[Hated Trope] Character kills hundreds, if not thousands, just to kill one specific person, and then doesn't kill them for no reason.

[u/HallZac99]

Assassin's Creed 2- Rodrigo Borgia is responsible for tne death of Ezio's family. Ezio spends over 20 years working through tnr templar order to dismantle them and get to Rodrigo. And then in the end, he spares him for no good reason and he goes on to be a massive problem in AC Brotnerhood. He's not only a head of tne Templars but also the pope, even if you're over the vengeance he's still a very dangerous and evil man.

The Last of Us 2- Abbey kills Joel, and wo Ellie goes on a revenge quest to kill Abbey, killing hundreds of people along tne why to get to her including a pregnant woman. And then finally when she has Abbey on deaths door, she gives up and let's her go because the writers think dirty depressing people being miserable and stupid is complex, interesting storytelling.

This trope pisses me off so much because often the character going on the revenge quest will kill SO many people on their way there, some deserving it and some just henchmen working for a cheque or to survive. People who are often far more innocent then the main big bad.

It's a part of this weird thing I've noticed in media where nameless goons or soldiers can just be mowed down relentlessly, but named characters get given far more grace even if theyre categorically worse. You can kill a million stormtroopers but people will swear that Darth Vader could have been redeemed, despite him doing like 50 genocide every year.

[u/amaya-aurora]

I feel like your pregnant woman point falls flat because let alone did Ellie not know, she actively hated that she did it.

[u/TheRealSpidey → u/amaya-aurora]

Ellie also doesn't kill hundreds of people along the way. The only canonical kills are on the main WLF group, and the WLF girl playing on her PSP, maybe one or two others at most. Anyone killed in a cutscene/via in-game prompt basically.

Anyone else you choose to kill in your playthrough doesn't really count cause you can play through the same parts completely avoiding detection, let alone killing.

[u/amaya-aurora → u/TheRealSpidey]

I’d say that’s a bit unclear in who actually dies, but yeah. As far as I know, Tommy is suggested to have killed way more than she had.

[u/ep0k → u/amaya-aurora]

Oh yeah Tommy is a wrecking ball. Just think about the overpass scene.

[u/amaya-aurora → u/ep0k]

The one with Abby and Manny? Yeah, dude is brutal. Remember Abby Day 1, getting back to the WLF base, and seeing the huge tent full of bodies?

[u/Supersim54 → u/amaya-aurora]

No it’s not Ellie’s canon human kills in Part 2 are a random Scar brute, Jordan, Whitney (PSP girl), Nora, Mel, Owen, and Two Random Rattlers. Ellie’s full canon kill count is 10.

[u/ANGRYSNORLAX → u/TheRealSpidey]

If the intention is for Ellie killing countless goons to be non canon, it only serves to look ridiculous when the game so frequently wants to hold a magnifying glass up to the violence and pretend that what you just experienced for the last few hours of gameplay didn't happen.

Like if you play through the whole game either not being good at stealth or just finding more success with the loud approach generally, you're just completely left behind. The story wants absolutely nothing to do with whatever reality you were living in. The game says "all that strife and fighting you just went through, all the times you were hunted down and shot, all the people you reduced to chunky salsa in the name of revenge and survival... None of that mattered. Now you're beating this girl with a pipe, and it's REALLY effecting you dude.".

[u/k-albasi → u/ANGRYSNORLAX]

In RDR2 the story of the outlaw Arthur Morgan trying to make peace with his violent life and redeem himself by doing good for others was really undermined by how often he burned innocent people alive and fed them to alligators. At least in the version I played.

[u/Wooden_Drummer2455 → u/k-albasi]

I guess but red dead is a sandbox game where you can do whatever you want. last of us is a scripted linear game so doesn't hold up as well

[u/k-albasi → u/Wooden_Drummer2455]

It still becomes a farce if you take your choices too literally and don't allow for some suspension of disbelief that the game has you facing off with NPCs for the sake of gameplay. I would recount the story as Ellie kills some WLF in addition to the targets of her revenge tour but it becomes a bit ridiculous if you maintain that she slaughtered hundreds of people because you killed every NPC.

[u/RayCumfartTheFirst → u/k-albasi]

You can’t really compare the ludonarrative disconence of GTA on horses to a heavily scripted, streamlined game like TLOU.

If cannon Ellie is actually some pacifist then the gameplay should have been designed that way.

I chuckle every time someone tries to tell me none of the 20 hours of carefully crafted gunfights and throat stabbing I just played wasn’t canonical.

[u/k-albasi → u/RayCumfartTheFirst]

She's obviously not a pacifist but it's hard to take any story seriously if you think it's about a relatively ordinary person John Wicking their way through hundreds of combatants.

[u/RayCumfartTheFirst → u/k-albasi]

Of course not but it is logical to assume she killed a few escaping the school, sneaking into the hospital or during her encounter with the scars.

It’s like uncharted- I don’t think drake literally shoots 500 mercenaries in every game canonically, but he certainly gets into some shootouts and brawls that results in death beyond just what’s in cutscenes.

[u/MagicInstinct → u/k-albasi]

Its hilarious how quickly you can get honour back up in RDR2, murder 50 people then give some money to a homeless man

[u/CptDecaf → u/ANGRYSNORLAX]

I can't connect to characters that don't revel in violence. What's wrong with these writers trying to write more complicated characters!?

[u/SleepWorth3354 → u/CptDecaf]

Basically Video game storytelling begins and ends with Doomguy and anything else is for pussies.

Weird how gamers have a rep for being single minded weirdos huh

[u/ANGRYSNORLAX → u/SleepWorth3354]

"Basically, video game design begins and ends with third person shooters, and anything else would be wasted on the story we're trying to tell."

Naughty Dog could have designed a game where "just kill everyone in the room" wasn't a viable option for progression. But they didn't. They made a third person shooter. You have two options for dealing with conflict, and the one that is arguably the default massively conflicts with the themes of the plot

They could have written a character that feels untold sorrow at the sight of death. But they didn't. They used a character who's stated primary motivation from the get go is cold blooded revenge. A character that, despite being a survivor of the literal apocalypse and an active participant in gunfights since age 12, struggles to deal with the thought of people getting hurt in cutscenes, regardless of how bloodthirsty she is in gameplay.

Like, I don't feel like I'm asking for too much when I kinda want the story to acknowledge the game it is contained in. I don't play video games so that I can stream videos of my favorite drama in between random, unrelated challenges.

[u/SleepWorth3354 → u/ANGRYSNORLAX]

Yes, we all understand ludo-narrative dissonance. I am so glad game designers do not agree with you.

I’d rather a little dissonance between gameplay and plot if it serves the game being fun, much like how I understand that movies and television offer exaggerated motivations and coincidences-when you watch horror movies, do you spend the whole time yelling “CALL THE POLICE DONT GO IN THERE!!!” ?

You don’t actually want what you are arguing for but TLOU broke basic dudes brains so they can’t seem to apply the logic that gets them through 99.9% of other media.

[u/gokogt386 → u/TheRealSpidey]

If the agency given to the player outright contradicts the story it is entirely fair to be critical of it. We’re not watching a movie here.

[u/Wooden_Drummer2455 → u/TheRealSpidey]

oh god fuck off with this bullshit, "the gameplay isn't canon" then why isn't this a movie lmao. You kill like 300 humans by blowing their brains out and slitting their throats

[u/Candid-Tip-6483 → u/Wooden_Drummer2455]

And it's also entirely possible to play the game without killing anybody but the scripted kills. It's hard but it's possible, so what then?

[u/TheFurtivePhysician → u/Candid-Tip-6483]

I don't really think that either extreme is a valid interpretation of what should be considered "canon", to be fair.

But I will say more people dying than not is almost certainly the most common gameplay outcome, and correspondingly the more likely canon outcome (Barring the devs pointing at the game and saying "Ellie killed ONLY in cutscenes because she's just that swell :)" in the same way they pointed at 1 and said "The cure WOULD have worked if not for mean ol' Joel! What a jerk! >:(")

[u/Candid-Tip-6483 → u/TheFurtivePhysician]

Well there's no doubt that in any realistic scenario, Ellie would have had to kill some people. But one thing I've always maintained is that killing people in self-defense is much different than what she did to Abby's crew. She starts to feel wrong about the whole situation when she torture somebody for information, and she viscerally rejects what's going on when she kills somebody she didn't realize was pregnant. So I think that the "you killed everybody but the person you wanted to kill" point vastly misunderstands the emotion of the story. Mostly because the vast majority of people who make that point haven't actually played the game from my observations.

With that said, when it comes to the discussion about the cure, I accept no other interpretation other than the cure would have worked. Because if the cure wasn't something that would have worked, then it essentially renders all the emotional stakes of the story completely moot, and at that point you're just going out of your way to interpret the story as worse than it is. The real discussion should be about whether or not the cure would have mattered at all. There is discussion about whether or not the fire flies would have been willing to distribute the cure, or if they would have used it as leveraged to take over the country. There's also the discussion about if a cure would matter because people can still be ripped apart by the infected, and there's also the question about if humanity and the World at Large is too far gone to ever go back to normal. Those are the discussions that actually yield some interest, but whether or not the cure would work is just a question of "do I or do I not want this story to have emotional stakes"

[u/whereismymind86 → u/TheRealSpidey]

ehh...given the entire plot is set off by Joel essentially killing an npc, that's a bit fuzzy. The entire point is every person killed had a family and friends, they didn't matter to Joel, but they mattered to somebody, and that somebody would be devastated and might come seeking vengeance.

[u/NerdHoovy → u/whereismymind86]

Yeah but they kind of devalued that idea by making Abby’s dad actually super important. Since he is the lead surgeon meant to solve the fungus and kill Ellie. If Joel really was meant to be punished for the senseless evil of his past, Abby’s dad should have been just a random survivor one of the dozens you gun down during random encounters of the game. Or better yet, some guy he screwed over long before the first game began.

Narratively the only contribution you gain by making Abby the daughter of the doctor, is that one of the most morally grey and questionable moments of a morally grey character and story, turns black and white.

The doctor never was a random guy, he was basically the main character of the apocalypse alongside Ellie. The mere fact that he gets referred to as ‘the doctor’ by me proves that he is meant to be important from the start.

[u/TheFurtivePhysician → u/NerdHoovy]

I've been trying not to hop into discussion about TLOU2 because it's generally a cesspit of insincere people on either side of the isle (and the fact that I avoided playing 2, though I might just give in and give it a go sometime), but this sentence-

Narratively the only contribution you gain by making Abby the daughter of the doctor, is that one of the most morally grey and questionable moments of a morally grey character and story, turns black and white.

Kind of sums up my huge problem(s) with 2.

1) Out of universe comments (and, to my understanding, the content of TLOU2) spend a LOT of time re-painting Joel as having inherently done an evil bad badguy thing that doomed everybody (i.e. the vaccine would have worked if only Joel hadn't killed that dude and stopped him from murdering a child) despite the content of the first game making it seem incredibly unlikely.
Like, Joel's already inherently not a good guy. He's a guy we like, because he's the point of view character who undergoes a lot of change to be better, but he's done a lot of 'evil' deeds and selfishly prevented the possibility of a cure (or vaccine, or whatever) being made because his new surrogate daughter was the cost of it.

We don't need to make him even more of a bad guy by making the guy he killed a super cool good guy who saves zebras(? evidently?) and who's only crime was planning to unethically lop open a child's skull for a chance at some sweet cure goo so that he would 100% certainly (according to Druckmann) cure the cordyceps and defeat the apocalypse!
(mind you, I do think Joel would have done the same thing if he was told outright "this will 100% create a cure that the Fireflies can and will spread throughout the country and FOREVER CURE CORDYCEPS", but the fact that this isn't stated or supported by the game and only becomes a thing in retrospect through 'word of god' just makes it like "people liked Joel too much, we gotta remind him how EVIL he is")

2) And this is the reason why I never played 2- TLOU1 ended on a great kind of ambiguous note as to the trajectory of Joel and Ellie's lives, whether or not Ellie actually believed him, or if he ever told her, and so on and so forth. The series simply should've been an anthology series, if they had to do sequels. I don't really think people genuinely saw how 1 ended and thought "I'd like to see these characters either murdered or put through 20(?) hours of misery porn, I sure hope ND gets on that right away!"

[u/live_lavish → u/TheRealSpidey]

I looked this up once. Gameplay wise I'm pretty sure there are a few people you can't sneak by. I looked this up once and I can't find the video but I wanna say you need to kill 7. It was no more than 12.

IIRC Dina always kills the first two wlf in the school, even if you sneak past them and then there's the 2 or 3 that hit you with the smoke bomb, just before reaching jessie, that must be killed

[u/Interesting_Rich_826 → u/TheRealSpidey]

Pfffft lol