100 %. It looks to have been rendered mainly to infuriate anyone with a lick of sense.3dender wrote: ↑01 Jun 2025 20:54 pmShe's not dead, the game also breaks away at that scene to take you into Abby's story.MikoTython wrote: ↑26 May 2025 15:24 pm Is Ellie dead ? They wrote Jesse back in the last couple of episodes to drive home the point of how off-the-wall she is. Maybe that's in the game too, I don't know. This last episode was a non-stop sequence of boneheaded stunts that ended with good people dead. Her girlfriend was also looking at her sideways.
She's such an obnoxious half-witted goof. But maybe, you know, she is among the dead.. If not, its a pure red herring.
I think part of the point of the show is that we were sort of naturally manipulated into sympathizing with a character who isn't sympathetic - her faults outweigh her virtues. I've heard in other places they've written her way dumber than she was in the game.
Assuming they were trying, they really failed at getting my wife and I to sympathize with Ellie. She's an incredibly irritating protagonist (both dumb and a selfish jerk). It seems like a combination of bad writing, casting, acting and directing.
A good example is that argument she has with Jesse before they split up. The way Jesse reacts to her seems to suggest she's right that he's a hypocrite. But the way it's written and delivered does not convince me even a little bit.
And then when they reunite in the theater we're supposed to believe her when she says she would go to the ends of the earth for him? When she literally just declined to do that for Tommy cause she was too selfish? It's totally incoherent.
The writers seem to think they've presented a compelling conflict between Jesse' ethics of community (plus common sense) vs. whatever unconsidered vainglorious impulses that govern Ellie. Here's how the writer presented that last interaction between Jesse & Ellie :
The pair later runs into a Seraphite being cornered and captured by a group of WLF, which Jesse stops Ellie from intervening in due to his much more tactical approach to combat.
“He blankets it all in black and white. It’s very binary. Whether its a stalker or a Seraphite, in Jesse’s mind, he’s just like, ‘Can I put a bullet through its head? OK. If I’m outnumbered, get back,’” Mazino explained. “He understands the law of the jungle — the strong live and the weak die — and he abides by that. And he understands at this point that Ellie may not necessarily feel the same or know the same, which is super dangerous and can be a very compromising position to be in.”
“Because Ellie has this immunity, she sees this world in a bit of a different light. She’s not so worried,” he added. “But for someone like Jesse, who’s a mere mortal, there are rules you have to follow in order to survive. That practicality can only get you so far, though.”
The tension between the pair hits a boiling point when Jesse reveals that he voted ‘No’ in Episode 3 about sending a crew after Abby to avenge Joel’s death, since the community of Jackson had to come first after being left vulnerable from the infected attack.
“In our conversations of how Jesse voted, we were both under the same notion that he would vote to protect Jackson, because Jesse is more about the larger community — at least the community he belongs to, not the community of mankind — than about the individual or this pursuit of justice,” Druckmann said. “There’s some overlap there between Jesse and Joel, because I believe in similar circumstances Joel would have voted the same way.”
“When she finds out how he voted, she makes a point that I think is so solid that I start to think, ‘Oh, yeah, so there goes another hero,’ because she’s right,” Mazin noted. “It’s not that what she’s doing is right, but his belief that he is moral is so challengeable and so arbitrary that I am moral and upstanding and sacrificial to people as long as they’re on the inside of this wooden fence. But if they’re outside the wooden fence, I’ll just let them die, even if they’re a kid. And I love that, because no one in life really is an Eagle Scout, except for the actual Eagle Scouts.”
https://www.thewrap.com/the-last-of-us- ... ng-mazino/
The failure here is the casting & the writing - if you want to project implacable, which is coherent dramatically, you don't also have to project completely impulsive & heedless, not to mention obnoxiously self-righteous in the manner of an irritatingly entitled teen-ager. It might be a fault of the game characterization as well, expect it is, I don't know, but this sort of character is nothing new in fiction or cinema. They've botched it. Of course, we're examining this from a standpoint of coherence & (ahem) maturity I don't think the writers even aspire to, or are intelligent enough to consider/grapple with - the huge inconsistencies are just sloppy writing. They don't really care.