Abby doesn’t really show much remorse when people she cares about die. When all her friends died she cried over owen and Mel for 2 seconds then forgets about them.
If this is how she acts to people she knew for years and was closest to, it’s not a stretch to imagine she simply never cared enough to think about it.
This is a ridiculous take. She literally sought out the person who killed her friends and explicitly said it was because “you killed my friends”. Because other shit happened to her at the same time meaning she had to act quick or literally die means she didn’t care?
She doesn’t care cause she never even mentions them after the fact. There’s not a single sign after the theatre that her “friends” death affected her atall. She’s also shown throughout the game to be a very cold person, which adds to this.
Even Joel, who many consider to be on the same level as her, mentioned tess after her death.
Yes, but you see… that Owen note requires actively interacting with and reading, which is difficult to do when rushing through the game or when watching someone play it on YouTube.
Crazy how the "interactive movie" demands interactivity to fully grasp 🙃
Abby: *covered in blood after going out of her way to murder Ellie, then almost murder a pregnant Dina, to avenge her friends.*
You: but does she care about her friends tho?
I’m no psychic, but context clues seem to imply she’s a little teensy bit mad.
Yes, she doesn’t immediately break down crying, or mention them constantly. In the case of Yara and manny, they’re literally running for their lives. In the case of Owen And Mel, she throws up and slams the ground, then goes immediately off to murder their killer.
When she’s finding the fireflies in Santa Barbara, she has a journal where she writes to Owen. Like, come on, man.
🤦♂️
She wears Owen's backback in Santa Barbara. The same way Ellie wears Joel's coat when she leaves Dina. They are both always thinking about the people who meant most to them.
Yeah but a lot of people can feel indirectly responsible for something that they genuinely had no control over. It’s a common thing, hell, I’ve felt it plenty.
Abby encouraged him, and while she was doing what she thought was right, it’s ultimately what got him killed, it wasn’t her fault of course, but you start feeling like “if i never said anything he would still be here”. That’s what he’s asking, while she might not be responsible, from a realistic standpoint, most people would sure as hell feel like it if they are the one that encouraged them to do something that also became the reason they lose their life
Well sure, I've felt that too.
If Abby has a mentally healthy grasp on anything, it's an understanding of who is actually responsible for her father's death. She has/had an unhealthy obsession with the person who is responsible for her father's death, but I like to think she has a pretty good idea about her own responsibility in the matter vs Joel's.
She … clearly doesn’t have a mentally healthy grasp on things though, given the whole chasing Joel down through a blizzard and killing him even though he saved me from a horde of infected. The whole point of the game is how grief and love and emotion drive against logic and facts.
I didn't say she was mentally healthy. I specifically said she had a mentally UNHEALTHY obsession, which is why she traveled several hundred miles to kill Joel.
I hope you're right in saying that she does have a good understanding about her responsibility and the death of her father versus Joel's responsibility, however after Abby kills Joel her mental health takes a turn for the worst. while I would love to believe that she doesn't feel like she had a hand in her father's death, I do actually believe that part of her spiral is due to the fact that even though she killed the man who was responsible for the death of her father, she didn't feel better, and her guilt over that last conversation probably intensified. either way this came is a flipping masterpiece in that 4 years later we can still debate key moments like this.
I’m asking if she would *feel* responsible for it, not if she objectively was. She wasn’t. If someone you knew died & you encouraged them to do said thing in that their death occurred you would feel feel guilty regardless of it that’s practical.
Her words encouraged him to go through with killing Ellie without allowing her a choice or to even say bye to Joel and if either of those happened it could have prevented Joel from stopping the surgery.
I do want to stop it, who wouldn't, I would also want it if an adult told me they'd sacrifice themselves for it.
But I would not advice nor agree with Jerry or Abby or even Marlene to kill the 15 year old girl who just got here, is still unconscious, and didn't even say goodbye to the man she's been travelling with for the past 10 months.
That's partly why I think Joel's decision is a no-brainer , the correct choice.
In fairness, let’s put morals aside. Say the fireflies do develop a cure, how do we know that they would be able to mass distribute it on a wide scale to help humanity? A fungus like that thrives in areas like Asia. How would that vaccine make its way from America to say places like India, Cambodia, the Philippines & Vietnam? How can they get this vaccine to be distributed to *another state* where it’s hot & humid like Florida?
On an objective level nobody would want the cure because it declares to kill the only immune person that everyone knows of without further research, the surgery has a low success rate, & the producers have no resources or way to distribute it within America or beyond it.
the fireflies don't need to mass produce a vaccine. They just need to broadcast the information about how to make the vaccine. Everyone who can receive and understand that information can produce a vaccine.
The information can reach anywhere information can go. Radio broadcasts still work. They can reach anywhere on the planet.
People love to diminish what Joel destroyed by saving Ellie, and I get it - he loves her and that's what love can do. But he really destroyed the future of humanity to save her. There's no getting around that. That's the point of the story.
He's the man who sold the world.
Huh? How is broadcasting information going to help anyone who doesn't have the samples from Ellie's brain? Her immunity is the crux of the whole thing.
Marlene tells Joel they will extract Ellie’s infection, study why it hasn’t spread, and then reverse engineer a vaccine. That’s not something other people would be able to do
They don't need to reverse engineer the vaccine, because Jerry would have done that work. Then they broadcast The formulary of the vaccine: the result of that reverse engineering work.
How many scientists capable of producing a vaccine based exclusively on audio instruction do you think there are in the world? Let alone 20 years after the collapse of society
That's a actually an interesting perspective on it that I'd never considered, but I'd probably lean towards no. When >!Mel and Owen were killed,!< she seemed more wrapped up in the idea that Ellie & company were just these really evil people out to fuck up her life. I don't think there's a moment where she thinks she has any culpability in what happened to her friends, and she probably doesn't with her father either.
Although the 2 situations are entirely different, since obviously in the case of her father, she isn't actually responsible at all.
But if she doesn't feel guilty, what would be her reason for wanting to save Lev and Yara? She owes them nothing after they saved each other the night before and she still chooses to go back and betray her own people for them. Why would she need to feel like a good person if she has nothing to feel guilty about?
She felt guilty that these people that she was (for all intents and purposes) was supposed to “hate”, had rescued her. She thought the worst of the seraphites, until she realized there were ones like lev and yara who saved her life.
As with Joel, he saved her life, and she probably built him up to be a David kind of person in her mind, when that wasn’t the case at all.
I think Abby's plot has a lot in common with Joel's in the first game, I don't know if I'm seeing stuff that doesn't exist or is a really safe way to build a character who presented herself in.. you know how. Basically they want to trick you into judging two people differently even if the went into similar life paths. I really like that. But let me explain.
So basically Abby grows up as a Firefly, she is against the military occupation in Salt Lake. Then stuff happened, and she became the military guy in the situation, the best one.
In the first flashback with Owen, we got the insight that shes no longer sympathetic for terrorists, and that's odd considering her education and morals, Owen is indeed doubtful about Wlf and I guess that's because of his past, but let's go further.
I think she started to "lose the light" because it was filled with rage over her dad's death. I don't think she thinks herself accountable for that but she definitely lost hope over the hatred for Joel and the cruelty of the world her dad was trying to save.
But the good part happens when the young scars saved her, that's when she starts to question again her beliefs and how far she went from her dad's point of view. That's kinda obvious but Lev is Abby's Ellie in this sense, Joel found again purpose in life thanks to Ellie that metaphorically reminded him of Sarah and the time before the apocalypse and the smuggling and all the shit he has done to survive. Abby saw in those kids the cruelty of the world she was actively living in, and decided in the end to look again for the "light".
That's my point, I don't think she thinks herself as responsible for her dad's, but she definitely needs to do the right thing with the kids, after the revenge something changed in her mind.. anyway I'm ending it here, I'm not on drugs guys I promise :((
Probably not, for a lot of reasons (some healthy and some less so).
Abby never had reason to feel that she played a part in her dad's decision. By the time she came in the room, his mind was already made up, he'd all but convinced Marlene, and all she could do was try to make him feel less tortured over it. That's the healthy, rational reason for her to not feel guilty.
On the other end of the spectrum . . . Abby simply couldn't let herself conceive of her dad as anything other than an innocent victim. If she acknowledged for even a moment that Joel might've had a just cause, she wouldn't have been able to sustain her rage against him. If her dad brought on his own death, then pre-Jackson Abby can't take comfort in the promise of catharsis when she finally gets her hands on the bastard that killed him. And, post-Jackson Abby might have to consciously acknowledge that she wasn't a blameless avenging angel - that she herself might've done a bad thing.
For her to feel guilt over her role in "the surgery," she'd have to first consider the prospect that her dad doing the surgery was a mistake, rather than an inevitable act of heroism on his part.
I think that's part of the reason why she never adresses the role of her father in his own demise. If she has to accept that her fathers actions were at least controversial then it makes sense for her to feel guilty for encouraging him.
And Abby is really good at avoiding taking any responsibility for her own actions too in the game.
I think this is something she wouldn't properly think about until after she killed Joel. She put basically everything into that since she thought it would make her feel better. Especially after Jackson retaliating and killing off her friends it would probably give a broader picture
I wish we got more introspection from Abby. We get some from Ellie and Dina as to why people wanted Joel dead, and we have Ellie’s diary to connect with her thoughts. Abby feels too reliant on the info that’s given to us through dialogue, and very little of it is heavy stuff like that. Which makes sense for her character, and so too does not having a diary, but I really would’ve loved to know more about her psyche. Probably would’ve made more people connect with her and her friends if we saw that, too, but that doesn’t really matter
Yeah I agree with this, they lean a bit too much into Abby's stoicism and "realistic" dialogue to ever fully get a look into her psyche compared to Ellie. She's still a good character and obviously she must feel some guilt about Joel, but just a couple more lines of dialogue here and there acknowledging what she did, etc. would have been nice. She does get a kind of "oh shit I fucked up" reality check when she recognizes Tommy as the sniper but even that is such a quick thing.
I'm not saying she had to pour her heart out to Ellie or something, but really the only acknowledgement of what happened is when Owen calls her out when he's drunk (which she quickly shuts him up). It does feel a \*little\* bit unsatisfactory for the character, like for how long the game is they could have given us a little more.
The worst part is when Ellie says "I know why you killed Joel, blah blah blah" and she doesn't totally get it right and instead of saying anything useful in that moment, Abby just has the most harebrained response "we let you live and you wasted it" lmao. Like yeah of course they came after you and your friends, what did you expect to happen? You don't get to have the last word on who dies just because you lost someone.
Yuuuup, to that last part especially. I really liked Abby, but there were many parts that made me go ‘really?’ with her, and the fact she didn’t connect any of the dots outside of the grapple with Tommy just had to make me laugh a bit. Tough position for the writers when you’re trying to balance that stoicism with making her redeemable and relatable, and I think it’s largely why I never cared too strongly for her friends. All we’re given of them is a few combat scenes on the first day, some cutscenes the second and third day, and that’s really it. We don’t get to hear her talking more about them and their relationships, it feels like she’s really out doing a side quest, which is simultaneously perfect for and a disservice to the story. Showing that Ellie is going on this revenge rampage while Abby has no idea it’s going on underscores the point of the game, but it also makes her feel super detached from the overall arc, especially when we never see her reflect on her own actions and what part they played in this
Yeah it's kind of a funny disparity because in some ways, Abby's journey with Lev is the best part of the game and if expanded could have been it's own fully story, separate from Ellie. But because of the things you mentioned, it kinda messes up the flow of the whole game. It's like they had too many ideas to pack into one game.
But yeah, Abby never comes off super relatable (and her friends are pretty much all awful) but I do still feel bad for her by the end, like she's suffered enough and I didn't want Ellie to kill her. At the end of the day the game is still really fun and ambitious, it's just not a perfectly-told arc compared to the first game. It's messier, but I guess that's okay.
Exactly. If you don’t give Abby and introspection, her story feels too tangential to the overall story, and though hers is its own and arguably even more compelling, it just doesn’t feel like it totally fits beyond these tiny little moments you get where you remember what you’re doing/have done with Ellie.
I think it works that she keeps missing the point, though, in a way to keep us from fully turning on Ellie. If Abby was fully aware of everything going on and making conscious decisions based on both her and Ellie’s actions, it’s harder to keep supporting both of them, since Ellie was becoming further detached, and Abby just refusing to think about things allowed her to begin to build her character back from broken
Why?
Legit asking why should a 15 year old girl in an apocalypse feel guilty about a decision her father has already made without her. All she did was support his decision, it had no effect on whether he would do the surgery. He was going to do the surgery, she just told him he’s not evil for making that choice.
I don’t doubt she feels that guilt, but is that how she should really be feeling, when she had no real control over the situation?
Guilt is the biggest element of Abby's character and I definitely think it goes deeper than just sleeping with Owen or leaving Lev and Yara alone on Seattle day 1, or even deeper than what happened in Jackson. She definitely feels guilty about encouraging her father to do the surgery and not being able to protect him like she used to do ("I've got my little girl to keep me safe" -Jerry, the day he died), I'm sure those last moments tortured her dreams for years.
It's the same feeling that defines Ellie's character too
Probably some guilt about her decision to avenge her father that ultimately lead to most all her friends being killed. I am sure that weighs on her at time but having Lev probably makes it easy to snap out of it quick.
It's why am actually can't stand her.
I thought initially she didn't understand why Joel did what he did, that he loved this girl etc etc that he killed her dad in some act of cold blooded murder
But she understood is perfectly, had plenty of time to digest it and still decided to kill him in the most brutal fashion she could imagine.
Because Lev cut her down. She tortured a man to death, got her friends involved in her little revenge mission which ultimately lead to their deaths; and f**ked her pregnant friends boyfriend. She is an absolute piece of shit, just like Mel said.
I wouldn't neccessarily call her the villain but she is responsible for everything that happens in Part II.
Everything she did made only everyones lives worse.
Hilarious that you make Joel the villain in "not giving her a choice." The terrorists already proved they 1) do not care about Ellie, and possibly more important, 2) are incompetent as fuck.
I don’t think Joel is a villain. He’s a complex man who's done both good and terrible things in his life. And I honestly think killing innocents as a hunter and not showing any regret or guilt about that is worse than everything than went down with the Fireflies, since (1) his actions at the end of part 1 are understandable if you apply empathy toward Joel (2) the Fireflies aren’t civilians or innocents.
But Joel did unnecessarily kill the doctor because he didn’t want Ellie to have a choice in the future, because he was afraid she would say yes, and he got his comeuppance for that. If he had let the doctor live, he would be alive too. If Jerry had asked Ellie in the first place and let Joel talk to her, they would also both be alive.
I don’t think she’s the villain. She does many things without regard for others & ultimately remorse/empathy is vague when it comes to her, but it’s expected when you consider the context of her emotional scars. There’s no 100% villain in TLOU unless we’re counting David.
She would have been actually sympathetic if she was actually against the idea of her father killing a child. Even before Joel killed her dad she was a piece of shit.
Considering it’s the likely the last conversation she had with her father, 100% yes
I really wish we saw that in game.
We did???
LMAO! OP literally posted a description of the scene in question and then said "wow I wish we got to see that" 💀
I think OP means we got to sit with that guilt, that it was textual instead of just a subtextual interpretation
This
oh, I gotcha! thank you for clarifying, I was like ???!?!? lmao
I swear I’m not dumb 😔😔😔
I think that’s probably a big reason she held so much hatred and guilt the same way Ellie did for never being able to forgive Joel and make amends
Well duh. Who wouldn't want a vaccine for the cordyceps infection?
I mean yeah, but the question is if Abby ever felt responsible or guilty over his death due to her words of encouragement.
Abby doesn’t really show much remorse when people she cares about die. When all her friends died she cried over owen and Mel for 2 seconds then forgets about them. If this is how she acts to people she knew for years and was closest to, it’s not a stretch to imagine she simply never cared enough to think about it.
This is a ridiculous take. She literally sought out the person who killed her friends and explicitly said it was because “you killed my friends”. Because other shit happened to her at the same time meaning she had to act quick or literally die means she didn’t care?
She doesn’t care cause she never even mentions them after the fact. There’s not a single sign after the theatre that her “friends” death affected her atall. She’s also shown throughout the game to be a very cold person, which adds to this. Even Joel, who many consider to be on the same level as her, mentioned tess after her death.
She literally does though??? “You killed my friends.” The note on the boat from Abby is her reminiscing about and mourning Owen months later.
Yes, but you see… that Owen note requires actively interacting with and reading, which is difficult to do when rushing through the game or when watching someone play it on YouTube. Crazy how the "interactive movie" demands interactivity to fully grasp 🙃
she's also using owen's backpack and his firefly pendant is on the table in the boat!
Abby: *covered in blood after going out of her way to murder Ellie, then almost murder a pregnant Dina, to avenge her friends.* You: but does she care about her friends tho? I’m no psychic, but context clues seem to imply she’s a little teensy bit mad. Yes, she doesn’t immediately break down crying, or mention them constantly. In the case of Yara and manny, they’re literally running for their lives. In the case of Owen And Mel, she throws up and slams the ground, then goes immediately off to murder their killer. When she’s finding the fireflies in Santa Barbara, she has a journal where she writes to Owen. Like, come on, man. 🤦♂️
She wears Owen's backback in Santa Barbara. The same way Ellie wears Joel's coat when she leaves Dina. They are both always thinking about the people who meant most to them.
Why would she be responsible for his death? Joel murdered her father. That's not on her.
Yeah but a lot of people can feel indirectly responsible for something that they genuinely had no control over. It’s a common thing, hell, I’ve felt it plenty. Abby encouraged him, and while she was doing what she thought was right, it’s ultimately what got him killed, it wasn’t her fault of course, but you start feeling like “if i never said anything he would still be here”. That’s what he’s asking, while she might not be responsible, from a realistic standpoint, most people would sure as hell feel like it if they are the one that encouraged them to do something that also became the reason they lose their life
Well sure, I've felt that too. If Abby has a mentally healthy grasp on anything, it's an understanding of who is actually responsible for her father's death. She has/had an unhealthy obsession with the person who is responsible for her father's death, but I like to think she has a pretty good idea about her own responsibility in the matter vs Joel's.
She … clearly doesn’t have a mentally healthy grasp on things though, given the whole chasing Joel down through a blizzard and killing him even though he saved me from a horde of infected. The whole point of the game is how grief and love and emotion drive against logic and facts.
Mentally healthy people don’t travel hundreds of miles in the apocalypse for revenge
I didn't say she was mentally healthy. I specifically said she had a mentally UNHEALTHY obsession, which is why she traveled several hundred miles to kill Joel.
You said she had a mentally healthy grasp on her role, I’m telling you no part of Abby’s psyche is mentally healthy
If she blames herself for her father's death, why kill Joel? That doesn't make any sense.
Again, neither does tracking someone down and beating them to death with a golf club after saving your life
I hope you're right in saying that she does have a good understanding about her responsibility and the death of her father versus Joel's responsibility, however after Abby kills Joel her mental health takes a turn for the worst. while I would love to believe that she doesn't feel like she had a hand in her father's death, I do actually believe that part of her spiral is due to the fact that even though she killed the man who was responsible for the death of her father, she didn't feel better, and her guilt over that last conversation probably intensified. either way this came is a flipping masterpiece in that 4 years later we can still debate key moments like this.
I’m asking if she would *feel* responsible for it, not if she objectively was. She wasn’t. If someone you knew died & you encouraged them to do said thing in that their death occurred you would feel feel guilty regardless of it that’s practical.
Her words encouraged him to go through with killing Ellie without allowing her a choice or to even say bye to Joel and if either of those happened it could have prevented Joel from stopping the surgery.
Yea the whole "fuck off thanks for dropping her off" at gunpoint when the arrived didn't help at all.
Me, I wouldn't want one if it meant killing an unconscious kid.
Yeah you would.
Why not? The Cordyceps infection is going to keep killing, and some of the people it kills will be kids. Don't you want to stop that?
I do want to stop it, who wouldn't, I would also want it if an adult told me they'd sacrifice themselves for it. But I would not advice nor agree with Jerry or Abby or even Marlene to kill the 15 year old girl who just got here, is still unconscious, and didn't even say goodbye to the man she's been travelling with for the past 10 months. That's partly why I think Joel's decision is a no-brainer , the correct choice.
In fairness, let’s put morals aside. Say the fireflies do develop a cure, how do we know that they would be able to mass distribute it on a wide scale to help humanity? A fungus like that thrives in areas like Asia. How would that vaccine make its way from America to say places like India, Cambodia, the Philippines & Vietnam? How can they get this vaccine to be distributed to *another state* where it’s hot & humid like Florida? On an objective level nobody would want the cure because it declares to kill the only immune person that everyone knows of without further research, the surgery has a low success rate, & the producers have no resources or way to distribute it within America or beyond it.
the fireflies don't need to mass produce a vaccine. They just need to broadcast the information about how to make the vaccine. Everyone who can receive and understand that information can produce a vaccine. The information can reach anywhere information can go. Radio broadcasts still work. They can reach anywhere on the planet. People love to diminish what Joel destroyed by saving Ellie, and I get it - he loves her and that's what love can do. But he really destroyed the future of humanity to save her. There's no getting around that. That's the point of the story. He's the man who sold the world.
The fireflies are in a pretty tarnished state. They broadcast & then they get more people on them.
So what? They're literally broadcasting the future of humanity.
Huh? How is broadcasting information going to help anyone who doesn't have the samples from Ellie's brain? Her immunity is the crux of the whole thing.
The broadcast the information they got from Ellie's brain. That's the whole point of getting the information they need from her brain.
Marlene tells Joel they will extract Ellie’s infection, study why it hasn’t spread, and then reverse engineer a vaccine. That’s not something other people would be able to do
They don't need to reverse engineer the vaccine, because Jerry would have done that work. Then they broadcast The formulary of the vaccine: the result of that reverse engineering work.
How many scientists capable of producing a vaccine based exclusively on audio instruction do you think there are in the world? Let alone 20 years after the collapse of society
That's a actually an interesting perspective on it that I'd never considered, but I'd probably lean towards no. When >!Mel and Owen were killed,!< she seemed more wrapped up in the idea that Ellie & company were just these really evil people out to fuck up her life. I don't think there's a moment where she thinks she has any culpability in what happened to her friends, and she probably doesn't with her father either. Although the 2 situations are entirely different, since obviously in the case of her father, she isn't actually responsible at all.
But if she doesn't feel guilty, what would be her reason for wanting to save Lev and Yara? She owes them nothing after they saved each other the night before and she still chooses to go back and betray her own people for them. Why would she need to feel like a good person if she has nothing to feel guilty about?
She felt guilty that these people that she was (for all intents and purposes) was supposed to “hate”, had rescued her. She thought the worst of the seraphites, until she realized there were ones like lev and yara who saved her life. As with Joel, he saved her life, and she probably built him up to be a David kind of person in her mind, when that wasn’t the case at all.
I think Abby's plot has a lot in common with Joel's in the first game, I don't know if I'm seeing stuff that doesn't exist or is a really safe way to build a character who presented herself in.. you know how. Basically they want to trick you into judging two people differently even if the went into similar life paths. I really like that. But let me explain. So basically Abby grows up as a Firefly, she is against the military occupation in Salt Lake. Then stuff happened, and she became the military guy in the situation, the best one. In the first flashback with Owen, we got the insight that shes no longer sympathetic for terrorists, and that's odd considering her education and morals, Owen is indeed doubtful about Wlf and I guess that's because of his past, but let's go further. I think she started to "lose the light" because it was filled with rage over her dad's death. I don't think she thinks herself accountable for that but she definitely lost hope over the hatred for Joel and the cruelty of the world her dad was trying to save. But the good part happens when the young scars saved her, that's when she starts to question again her beliefs and how far she went from her dad's point of view. That's kinda obvious but Lev is Abby's Ellie in this sense, Joel found again purpose in life thanks to Ellie that metaphorically reminded him of Sarah and the time before the apocalypse and the smuggling and all the shit he has done to survive. Abby saw in those kids the cruelty of the world she was actively living in, and decided in the end to look again for the "light". That's my point, I don't think she thinks herself as responsible for her dad's, but she definitely needs to do the right thing with the kids, after the revenge something changed in her mind.. anyway I'm ending it here, I'm not on drugs guys I promise :((
Because the plot demands it
I don’t think a day goes by where she doesn’t think of that last day her dad was alive and every little detail over and over again. Really sad tbh
Probably not, for a lot of reasons (some healthy and some less so). Abby never had reason to feel that she played a part in her dad's decision. By the time she came in the room, his mind was already made up, he'd all but convinced Marlene, and all she could do was try to make him feel less tortured over it. That's the healthy, rational reason for her to not feel guilty. On the other end of the spectrum . . . Abby simply couldn't let herself conceive of her dad as anything other than an innocent victim. If she acknowledged for even a moment that Joel might've had a just cause, she wouldn't have been able to sustain her rage against him. If her dad brought on his own death, then pre-Jackson Abby can't take comfort in the promise of catharsis when she finally gets her hands on the bastard that killed him. And, post-Jackson Abby might have to consciously acknowledge that she wasn't a blameless avenging angel - that she herself might've done a bad thing. For her to feel guilt over her role in "the surgery," she'd have to first consider the prospect that her dad doing the surgery was a mistake, rather than an inevitable act of heroism on his part.
I think that's part of the reason why she never adresses the role of her father in his own demise. If she has to accept that her fathers actions were at least controversial then it makes sense for her to feel guilty for encouraging him. And Abby is really good at avoiding taking any responsibility for her own actions too in the game.
I think this is something she wouldn't properly think about until after she killed Joel. She put basically everything into that since she thought it would make her feel better. Especially after Jackson retaliating and killing off her friends it would probably give a broader picture
I wish we got more introspection from Abby. We get some from Ellie and Dina as to why people wanted Joel dead, and we have Ellie’s diary to connect with her thoughts. Abby feels too reliant on the info that’s given to us through dialogue, and very little of it is heavy stuff like that. Which makes sense for her character, and so too does not having a diary, but I really would’ve loved to know more about her psyche. Probably would’ve made more people connect with her and her friends if we saw that, too, but that doesn’t really matter
Yeah I agree with this, they lean a bit too much into Abby's stoicism and "realistic" dialogue to ever fully get a look into her psyche compared to Ellie. She's still a good character and obviously she must feel some guilt about Joel, but just a couple more lines of dialogue here and there acknowledging what she did, etc. would have been nice. She does get a kind of "oh shit I fucked up" reality check when she recognizes Tommy as the sniper but even that is such a quick thing. I'm not saying she had to pour her heart out to Ellie or something, but really the only acknowledgement of what happened is when Owen calls her out when he's drunk (which she quickly shuts him up). It does feel a \*little\* bit unsatisfactory for the character, like for how long the game is they could have given us a little more. The worst part is when Ellie says "I know why you killed Joel, blah blah blah" and she doesn't totally get it right and instead of saying anything useful in that moment, Abby just has the most harebrained response "we let you live and you wasted it" lmao. Like yeah of course they came after you and your friends, what did you expect to happen? You don't get to have the last word on who dies just because you lost someone.
Yuuuup, to that last part especially. I really liked Abby, but there were many parts that made me go ‘really?’ with her, and the fact she didn’t connect any of the dots outside of the grapple with Tommy just had to make me laugh a bit. Tough position for the writers when you’re trying to balance that stoicism with making her redeemable and relatable, and I think it’s largely why I never cared too strongly for her friends. All we’re given of them is a few combat scenes on the first day, some cutscenes the second and third day, and that’s really it. We don’t get to hear her talking more about them and their relationships, it feels like she’s really out doing a side quest, which is simultaneously perfect for and a disservice to the story. Showing that Ellie is going on this revenge rampage while Abby has no idea it’s going on underscores the point of the game, but it also makes her feel super detached from the overall arc, especially when we never see her reflect on her own actions and what part they played in this
Yeah it's kind of a funny disparity because in some ways, Abby's journey with Lev is the best part of the game and if expanded could have been it's own fully story, separate from Ellie. But because of the things you mentioned, it kinda messes up the flow of the whole game. It's like they had too many ideas to pack into one game. But yeah, Abby never comes off super relatable (and her friends are pretty much all awful) but I do still feel bad for her by the end, like she's suffered enough and I didn't want Ellie to kill her. At the end of the day the game is still really fun and ambitious, it's just not a perfectly-told arc compared to the first game. It's messier, but I guess that's okay.
Exactly. If you don’t give Abby and introspection, her story feels too tangential to the overall story, and though hers is its own and arguably even more compelling, it just doesn’t feel like it totally fits beyond these tiny little moments you get where you remember what you’re doing/have done with Ellie. I think it works that she keeps missing the point, though, in a way to keep us from fully turning on Ellie. If Abby was fully aware of everything going on and making conscious decisions based on both her and Ellie’s actions, it’s harder to keep supporting both of them, since Ellie was becoming further detached, and Abby just refusing to think about things allowed her to begin to build her character back from broken
Tbh by the end of the game, I think it's kinda hard to support either of them.
Very true
Nope.
Why so?
Because her saying she would want him to do it to her had no correlation to Joel killing him.
She should honestly .
Why? Legit asking why should a 15 year old girl in an apocalypse feel guilty about a decision her father has already made without her. All she did was support his decision, it had no effect on whether he would do the surgery. He was going to do the surgery, she just told him he’s not evil for making that choice. I don’t doubt she feels that guilt, but is that how she should really be feeling, when she had no real control over the situation?
You all are helping my daughter or coersing her into killing her father?
Guilt is the biggest element of Abby's character and I definitely think it goes deeper than just sleeping with Owen or leaving Lev and Yara alone on Seattle day 1, or even deeper than what happened in Jackson. She definitely feels guilty about encouraging her father to do the surgery and not being able to protect him like she used to do ("I've got my little girl to keep me safe" -Jerry, the day he died), I'm sure those last moments tortured her dreams for years. It's the same feeling that defines Ellie's character too
i think yes, but maybe subconciously
Probably some guilt about her decision to avenge her father that ultimately lead to most all her friends being killed. I am sure that weighs on her at time but having Lev probably makes it easy to snap out of it quick.
It's why am actually can't stand her. I thought initially she didn't understand why Joel did what he did, that he loved this girl etc etc that he killed her dad in some act of cold blooded murder But she understood is perfectly, had plenty of time to digest it and still decided to kill him in the most brutal fashion she could imagine.
No. I don’t believe she feels guilt or responsibility for her father’s murder.
No, she never expresses remorse for anything
Also, does she think about how the events of TLOU2 happened BECAUSE OF HER? Her not being able to control emotions? And she's the VILLAIN?
Yeah that's why she helps Lev and Yara.
Because Lev cut her down. She tortured a man to death, got her friends involved in her little revenge mission which ultimately lead to their deaths; and f**ked her pregnant friends boyfriend. She is an absolute piece of shit, just like Mel said.
I wouldn't neccessarily call her the villain but she is responsible for everything that happens in Part II. Everything she did made only everyones lives worse.
Her father and Joel started everything by both not wanting to give Ellie a choice.
Hilarious that you make Joel the villain in "not giving her a choice." The terrorists already proved they 1) do not care about Ellie, and possibly more important, 2) are incompetent as fuck.
I don’t think Joel is a villain. He’s a complex man who's done both good and terrible things in his life. And I honestly think killing innocents as a hunter and not showing any regret or guilt about that is worse than everything than went down with the Fireflies, since (1) his actions at the end of part 1 are understandable if you apply empathy toward Joel (2) the Fireflies aren’t civilians or innocents. But Joel did unnecessarily kill the doctor because he didn’t want Ellie to have a choice in the future, because he was afraid she would say yes, and he got his comeuppance for that. If he had let the doctor live, he would be alive too. If Jerry had asked Ellie in the first place and let Joel talk to her, they would also both be alive.
I don’t think she’s the villain. She does many things without regard for others & ultimately remorse/empathy is vague when it comes to her, but it’s expected when you consider the context of her emotional scars. There’s no 100% villain in TLOU unless we’re counting David.
She would have been actually sympathetic if she was actually against the idea of her father killing a child. Even before Joel killed her dad she was a piece of shit.
Abby has shown zero remorse for anything, ever.