I wonder what the psychology is behind this. I’m sure most of us don’t understand and can’t sympathize with someone who gets so caught up in a fictional character, that you go harass the actor, or worse? I just don’t get it. I think that guy who played goffrey on game of thrones had problems too.
It just doesn’t make sense to me. Is it as simple as lack of intelligence? How can some people not separate fiction from reality? Not to mention all the celebrity worship nonsense.
Critical thinking is a skill and the longer you don’t practice a skill the worse you’re going to become.
The actor that played Joffrey is a wonderful, sweet young man, and a really great actor. I’ve watched him in interviews and he seems so nice and even a little bit shy about the attention. And I still can’t see his face and not want to wring his neck. I know intellectually that he is a completely separate and even great person. But my lizard brain still still triggers the “kill it with fire” response to seeing him. Obviously I know better than to listen to my lizard brain, but there are plenty of people who absolutely cannot control their’s. Honestly, in a weird way, it’s a complement to his acting ability.
Laura Bailey is super sweet too - she even cried for Ashley Johnson during the recording of the death scene. Those people not just threatened her life, but even that of her newly born son.
And yes, Joffrey is one of the most hateable characters out there for sure (and an actually evil one, unlike Abby). I cheered when he died, wishing that it would’ve been more prolonged and painful. I never felt an ill will towards the actor though.
yeah I have the opposite reaction like with Louise Fletcher nurse ratchet and ki winn on DS9. I would be excited to meet them because they made me love to hate their characters with their preformence.
i also found some of the nicest people play the best villains. Because they have to act vs just be themselves like some movie stars and most people that are assholes are not self aware enough to realize they are a shitty humans.
Just go and rewatch Batman Begins. Maybe his role as the kid who spots Batman from his porch and gets given one of his gadgets can soften the reflex…
He played that role so fucking damn good, its not often that I get such a visceral reaction from an actor, bug god damn I despised every atom of Joffrey, also similar respect to the dude who played little finger, both showed a masterclass in being an utterly hated character.
Gamergate. Where an anthropomorphic slug named Steve Bannon encouraged and incited the worst instincts in teenage boys (and male adults with the emotional intelligence of a teenage boy) to bully women. Namely, the ones who wouldn’t fuck them and made fun of vidya gamez.
Most people are stupid. All teenage boys are stupid. And stupid is easy to manipulate.
I always assume these are those Very Online™ people. Who spend most of their lives in a bedroom, not interacting with the real world.
It’s because some people don’t have much going for them in their lives. So they consume media to fill their time and they do it so much that it becomes an important part of their lives. It basically forms their personality. So when the media they love “betrays” them because the message doesn’t align with their own views or the media is just plain bad or whatever they feel attacked at the core level. Mix that with some mental issues and you get people who feel they have to take measures in real life to defend themselves against those “attacks”.
It’s not that different from football hooligans.
In those groups there is so much self hatred that gets pushed out on the world in order to not face their own feelings. I remember a coworker i was talking with in a group and mentioned without a second thought that another coworker (another dude) new haircut looked good on them and he kind of locked up. he Started saying “he was im not gay. so he couldn’t even think like that.”
now remember we are talking about a haircut and this guy starts freaking out like we are talking his package. If you are that insecure in your sexual preferences. That talking about someones haircut is the same as thinking about them in a sexual way. So something is definitely being repressed. I think most healthy people one day ask themselves “Am i gay?” then answer yes or no and moved on with their day.
For these people it’s all about the “culture war”, and for them, for whatever reason, Abby from TLou2 is a part of that.
It’s because Abby kills someone these incels idolized as well as the online rants way back then that she was forced into the game’s plot as some sort of “woke” movement. Their reasoning was that it was unrealistic how strong she was (i.e. blah blah blah, “muscular women during the apocalypse being unrealistic due to limited resources” blah blah more idiotic arguments). I can’t even remember all the other stupid shit they said. The controversy over that game was so obnoxious. The bottom line is that it was a pretty good game and incels need therapy.
I can understand some of the reasoning behind the fact that she’s too strong, but this applies to almost every video game character. Just try hanging on a cliff by your fingertips 😅
Also, being not so enthusiastic about the extend of the LGBTQ movement, I think Naughty Dog made a really good job in this series with really touching stories and characters who aren’t too stereotypical.
I really enjoyed Ellie ´s struggle to find her identity and her love story. It makes you think about how difficult it could be sometimes in real life.
Also in the first game there was a gay character I hadn’t noticed he was gay during the first playthrough.
It just shows you how subtle it was.
Before the game came out we had two major leaks. The first one was that Joel gets killed, and that Abby is the one who does it. The second one was that it features a trans character. Abby being a muscle mommy made those people assume that Abby must be the trans character. So from their perspective, a trans character murders their beloved (and definitely no closeted gay feelings attached) daddy Joel. This fabricated & deluded image became their perfect scapegoat for their fake outrage.
For those of us unfamiliar, what’s her character?
Abby, like the title says. In the vaguest, non-spoilerest way possible, she kills someone most players care about.
I just looked it up because I never played the 2nd game and never cared enough to look into it. I knew people hated her but just assumed she was probably trans or something based on her physique. Not sure whether the real reason is better or worse tbh, it’s pathetic.
Well there were plenty who thought she might be trans when the game came out (she’s not, she’s just swoll). Bigots hated her initially because of that.
Then there were people that hated the character viscerally because of what she does in the game
SPOILER
Specifically, she kills Joel, the main character from the first game and father figure to Ellie, the main character in this game. ::: That’s fine, actually. You are meant to hate her and want revenge on her. That is part of the narrative and the meta of the game. As often happens when you hate someone, a lot of people then justified hating everything else that’s different about them. In this case, her predominant feature that differentiates her is that she is a beefcake. So then people were ripping into her for looking masculine or ugly.
Then, a large number of people were forced to look inward at themselves and face their own reaction and hatred to Abby’s actions halfway through the game.
SPOILER
This is because the game switches things up in a major way nearly halfway through the game. You spend the first 40% of the game as Ellie, consumed by grief, rage and hatred, on the warpath to get revenge. You are killing Abby’s allies that helped her kill Joel, all while trying to find and kill Abby herself. You put revenge even above the wellbeing of your love interest and the father of her child. But then at the height of your revenge quest, just as you get to the apparent final showdown with Abby… the story switches to Abby’s perspective a few days prior, about the time that Ellie arrived in the city to kill you, Abby. And now you get to meet all of Abby’s friends, your friends, the people you had been hunting down as Ellie up to this point. You find out that Abby had her own justification for killing Joel, her own vendetta over the death of a father, just like Ellie. Turns out Joel killed Abby’s father when he rescued Ellie at the end of the first game, and so she hunted him down and avenged her father. Now you play as Abby as she deals with mixed reactions to her successful revenge quest, as she befriends a young trans boy and his sister who were fleeing from the religious cult they were born into, as she defects from her own people rather than participate in the mass genocide of that cult, and as she saves that boy and takes him under her care as family, not unlike Joel did for Ellie.
The game makes you feel the rage and intense desire for revenge and then smacks you across the face for it. The message is clear. Hate begets hate, revenge propogates revenge. The only way to find peace, both within and without, is to break the cycle. And delivers this message in a very visceral way. The game forces empathy and compassion on you whether you like it or not. And many people did not like that. Many people were absolutely furious that they were expected to step into the shoes of someone that they hate, to examine and question their own hatred, and to sort out the complicated feelings they have over someone that they condemned to death for their crimes also being a friend, a lover and a savior to other people. They could not or would not process those feelings as the game designers intended, and so they doubled down on their hatred of Abby AND of Naughty Dog/Neil Druckmann for expecting them to.
Then there were plenty that were just happy to hate a game featuring predominantly female characters, a trans character, and with a pro-compassion message.
TLOU2 was a peace of art, as was TLOU1. And the message, while not subtle, is masterfully executed on and makes you truly examine your own impulses and hatred. I love these games.
Thanks for writing this, genuinely one of the best descriptions of the second game I’ve seen.
The character had the audacity to be a strong young woman with a nontraditional build, and not conventionally attractive.
I mean, I hate the character for her actions (early in the game at least).
There aren’t “good” reasons to transfer anything from a character to an actor, so it’s pretty moot.
The initial feelings for her character are completely intentional at that part of the game. Translating those feelings over to the voice actor, face model, body model, show actress, and everyone else involved in the game and the game as a whole is nothing but unhinged though.
The beauty of the game is how everything completely reverses by the end.
Before the game came out we had two major leaks. The first one was that Joel gets killed, and that Abby is the one who does it. The second one was that it features a trans character. Abby being a muscle mommy made those people assume that Abby must be the trans character. So from their perspective, a trans character murders their beloved (and definitely no closeted gay feelings attached) daddy Joel. This fabricated & deluded image became their perfect scapegoat for their fake outrage.
The sad part with Jack Gleeson (Game of thrones guy), I’ve seen interviews with him about his love of theater and why he was going back from film/TV acting, and he seems like such a nice guy. Really a shame the fanbase reacted so poorly to his amazing portrayal of a terrible person.
I mostly just can’t believe people are still mad about that.
I guess the people who hated Part 2 because they didn’t like the story have just let it go by now; how empty is your soul that you’re STILL mad that Abby looks a bit masculine?
What is the psychological phenomenon called when people can’t separate reality from fiction? Seems more specific and applies to a wider crowd than just, say, schizophrenia.
Also did any of these motherfuckers ever watch or read Harry Potter? Lord Voldemort was actually evil but nobody wanted to kill Ralph Fiennes.
