Yup! On the other hand it also is itself a very artificial thing, because it's demanding the player have a higher sense of empathy & humanization than literally any participant in the plot. So it's a bit of a wash.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @arthur_affect and
Like this is the really big cheat for at least softhearted people like me. The game *doesn't* let you slip into Ellie's head. At all. Ellie is a killer. She has been killing since she was a young teen. Almost everyone in her world is a killer. She *is used to it*.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @arthur_affect and
But the game isn't appealing to Ellie. It isn't talking to her, and it doesn't want you to get too comfortable in her head. Which is why it uses beats for pathos and anguish that Ellie would long since have stopped responding to for the enemy mooks. It's aimed at YOU, the player.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @arthur_affect and
It is not necessarily trying to get you comfortable in her skin by default when it comes to violence. The Doom Marine doesn't kill demons with any particular weight, so you slip into his mindset fast. TLOU2 plays games with identification a lot. In a very clever way
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Replying to @loudpenitent @arthur_affect and
And this is what gets a lot of people. The spotlight of protagonism is actively bounced around not just from arc to arc but even within gameplay. Mel and Owen are ruthless murderers but they're also CW Show Complicated Cuties and folks want to iron out which one is "true".
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Replying to @loudpenitent @arthur_affect and
When the whole point is "all of them. They're all true." And that's not a perspective many of us as humans can really process beyond a certain point, doubly so when it comes to such monstrous crimes as are regularly committed on screen
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Replying to @loudpenitent @arthur_affect and
The Salt Lake Crew are totally just a standard darker than usual YA Cast w/bonds and griefs AND they're a bunch of ruthless murderers who tortured a man to death after they had him in their power. Literally none of that Meet Cute flashback stuff erased any of that.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @arthur_affect and
And this is an incredibly subversive decision, which deliberately doesn't really give the player any outs. It provides a bird's eye view of a tragedy.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @arthur_affect and
Like this is why I will totally praise the ludonarrative genius of making Abby the one who feels, for the most part, more pleasant to play. Anyone who doesn't think Naughty Dog knows exactly what they are doing with that at LEAST as much as branching dialogue options do is wrong.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @arthur_affect and
It's a systemic deconstruction of the assumed positive emotional and story associations of "the hero route" in games.
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Yes, the fantasy that "more powerful" = "more right" Ellie relying more on stealth means her route feels more like transgression, like breaking the rules and doing something wrong
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Replying to @arthur_affect @muddlewait and
Yup! It's brilliant, at least for certain audiences!
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