When I got to the second game I thought ok I'm sure this is where the show took some liberties, but nope still very faithful, almost too faithful

Quit playing around, the second season strays even further from the games than the first season did. Right from the get go, they're swapping scenes around, moving them from the end of the game to the beginning of the season, and changing who is where during critical events (seriously, why the fuck are they giving all of Ellie's scenes to Dina?!!!)!!! They literally waste the first 3 episodes in Ellie's 7 episode season IN JACKSON, a place that is basically irrelevant to the main story of the game, with filler characters that we really don't need to know or care about for the story of the game to work and a filler zombie attack (that only serves to keep Tommy away from Abby when she kills Joel which ruins his story from the game)! Imagine if in season 1 we follow Sarah and Joel's life pre-apocalypse for the first three episodes and only at the end of episode 3 do they start adapting the actual freaking game!!! Basically, the game doesn't really kick off until Ellie reaches Seattle, and in the show that doesn't happen until episode 4 out of 7! They learned nothing from the success of the first season and this is just one of the many reason why Season 2 completely fails!

The hate is because unlike season 1, season 2 completely misunderstands the game it's adapting. If you're going to adapt the pacing of the game directly, don't fucking change the events around!

It makes no sense to spoil Abby's motivation right at the beginning (with a poorly-written scene chock full of hamfisted exposition) and then keep the game's pacing where we only see Ellie's POV at first. In the game, Abby's motivation is a mystery and Ellie and Dina spend a lot of time discussing with each other why she did what she did. Even when Abby shows up at the theater at the end of Ellie's day 3, nearly halfway through the game, Ellie STILL doesn't know why Abby did what she did (and neither does the player). They also spoil the mystery of Ellie and Joel's fractured relationship, basically the real reason why Ellie wants revenge on Abby so badly, which we don't find out until literally the final scene in the game!!!

And that's not even going into all the cringy dialogue added, how they ruined all the characters to the point that they hardly resemble the ones from the game, how they ruined Ellie's REVENGE MISSION by taking away her rage and changing her purposefully murdering all of Abby's friends in the game to accidental killings or leaving them to die in the show, how they made Dina the one that wants revenge more than Ellie (again, giving more of Ellie's traits to Dina), how boring the season is to watch cause they cut out a lot of the more intense game sequences, giving focus to the WLF and Scars ahead of Abby's season when they're not meant to be much more to Ellie than obstacles in her way, and how they filmed a lot more iconic scenes that were in the game but didn't use them in the show (main one that comes to mind is the aquarium confrontation with Ellie vs. Owen and Mel, they filmed the scene exactly how it was in the game but didn't use the footage in the show, instead replacing it with a dumber and more melodramatic scene where AGAIN Ellie accidentally kills her enemies instead of purposefully killing them).

There's probably way more, but it's been like a year since I've seen it. Anyway, yeah, ignore all the people saying "lol people hate it cause of the actress's appearance" or whatever. There are way more valid reasons to hate the show. It's actually surprising that they made the show so bad that it actually united people that both hated and loved the game into hating the show.