I got a ridiculous speeding ticker (43 in a 40) and now have to waste my morning going in person to court to get it dismissed. I'm worried about finding parking near the court (201 Poplar if I have it correct). Any recommendations for a safe place to park?
This essay summarizes my thoughts of Neil "Cuckmann" Druckmann, who served with distinction as a random idea generator on "The Last of Us", only to usher in the ruination of the IP after being given total creative control on the sequel.
Cuckman is a pathological narcissist, convinced he is a genius story teller, and was wounded over having his "vision" compromised in the first game by Bruce Straley. Even worse for Neil, when that game was released, it was acclaimed as one of the greatest video games of all time, vindicating Bruce even further.
Thus Cuckmann harbors an intense hatred of the fans for having loved the first game so much, and designed the second to inflict as much pain on them as possible.
Joel's death can't be understood as serving the character’s development or advancing the plot. Joel in the beginning of the second game is unlike Joel from the first, and Cuckmann had to go back during the remaster of the first game and alter things to make the ending flow cleanly into the second.
Rather, Joel's character is ruined, then he is killed horrifically, purely to punish the audience. Cuckmann even said that the death scene was designed to elicit as much hatred and negative emotion from the audience as possible. He argues this was part of the emotional arc players were supposed to experience, but this is most certainly an obfuscation.
Unable to kill Ellie, he settles on ruining her by making her unlikable, "a villain", and reduced to a shadow who runs around the wasteland obsessed, like Smeagol obsessing over the ring of power, with Neil's new, perfect creation – Abby.
Neil couldn't content himself with just working with Joel and Ellie – he needed a new protagonist he could take full credit for. Hence Abby. He uses every trick to get the audience to love her - better weapons, more fun gameplay, story-telling tropes designed to elicit sympathy, and it's so fucking contrived and ineffective that Cuckmann is reduced to literally begging the audience to love Abby in the end.
He even needs to go back to the first game - via the remaster - and warp it to deny it any existence separate from the second. Re-naming it "Part 1", altering the ending sequence in subtle ways – the color palette of the hospital, the appearance of the surgeon and what he says, and Joel's expression as he drives off with Ellie, making him seem weak and regretful rather than hard and determined like in the original version of the game.
Cuckmann complained at one point that it's harder to make a sequel because you have so many expectations to deal with. What a joke. Introducing characters from nothing and getting an audience of millions of people to love them is somehow easier than taking existing, beloved characters, and ruining them in thirty-hours of sadism?
What’s more, he is so tasteless that he even attempts to destroy the ambiguity and uncertainty in the story. These are wonderful things that imbibe stories with material for endless reinterpretation and analysis. Yet he comes along and says, years after the fact, that the cure the fireflies were trying to develop would have worked! No more debate, analysis, and interpretation, forget the pattern of incompetence of the fireflies. Forget giving the audience ambiguity to chew over. Lord Cuckmann has decreed the truth!
I won't even get into his inability to match Straley's talent for bringing an audience through emotionally intense plot developments without overwhelming them.
My final conclusion is that there will be no third game, not if Cuckmann gets to decide, because I think he knows he just barely got away with it. Coasting on the massive love for the first game, relying on bribed 70-IQ video game journalists, gaining a new fanbase who mistake "makes me feel strong emotions" with good storytelling, and aided by the undeniably great mechanics, graphics, and supporting media that everyone else contributed to Part 2, it was successful enough that he could claim he was indeed a video-game making genius, the lower sales compared to the first game were due to the chuds hating the brave LGBTQ plot points, coupled with his decision to make the game "polarizing" which was totally a creative choice from the start and not an after-the-fact thing he made up to save face. The same guy begging audiences to love his Abby, also designed the game so a huge portion of people would hate it?
And this game was supposedly inspired by events in Israel/Palestine, and the "moral" of the story - that revenge is le bad - suggests it's better to adopt an attitude of understanding rather than hostility in the face of conflict. Yet Cuckmann portrayed the Sepharites, supposedly inspired by the Palestinians, as insane fanatics who scream nonsense religious invocations while in combat. And the only two Sepharites who are portrayed humanely, Yara and Lev, are Sepharite cast-outs. So much for practicing what you preach!
As many on this subreddit have already said, the first game is the only canon one. Joel protected Ellie and lied to her so she could finally have the normal life she wanted, and she, at least partially, chose to believe him. A beautiful story, and sadly it has already been slightly ruined by Cuckmann's edits in the remastered version. I hope this clown is sent off to retirement before he can ruin it any further.