel at all shows that to some extent they really were trying to be decent.

The first 20 minutes of the game the Fireflies are committing a terrorist attack in Boston.

They absolutely are no better.

I feel like, "terrorist" is a loaded term, and that comparisons to groups like the Taliban are unfair, when we're talking about the Fireflies.

this isn't to sanitize anything they've done, but FEDRA is a highly authoritarian government, where no one has any rights, and where they can just be executed.

as a group, we see the Fireflies bomb FEDRA targets, which isn't as bad as what we hear about what FEDRA has done.

individually, we know about them willing to sacrifice Ellie for some kind of vaccine, which is hard to moralize in a world like that, unless if you have a utilitarian view.

It seems like most people can at least understand why he made his choice, and most still agree with it.

He was right to try to protect and stop the experiment, but he was wrong in the way he did it.

He honestly should have let Eli decide for herself. She was mature enough to understand. This is where Joel was being selfish. Yeah she was passed out at the time, but he also lied to her, creating a huge mess.

_____Cait posted...

He was right to try to protect and stop the experiment, but he was wrong in the way he did it.

He honestly should have let Eli decide for herself. She was mature enough to understand. This is where Joel was being selfish. Yeah she was passed out at the time, but he also lied to her, creating a huge mess.

He had no other way to stop them. The fireflies were not listening

_____Cait posted...

He was right to try to protect and stop the experiment, but he was wrong in the way he did it.

He honestly should have let Eli decide for herself. She was mature enough to understand. This is where Joel was being selfish. Yeah she was passed out at the time, but he also lied to her, creating a huge mess.

Eli pretty much admits to having a death wish so I wouldn't say she would be mature enough or in the right state of mind to make a choice.

He was. Ellie probably would've sacrificed herself, and the cure would've worked but the Fireflies took away her choice

No. He wasn't. I remember playing the game and standing in front of the doctors and was like... "really"?