[timun]

Originally Posted by GGG

It’s interesting that you seem to see Joel as sympathetic relative to Marlene.

No, I'm playing Devil's advocate. You have come to concrete conclusions that I find amusing because they seem baseless to me.

You seem to think that Joel had to kill the doctor.

Not what I said at all.

He did not. He could have shot the doctor in the leg and stopped the surgery.

I think it's agreed that murdering people is bad, which I've already written repeatedly.

I agree that Joel massacring all the firefly’s was restoring Ellie’s agency right up until he shoots the doctor and between the eyes and kills Marlene.

At that point Joel did the same thing that Marlene did: take away her agency while she was unconscious. Marlene in taking away her life Joel [in] forcing her to sacrifice her dream of saving the world.

This business about her "agency" is nonsense (and originally prompted my responding to you because I wondered WTF show you were watching ). Unconscious people have none. There was no potential outcome wherein he shot the doctor in the leg, convinced the Fireflies to stop the procedure, woke Ellie up, and told her the gravity of the situation and let her decide. That was not a choice they were going to have. The potential outcomes were that he let himself be escorted away and Ellie dies, he tries to stop the procedure and fails, and both he and Ellie die, or he tries and succeeds and they both live. Could he have shot the doctor in the leg? Marlene too? Yeah, he could have. He made a decision not to leave them alive, but that didn't rob Ellie of any agency. She already had no choice.

Marlene is right when she says Ellie would have chose death and Joel agrees with her. The whole point of that scene is to make them both monsters.

"Ellie would have chosen death" is completely specious.

I will concede that the point of Joel killing Marlene and everybody else is to make him a monster.

The game clearly is much softer on Joel, Joel has to kill the doctor to defend himself and the cure might not work. Here it’s much more cut an dry. Joel choses to kill the Doctor and Marlene over Ellie’s unconscious objection.

Again, specious; you don't know if she would have objected or not.

As you state for Ellie to have agency she would have to be told. Joel chose not to facilitate this making him as bad as Marlene, worse actually because his motivation is selfish. I disagree that in the show this is left up to interpretation.

Well your interpretation is your interpretation, but if you don't think the conclusion is left up to one's interpretation then you're categorically wrong.

When you watch the first episode he essentially ignores his daughters birthday,

It was HIS birthday, ya mook!

ships her off to the neighbours, shows up late when his daughter has something special planned. Certainly not dad of the year here. If the goal was to communicate that Sarah was the most important thing to Joel it didn’t work. Perhaps again that’s different in the game.

He was a contractor, and the conversation with Tommy in the morning makes it very clear that a concrete sub flaked out on him and was putting the day's earnings at risk. He was trying to make a living; what an ###hole!

She'd obviously been to the neighbours' before, and was friendly and sociable with them; he didn't "ship her off".

Joel is just filling the hole left by his previous failure to protect his daughter. It’s motivated out of guilt and failure.

Yes, this much is true.

If he loved her he at a minimum doesn’t lie to her.

Ah, now here's the crux of the ending. Lying to her was undeniably a ####ty thing to do. Boy is he in trouble if Ellie ever finds out.