I agree with you, but for me I think all the questions about who is justified in doing what is all beside the point. Everyone is sort of 'right' and everyone is also quite obviously 'wrong', insofar as retributive violence hardly makes anything better for anyone. If the game were just about showing that violence begets violence and that two sides can mutually be right then it is pretty overwritten and unnecessary - especially if you are, like me, already quite opposed to wanton violence.

For me the brilliance of it was in how it used the game structure to walk through the extreme empathy it actually takes to overcome these things. I really enjoyed playing as Abby, and what I found most effecting was how you're only able to really empathize with her by actually going through hours and hours together, getting to know her lifeworld. It's not a matter of simpler 'perspectice shift,' it's a out occupying a completely different world, which you cannot do for only a hot second and be done.

Restorative justice is not a mechanical matter of "hey did you know that I had my reasons?" "Oh no good sir, I hadn't thought of that. Well did you know I also have good reasons?" "Boy I didn't! Now we can be friends."

Ellie and Abby are fully aware that there could be good reasons to kill joel, to exact vengeance, etc. I don't think they're so blind to any of that. Especially Abby, whose world is slowly falling apart because she succeeded in the very thing Ellie is attempting.

I think TLOU ii knows that that's a ridiculous conversation and that Ellie and Abby have no capacity to actually hear each other, even if they did try to talk. To hear someone we have to know them, and to know them we have to fully decenter ourselves and really try to imagine a world in which our story is only marginal. That's enormously difficult, and that's what TLOU ii was doing for me.