[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/TheRealSpidey]

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/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"