It felt like a road trip instead of a revenge tour

Taking away Ellie's agency... On HER REVENGE QUEST is WILD.

A character can only ever be as smart as their writer.

It makes no sense that Ellie is written both as more psychopathic and less interested in getting revenge in this show. These writers have no clue what they're doing.

They also totally messed up Dina in this adaptation. In the game Dina goes to Seattle not because she wants revenge for Joel, but because she loves Ellie. This is extremely important as the gamer will come to realise that Ellie’s hatred is so much stronger than Dina’s love and this will ultimately break them apart. That revelation is truly terrifying and it makes the game infinitely better than the TV show.

It’s crazy that she’s supposed to be the brawn and not the brains when in the game out of the two playable characters she is supposed have more smart, stealthy gameplay compared to Abby’s strength in head on gunfights.

never let craig cook ever again. bro burned down the whole kitchen

The infantilazion of Ellie felt extra weird next to Jessie. He's kinda her rival for her love interest but also somehow her chaperone?

“Ellie was intelligent and strategic in the games” well, not the Ellie I was controlling 🤣

I'm sorry but every time I see Dina with her perfect salon blowout hair, makeup, nice and perfect clean clothes, I realize I can't take her and this show seriously

It drove me absolutely nuts that they didn’t show her using a bow ONCE. It was such a critical piece in the game and would have given show Ellie some redeeming abilities this season other than “run away scared with a pistol”

20:11 I watched a streamer play tlou2 for the first time and in this scene he was very hesitant and he had ellie point the gun for 5 minutes without doing anything and in these 5 minutes you could really see her face shifting from rage to doubt to sadness and back again to rage. I cried the first time i saw this scene, i felt like i could feel everything ellie felt, she wasn’t enjoying this.

Game Ellie is an unstoppable threat, pushing aside everything important in her need for revenge, losing the snarky curious kid that Joel's guidance and protection allowed her to be.

Show Ellie is a goofball with plot armor.

Even with saying Ellie is the brawn she still couldn’t kill anything which was the main plot point of last of us part 2 making her a killer, he destroyed her character.

I subscribe to the theory that Craig wrote Ellie as a self-insert and that explains why she’s written as a brutish low intelligence crude psychopath man-child with a dreamy intelligent mommy girlfriend

The problem is they didn’t want her to be flawed and tried so hard to make her likable but failed making her unlikable.

I have no idea how show Ellie is gonna make it to California by herself

Ellie is the brains AND the brawn, but not all the time, that's what makes her so interesting, she isn't one thing and she isn't perfect, she's human and a really fucked up human at that.

My biggest question is WHY IS SHE DUMB?! Like from a writers perspective, you know that this is a character that has been trained by FEDRA, Tommy, and Joel Miller. This is a person who is extremely intelligent in the game when it comes to battle strategy and things of that nature. So why does Ellie in season 2 have to have EVERYTHING explained to her? There’s a difference between on moments in the game where Ellie makes dumb decisions based on anger and impulses when she’s angered, like the first time she lets Nora get away bc she insults Joel. But she’s still very smart

RE: the psychopathy: in the games, the Nora torture sequence, where she kills Owen and Mel - it's because she's trying to emulate Joel, his ruthlessness and violence and willpower, but you can see the conflict that it's causing her (because of the acting). She doesn't enjoy it, it's not natural to her, but she's trying to live up to Joel's legacy. That's why at the start of the game when Dina's asking Ellie about what they'll do, Ellie goes "I'll make them talk" and Dina goes "oooookay" because she knows that Ellie isn't a torturer, and that's why she fucks up the map trick with Owen and Mel, because Joel would have had them beaten and tied up before trying the trick and she doesn't have the same level of grit and experience with brutality. That's why at the end of the game, she lets Abby go, because she realises that she's losing the parts of Joel's legacy that really mattered- the kindness, the love of family, the self-sacrifice.