Written in response to MisAnthro Pony’s superb YouTube commentary “The Last Of Us Part 2 Is Worse Than You Think”
Who would have ever thought that a sequel could ruin a magnificent prequel? That is what The Last of Us 2 accomplished. I ranked The Last of Us among the top 5 games ever. It was perfect. Yet, the sequel ruined it. I can never play it again. I might as well trash it. There something really real about the first The Last of Us, movingly real. The second is a tortured peace of PC propaganda and a nihilistic orgy of violence and hatred. I loved Ellie and Joel and now I hate Ellie. I haven't played the game but have watched many YouTube videos about the game. I could never play the sequel because it ruined a beautiful and perfect game. It's a shame. What the game accomplished for me is to never buy a PS4, which I was tempted do just to play the continuation of The Last of Us. Now, however, once I move up it will be Xbox One. I own a PS3 but will never buy a PS4 because of the desecration of The Last of Us.
The great thing about Mass Effect 1, 2, & 3 is that it convincingly preaches inclusion. It’s all over the game. And if you want to participate in a gay relationship, you can. I actually do by happenstance because I play a female Shepard because she’s cooler than dude Shepard and beautiful but I also enjoy her friendship with lizard girl Liara because Laura is so lovable. It leads to a lesbian relationship but I don’t care. To me they are just friends and their relationship is about friendship, not sex. I skip through or avoid all sex scenes—heterosexual or otherwise because I don’t play games for the sex. In the Mass Effect trilogy there is an incredible variety of friendships between humans and with robots and bizarre looking aliens. The Hollywood influence has been to equate sex with friendship. They are not the same. Anyway, The Last of Us 2 was a requiem for the first The Last of Us. That’s really too bad. Without the awful sequel the first The Last of Us could be played repeatedly, but not now. Naughty Dog has been really naughty, like evil. It’s time for a name change: Judas Dog.
Before completing your video I didn't know about Joel's end but based on what was said and shown, it was absurdly graphic and awful. Judging from your video the game is a mess at many levels--trying to score virtue points with the LGBTQ crowd (represented by two female monsters) yet weirdly appealing to the crowd that enjoys over the top graphic mayhem and murder. Actually, the two seem incompatible. What happened to feminism being an alternative to mean-spirited, hateful, destructive masculinity? The new feminist role model is now the rabid monster Abby? And why must she be so masculine that she has essentially become a man with a vagina—making her a female destroyed by her masculine build and hateful attitude thus an antagonist of feminism? Making her look like a man seems to undermine the feminist narrative that girls can be bad-asses without being men, as illustrated in games like Mass Effect and Tomb Raider or Ellie in the first game.
What I liked most about The Last of Us was that it proved that great video games can have a profound beneficial impact on gamers. The last two Tomb Raider games show girls that they can be adventurers and heroes. Yet, The Last of Us 2 negated that message by proving that video games can inspire pathological behavior—such as nihilistic acts of murder, destruction, and rioting. The Last of Us 2 says that hatred justifies murder and torture. Yes, I’m making a connection between nihilistic forms of entertainment and the recent mindless riots that are an expression of hated. I mean HOW COULD THE LAST OF US BE RUINED BUT WAS? As a nihilistic act of hatred—of everything good. Today some corrupting force is at work. Hollywood ceased to make great movies decades ago. To me the greatest game of all time is Half-Life 2 Orange Box. It does it all perfectly and a very long time ago. And that a sequel wasn't made because of nihilistic mischief perhaps was a sign that the end was near for great video games. It is sad. To trash everything good and to produce nothing but trash seems to be the case for today’s entertainment industries.
It is creepy the way the monster Abby suddenly appears in the story. She is worse than the infected, though her mind is diseased. Nemesis Abby is impossible to like no matter how many dogs she plays with. I mean Adolf Hitler loved his dog Blondi. Why was she made so unattractive, in a way that doesn’t appeal to men or women because she is neither male nor female but both so neither. She looks like thug and behaves like a psychopath. She has the face of Michael Myers in Halloween. Is it because she is evil that she must look that way? Oh, she’s not evil, just seeking revenge for her daddy’s death? But she behaves evilly. She slaughters people who had nothing to do with her daddy’s death. This reminds me of the biblical story of the rape of Dinah. In revenge, her family destroys the entire population of tribe the rapist came from—men, women, and children. It does that make it easier to hunt her down and kill her which seems to be the main plot of the story: kill the cyborg killer lesbian. Correction: Abby isn’t a lesbian or a transgender just a monster female in the way that Frankenstein’s creature is a monster human. (She’s not killed! That’s disappointing.)
Actually, Abby is a complex meme representing lesbians, transgenders, or women who hate pretty women because they are themselves not pretty. So Abby hates Ellie not because of Joel but because Ellie is cute, loveable not just fuckable. I understand that she want revenge for her father’s death (Dr. Mengele who would kill a child if doing so MIGHT save humanity), but at least make her likable to some degree; otherwise, we just don’t care, and that seems to be Judas Dog’s agenda—getting us not to care about The Last of Us 1 or 2. Ronda Rousey, Amber Stautzenberger, and Holly Holm are real UFC fighters but don’t look like dimwitted, pinched face thugs. She’s not lovable, likable, respectable, or interesting. Mordin, Garrus, Jack, Grunt, Thane, and Legion of Mass Effect are way cooler than this monster and very likable, in the case of Mordin even lovable. And except for Jack they are totally alien. And Jack is an infinitely more interesting character. You hate her then you love her. With Abby you hate her and then want to kill her in the way she killed Joel. Abby looks like demented female serial killer. Such people are not interesting except to the morbidly inclined. And The Last of Us has probably substantially increased their number.
And then there is the inappropriate, unnecessary graphic sex and nudity. It was as much fun as watching Mr. Terminator and Ms. Nemesis having sex—which would be kind of entertaining. Such images accomplish nothing except to create a need for nausea medicine. They simply appeal to prurient minds—like those of the creators of The Last of Us 2. It’s using freakish titillation to attract viewers—the kind of people who slow down to see the mangled bodies of dead after a traffic accident. That is why Hollywood no longer or very rarely makes good (forget about great) movies. They now make movies that fall into the category of sex & violence pornography and/or various forms of propaganda. The Last of Us 2 creators do both in a single game.
A lot of propaganda spin by Judas Dog has been used to defend this act of artistic terrorism. (And who ruined Hollywood? And who ruined The Last of Us? These people don’t care because they are a cabal separate from the rest of us.) I fear after The Last of Us 2 video games will rapidly become similarly degraded. Last of Us 2 makes Grand Theft Auto an ESRB E game by comparison. Abby viciously and crudely murders Joel. By doing that and other ghoulish things Judas Dog murdered a great video game, the first The Last of Us. It was like the killing of Jesus who came with a message of love and redemption only to be sent to his death by haters. Judas dog crucified the fans of the beloved The Last of Us. That is what sequel is: A CRUCIFIXION of Joel, Ellie, and their fans. What a disgraceful accomplishment. It’s like taking a hammer to Michelangelo’s David and calling the pieces art. But The Last of Us 2 was never intended to be a work of art but propaganda inspired by hate that promoted the ludicrous idea that murderous female cyborgs are people just like the rest of us. Worse than Abby are her creators, who betrayed the fans of The Last of Us just as Judas betrayed Jesus, not just for 30 pieces of silver but in a nihilistic fit to destroy something good and loved. Yet, Judas didn’t betray only Jesus but his followers. That is also what Judas Dog does: betray the fans of the first game. But they don’t matter to Judas Dog. They’re just a bunch of schnooks.
Of course there is more to it than that. This game is sick, pathologically so, and one might conclude the product of sick minds—like Victor Frankenstein creating his monster. Of course, Victor thought he was accomplishing a great good but that wasn’t Judas Dog’s intention. The Last of Us 2 is like the Columbine shooting and the game’s designers are like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who do something truly awful just to do something truly awful and make a lot of money doing so, get a lot of media attention, and thumb their noses at a society they hate. And, unfortunately, today in the U.S. there are a lot of sick minds to appeal to—the creation of the entertainment industry. But to do this, the awful act had to be built on something truly good, the first The Last of Us, just as Harris and Klebold had to do their evil in a place that is consider inherently good—a high school. In America the way to get a lot of media attention right away is to do something awful, something evil like killing a lot of people or destroying something truly good. And today in show business a sick and pathological movie or game that is a big seller is called a work of genius.
But there is more: the subtext. The old white guy must die. Joel’s crime is the killing of the black woman, Marlene, in the first game so that she wouldn’t continue to come after Ellie. If her brother or sister came after Joel that would make some sense, more so with the story’s hidden agenda. But weirdly that doesn’t happen because weird gender theory supersedes black lives matter. The creators wanted to promote the idea that men and women who become woMEN deserve to be loved like the rest of us—forgetting that love has to be earned. Joel is like Jefferson and Washington, a man who accomplished a great good—saving the child he loved—but did an evil deed on the way. The hatred of old white Americans in the U.S. is fueled by their treatment of blacks and women. Thus, they must be destroyed. Their statues must be pulled down and broken into pieces. That is what the killing of Joel represents. And that he is killed by an angry, mannish looking cyborg killer female fits the hating-old-white-men narrative. Poor Ellie witnesses the destruction of her flawed hero and so must take revenge. Thus continues the ongoing blood fest. And so now we have dueling female demons. I do find that totally weird because it appears the game’s designers want us to hate mannish women and lesbians, to consider them monsters. And now I know the though I won’t play the game: like Victor Frankenstein’s monster, Abby gets away, I suppose to continue her mayhem elsewhere. When I first discovered the nature of The Last of Us 2 it was like discovering that my nice neighbor had poisoned my dog—an act the game actually supports. Hatred and revulsion are what I felt and depressed—that something beautiful—the first game—could be desecrated. But that seems to be what America has also come to. And that is exactly what Judas Dog wanted to accomplish with its desecration of The Last of Us. And everyone who participated in the desecration has dirty hands. Just like those who joined Hitler participated in the destruction caused by Nazism.
Your analysis is terrific. Better yet your intelligent humane worldview comes through in your analysis—the opposite of which dominate The Last of Us 2. What you say about the killing of dogs is especially on target. What’s next—killing children, babies on bayonets? The Last of Us 2 is a sick piece of work, totally pathological and nihilistic, which it was intended to be. However, it seems symptomatic of a sick society that grows sicker each day—with the help of the post-morality entertainment industry. Are pathological games and movies being intentionally used to destroy American society? I can’t think of a better game than The Last of Us 2 to get people to riot destructively in the streets.
In the end, The Last of Us 2 proved revenge can be good. How satisfying it would be if the ground opened under Naughty Dog and made it disappear forever. That would be sweet revenge.
PS: I might have got some of my facts wrong because I’ve relied on negative condemnations of the game, which, like yours, have been far more meaningful and entertaining than the game itself. No apology to Judas Dog, which would be apologizing to the Taliban for mistaking the weapons they used to destroy the two Buddhas of Bamiyan, built six centuries before Islam. That pretty much what Judas Dog did to The Last of Us, and by doing so making that masterpiece unplayable. Perhaps the betrayal occurred because Neil Druckman, the game’s creative director and writer, developed a brain tumor during the development of The Last of Us 2. Let's hope so. That’s the only humane explanation.
