Headscratchers / The Last of Us Part II

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The Theory of Joel being dead

• I've been watching a lot of videos regarding The Last of Us, Part II and there's this theory that's growing that suggests Joel is dead, and what we're seeing is really a figment of Ellie's imagination. Why is this theory even a thing?
  • This video gives a good explanation.
    • Haven't played the game but Joel was actually killed in the story, wasn't he? All scenes with him were flashbacks, so this is not a theory.
    • Joel is, in fact, killed relatively early on, and the story follows Ellie's quest for vengeance.

Ellie's age

• If Part II takes place five years after the first game, shouldn't Ellie really be 20 years old, not 19? Yes, she was 14 in the first game, but she and Joel traveled for almost a year, meaning she most likely was 15 by the end of the game. A minor case of Writers Cannot Do Math?
  • Actually Ellie was one to three months off being fifteen come to the end of the first game; from what little we know about her, we know that she was born in the Spring. So there's no reason why Ellie in Part II can't be 19, almost 20, years old.

Main page description

The main page describes that the Fireflies attacked the community where Ellie and Joel lives... Has this been confirmed?

• Well, there was a spraypainted firefly symbol at the stop sign at the beginning of the trailer, so the house were either attacked by fireflies who sprayed it there or the house were already a Firefly compound being attacked by Ellie. The former seem more likely.
  • While the theory that the Fireflies attacked their settlement and they're the ones Ellie wants to kill is likely, it's still not confirmed, so it seems a bit premature to put it as canon on the main page...
    • so change it, I will not. The idea of Ellie being ambushed and then Murder every single Firefly attacker and then taking the fight to them is infidently more pleasant than her searching out a house of Fireflies and Murder them and then continue the slaughter.
• The community itself isn’t attacked. Joel is during a routine patrol.

So was Ellie ever even IN the Closet, to begin with?

There is a lot of yelling and civil war going on in the YMMV History tag and on the internet at large about Ellie’s sexuality being a political statement and retcon. So I took a look at the original game, and she had few to no sexual comments, and none of them exactly screamed ”straight” (she saw a photo model on an old poster, went WOAH! But she then bitched that anyone who had food lost the right to be thin and she also got hold of a gay male porn magazine, went Whoa! But then laughed the whole thing off (”Hold your Horses, I wanna see what the fuss is about!”) and threw the magazine away.))So it is all about a sexless CHILD being given an adults Sexuality once she was shown as an ADULT in the Sequel set years later. What the hell are people screaming about?

• It is just people being annoying. There is really nothing political about it. She is just a lesbian girl, or at the very least, a girl who likes girls and boys, but so far only girls. Nothing bizarre or wrong about that.
• Honestly, who cares if she likes guys or girls. She's a teenage girl in a post-apocalyptic world, there are more important things for her to worry about.
  • Except she is beyond a doubt a lesbian, a girl who likes girls. How about you assume she is a girl in the post-apocalyptic world who likes Girls and that is a core part of her story?
  • Being into girls should never be a core part of anyone's story. Otherwise it's just tokenism.
  • I disagree with your definition of what Tokenism is. If anything, having a main character mention "I am gay" once and leave it at that is Tokenism.
• The 'retcon' part is especially stupid given the Left Behind DLC for the first game. I suspect the screaming people in question are ticked off because not only do they not get to play as Scruffybuff McDadsalot, shooting up the zombies and the bad guys, Ellie isn't even dateable, like, geez.

Joel Forgetting Major Events

• OK, did Joel just forget the exact events of the last game? He tells Ellie, "the vaccine would've killed you, so I stopped them." except...there was no vaccine. They were looking for one, and thought they needed the brains of the immune, hence the whole operation on Ellie. It's clear the writers shouldn't have forgotten because we explicitly see cutscenes from the last game describing the events. What's going on here?
  • Well Joel understands what he did in the first game ruined humanity's one shot at a cure. Sure enough anyone in the real world would dissect someone if that meant even a 5% chance of the zombie apocalypse ending for good. So after grappling with it he would think more and more about that 5% being true.
  • (OP here) Ah, I must’ve misunderstood. What he was saying was, “Yeah, you would’ve died, but there was a chance you would’ve been the one that created the cure to save humanity. so when I destroyed the Fireflies looking for the cure, I basically doomed humanity.”
    • Yup. It's not a straightforward rescue-the-girl-shoot-up-the-bad-guys scenario in the first game, and Marlene isn't some evil mastermind—they're just a bunch of people who are desperate to save humanity, and (equally as Joel) the ones they care about. Are they wrong? Is Joel wrong? That's up for the player to decide, but his actions aren't supposed to sit easily with the audience, and they certainly don't with Ellie.
  • This is misquoting Joel. He says that making the vaccine would've killed Ellie.

Abby and her protein shakes.

• In a world so deprived of resources and leisure time, where did Abby find the calories and gym time to become so large as she is? And for what reason as it's not like she was planning on winning any weight-lifting or Miss Olympia contests, Ellie and every other tough female character in the games are proof you don't need heavy muscles to be a deadly killer.
  • The WLF base, being housed in a football stadium, already has at least one sizable gym and enough room to house potentially thousands of people. They also don't seem hard up for food at all, especially since the field itself has been converted into farmland. So already Abby would have adequate access to the resources she needs to get and maintain such a build, and she could also be genetically predisposed to that sort of body, such as if she's an endomorph. Since the base seems to function as a city, she presumably also has free time, as with any other job, and workouts would be a perfectly reasonable use of such time. As for why, there are three reasons that immediately spring to mind: first, physical strength has plenty of practical uses besides combat, such as clearing debris, carrying wounded or dead allies, etc.; second, since Abby is able to kill infected with her bare hands, she not only doesn't have to waste bullets, she also saves any blades she has from wear and tear; and third, being so large provides more of a cushion for when she does have to venture outside the base, as that extra muscle and fat are energy stores if she were to completely run out of food. Or she might just like how being so muscular looks.
  • Speaking to protein shakes: Cordyceps is a common protein supplement.
  • Abby is one of Isaac's elite soldiers, able to jump the food line at will and living in a luxury box at CenturyLink Field. She would have no shortage of either food or gym time.
  • The fact that she is re-introduced in her part of the game by literally waking up next to a gym tells us that the developers realised people would think about this and gave them an answer.
  • It is extremely difficult for a woman to gain muscle mass like that through gym time alone. Men and women are built differently - which seems to have become a controversial thing to point out.
    • Just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. Abby probably has some combination of a natural gift for muscle mass and a lot of dedicated gym time. The game doesn't act as if every woman has muscles like that; it's really just Abby. And the characters do acknowledge she's a bit unusual; one person describes her as being "built like an ox".
    • At one point in the Abby sections she brags to Owen about breaking her personal weightlifting records. She didn't fall backwards into having that body, she is specifically focused on bodybuilding. It's a significant character trait.

Clickers and Hostility

• Why don't Clickers and Bloaters attack Runners? The lore says that they attack anything that makes noise, hence their fits of rage when Joel started that generator in the first game. But since they're blind, why don't they attack the Runners in the same room as them? Why don't they attack each other?
  • Perhaps clickers and bloaters are able to distinguish the noise runners make considering that the scream of the runner is different compared to normal human beings.
  • I figure Clickers don't only rely on their clicks, being fungus monsters perhaps they excrete spores that other infected can "taste" to as a friend/foe sort of system, so other infected don't kill each other and allow them to mature.

Clickers in the Bank?

• It takes roughly two years for the Infested to 'mature' into a Bloater, but if those two Clickers and that one Runner in that bank were the robbers on Outbreak Day, why weren't they all Bloaters after almost thirty years, or at least dried smears on the wall after they died?
  • It is possible that not every Infested is ought to mature. For some, Clickers is the final stage. Some might not even evolve from Runner.

'A Bullet Can't Stop a Bull Moose'

• How in the world were those Runners at the start of the game able to take out that moose? Granted, it didn't look like it was fully-grown, but there's a good reason why parks give you as much warning about them as they do bears. There's no way that human fists and teeth can bring down a moose, and there's no way that something as violent and angry as a moose isn't going take them down with it.
  • There are dozens, if not hundreds, of Runners in that area. Nothing says it was only Runners anyway.
  • What, like a hunter killed it, and the horde scared him off when they heard the gunshot?
  • Maybe, but the game implies the moose got swarmed by many Runners.
  • Runners are just humans, though; they can't even use weapons. Moose are notoriously aggressive, to the point that they can legitimately fuck up a bear if given the chance. Flailing your arms and trying to bite it won't do anything more than just piss it right off. Even if they did manage to chase it down through the snow and kill it through attrition, there should be at least dozens of corpses littering the area.
  • They're extraordinarily aggressive humans. Is it so hard to believe that a few dozen of them could eventually manage to get a moose's jugular, or disembowel it, or even break one of its legs, and then run it down? For that matter, what's to say the moose wasn't already injured or sick when they got to it?
  • Ok see, bringing up the chance that it was already injured makes it way more believable that they managed to take it out.
  • I am baffled as to why certain people can't see how easy it is to take something down through sheer numbers. If you watch animal documentaries such as insects or packs of animals against a larger foe then you can see a horde of infected humans can kill/eat a single moose.
  • In their defense, those animals have sharp teeth and claws. We don’t. The only reason we were able to take down, say, a woolly mammoth was due to weapons (spears, clubs, etc.) and tactics. That said, you are right that with sheer numbers, they would be able to overwhelm a bull moose, especially if said bull moose were sick/injured.

'They Come in Numbers'

• In the prologue, there were easily two-hundred Infected attacking that ski lodge, with more in the surrounding area if you include those frozen corpses Abby had to crawl through. Where did they all come from, that they were infested at roughly the same time? It's been almost thirty years, there shouldn't be an infestation on this scale anymore. At this point, wouldn't human settlements be spread too thinly to cause this kind of outbreak?
  • Tommy mentions in a flashback that there's a migratory horde that passes through the area every year, and leaves stragglers each time. Could be those Infected are leftovers from that group (or even the group itself).
  • Could be infected from the start of the outbreak, survivors who came up to the Ski Lodge area thinking the fungus wouldn't like the cold, were wrong and ended up infected.

Why was Ellie so sure the Washington Liberation Front was based in Seattle?

• Why was Ellie so sure that the WLF was based in Seattle just because she saw their jacket emblems? Couldn't they have been based in Washington D.C.? Besides that, there are more then a dozen cities and counties in America with the name "Washington". And even if one does assume "Washington" means the state, that still doesn't prove they are based in Seattle. It's a big state with several large cities. There's no reason to assume Seattle is their base.
  • It's the best guess she has (Tommy brings up similar questions to her). D.C. would be unlikely, as it's practically on the opposite side of the continent from Jackson; Washington state is far closer. It's also possible something may have happened to D.C. that the audience doesn't know about which would make it completely uninhabitable, and the same could be true for other cities in Washington.
  • Tommy is the one who knows the WLF is based in Seattle, as he presumably had some knowledge of them from his Firefly days. He apparently tells her offscreen at some point after Joel's death. Tommy raises the concern that they might have left Seattle or stolen the jackets to discourage her from going after them.

Do they still need a cure? Did they ever need a cure?

• Through out the game the most common enemy is humans. In the second game it appears that the infected are slowly dying off, humanity is slowly rebuilding, its not going to be easy but it looks like humanity won just by surviving through it?
  • The cure would prevent human who take it from turning if they’re bitten/scratched by the Infected. Presumably if the cure were somehow mass produced (likely not possible) then getting rid of the Infected would go much faster.
  • The most common enemy is humans because the game chose to focus on it, not because humans are winning the fight. Tommy mentions that there are huge migratory herds of infected that wander the country side, Ellie mentions in her journal that Las Vegas is so thick with infected that she goes completely around it, and there are huge infected swarms in Seattle not far from human areas - Ellie and Dina barely escape a huge one in the subway system and Abby and Lev fight another in the hotel. If nothing else, spores remain a concern in many places where a vaccine would allow an easier cleanup.
  • And considering that all it takes is one bite/scratch from an Infected to turn you into an Infected…and we see huge swarms of them in certain places, there’s a good bet humanity is still barely holding on. As in, there’s no evidence to suggest the Infected are finally dying off. The only way to *really* stop them is via a vaccine. Which they don’t have. Which would be nigh-on impossible to mass-produce.

Do they even mention Joel's last name?

• When Tommy introduces Joel and Tommy says is "Hi my name is Tommy and this is Joel. Then bam, kill the guy named Joel. Do they just go around killing men name Joel? How do they know this is the specific Joel they are looking for? Joel is a very common name where I grew up, how many men named Joel have they killed just for having the name Joel?
  • Given that Abby was at St. Mary's hospital at the same time Joel was, it's likely she saw him. Also, the trip to Wyoming is based on a lead from former Fireflies who served with Tommy, and who may have had photos of Tommy as well; in other words, she could have deduced Joel's identity by way of Tommy if she didn't already know what Joel looked like. She could have learned Joel's full name either at the hospital or from the Fireflies.
  • Abby knows Tommy and Joel are brothers. After he introduces himself, Tommy refers to Joel as "my brother". Right names, right location, right familial relationship.
    • Still that's not exactly iron-clad proof. There could other brothers in the town named Tommy and Joel, since those are very common names. You'd think they'd at dig at least a little bit further just to be sure they are the right ones.
    • They don't really have the opportunity to dig further. Owen is already pushing Abby to turn back when they are first introduced. They are a small group and Jackson is a big settlement, so they can't exactly stroll around asking questions without potentially giving themselves away and inviting the exact retribution that they receive. They got lucky and didn't push it. Besides, Joel didn't exactly protest his innocence when Abby started in on him.
  • It's extremely likely she did the research. Remember, her dad was the lead surgeon of the Fireflies. Possibly the one who could create the vaccine. And Tommy was once a member of the Fireflies himself, so they would've had intel on him stored somewhere. If I remember correctly, Marlene had connections in Boston and when she found out Ellie was immune, she had Joel be the one to deliver her to their facility. I'm pretty sure she also used her connections to let them know who the smuggler was. All Abby would have to do is consult those files.
  • They did mention Joel's last name. First, Tommy and Joel mention their first names and the fact that they're brothers. (What are the odds that there's a separate pair of Tommy-Joel brothers in the same location where they expected to find the actual Tommy and Joel?) At that point Abby shoots Joel in the knee but doesn't immediately kill him. Then she says "Joel Miller" and Joel doesn't even attempt to deny it. He says "Why don't you say whatever speech you've got rehearsed and get this over with?" The odds of them having the wrong Joel are really low at that point.
  • What would Abby have done after shooting him in the knee if he'd turned out to be the wrong Joel?
    • She would have felt super guilty. And then she would have learned a lesson about the hazards of seeking revenge. Which is the whole point of the game, actually.

Why do the Santa Barbra bandits keep a locker full of weapons next to their prison cells?

• I get that the bandits aren't exactly the smartest guys around, but shouldn't they still know better then to keep a locker full of loaded guns right next to where they hold their prisoners?
  • They probably should've, but it's quite possible they just grew complacent. They mistreat their captives so badly that they might not have even considered a revolt, especially not one caused by an intruder.
    • The Rattlers are very, very complacent. The one who snares Ellie tries to drag her to a captured Clicker for fun (getting himself bitten and then killed in the process), and they keep captured infected on chains inside their base to taunt them.

Doctors

• During the end of the first game, you could get past all of the fireflies without killing them until you reach the operating room where Joel kills the surgeon. Then when Ellie goes back she finds a recording that says that because of Jerry's death a vaccine would be impossible to produce. This means that all of the fireflies hopes of a vaccine were relying on a single person. It could be possible that Jerry was just the only one with a capable hand to do the brain surgery, but even then you could still find a new surgeon from somewhere. If you can't find the brain surgeon then you could start training someone.
  • The original game takes place two decades after the apocalypse and 2 takes place five years after that. Having anyone with a pre-outbreak medical background is extremely slim at this point, let alone surgery or vaccine development. And the recorded knowledge of humanity is being lost to decay. There's no way to train a replacement, and Ellie was lost to them when Joel took her. With no reason to believe they could ever replicate that opportunity, they disbanded.
    • To be fair, though, it’s not like people stopped caring about medical things after the outbreak. Ellie clearly knew a thing or two when she was scrounging around for medicine for Joel after his impalement on a spike. I will grant you that a random doc from a random settlement would still need time and training before he/she is ready to take Jerry’s place.
  • (continued from above) And — not trying to be hostile here, OP — you’ve any idea how lucky they were to find Ellie? Even if Ellie weren’t the only one, chances are the others are hiding their bite mark (like she does) and they’ve no idea the Fireflies even exist, much less that they’re looking for immune people to create a vaccine from.
    • Well, if Ellie decides to look for a suitable doctor than conceivably that doctor can use the notes from the original operation to create a vaccine. It would be up to Ellie to determine if she should make that sacrifice.
  • Brain surgeons are rare. Immunologists are also rare. Jerry was apparently both. This was a man who could do brain surgery, take out some vital element, and then use that element to create a vaccine to an otherwise unstoppable infection. The entire world was probably frantically researching vaccine options during the apocalypse and nobody ever came up with anything. So it's safe to say that this a really hard thing to do and Jerry is exceptionally skilled. Also, new doctors typically get their training from existing doctors. Do you know how hard it would be to learn medicine from textbooks alone? Especially surgery? But they apparently don't have any brain surgeons remaining, so how exactly would they train a new one?
    • Having said all that, it's still possible that someone figures it out eventually, and they end up making a vaccine from Ellie when she's 50 years old or something. But that's far beyond the timespan covered in this plot.
    • There's no shortage of bodies. So long as the head is intact, they can get the practice they need. It's not like they're trying to save the subject's life, so the only difference is how fresh it is.
    • Practicing on cadavers might teach you something about anatomy, but that's not the whole picture. They need to know specifically how to take a vital thing out of Ellie without destroying that thing. Sure, they don't need Ellie to survive, but they do need that thing (whatever it is) to be extracted properly without contamination. That in turn plausibly requires some knowledge of how living tissue works, because if you cut the wrong blood vessel or snip the wrong nerve maybe it damages the vital thing. Which brings us back to the question of how anyone is supposed to learn brain surgery from scratch. And even if you overcome all those problems, there's still the question of how to convert the vital thing into a workable vaccine.

Cure or vaccine?

• It bothers me how writes are inconsistent with how they refer to the product that was supposed to be created with Ellie's brain, some characters call it a "cure", while others call it a "vaccine". Now that we have all experienced covid-19, we should be aware of the differences between the two, but just to recap: a cure would be administered to someone already sick and bring them back to healthy state, while a vaccine would be given to someone healthy to prevent infection in the future. It's important, because it drastically changes the argument about "was Joel justified" from the first game.
  • Possibly, they were trying to make both. Remember that the infection is fungal in nature, so it spreads at a slower rate than bacterial diseases. The vaccine would work more like an antibiotic. So if someone gets bitten or spores enter their system, injecting the vaccine could save them depending on where they were bitten and how much time has past. It would never make a clicker return to a normal human, but it would have saved at least people that had some of the vaccine on hand but didn't want to use it until they had too.
  • First off, it makes sense that the characters would use "cure" and "vaccine" interchangeably, because no one outside the original medical team knows exactly what they found in Ellie or what they were planning to do with it. It's clear that they were trying to make a cure and/or a vaccine, but there's no one still alive who knows any details beyond that. Secondly, this doesn't drastically change the argument about whether Joel was justified. A cure would save millions of lives in the long run. A vaccine would also save millions of lives in the long run. It's a big deal either way.

No therapists in Jackson?

• Is there no therapist in Jackson Ellie could talk about her PTSD with? Jackson is a big settlement, and the apocalypse happened in 2013, so most people should have at least some awareness of how important mental health is. I understand that getting someone trained might be difficult, but there's plenty of empathetic people in the world who could at least study the theory from some books. We know new doctors are being trained (Mel was Abby's father's student and is capable of doing surgeries in the current times), so why not therapists? I know it's so that Ellie would still be plagued by guilt and go after Abby, but that still could've happened even if Ellie went to therapy; she could be frustrated with it taking so long, she couldn't find an understanding with the therapist and there's only one in Jackson, or she was offered an opportunity but just didn't take it for whatever reason.
  • In the current day, especially in a place like Jackson, "therapist" simply might not be considered a practical occupation. Yes, there are still doctors, but they deal with problems that are more obvious, immediate, and more likely to be clear matters of life or death. Even more "frivolous" occupations like Joel's guitar building and music lessons still end up with a definite product or set of skills in the end. In real life, Therapy Is for the Weak is still a common attitude, so in the middle of an actual apocalypse it's not surprising such a thing might fall by the wayside.
  • There's also the fact that Ellie might not even want therapy in the first place. Not to say she doesn't need it, but it's hard to help someones mental state if they refuse to get said help.

Soldiers of the WLF

• Is the WLF an army of child soldiers or something? Aside from Isaac who seems to be in his mid-40s, everyone in the WLF seems to be late teens to early 20s. Even at the stadium, Manny's father was the only distinguishably older person this Troper noticed. Jackson and the Seriphites, by contrast, have quite a few middle-aged people among them.
  • Armies in real life are generally made up of people aged 18-35, simply because it's a tough job and that's when you're at the peak of your physical fitness. And we mostly see those members of the WLF that make up their army, so we mostly see the young people. There's a decent chance that there are plenty of older people at the stadium who we don't see simply because Abby has no need for interaction with them. On top of that, people simply wouldn't live long enough to reach middle age when Cordyceps is fatal with just a single bite or scratch. Living into your 50's like Joel and other people in Jackson is the exception, not the rule.

Abby and her friends’ lack of empathy

• How is it that Abby and her friends are so uncaring towards the idea that they scarred Ellie by murdering Joel right in front of her? Abby, I can understand with her being so filled with rage towards Joel that she never thought about how her actions could affect others. However, her friends didn’t do anything to make themselves look better when they had Ellie pinned down as Abby finished off Joel right in front of the poor girl. Why did none of them think to knock her out or something before Joel was killed? It was clear that Ellie cared about Joel and was begging for his life. Did any of them think that maybe they shouldn’t be doing that anymore or again, knock her unconscious or take her outside so that she didn’t have to see that happen? Were they that vindictive towards Joel that they were willing to let him listen to Ellie’s cries and pleads just to make him suffer before he died?'
  • They probably didn't anticipate that Ellie might be in the room when they killed Joel, and they didn't know how to react when it worked out that way. Maybe it's more merciful to drag Ellie outside so she doesn't see the death. But then again, maybe it's better to give Joel and Ellie a chance to exchange a few words before the end. Maybe one of them will shout "I love you!" or something, and maybe it's important to give them that chance. (Knocking Ellie out runs the risk of injury, by the way). If you do take Ellie outside, there's also the question of who do you send to do that? How many people are required to keep Ellie restrained? If they keep her in the room they've got maximum strength in numbers. If they send two people to take her outside there's a chance she overwhelms those two people. (Especially since she might already have allies en route). Now maybe in retrospect they still should have hauled her outside, but hindsight is 20-20. They hadn't anticipated this situation, so they didn't know how to react in the moment.

Ammunition Scarcity

• I can understand why you find few bullets while scavenging around, but why can you loot so few from enemies? Especially ones ready to shoot you on sight?