“We’re Allowed to Be Happy”: The Impact of Abby Anderson in The Last of Us Part II, Five Years Later

Joel howls in pain as he’s dragged against the window by Abby’s comrades, alongside his brother. As he winces and squirms, the previous game’s protagonist has one last tough guy moment.

“Why don’t you say whatever speech you’ve got prepared,” he says, “and get this over with.”

Furious, Abby urges her companions to get behind her as she picks up a golf club. She then snarls with disdain and disbelief at Joel’s taunt, readying her blunt instrument to the side.

“You stupid old man,” she growls. “You don’t get to rush this.”

This line has a double meaning. The most literal, of course, is that Abby wants Joel to suffer before she kills him. But on a figurative level, it’s an apt summation of Part II itself. Because no matter how quickly players regain control of Ellie, hop on a horse with her girlfriend, and ride to Seattle to avenge her surrogate father, the expected catharsis never comes—even if the bloodshed does.

As recompense for Joel, Ellie kills Owen and Mel, along with their dog Alice.

Abby retaliates by tracking her down, shooting her friend Jesse, then holding Tommy hostage at gunpoint as Ellie begs for his life.

As Abby prepares to pull the trigger, the player is helpless—unable to protect the young woman they’ve been with since girlhood and the man who saved her life. Ellie’s vengeance remains unfulfilled.

Abby Anderson’s biggest asset is the human being behind her—veteran performer Laura Bailey.

Bailey was a prolific presence in Western anime dubbing before making a separate impact on gaming. Millennial audiences grew up with her voice on Cartoon Network as Kid Trunks and Dende in Dragon Ball Z, Lust in Fullmetal Alchemist, and even the titular Shin-Chan. These three roles alone help to demonstrate the broad range of talent Bailey brings to any given role. Two are brash and bawdy young boys, while the other is a slinky seductress in a tight black dress. Bailey is at home in all of them, and while there are distinctive elements of her range that close listeners will pick up on, the distinction she brings to each performance is a rarity.

Abby, then, embodies both extremes of Bailey’s scale. She is an undeniably sexual character in the context of the game’s narrative, as her intimacy hangups around Owen continue to escalate throughout their fraught relationship. However, her lack of conventional femininity is an unspoken tension between Abby and Mel, who is pregnant with Owen’s child. Raised by and mostly grouped together with men, Abby embodies a certain type of masculine femininity that’s rare in a female video game character.

Bailey is the perfect actor for this role, then, as the foundations of her career were built on exerting herself in either direction. It’s a role that encapsulates so much of her own work, and that reflects in the committed mo-cap and vocal performance she gives. The sultriness she channeled for Bloodrayne and Catherine can be heard in concert with that brash boyishness of her early shonen anime performances. On the same note, she carries the character with top-heavy, imposing stature that flexes her impressive musculature with each movement.

This performance gives Abby the ability to be gruff and big in a way female characters rarely get to be in this medium. Take the bride boss in Dead Island 2, for instance, which makes a series of ugly jabs at a bodybuilder zombie bursting out of her gown in a way that’s meant to look mannish. Even the Amazon in Dragon’s Crown is more of a fetish object ripped from bodybuilder mags and muscle doujinshi more than she is a nuanced complication of secondary sex characteristics.

Women taking up space in games is often meant to be a spectacle, not an accepted part of their lived reality. But through Abby, Laura Bailey is not only given the opportunity to do just that, but to negotiate her lived reality as the player.

After Ellie is brought to gunpoint, players then jump back six years in time. They arrive at a familiar sight—a young girl, following an older man.

This pair, however, is not Joel and Ellie. Players are instead put into the shoes of a younger Abby as she accompanies her surgeon father back to camp. The two, we discover, are part of the Fireflies—a resistance group introduced in Part I. Abby is told that a young girl was brought to the camp, and that her immunity to Infected bites may provide a cure for the virus.

It’s in this moment of bitter dramatic irony that Part II begins in proper. At the end of Part I, Joel kills almost every last Firefly when it’s revealed Ellie will die during the procedure to develop a cure. One of his victims? Jerry—Abby’s father. The death of a heretofore unnamed NPC from the end of the original is the inciting incident of the sequel.

After this already-divisive decision, Part II then does not relinquish control of Ellie. She’s left captive, in stasis, as Abby grows into a sturdy pair of biceps and gets out of bed after another leap forward in time. It is now three days before Ellie will kill Abby’s friends, and now, players must take her up to that point.

This is not a montage or brief flashback—it’s the next 10 to 12 hours of the story.

This is what elevates The Last of Us Part II from an impressive work of interactive art to a vital one. Druckmann and Gross’ choice forces players to re-contextualize their own actions in a way dialogue wheels and ‘perfect stealth’ medals simply cannot. After Ellie has descended into outright myopic sociopathy through several dozen murders en route to Seattle, players must weigh their own culpability in perpetuating a cycle of violence through one of the cycle’s other victims.

It’s a mechanical twist that challenges what sort of relationship a player and their player-character can have. In a classical sense, revenge narratives in games often amount to a one-sided struggle with clearly legible moral lines. Pauline is kidnapped, Donkey Kong’s at the top of the stage, Mario has to rescue her—this is a familiar and comfortable structure.

As game narratives evolved in subsequent decades, stakes grew more severe even if the narratives themselves barely shifted. One such example: ‘Pauline’ is killed, then ‘Mario’ must murder his way to a final conflict with ‘Donkey Kong’. This is the same structure, just with more confrontational content; ‘Pauline,’ ‘Mario,’ and ‘Donkey Kong’ can all be replaced with other proper nouns.

The Last Of Us Part II, then, challenges these assumed medium trappings that have been mainstream gospel since the 1980s. What makes it special is that it does something that can only be done with the medium to accomplish it: take time. A film or a television show is forced to contend with runtime in a way that interactive storytelling isn’t beholden to. At their best video games also offer transgressive possibilities in how they allow a player to interface with their art. They allow for a consumer to not only empathize with a character through narrative impetus, but tangible ‘touch’ as well.

By interfacing with a character, players can ‘live’ as them to gain new insight and perspective.

The opening moments of Abby’s chapters are spent humanizing the Washington Liberation Front, a survivalist militia led by former Marine Isaac Dixon where the former Firefly has found a home. An average player has probably killed several of these uniformed soldiers as Ellie by now. In a repurposed sports arena bustling with raggedy tents and worn-out souls, the player-avatar now passes by and greets some of these very same enemy units. She even walks by a classroom of young children being let out for the day.

“How many of their parents did you kill?” the game seems to ask.

Enemy NPCs in Part II are given unique names, and will grieve each other’s deaths through organic dialogue. This feature works in haunting concert with the perspective shift, in that the game never allows players to forget they’re killing other human beings in similar material circumstances.

Abby’s main assailants—aside from Infected—are the Seraphites, a militaristic religious sect that travel through complex bridge networks and worship a martyred prophet figure. To even have a chance of guiding Ellie to her revenge—a proverbial ‘congratulations’ screen—the player must outwit and outkill the group’s members on their way back to the game’s midpoint.

For the back part of her journey, she’s assisted by Lev—a transmasculine Seraphite child now being hunted down for being ‘an abomination,’ according to NPC dialogue that misgenders and deadnames him. Lev shaved his head in protest of being offered to a Seraphite elder for a bride. Despite his traumatic upbringing, Lev—along with his sister, Yara—remains devout in his religious belief. As they travel together, Abby learns that there is even humanity in the Seraphites, who she’s killed with no remorse up until this point.

This is not just a narrative-bound aesthetic reframe, but a mechanical one as well. Abby has her own unique set of skills, including different weapons and a distinct loadout of character upgrades. She’s even given unique collectibles in the form of state quarters, which the player learns she collected with her father. Instead of being told via exposition why Ellie ought to take pity on her, players are tasked with keeping Abby alive and protecting Lev if they want to know how the game even ends.

Abby controls much differently than Ellie. She’s bulkier, much slower, but more sturdy during hand-to-hand combat and able to choke out foes where Ellie is forced to rely on knives. Her weapon handling is more trained as well, as players begin her leg of Part II with a semi-automatic rifle that has minimal kickback. In contrast with the terse, quiet fragility of Ellie’s portion, Abby is thrown into several sequences that begin loud by default—as if the game knows she can take the extra abuse.

While stealth is present, there’s a greater emphasis on holding steady, dodging blows, and gunning down Infected and Seraphites. It’s more rousing and less languid than Ellie’s bleaker, moodier portions, and helps to instill some of the expected Naughty Dog action-adventure flavor into the experience. Abby and Lev’s ascent up a dilapidated skyscraper to traverse a bridge fashioned from a crane, for example, is the sort of high-flying thrill that only the Uncharted developer can cook up.

Even so, the narrative component of Part II always prevents the player from having too much fun.

As Abby is humanized in Part II, so too are the myriad mistakes she’s made.

In particular, we see her and Owen drift apart even as the latter tries to keep them together. Even in a relationship with the pregnant Mel, Owen wants to be close to Abby and even subtly seems to suggest a polyamorous arrangement. “We deserve to be happy,” he pleads in one of his last scenes.

But Abby does not feel that way. She has not known happiness since her father’s murder. Further, her obsession with vengeance took her to an emotional dead end once she took her pound of flesh from Joel. Now, she’s a hollow and bitter person driven by a will to survive and not much else. Intimacy and tenderness with Owen is now, itself, a source of woe—something Abby feels she can’t ever have as a result of her own actions. So she isolates and stows her feelings, to preserve both Owen and Mel’s happiness.

These are the two people closest to Abby, and yet she ends up as little more than grief to both. Both Abby and Owen succumb to adolescent yearnings in a boat’s cabin during one of gaming’s only earned—and most effective—sex scenes. As Abby gets thrust into from behind with forceful and passionate vigor, a simultaneous relief and worry haunts her weathered complexion. This joy, this release… she knows it’s as temporal as life in post-apocalyptic Washington. That it, too, will come crashing down around her.

This happens sooner than later, when Mel gives Abby an ultimatum. She and Owen will take Lev and Yara to Santa Barbara—alone. It’s clear Owen has told Mel about his and Abby’s cramped coitus. It’s also clear Mel has only ever been Abby’s friend by proximity.

“He may fall for your little act with these kids,” Mel says, “but I don’t. Isaac’s top Scar killer suddenly has a change of heart? Has nothing to do with Owen, right?”

The implication is clear. Mel believes that Abby is jealous of her pregnancy. That the cold-hearted killer is choosing to have mercy on Lev and Yara not out of genuine interest in their wellbeing, but to prove she has a maternal streak. It’s a nasty accusation, and one the script never actually addresses being true or not. This is one of Part II’s biggest strengths—a Cormac McCarthy-adjacent tendency to let sparseness speak for itself.

Abby tries to defend herself. “I know I haven’t always done the right -”

But Mel interrupts. “You’re a piece of shit, Abby. You always have been. I’m done with you.” She turns to walk away, but rubs salt in the wound one last time. “You want to do right by these kids? Get out of their lives before you screw them over, too.”

This is the last conversation Abby has alone with Mel.

Shortly after this, Lev leaves on a boat for the Seraphite island compound on the day of a planned WLF attack. He hopes to free his mother from religious influence, but instead, is forced to kill her in self-defense after “she started chasing [him] around.” With Yara, Abby leaves to bring the child back to safety. Through a fiery and violent conflict between both factions, Abby and Lev escape after Yara sacrifices her life as cover. They return to the aquarium.

Owen, Mel, and Alice are dead. The player already knows this, and has been waiting for the exact moment since the outset of Abby’s arc. But now, they know the true weight of the life lost. They know that Lev and Alice played together. That Abby and Owen have loved each other their whole lives. That Mel resents the only living female friend she has left, and was carrying Owen’s child.

Any hope of resolution or understanding, of bonding in the midst of a frigid, rainy hell, is snuffed out when Abby has no chance to stop it.

Among the bodies, Lev finds a Seattle map and hands it to Abby. It’s the player map from Ellie’s portion of the game. The soggy, glossy piece of paper is still marked up with objectives routed to help the player – now Ellie’s undoing at the hands of the same person behind the controller.

Abby and Lev descend upon the theater where Ellie, partner Dina, friend Jesse, and Tommy have sought shelter from the storm. After she boosts the child up some scaffolding, the pair find a way inside and begin to stalk the very halls that—just 10 or so hours prior—were a place of sanctity and safety for the player—now an arena and grave.

Abby’s narrative, up to this point, reflects a life lived in which everything one knows is revealed as dogmatic narrative. Here’s where I believe the most direct parallel lies, if there is one to be made, to Neil Druckmann’s own life. Abby, as character and figurehead, can be read as representative of a schism in his own beliefs.

Inspiration for Part II is, in fact, rooted in one of the creator’s memories—footage of the 2000 lynching of Israeli soldiers in Ramallah. The lynching occurred during a funeral procession for a Palestinian child, who had been killed by the Israeli military two days prior. This child, Khalil Zahran, was just one of over two dozen slaughtered children. These children only made up a quarter of the 100-plus Palestinians killed at the hands of the IDF during a two-week assault condemned by the UN, according to Eve Spangler’s book Understanding Israel/Palestine—a good primer of the conflict up to the late aughts.

This lynching, then, was vengeance—ritualistic and performative bloodshed as symbolic recompense for slaughtered innocents. The two Israeli reservists who were made an example of had entered the funeral for a Palestinian child at the start of the second Intifada—a coordinated uprising against the Israeli apartheid state. In perspective, this was a grave insult to the populace whose children had been killed by the state apparatus of those two men. 

These were not two random soldiers being yanked from the streets, then put on display. It was a very specific, intentional political killing.

But Druckmann, then in his early twenties, did not see the complexities.

“They cheered afterward,” Druckmann told The Washington Post in 2020. “It was the cheering that was really chilling to me. … In my mind, I thought, ‘Oh, man, if I could just push a button and kill all these people that committed this horrible act, I would make them feel the same pain that they inflicted on these people.’”

Druckmann later, however, felt “gross” about those dark impulses. That feeling—this “grossness,” as it were—is at the heart of Part II. Instead of rewarding it through the righteous slaughter or justified atrocities found in an average military shooter, however, the game provokes the player’s anger and stokes their basest instincts. This is not a game about geopolitical grudges, but the very personal and perpetual cost of choosing dehumanizing violence over compassion. 

As such, life is as cheap as it is precious in the game. Characters with hours of exposition die fast, with no warning and no time to grieve. Everybody has a cause to kill for, and most of them will die for it as well. Nowhere is safe, and nothing is sacred. NPCs beg for their lives as they panic over the corpses of their friends. To add to this, guns are slow—squeezing the PlayStation 5’s impulse trigger makes even pistol fire feel as heavy as musket shot. Where I’m eager to gun down innocents and enemies alike in many games, Part II makes every single shot feel like a decision versus reaction.

Narrative, environment, and mechanics—in concert—convey Druckmann’s stated intent: to make players understand the consequences of hatred from two opposite ends of a conflict.

“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann stated in the same Post interview. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”

As it pertains to Abby, then, Part II does not just ask the player to understand her—it forces them to. Instead of a dramatic speech about her motives, or a pithy flashback, Abby is given a whole self-contained story arc that organically leads players to resent Ellie. This is accomplished via those labored, deliberate mechanics just as much as it is the script and performance.

To understand Abby Anderson, the player must quite literally feel what she feels.

Abby and Ellie come to blows twice in the last quarter of The Last of Us Part II.

“”You killed my friends,” Abby bellows before their initial bout. “We let you both live… and you wasted it!”

The first clash is one of the game’s highlights. After a struggle that leaves Tommy shot and bleeding out on the floor, Ellie retreats from the theater lobby into the rotting auditorium. Abby gives chase and—after barely avoiding rifle fire—corners Ellie. They come to blows, then tumble to the floor. The ground gives way, and both fall into the murky, moldy basement below.

The women take their positions, then begin to hunt each other down. Mechanically, this requires the player to be the most careful they’ll have to be during Part II. It’s a close-quarters cat and mouse game in which Ellie is armed and Abby has only her fists to protect her. Direct confrontation gets Abby killed on-sight; players must outmaneuver the young woman they spent their opening hours turning into a grizzled hunter. Cast against flickering lights, broken glass, and piles of nude mannequins, it is the ultimate test of both women’s will to survive—and of the player’s ability to assist them.

This struggle has been cast in polystone by Prime 1 studios, with an intimidating 23-inch statue that depicts Abby as she is most of the clash: prone against a wall, looking around a corner, praying that Ellie doesn’t get the jump on her. It’s a piece of mass-produced art that conveys the true effectiveness of the sequence.

Even in stasis, with ludic and even aesthetic elements removed, this scene is pure momentum in the shadows—a steady, quiet thrum that only ceases when Abby gets her third jump on Ellie and pounds her skull into cement until the battered, blubbering woman relents. A still moment—even one struck to tangible material—still conveys this latent queasy inertia.

After Abby bests Ellie, Dina jumps the exhausted woman and tackles her off of Ellie. But she’s soon overpowered. Abby holds a knife to Dina’s throat. Ellie, in tears, pleads for the life of the last person she loves.

“She’s pregnant,” Ellie sobs.

Abby, reeling from the deaths of Owen and Mel, grimaces to contemplate.

Then she growls, “Good.”

But as she lifts the knife, Lev enters the room and begs Abby to relent. She does. As she leaves both women on the ground, bleeding, possibly on the verge of death, she looks down at the one she’s now spared twice with hatred reserved for something less than human.

“Don’t ever let me see you again,” Abby warns.

And she leaves.

Part II skips forward one last time—several months to an indeterminate point in the future. Ellie has retreated to a farmhouse with Dinah and her infant son. She’s haunted by PTSD flashbacks of Joel’s death that render her a screaming, crying mess in the barn dirt.

Tommy, who survived Abby’s gunshot on the lobby floor, arrives at Ellie and Dina’s home to deliver info on Abby’s whereabouts. Ellie wants to track Abby down and finish their fight. Dina wants her love to put down her arms and embrace their post-apocalyptic agrarian bliss. 

The player knows, alas, which narrative impulse will win out. When Ellie leaves, players spend their final moments with Dina. In their absence, she will take her and Jesse’s child to further safety.

Away from Ellie, and from all of the harm she brings.

Abby, meanwhile, has traveled down the West Coast with Lev. However, the two wind up in the sights of the Rattlers—a group of slavers who intercept their communiques to the Fireflies. The sadistic bikers kidnap, then force them into indentured servitude for months. Both are starved and beaten, before being bound up to drown at the ocean’s edge for attempting to escape. Abby loses her signature physique—her body a broken shell of its former magnitude.  

When Ellie finds Abby and frees her—along with Lev—the former demands a final fight to settle the score. But this is not another tense stealth sequence or multi-step boss encounter. The two come to blows on a beach, both ankle-deep in the frigid tide. Both weak, tired, and ready to give up, the two can barely muster enough ferocity and tenacity for their climactic clash.

These final moments are perhaps the game’s most distressing. It’s a sad, slow fight where each and every blow is felt. The central mise en scene is gray, almost colorless, robbing the sea of its natural splendor and spiking it with plasma. Both women brutalized and mutilated in the tide, choking in salt water that simmers each and every wound with fresh stings. No triumph or glory is given to the player—it’s a spectacle of tragedy over audacity or tenacity.

Abby takes Ellie’s ring and pinkie fingers in her mouth, then crunches into bone—severing the digits entirely. Enraged, bleeding out, on her last leg, Ellie overpowers Abby and begins to throttle her underwater. In these moments, it’s important to recall Ellie’s inability to swim and fear of water in the previous game. Likewise, the visibly shaken and terrified Lev has an innate fear of the ocean. As such, this can be read as Ellie conquering her fear, then using it to do violence that reaffirms Lev’s own fears. The imagery can be taken as trenchant metaphor for the nature of observed violence, and the effects that can have on belief.

Again—we return to Ramallah.

If The Last of Us Part II is any indicator, life in America shook Neil Druckmann’s beliefs.

Viewing the continued violence that has claimed millions of lives and displaced countless from abroad likely raised questions about assumed truths about his upbringing and beliefs. Being raised in Israel has a direct impact on one’s understanding of Palestine; as reported by Haaretz, a Pennylvania State University study found over 50% of polled Israelis supported the outright ethnic cleansing of Gaza and Israel.

A contributing factor? The very same thing Abby wrestles with in her character arc: propaganda. Propaganda that strips away a person’s humanity, and in its place leaves only a loosely assembled collage of ideals. Ideals that can be shaped into immutable monuments by the combined effects of misinformation, bad faith, and—perhaps above all—lack of personal experience.

Lev was raised with the belief that—regardless of his desire—he would serve as a child bride. This is because the Seraphites dehumanize and essentialize human beings based on biological functions—a pointed critique of religious fundamentalism. Even so, Lev’s faith remains intact; in fact, it’s his belief that gives him the confidence and tenacity to embrace his identity.

But to Abby, the Seraphite belief is a dangerous cult. She refers to its members as “Scars”—an in-universe slur—until she’s driven to protect Lev and begins to refer to them by their chosen moniker.

By the same token, Abby and Ellie coming to a collective realization that they’ve taken everything from each other is itself a dark parable with national subtext.

The root cause of it all? Dehumanization—the failure to see another person as a human being. Whether via religious dogma, ideological warfare, or outright personal vendetta, each character has been radicalized into and affected by violence under the pretense of preserving the way things ‘ought’ to be.

As Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley wrote in their 2006 book, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder:

The idea of essence … turns out to be a key psychological concept in examining violence against groups. Something about members of the targeted group is inherently disgusting—their habits … their appearance—and this justifies the violence against them because their disgusting characteristics threaten to pollute the environment and must be eliminated.

Is mutual hatred between collectives and their individual actors in The Last of Us Part II, then, a 1:1 analog for Druckmann and Halley Gross’ own evolutions and individual beliefs?

Emphatically: no. That would be impossible. No piece of art can be a monument to any belief, even if it’s explicitly stated as such by its creator. Subjectivity and external elements that impact the reception of a work ultimately mean that a piece can never be an ideological pillar. At the same time, however, I do believe this story—which is ultimately one of compassion, not hatred—can be read as the artist interrogating his own hate, as well as the places that brought him there.

(Reflective of this, Druckmann has publicly donated to both Israeli and Palestinian relief organizations. He leads his posts and reflections on the conflict with grief over bloodshed, not calls for further violence. It’s a stark contrast to, say, a director stating that Greta Thunberg should be “eaten by cannibals” for her pro-Palestinian activism.)

Through a virtual embodiment of Joel’s killer, both writers likely hoped to trigger the same interrogation and reflection within the player themselves. How much of what we know is narrative, and how much of it is perspective through lived experience?

But the themes of mercy and compassion latent in Abby’s narrative were not internalized by a player base furious that the game they were “promised” had been “taken” from them by the character.

While ‘rage’ is an overused term online, it’s an apt one to describe the furor of bile directed at Laura Bailey. Shortly after the game’s release, Bailey spoke out about the influx of vehement hatred she’d received from players, which included threats directed at her husband and child.

When it came time to adapt the game for HBO, Dina’s live actress Isabel Merced stated that extra security was brought on to ensure the safety of Abby’s actress, Kaitlyn Dever.

“There’s so many strange people in this world because there are people that actually genuinely hate Abby, who is not a real person. Just a reminder: Not a real person,” Merced stated on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “Kaitlyn had to be extra secured by security when it came to the filming of this.”

Behind all of it: that rage. Outright, unbridled anger. Desire for active harm, even.

To this day, the choice to saddle players with Abby and her ample baggage is the single most divisive element of Part II. The game’s sub-Reddit is populated by threads littered with now-years-old pleas for all material post-Joel’s death to be retconned. Hatred of a character metastasized into a possessiveness that, vis a vis, became a feeling of entitlement to the game’s narrative.

“Blows my mind that they thought it was a good idea to have us play this character for more than 2 hours…” bemoans one commenter. “Even if Abby was an awesome character, this was supposed to be Ellie’s story.”

Many of these comments dance to a similar beat as the one above. There is a nebulous ‘other’ that is held accountable for the decision to play as Abby. This ‘other’ is blamed for ‘taking away’ something that was ‘supposed’ to be different. In a way, this is part of the meta-textual cleverness to Part II—it subverts player entitlement to elicit an emotional response.

But it becomes a danger when consumers cannot delineate between player-avatar and player. It speaks to the perpetual struggle some have distinguishing between performer and performance in mass media. This is especially true of popular, multi-million dollar enterprises like a Naughty Dog game, which are often driven by ‘mascots’ like Nathan Drake, Jak, and Crash Bandicoot.

Players build parasocial relationships with these characters based on that aforementioned ‘touch’—simulated movement via manipulation of a plastic peripheral. Based on the subjective ‘feel’ of a character, a player will be more or less inclined to commit a serious amount of time to them. From commitment comes attachment, and from attachment grows that entitlement for a way things ‘ought to be.’

It does not matter to these players if the character they’re attached to is not real. The hours of life spent with Joel and Ellie in the first game were real. Unprocessed family issues projected onto the character were real. And the anger at the possibility of losing Ellie, for some, was real. When a player completely actualizes with their avatar, it results in a sort of constructed reality that’s hard to penetrate.

The murder of Joel, then, is a blunt object to shatter that reality. A golf club not to skull, but to sugar glass—an artificial lens as fragile as it is useless.

An early promise that nothing, nowhere, and no one is safe.

Where many games choose climactic violence, The Last of Us Part II ends in forced mercy.

Players are not given the choice whether or not to kill Abby, once Ellie holds her under. She will always remember Joel’s warmth more than his bitterness, even if flecks of emotional frost will always chill what could’ve been between the pair. This will always make the tired anti-heroine relent, as she realizes that Lev will grow up without Abby.

For all of her suffering, nobody ever robbed her childhood with Joel. Warm days of discovery in abandoned museums and city streets with wild giraffes. Comic books and trading cards, jumps from cliffs into fresh water below, old ‘80s movies. Ellie will always have those in her heart, so long as she lives and retains her humanity. But if she chooses to end Abby’s story, choked to death on sea water and sand, Lev won’t even have a chance to make those memories to fall back on.

In other words, Ellie will put Lev through Abby’s own pain.

Without those 10 to 12 hours as Abby, the heft of this would be lost. Worse, it would feel unearned. But with that time in her sweaty fatigues, dodging sniper fire from Tommy and frantically crafting bullets to take down a Clicker boss, the player has now been given a hands-on opportunity to evaluate the life of Joel’s killer. This choice is a knowing subversion to four-odd decades of expectations in how a game’s narrative frames the protagonist’s actions and their consequences.

Through dramatic irony, the player has a better grasp on the weight of Abby’s life than Ellie does. That’s precisely what makes her act of mercy so compelling, as it is a full capitulation of the mechanical and narrative decision to humanize the character. Players have sense memories tied to Abby—encounters and experiences that they’ve guided her through. This is not just another character—it is another ‘them’, in a sense. The full weight of knowledge that, perhaps, both women had just cause for their loathing.

There is no ‘final boss’—no villain.

Both women part ways as their story draws to a close. As Ellie returns to a life of solitude, Abby takes Lev to the remaining Fireflies by boat. They are scarred by their protracted grudge match, as well as the heinous bloodshed that precipitated it.

Ellie is left with Joel’s guitar and only those warm memories to keep her company.

Abby has sacrificed everything—and everyone—to travel into an unknown future with Lev.

Players are left to grapple with these futures. The events that brought them to this point were not glamorous nor heroic. An epic journey capped off by a triumphant victory, this is not. Instead, one is presumably meant to feel relief that these characters survived at all. That these three mismatched souls etched into each other still draw breaths of an air less polluted by human debris.

Yet this, too, comes as a pale shelter from a pitch black cloud.

How long can a species that justifies killing itself truly survive?

But at the very least, as Abby is told, we’re allowed to be happy. We are allowed this small mercy—even if we may not deserve it. 

Madeline Blondeau has been writing about games since 2010. She’s written for Paste, Anime Herald, Anime News Network, CGM, and Lock-On, among others. In addition, she has written, hosted, and recorded film criticism podcast Cinema Cauldron. Her published fiction debut is due out between 2026 and 2027. You can support her work on Patreon, and find her on BlueSky @mads.haus.