Okay, so why do people want to kill enemies without thinking about it? Because the first game conditioned them to. For the second game to get players to change their viewpoint about this utterly fundamental part of the gameplay, they had to fundamentally change the gameplay mechanics. Many of the examples I’ve seen for an adequate change have revolved around giving Ellie or the player the choice not to kill, thus giving much more credibility to the argument that Ellie’s character arc is about how she becomes so emotionally traumatized and changed by her violence that she changes her mind about revenge.

What did ND do instead? Several things, like give us Abby’s backstory, Abby’s POV, and make the friends of the people we killed mourn them. Where did this fall short? Well first of all, Abby’s backstory takes a whole of, what, three minutes to tell? While the first game built up to Joel’s decision over the course of hours - from establishing his loss as a father to his loyalty to a goal to his blossoming relationship with Ellie - in order to make the players understand and agree with his decision to save Ellie at the end, the second game gives you a couple minutes. It expects you not to feel for Abby, which would’ve taken much more time and effort, storytelling-wise, but rather, it just tries to give you a “told, not shown” reason for why what Joel did was bad. Second, regarding Abby’s POV: because of the game’s failure to convince most players of her moral equality to Ellie and Joel (as in, truly establish the point that none of them are wholly bad or good), playing as Abby broke the immersion for most people. These people felt many things - like they could never forgive Joel’s murderer, like they just wanted to go back to Ellie, etc - that broke them from the immersion of the story. And again, this isn’t the player’s fault for refusing to empathize with Abby; it is Naughty Dog’s burden to achieve that goal to the best of their ability, and they didn’t. Lastly, the mourning. That was probably the shoddiest attempt at forcing you to empathize they could’ve attempted. Having AIs yell out their dead friends’ names did fuck all but make the player annoyed because, in the end, it has absolutely no real effect on Ellie. She doesn’t react, she doesn’t change her actions. It would’ve made more sense and made her much more human to have her steadily stop killing her enemies, maybe knocking them out or opting to sneak past instead because she does start to realize these people she’s killing are people, and she is no better than them. But everything she does in Seattle tells us she hadn’t changed - that she didn’t start to feel empathy for her enemies; she still just saw them as enemies, and therefore, (1) why should the player do anything different?, and (2) what she did in the end makes little sense.

Now, why do we hate the “violence is bad” message? Because Naughty Dog does the bare minimum of trying to hit us over the head with it. It’s like a toddler trying to tell a story with a set of crayons. “Violence is bad? Oh, but we’re not gonna keep the player or protagonist from continuing with their violence even after experiencing trauma.” It makes no sense. The violence is rendered utterly meaningless in the game, not just with the ending, but with the entire journey falling flat on this supposed “revenge/violence is bad” theme. Who the hell went into TLOU 2 thinking there wouldn’t be violence? Fucking no one. But we did go in thinking the violence would have some sense, and… it just doesn’t. Except for a couple moments of misery that are eventually brushed over and never again addressed, Ellie doesn’t react to or grow from the violence she enacts. So what was the point of it all?