Edition note: An independent English rewriting of the Chinese argument for English-language readers. Plot claims have been checked and interpretive claims are marked as such.

Abby spends four years training and searching for Joel. He killed her father in the Salt Lake City operating room. Her friends—Owen, Mel, Manny, Nora, Jordan, Leah, and Nick—travel with her to Jackson because the Fireflies’ collapse is part of their history too.

She finds Joel and kills him before Ellie’s eyes.

The act does not end the nightmares. In Seattle they change shape, eventually drawing Yara and Lev into the corridor. Only after Abby turns toward keeping them alive does her father appear in the dream as something other than a body waiting at the end.

Revenge completes an action, not the past

Killing Joel succeeds in the narrowest sense. Abby identifies the responsible person, reaches him, and performs what she has prepared to perform.

It cannot do the job for which she emotionally recruited it. Jerry does not return. The operating room remains in her history. A later death cannot subtract an earlier one.

Revenge is seductive partly because it converts an irreversible event into a finite task. A loss has no endpoint; locating and killing someone does. When the task is completed and the loss remains, the avenger confronts the difference between the two.

The game reverses knowledge and action

For the first half, the player controls Ellie. Abby’s friends appear as obstacles between her and the target. Nora, Owen, and Mel die; many unnamed WLF soldiers may die along the route.

Then the screen returns to “Seattle Day 1,” and the player becomes Abby. The same people walk into ordinary scenes alive. Nora jokes. Owen argues. Mel’s pregnancy exists as a relationship and future rather than a shock revealed after death.

The order is the design. If we knew them first, sparing them could become a flattering moral choice. Instead, understanding arrives when agency has expired. The player cannot use knowledge to preserve an image of being merciful.

The game is not asking only for regret. It asks what it means to learn who someone was after reducing that person to a function and removing her.

Mel

Ellie kills Mel without knowing she is pregnant and vomits when she discovers it.

The moment exposes a comparison Ellie had not wanted to make. Abby came to Jackson for Joel and allowed Ellie and Tommy to live. Ellie has moved through Seattle killing people who refuse information, obstruct her path, or belong to the group protecting Abby.

That does not make Abby gentle or Ellie uniquely cruel. It breaks the story in which Ellie’s violence is merely the equal return of what Abby did. Each side has begun writing new entries rather than balancing an old one.

Two complete accounts

Abby’s account is true: Joel killed her father while Jerry was attempting work that might have served humanity, then lived for years without answering to her.

Ellie’s account is true: Abby tortured and killed the person who raised her, just after Ellie had chosen to rebuild their damaged relationship.

Neither account needs a fabricated fact. Each can be complete from inside itself, and each demands the life of the person at the center of the other.

The game’s controversial demand that the player control Abby is coercive as form. The resistance it produced is not irrelevant to the project; it shows how fiercely identification protects a settled account. Yet formal ambition does not excuse every pacing problem. A work can be structurally right about what it attempts and uneven in execution.

Abby’s transformation does not occur when revenge is completed. It begins when two children from the enemy community give her something in the future to protect.

Based on Naughty Dog’s 2020 The Last of Us Part II. Abby travels to Jackson with Owen, Mel, Manny, Nora, Jordan, Leah, and Nick; the essay avoids reducing that group to obstacles in Ellie’s route. Full spoilers throughout.