Why Abby Is So Controversial on The Last of Us

We need to talk about Abby. The sort-of antagonist in The Last of Us Part II first stirred up controversy when the game originally debuted in 2020. Abby faces off against our protagonists Joel and Ellie in a world beset by zombies and carved into warring factions of survivors. Leading up to the release of the TV series’ second season on April 13, various critiques are again circulating online, and they may be hard to make sense of if you haven’t played the game or followed the chatter around it.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Some gamers hate Abby, and The Last of Us II as a whole, for bigoted reasons. A toxic subset of fans objected to the sequel before it was even released: Teasers and leaks from the game confirmed that Ellie is gay (a plot line touched on in the first game), that the main antagonist Abby was a woman who defied the female body types typically seen in video games, and that there would be a trans character in the game. All those character traits remain pretty radical for AAA games.

Then there were complaints about Abby actually based on story and character. On a basic level, players would also navigate the game in Part II not as Joel, the primary playable character in the first entry, but as Ellie and Abby. That alone was a big change since a lot of players had grown emotionally attached to Joel. It’s difficult to explain the challenge with forcing players to play as (and, implicitly, empathize with) Abby without spoiling the plot of the game.

But people felt so passionately about Abby that the actor who voiced and provided a motion-capture performance of Abby for the game dealt with significant harassment and death threats directed not only at her but at her infant son. As Season 2 of the HBO adaptation approaches, here’s everything you need to know about the controversy around Abby. Spoilers for The Last of Us Part II—both the game and TV show—ahead.

The spoiler-y plot reason Abby is so controversial

Here’s a big spoiler for the beginning of The Last of Us Season 2. Early in the game, Abby kills Joel—brutally—as Ellie watches. Abby has her reasons. Joel, you will recall, loses his biological daughter early in the pandemic. He then shepherds Ellie, an orphan with an immunity to zombie bites, from Boston to Seattle in search of doctors who work for a rebel group called the Fireflies. They think they can use Ellie to create a cure.

But after a long and dangerous journey across the U.S., Joel arrives in Seattle to discover that the Fireflies will have to kill Ellie in order to extract what they need to create a vaccine. Joel refuses to let his surrogate daughter die and goes on a killing spree in the hospital. It is both a heroic moment of fatherly protection and brutal act of utter selfishness.

Abby is the daughter of the doctor who was supposed to operate on Ellie but whom Joel shot point blank as Ellie lay unconscious on the operating table. Abby’s friends are the family members of other Fireflies slaughtered by Joel. So they vow to hunt down Joel and make him pay for not only killing their parents but eliminating humanity’s last hope for a cure.

Abby killing Joel is a simple act of revenge. But violence, as The Last of Us II teaches us, begets violence…which begets violence…which begets violence. Ellie, predictably, seeks vengeance against Abby. But unlike Abby, who spared the lives of Ellie and Joel’s brother Tommy, Ellie hurts everyone Abby has ever loved.

The game forces you to play as Abby, the ostensible antagonist of the story, as well as Ellie, our hero from the first game who descends into a sometimes-monstrous figure in her quest. The game complicates our perceptions of hero and villain, pushing beyond even the concept of antihero as you commit outright acts of atrocity while playing as these two characters.

Even before we learn more about Abby’s backstory, her actions are objectively understandable, if not condonable. Still, many fans detested playing the game as Abby, the person who kills their beloved Joel. Frankly, I did at the beginning. Midway through, I wasn’t particularly eager to play as Ellie either. Burning hate strips both women of their humanity. But that’s the point. Characters scream as you torture and kill them. The usual thrill of a boss fight is totally undercut by the empathy you eventually develop for both characters. It’s hard to think of another game that so daringly confronts players with their own appetite for violence.

Abby is an imposing figure in the game, tall with broad shoulders and huge muscles, like you might see on a professional wrestler. It’s rare to see a female character like that in a game, though of course in a post-apocalyptic world where hand-to-hand combat with zombies and humans alike is a daily occurrence, it maybe shouldn’t seem so strange.

Abby is also designed in conscious contrast to the slight but quick Ellie, who often has to use stealth and wits to overpower her enemies. “In the game, you have to play both characters [Ellie and Abby] and we need them to play differently,” Neil Druckmann, the creator of both games and co-creator of the show, recently told Entertainment Weekly. “We needed Ellie to feel smaller and kind of maneuver around, and Abby was meant to play more like Joel in that she’s almost like a brute in the way she can physically manhandle certain things.”

But when Booksmart’s Kaitlyn Dever, an actor who is physically similar to Ellie actor Bella Ramsey—so much so that years ago she was once considered for the Ellie role—was cast as Abby, people who celebrated Abby’s physicality in the game wondered why the show decided to feature someone with a body type that we see onscreen all the time. “That doesn’t play as big of a role in this version of the story because there’s not as much violent action moment to moment,” Druckmann said in that same interview. He went on to praise Dever’s performance. “We need someone to really capture the essence of those characters…. We don’t value as much, ‘Do they look exactly like the character with their eyebrows or their nose or their body?’ Whatever it is. It’s not nowhere on the priority list, but it’s below a bunch of other things that we consider.”