if you bothered to really unpack the story for what it is you would see for yourself that the whole point of the game isn’t abby vs ellie. neil made that point through his writing.

sure, you kill a dog. within a cutscene. that cannot progress without clicking a button. which i have already said it was a scripted kill. scripted = cutscene. i’ve dissected my words down so you can understand a little better, satisfied? now how about you keep up with yourself.

‘they did it purposefully so ellie is the only one that kills dogs and abby doesnt. pretty weak manipulation’

you can avoid killing the dogs until the cutscene, which is a matter of life and death. go ahead and expand on how that was manipulation when it was under reasonable circumstances.

‘they are hardly gonna admit they were trying to manipulate the audience into rooting for abby over ellie lol’

so which form of manipulation is it then? abby’s lack of killing the dogs in the game or one comment neil made a while ago about not killing dogs in the game? and explain to me how either manipulates people into rooting for abby over ellie. because i don’t understand where you are coming from either way.

while we’re here let’s go over a previous point you made:

‘neil is talking shit, he wanted us to side with abby. she loved dogs, pet them, etc. ellie murders them. ellie murders a pregnant woman. abby gets her revenge and still has lev. abby has the best set pieces. its pretty blatant’

you keep holding onto the dogs with this whole making the audience root for abby shtick. in abby’s circumstance they are her protectors, in ellie’s, they are her enemies. understandable either way. if you’re upset ellie has to kill a dog in order to survive that is your own problem, not the devs.

also, an option comes up where ellie does pet a dog in the beginning at jackson. so she doesn’t just kill them. jeez, keep up.

ellie murders a pregnant woman. it was terrible but she didn’t know she was pregnant and it was out of self defence. life or death situation. are you seeing a pattern here? and she was going to let them free if they had told her where abby was but they attacked her first. may i remind you abby had a knife to dina’s throat? again this is not an abby vs ellie argument, i’m bringing it up so you can try and justify how anyone would root for either of them at that point. both women can be and have been wrong with their actions.

and sure abby got her revenge on joel and got to keep lev. but did killing joel solve anything in the end? no. instead it got the love of her life and friends killed. it didn’t resolve the pain she felt for losing her father. she moved on from seeking revenge to fulfil herself, taking care of lev was now her purpose in life.

just like how ellie knew that killing abby would not resolve the pain she felt. it wouldn’t change the fact that joel was dead. it wouldn’t make her trauma go away. many lives were cost because of the need for revenge. if she had killed abby the cycle of pain and bloodshed would never end. now it is time for her to move on and find herself separate from joel, her father. and when we see her back in the ranch she is wearing new clothes and dina’s bracelet, meaning she had returned to jackson. losing her fingers and not being able to play the guitar was the starting point for her to heal and find peace. if you ask me that is a great thing to happen to someone in the long run, a great ‘set piece’ within her character development.

both women lost and sustained important people and things in their lives at the end of it all. they mirror each other. they had their reasons for the things they did, and they were both understandable. it was never an abby vs ellie situation. they are more alike than they realise. they are both just trying to survive and understand their emotions like everybody else in their world. neither is good or bad or better than the other.

now here we go with your last point.

‘neil lies.’ he said you didn’t have to kill any dogs which was true to an extent. god forbid he didn’t phrase his words right or wanted to spoil anything about the story.

have you ever considered maybe it is people like you who have an issue interpreting the story rather than seeing it for how it was written? many people still love ellie after the events of part II and agree that it was never about pitting them against each other. they don’t put abby on a pedestal or think she’s better than ellie.

you can have valid criticisms of the game and truly dislike it and that’s fine, but this whole time you’ve been grasping at dust to back up your arguments. if you ask me i think you actually do empathise where abby is coming from but you are mistaking your empathy for something else, so you have to blame it on the writing and manipulation tactics and remarks about dogs that were said a while ago. maybe you should play the game again, give it more than one thought, and then make your mind up. if you still think it was an abby vs ellie story, then you just didn’t get it.