ESPECIALLY because there's clear and convincing evidence that the whole 'JOEL SACRIFICED HUMANITY TO SAVE WORLD REEEEE' isn't even true.
She wasn't even the first, or even the 2nd immune that the Fireflies had found and killed. They'd already cut multiple ones apart, and they STILL didn't have a cure. And even IF they succeeded in finding it, they're all fucking scumbags, they wouldn't distribute the cure to everybody out of the goodness of their hearts.
Joel 100% made the right decision, and Cuckman and staff literally spit on his grave trying to make him wrong.
This is actually biggest sticking point for me in the new story (I haven't played it, so I might be missing something).
At the end of TLOU, Joel is supposedly given an impossible choice -- let the FFs kill Ellie because she is immune, and theoretically they can extract a cure. Or, take her out of there and let the infection continue to run rampant. It's a classic utilitarian paradox, a version of the trolley problem: do you kill one person to save many people?
Of course, the paradox loses its weight when you consider several factors:
1) The FFs are murderers
2) There is no presented evidence that they can actually produce a cure from Ellie and, in fact, there is evidence to suggest that they have been failing at this task for some time
3) They never asked Ellie for her consent, presumably because they knew she would say no.
4) She is basically his daughter at this point in the game.
There is so much about this story that makes no sense. I feel like I'm watching an alternate reality universe where ND just had to make Joel the bad guy in order to do a
muh both sides nuance on violence Vox Explainer, but really, I'm struggling to see what Joel did wrong. It's astounding, really, how many people have suggested there is some moral quandary here.
Let's review the bidding: the FFs capture his daughter, kill a bunch of people in the process, and then plan on murdering her to possibly make a cure for this disease. The answer for Joel in this situation is astonishingly easy: they have no right to be doing any of this. To go back to the utilitarian paradox, it's actually pretty easy to take a principled stand on saying "I will not allow you to murder a child in order to save other lives." As far as I'm concerned, you've got free pass to kill as many of those motherfuckers as is necessary.
Now, Ellie might be upset because she feels some kind of survivors guilt, but that is hardly Joel's fault and any self-actualized adult should be able to work through that complex set of emotions and realize the real bad guys are the ones who captured her and were ready to dissect her fucking brain.
Reading the story lines of TLOU2, I feel like I'm seeing Babby's First Moral Philosophy homework assignment. It is clumsy and amateurish.
ETA: A far more compelling story would have been to see Abby's quest for revenge, but then abandoning it (or struggling with it) upon learning that her mother and father were actually terrible people, ready to murder a child. And that her hatred for Joel may be justified, but he did something that was defensible, if not morally correct.