She knows Joel lied. She knows, and TLOU Pt2 will pivot on whether she's come to hate the Fireflies for it, or if she's projecting her Joel-hate onto them.
I don't think she's just going to be hating on the Fireflies.
Part II is going to be about how the knowledge of Joel's lie and what happened to the Fireflies will begin to consume her (survivor's guilt x 1,000 with a healthy dose of regret, shame and resentment (for Joel)) and she's basically going to spiral into becoming a complete psychopath (we pretty much already saw this in the trailer).
In short: Like father, like daughter.
Also spoilers
I'll give my opinion on why exactly Joel made the correct choice in going all beserk and killing all of them for Ellie...
Working in the medical field and understanding the research process, there is an infinitesimally small chance that they would have been able to do anything with one live subject that had immunity and be able to engineer that perfectly to pass along to other people giving them the said immunity. Adding on top of the fact that the chances of being able to pass on the immunity genetically would be also a very limiting factor. Then they would have to hold out against people wanting what they have and are willing to kill for it.
Joel made the right choice, if you have someone in your life you care about especially in that scenario, you go all out and keep them safe. If I were in that position and could heal myself from bullet wounds by wrapping gauze around my forearm, you bet your ass I would do the exact same thing.
tl;dr
Firefly group sucks, save Ellie.
I've really got to find my evidence of this, but I'm pretty sure during a talk a couple of years back, Druckmann let slip that the Fireflies
would have been able to make a cure from Ellie. Or at least, that's how they wrote the story. That's the scenario they had in mind. Properly makes the whole thing 'grey'. I need to find the quote though. Also IIRC he hedged it/backpedalled so he obviously didn't want to confirm either way (I wouldn't if I were him).
The thing is, Joel's story isn't elevated at all by trapping the player behind him; it would've been just as effective if told through a series of environmental messages. Heck, do a 21 year timeskip and just cut out the fat--the moral of the story is the same: the world is fucked. Whatever happened to Joel that actually mattered occurred during the 20-year timeskip, when he transformed from father into selfish pscyhopath.
Giving the player room to actually define his personality, through dialog options and choices, could have filled in the blanks of the 20-year timeskip and solidified him as a character. It would have made the story being told more interesting, because currently, the only thing differentiating Joel from the hundreds of people he's murdered and creatures he's killed is the camera perspective.
And yeah, if the devs are unwilling to do that for Joel, then they should give players a character that they are willing to let them shape.
I don't know what to tell you. Are the only games you play Bioware ones?
Like, you're saying that most singleplayer classics, from Final Fantasy 7 to Thief to Bioshock to DOOM to Ico are fundamentally flawed and bad because we don't get to influence the story?
You're projecting your definition of 'what games are' onto every game ever and ignoring the facts of how they
are and how they have been designed for decades.
Like, video game stories should always leverage their interactive nature--anything else is a missed opportunity.
But it did leverage its interactive nature? You physically had to go through with Joel's actions. Just like how a novel can leverage absolute subjectivity - you have to think the thoughts of someone else (when first person).
It wasn't about 'interactivity' giving us control over the story, it's about 'interactivity' letting us experience the story in a more intimate and immersive way.
There's nothing wrong with that.
We get to play Joel's escape with his daughter. That brings us closer to her than if it was just a cutscene. The timeskip is fine - all Joel does in that time is shirk + resent society and turn to crime and violence in his mourning. The prologue is actually his nightmare that he wakes up from after the '20 years later' card, so the point is that
he has not moved on since the prologue. Then we play everything important that sets the stage for Ellie and Joel's journey. We
play it - we are in his shoes. We don't need to make the decisions.
What a strange conversation.
