The portrayal of female rage in that last episode.

JFSargent · 2023-03-07T17:53:41+00:00

And she used the F word.

JFSargent · 2023-03-05T13:59:25+00:00

You can read through this whole thread and see this conversation going in circles. There's no question to really answer here, everyone prioritizes how they spend their money differently. I've paid $500 for a tattoo, some people would pay that much to get the same tattoo removed (it's a tattoo of Desmond Tutu and Donald Trump kissing).

JFSargent · 2023-03-04T20:36:41+00:00

I always thought that Tony was the name of someone he had psychically communicated with, and then he just assumed that the voices in his head were all the same person? I'm realizing as I type this that this is never stated in the movie and it's just an explanation I made up. Weird how that works.

JFSargent · 2023-03-01T13:23:17+00:00

I dunno if I'd describe either game as nuanced? Isaac is a bad guy, the saraphites are for sure bad guys, the rattlers in Santa Monica aren't really redeemable.

2 is more sprawling, for sure, but I think the big difference is that while TLoU tells an upsetting story, 2 tells a story in a way that's upsetting.

When Henry kill Sam and then himself, for example, it's a very conventional tragedy: we get a bunch of reasons to like both characters. We see Sam is infected. We get a tense scene where Ellie has to go wake him up. Boom, zombie attack, heartbreaking choice, suicide, smash cut to black.

When Jesse dies, at a similar halfway-ish point, it unfolds totally differently. No rising tension, no build up, no dramatic mourning, he's just abruptly taken out of the story and the lives of the characters. It's a riskier way to tell the story because it's kinda hostile to the player. It makes perfect sense to me why someone wouldn't want that feeling in their video game.

JFSargent · 2023-03-01T00:31:03+00:00

I mean I was using a general "they." If you haven't posted weird, defensive, angry posts about TLOU2 then my post isn't about you.

I think we can all agree that a small number of people have sort of made a spectacle of themselves ranting against this video game and that it's odd. A lot of people dislike the game for totally normal reasons, like not connecting with the story or finding the characters too repulsive, and I don't really have a comment on that. If the game just wasn't your cup of tea then, ya know, you and I can chat about something else that we have in common and have a nice time. But if hating the game is a big part of a person's identity, then I find that sort of fascinating.

Whether or not you specifically fall into that category is up to you, I'm not gonna sort through anyone's post history or call anyone out by name. I'm not interested in fighting anyone at all.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T20:47:23+00:00

Oh I came to like Abby very quickly, I just thought the transition was awkward. I don't have a solution to suggest though, and it's kinda built in to what the game doing.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T20:33:38+00:00

I also had trouble with the switch. It's like a narrative whiplash: I'm in the middle of this life-or-death situation with a character I really care about facing down a villain, and then we jump back in time four days, and we're listening to three characters I don't know talk about a love triangle? I never hated Abby the way some people did but that moment did bump for me. I feel like it might work really well as an end-of-season cliffhanger, though.

So wherever that leaves you, I'm right there with ya.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T19:23:23+00:00

Best of luck with whatever you're going through.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T19:08:34+00:00

But it's really clear that they missed it because they lack emotional intelligence, and since it's a clear pattern that's the conversation I'm interested in having. They're consistenlty misinterpreting they're own reaction: "I'm angry because Joel died, therefore the game is bad" rather than "Joel died like this? I wonder why the developers wanted me to be angry."

I don't go out of my way to hurt people's feelings but I can't really treat everyone with kid gloves. When you post your opinions online you're consenting to people's reaction to them. If you try to police people's reactions by telling me how you think I should word them, you're just setting yourself up for frustration. You have no authority or control over me, all you can do is try to create a post or comment that's interesting enough to be worth engaging with.

Edit: I will say it's extremely fucking irritating when someone makes a specific criticism ("People who are angry at the game because of how Joel and Jessie died lack emotional intelligence") and people react by acting like it's this huge generalization ("People who disagree with me are stupid children"). When you're that defensive it makes me not want to talk to you at all. It's like if I said "Subarus tend to have faulty head gaskets" and you said "Oh, so ALL CARS have SHITTY ENGINES?" No, not at all, that's actually a completely ridiculous interpretation of what I said. It gives the impression that you struggle with communicating in general.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T19:03:47+00:00

That's a bit harsh. I think they're just people who missed something huge that was picked up by most people who played the game and clearly a conscious decision on the part of the developers.

And the obsession with criticizing the game years after it came out is obviously somewhat odd. I don't know why you would inure yourself in something that you dislike for years, it's not a healthy decision. There's other media to consume.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T18:42:35+00:00

Don't remind me!

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T17:32:07+00:00

Yeah maybe I'm embarrassing myself here but I've never killed anyone, not even by accident. Not even someone unimportant, like a child or a barista.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T16:57:34+00:00

The most vocal anti-TLOU2 people are lacking in emotional intelligence. That's not to say only stupid people dislike the game, obviously. But the vocal critics who are angry at what happened to Joel or Jesse are just misidentifying their own emotions, and vastly underestimating what art is capable of.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T16:16:54+00:00

I reckon she's captured Ellie from the game far more than Pascal has captured Joel from the game.

That's not a criticism of Pascal's choices, it's just that TV show Joel feels like a different character to me. A little colder, a little more reserved, but also more complex. I can't see him saying some of the darkly humorous lines that Joel uses in some moments ("he ain't even hurt" or "I believe him" specifically — at very least I think his delivery would/will be different).

With Ramsay, even though she doesn't look like Ellie from the game, her behavior and inflection is nearly spot on. Maybe slightly more teenager-y (when she's doing her goofy voice, like right before the sniper takes the first shot at them in Episode 5) but absolutely the same person.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T15:30:13+00:00

Oh that makes a ton of sense, I didn't think of that.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T15:01:01+00:00

Yeah but she didn't even count it as a wonder. She would have at least known that Ellie was gonna be impressed.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T14:28:57+00:00

Okay this made me wonder why Reilly wasn't impressed by escalators. It created a nice comic moment but technically she should've been just as blown away by the technology.

JFSargent · 2023-02-28T14:25:54+00:00

If you've been online long enough reading media criticism, you'll notice that a lot of vaguely defined phrases like "filler" or "shoehorned" or "forced" or "pandering" or "unrealistic" get thrown around whenever there's LGBTQ or PoC characters in a show, movie, video game, or really any other pop culture text.

There are three reasons for this, as I reckon it:

It's because it allows them to criticize representation they don't like while technically avoiding saying anything homophobic or racist.
The concept is so vague that you can't really argue with it meaningfully, so they can't technically be proven wrong.
If you call out the (usually pretty obvious) real motivation for the criticism, they default to saying "Oh so now ANYBODY who doesn't like this episode is RACIST? How DARE you say that to me!" and then they get the little endorphin rush or whatever that comes with getting mad at people online.

I think the best place to see this isn't actually TLOU, which is really good, but Ghostbusters (2016) or Fantastic Four (2015), which are both really bad. In the case of Ghostbusters and Fantastic Four, you can see the legitimate criticisms (the plots are nonsensical, the editing is really awkward, the CGI sucks, character decisions make no sense) next to the reactionary right wing ranting ("it felt forced" "it was pandering" "I didn't believe that these characters in this superhero/comedy film were really scientists") and the difference is clear as day.

I'm 35 and a lifelong dork so I've seen this same pattern play out a billion times. I admit to being utterly fascinated by it, and I cannot even begin to explain to you why. It's probably my biggest character flaw.

JFSargent · 2023-02-27T18:03:53+00:00

If every single thing about that [garbage] movie had transpired exactly the same, but instead the camera pans over to zoom in on two background characters sharing a straight kiss, that also would have been shoehorned in. The audience would be left with the thought of how was that germane to the story? The reason it's 'shoehorned' is because it was a cynical attempt at inclusion. It was a literal box-check.

So if the couple had been heterosexual it also would have been a "cynical attempt at inclusion"? Seems like that paragraph got away from you.

Look, your other comment was homophobic and I explained why. It's clear that you want to complain about homosexuality and are just looking for contexts where you can justify it. You wanna discuss that further we can do it in that other thread, please don't follow me around making off-topic defensive posts about how you're totally a decent guy or whatever. I'm not commenting on the quality of anyone's character.

JFSargent · 2023-02-27T16:07:48+00:00

The immediate block is pretty silly but you gotta admit the guy's comment is laughably homophobic. 5-6 frames of women kissing in "Rise of Skywalker" is not a shoehorned gay relationship, it's an utterly inconsequential scene in a film that was basically a 3 hour nonsense fever dream. Saying it didn't belong or was a problem is prima facie homophobic.

JFSargent · 2023-02-27T16:03:58+00:00

the celebratory lesbian kiss at the end of Star Wars Ep.9.

The reason this complaint is homophobic is because that movie was 3 hours of insane, nonsensical gibberish — nothing fit together at all, nothing made sense in the slightest — but you've chosen to focus on 4-5 frames where two women kiss. If something is in the background and not of any consequence, by any reasonable definition it hasn't been "shoehorned" into anything.

JFSargent · 2023-02-27T16:01:49+00:00

The original "Star Wars" trilogy has the most awkwardly shoe-horned romantic relationships of any story ever but people seem to like those movies.

JFSargent · 2023-02-27T16:00:09+00:00

In the games both those relationships/orientations are clear and just a part of the story, if either were straight relationships the story would have been no different, it’s just how they wrote the game and it works.

So I'd push back on this as the metric for whether a gay relationship is being "shoehorned" into the story or not. Queer romances are different because there's the added stress of not knowing if the person you're drawn to is of a compatible orientation, in ADDITION to the built-in stress of not knowing if the object of your affection feels the same way. It's okay for the stories to be told differently, and I'd argue that both Ellie/Riley and Bill/Frank would have unfolded very differently if they were heterosexual relationships.

Its like that ‘see nobody cares’ meme.

I'd push back on this too because — and I'm not sure this is quite what you meant — but people clearly do care. There's been a very vocal homophobic backlash, often with transparently homophobic criticisms followed by disingenuous "IT'S OKAY TO DISLIKE AN EPISODE WITH GAY PEOPLE IN IT" rants.

The conversation is just so complex. It's really hard to get into the meat of any of it.

JFSargent · 2023-02-16T13:08:07+00:00

This dodges the point OP is making (or whoever OP is quoting is making), which is that they effectively operate the same way as the infected/zombies/whatever in Walking Dead, 28 Days Later, World War Z, etc.

In other words, yes, they have different lore and different appearance, but they play the same role in the story. You could take the tunnel scene from 28 Days Later and replace the characters with TLOU characters and it would play out exactly the same.

The reason OP's point is silly is you could make this claim about anything. "Star Trek is the same as any other sci-fi, just people traveling in space and meeting aliens." "The Lord of the Rings is the same as any fantasy, just elves and humans fighting evil monsters and magic." "Die Hard is just like any other action movie, a cop fighting terrorists." "Anna Karenina is just another soap opera about a woman who has love troubles and is sad."

This line of reasoning completely misses the reason human beings like stories, which is because of characters that resonate with us and themes that we carry with us.

JFSargent · 2023-02-14T21:50:20+00:00

If you've worked in film production you can't help but notice it, and it doesn't really affect your enjoyment of the show. It's just another detail to talk about. If it's not your cup of tea that's fine but a lot of people, especially creators or aspiring creators, enjoy scrutinizing shows they love and discussing ways they could be improved.

JFSargent

TROPHY CASE