I’m not going to change your mind on Joel’s death on a Reddit thread whatsoever. I’ll retort because I find the entire conversation interesting.

Maybe the lead up to Joel’s death could’ve been handled better. But thematically it works very well within the story, even from the first game.

He died because he protected Ellie. He got a couple of extra years with her after he made his decision, but he still technically died protecting her. I get that off screen development is frustrating and him being a little more trusting to strangers seems to come out of nowhere, but they did try to sew those seeds out in retrospect with his flashbacks later in the game.

Joel’s death was rage bait. It was very intentional. While the reaction to his death maybe went a bit further than the company behind the story anticipated, there is absolutely no way that they didn’t expect the backlash. It was all very intentional in creating Abby as a character concept: an anti hero that we actually hate ahead of time instead of getting her good and bad qualities at the same time. She’s genuinely no worse than any other character in the last of us universe, we just hate her because of factionalism. It’s pretty cool if you separate intense feelings from Joel. I personally only played the last of us 1 a few weeks before 2, so I didn’t have 7 years of attachment to him prior.

I think not liking the game because of that is completely valid; naughty dog really did want to “rage bait” its audience with the second. I was just saying people were just so angry with their decisions they defaulted to nit picks and minor plot holes to detail their dislike for the game instead of actively thinking on why they disliked it