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[alt text: Text which says, "The 2 genders according to chuds". Below the text is two images. On the left is an image of Geralt from The Witcher 3, and he is labeled, "Male, parentheses (white)". On the right is an image of Ciri from The Witcher 4 trailer, and she is labeled, "Political".]
I also cannot understand how you could play the Last of Us Part 1 and not realise how horrible Joel is.
Spoilers for both games ahead.
The ending of 1 was super difficult for me to play and super powerful in its delivery. It was horrible to decide to "save" Ellie by literally murdering everyone in the research station and destroying all hope for a cure. I was really impressed that they went there storywise, but then when in 2 Joel gets killed, all these so-called "fans" are angry because their lovely protagonist was killed. It's like they willfully ignore the complicated morals that were already present in the first game. When Abby does horrible stuff, they hate her. When Joel does horrible stuff in 1, it's fine. Part 2 had some problems, but I hugely respect what they were going for and how it polarised the community.
I think it has less to do with gender politics and more to do with delivery, though.
The writing was just better. They make Joel to be a complicated, sympathetic character, and create a situation in which, even as Joel/the player murders relative innocents, you know he is doing a bad thing from a complicated and genuine love. Then, they take that character and reduce all his love to "he did a bad" and shoot him, make you chase his killer for half a game, and try to make you sympathize with his killer after the fact? And it's all tied together through this tired, "cycle of violence" trope that another major post-apolcolyptic zombie survival media has already bastardized and beaten to death.
The "fans" who defend Joel as the hero are insane, on that point I can't agree more. But I think the dislike of Abby and the love of Joel is deeper than "guy good, girl bad." I've seen far fewer complaints (though not zero complaints) about playing the notably more "woke" surrogate lesbian daughter than about playing as Abby.
As an aside, I've been thinking recently about how the game would feel if you spend the first half of the game as Abby, chasing her father's killer, only to have the rug pull later that the killer is Joel. Then, you spend the second half playing as Ellie, dealing with the consequences, while the player is trying to reconcile what just happened. Though it prob would have been harder to sell a game that doesn't open with Eillie and Joel.
I completely agree with your last part, the story would have been perfect if it was switched.
To counter your other argument, the surrogate lesbian daughter is still more visually stereotypically attractive though. The number of hate posts for Abby that even go into transfobic territory and misgendering was massive. I made the mistake of wanting to read some discussion on part 2 after playing it on reddit: the whole sub is just hate (there probably is an alternative but I didn't look further, I was to disgusted by it).
But your opinion on Joel vs Abby is valid, it's actually annoying that actual discussion about storytelling gets overshadowed by bigots.
On a similar note, I had issues with the change in direction of Doctor Who which accidently coincided with the casting of the first female Doctor, and it was so hard to have genuinely critical discussions without misogynists taking over or being accused of being one myself.
I looked it up, the horrible sub is TheLastOfUs2 (avoid!), the normal one is LastOfUsPart2
Ooh. That's a pretty clean fix for my bigger gripes about the game. I nearly put the game down when the second half was revealed. It felt so forced. Still don't love the forced participation in the torture porn at the end, but switching the order of perspectives would def be better.
Re: the ending and Part II - It pissed me of in particular because I specifically went for a leg shot in that scene, and then Joel just goes on a rampage. And then it turns into a big revenge plot in the sequel for the very thing I didn't want to do. It was all very frustrating.