Silent Buddha just translated many of my thoughts pretty well on his last post.
It's funny that he previously compared my overly rational way of judging Joel to Nazi-like thinking, the kind of comparison I was expecting already. I had written another pretty long post at the time explaining my side, but the page bugged out and I lost it, and felt discouraged to re-write it all.
I don't like to think Ellie is quiet at the last section because she is remembering David, because Joel does say "why are you so quiet today?" This is after many months have passed after David's aftermath, so it does imply from then to now, Ellie went back to her normal self, and became quiet that one day specifically, if not Joel would not be surprised by her silence. And that's what I would expect really. David's situation sure was stressful, but jeez, Ellie had been to plenty stressful situations by then. That was sure one of the worst, but I think some people underestimate the that girl's balls (figuratively) She is pretty badass.
Anyways, calling Joel a sociopath or maniac is a little exaggerated on my part. I recognize that. Its only human to care for your family, but my point is, the natural human behavior is not always the most ethically correct one, and can sometime be very damaging in the big picture. You see, family protection is a natural instinct developed to guarantee survival of our species, and it does provide that in most natural cases, but Joel was put in a corner-case here where protecting his family actually meant fucking up the survival of his species, which should be the main goal in the end. Family comes first, but Humanity comes firster.
Regarding Nazis, I usually disagree with the conception that they were an example of perfectly justifiable rational thinking leading to horrendous inhuman actions. Nazis were indeed pretty straight forward thinking, and did base most of their actions in cold scientific thinking, but not completely. The world already had perfectly scientifically justified ethic systems at that time to stop them from taking any of their genocidal decisions. Their reasoning was selective and biased.
Putting human life in a pedestal is a very important device to maintain social order and stability. Its just generally better for everybody to see life as the most valuable thing and something that has to be valued and kept at any circumstance. Sure we can't always do things the perfect way, but as far in on history as we were past century, that is just a very good rule of thumb.
The difference between nazis sacrificing thousands of people for supposed progress on the past century and the ff sacrificing Ellie for a supposed cure for mankind is large though.
Society has gone back to a much more primitive state in the universe of the game. The modern state of affairs of resources a'plenty, and a generally confortable lifestyle affordable to people we are used to today (and which the world was used to already by the time Nazis started going looney) does not exist anymore in the universe of LoU. And human's life value had already fell to the ground way before it was up to Joel to decide Ellie's fate. Be it by the hands of murderous groups like the ones we fight in the game, or in quarantine zones which still have some sort of formal government, people are killed all the time. The game takes place in a world in which, unfortunately, people can't afford to guarantee the type of sacred valuing of human life we grew accustomed to on modern society.
Joel did do what was natural to any "father", but when it's the fate of humanity you are talking about, I think you have to calm your fucking self down and take some cold decisions, as hard as it might be. If the thinking was that saving Ellie was actually the best from the point of view of attaining a cure, then I can side with him. I still don't like the way he lied to Ellie. If he thinks the FF were being clumsy and would compromise the cure with doubtful procedures, then he should have said just that to her. She might be young but she is no silly child anymore. Nobody at her age probably is on that kind of world, but her specially given the kind of shit she wen't through. Joel seems like he acted on impulse. An understandable behavior, but not the ideal one in my opinion.
Of course, my whole argumentation deals with many moral and ethical concepts which are not so clear cut, and are up to discussion, but I like to think I'm at least a little reasonable and consistent with it.
