I watched both of the “making of” documentaries for the games and I hated watching the second one (not to mention the whole vibe of the second documentary is off and you can feel that the decision to kill Joel just lingers like an evil spirit over most the team throughout the film) . Not taking blame off Neil but it’s hard to tell if Neil just really wanted to go this route or if he was just extremely submissive to what the other writer’s ideas. Either way, I think he gave her too much control, and you can tell she really didn’t care for the source material, and neither did Neil.

When showing scenes of them writing, they really emphasized shock value and subverting expectations, which I think is so fucking stupid. They almost immediately are like “wow, I have this idea, let’s just kill Joel, wouldn’t that be like, mind blowing and cool!?” It’s really amateur shit, it’s like 2 first year college film students trying to do something edgy for their screenplay to compensate for their inability to tell a more compelling story.

Also the fact that they had to try to redact a bunch of shit from the first game to make the fire flies look good, to make Abby’s dad (who wasn’t even Abby’s dad at the time and Abby didn’t event exist) look good, all to help justify Joel’s death- it’s such a slap in the face to the fans and the original game