Players also didn’t complain about the male characters being muscular, or the way that they can carry lots of equipment and get shot many times without dying. In the game, the players’ attention is explicitly drawn to farmland and animal husbandry in Abby’s community that would provide protein to build muscle.

In reality, Abby’s body was mapped from a CrossFit athlete, Colleen Fotsch, a fact publicly shared by Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann during the promotion of The Last of Us: Part II. Some also argued that it is unrealistic for anyone surviving in a zombie outbreak to be muscular, suggesting that since people are scavenging, there would not be enough protein to maintain muscles. Rather, Abby is a muscular woman, and after the games’ release many of the user reviews on Metacritic expressed disbelief that a woman would be able to have her physique. In fact, even before the game was released there was vitriolic speculation that Abby was, in fact, a transgender woman, and she was turned into a meme. While Abby’s role in the narrative is positioned to challenge players, much of the criticism around her character centred on her physicality. Abby and the feminine ideal in video games At different points in the narrative, Abby fulfils the role of a protagonist, deuteragonist, antagonist, and anti-hero. In The Last of Us: Part II, it’s no longer clear that Joel, who you are encouraged to identify with, and Ellie, who you are encouraged to take care of, are in the right.Īs you take on Abby’s role through the majority of the game, a position you already may be reluctant to take after Joel’s brutal murder, you’re exposed to more and more instances that cause you to understand the character’s perspective and challenge their own ideas of what is right and wrong in the world of The Last of Us. Images: Naughty DogĪlthough there are numerous exceptions, video games do have a reputation for fulfilling players’ desires to be a hero, overcoming challenges, or at least establishing some kind of empathy with the protagonist. In The Last of Us: Part II, you actually switch between Ellie and Abby as dual protagonists, with Ellie out for revenge for Joels’ death, and Abby for her fathers’. The situation only gets worse when Abby captures Joel and violently murders him while Ellie watches, and it’s revealed that Abby has done this because one of the doctors who Joel killed in the first game was her father. The Last of Us: Part II, in contrast, begins with Ellie and Joel in a strained relationship. At the end of The Last of Us, Joel kills the people who want to use Ellie to create a cure for the Cordyceps brain infection – a process that would kill her. Many positive reviews of the first game focus on the meaningful and emotional connection they forged with the two characters, which reflects the growth that occurs in the narrative. Joel protects and cares for Ellie throughout the game The Last of Us, and when Joel becomes unwell, you venture out as Ellie to ensure his survival. In The Last of Us, you mostly take on the role of Joel and, as in the recent HBO series, he forms a paternal relationship with Ellie. And these challenges can disrupt the sense of immersion for some players.Ĭaution: This article will contain significant spoilers for The Last of Us: Part 2.

She challenges their sense of righteousness and morality. She challenges ideas about what women’s bodies can do. She challenges ideas about what women should and can look like.

I believe Abby was met with vitriol because she challenges players. Image: Naughty Dogįor many people video games are a way to immerse themselves in a different world, and in my research, I’ve observed that for some players, anything that they notice which is different from their expectations, intercepts and contradicts their feeling of immersion. Other than sexualisation, we have seen the development of archetypes like the ‘helpful daughter’, such as Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite and Ellie in the first The Last of Us. The reaction was intensely emotional and largely came from some mismatch between the playerbase’s own perceptions of reality, and how the game presents reality, with much of this conflict centred around the character of Abby.Īs a games researcher, I’ve spent time writing and publishing around the player response to The Last Of Us and The Last of Us: Part 2, and though it’s clear that Abby is designed to be a challenging character within the narrative, she also stands at odds with a long history of the ideal feminine that has dominated the games industry.

When The Last of Us: Part 2 was released in 2020, it was negatively review-bombed on Metacritic.

Ellie the last of us part 2 vs 1