In My Opinion The Hardest Thing To Swallow About TLoU 2 Is How It Challenges Protagonist-centred Morality

In my opinion the hardest thing to swallow about TLoU 2 is how it challenges protagonist-centred morality with Abby. Because the thing is, Abby really doesn’t do anything worse or better than what Ellie or Joel have done. Her motivation for killing Joel is literally identical to Ellie’s own motivation for seeking revenge. Yes the way she kills Joel is horrific but Ellie kills people just as brutally (esp. Nora), and the more people talk about how much they hate her and wanted to fuck her up at the end of the game just proves that you’re capable of understanding her impulse to enact extreme violence on someone out of revenge. The only thing that makes Abby “worse” to the player is that she kills the protagonist of the last game and traumatizes Ellie, both characters who we’ve come to know and care about from a meta perspective. She is a direct challenge to the ingrained assumption we have when interpreting a text that the only characters who actually matter, who are actually human and deserve our empathy, are the protagonist(s) and their allies. And yeah, that can be a hard thing to adjust to, but personally I love narratives that challenge my own assumptions about fiction and whose perspectives matter.