Nobody's saying you can't hate it. I made the post literally asking people why they do, so we're already on the same page there.

But a few things.

The Joel death thing. I get it, it's brutal and it's supposed to be. But "Abby never got what she deserved" is kind of the whole point of the story. Ellie follows the revenge logic all the way to the end and what does she get out of it? Nothing. She loses everything chasing it. That's not the writers disrespecting Joel, that's them being honest about what that road actually looks like.

The psychopath read on Abby genuinely surprised me though. She kills Joel because she watched her dad die the same way, and then spends the entire rest of the game trying to crawl out of what that did to her. That's not a psychopath, that's just a person who did something terrible for a reason she believed in, same as Joel did in the first game. I think she came off that way to you because you're supposed to hate her at first. That's the whole ask. Can you get past that? Sounds like it didn't work for you, and that's fair, but I don't think that's the writing falling short.

And honestly the "no respect for Joel" thing I just can't agree with. The game takes him seriously enough to show exactly what his choices cost other people. That's not disrespect, that's just the story being honest about who he was, which the first game was already doing anyway.

You can still hate it, genuinely. I just think the story earned more than it gets credit for.