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Abby Anderson is one of many characters in The Last of Us, Part Two. Her most well-known appearance is in the death of Joel Miller, where she murders him in revenge for her father. While Abby may be thoroughly hated by the fandom for killing their beloved main character, her character is more than just a ruthless killer. She is complicated and tragic, her past haunts her and forces itself into her future in an almost endless cycle of revenge.
Starting off with her early life, one of the first scenes we play as her is in a short introduction to her father. We don’t see her father until later in the cutscene, as Abby scrambles to find a way back to him after he’s wandered off. She says,
“Dad? Dad! C'mon. Dad? Dad, come on! You can't keep doing this! Dad! Where are you?”,
making it known to us that this is a common occurrence. Abby clearly doesn’t want to stray far from her father, but her father does not seem to care. As Abby is left figuring out for herself, trying to reach her father and thankfully succeeding in the end, we see their dynamic immediately. Abby is playfully teased, much like how Joel teases Ellie, presenting the same closeness Ellie and Abby shared with their fathers.
When Abby is trying to get back to her father she finds a Virginia state quarter, dated 1978. Virginia never made state quarters until 2000, so this specific coin is intentional. The design on the front is a cardinal sitting on a dogwood branch. A cardinal commonly symbolises importance, or being the foundation of something substantial, whereas dogwood trees symbolise resurrection and sacrifice in Christian culture. The cardinal links back to Abby’s father himself. Jerry is the foundation of the story, he drives Abby to revenge and murder, being of extreme importance to Abby throughout her life. The dogwood connects back to Joel’s sacrifice, how he had to die to make Abby’s rage “settle,” and the resurrection is directly parallel to Lev and Yara in later scenes in her redemption arc. More on that soon.
This happy scene with Abby and Jerry, humanising Jerry and showing his significance to the story in a beautiful scene, turns sour when the cure is mentioned. We know what happens next.
Going over the next scene, we are met with Marlene and Jerry talking over Ellie’s immunity and the cure they hoped to build from it. Abby overhears this while bringing Jerry food. Jerry is much like Abby, possibly where Abby got her lack of morals from. Jerry sees the cure first and Ellie’s life second. Even if they made a cure, a child would die in the process, and to Marlene that isn't worth it. Marlene is extremely outspoken and makes the eventual connection to Abby.
“And what if this was Abby?”
(Jerry) “Look, everything that we've been fighting for, all the sacrifices, all the horrific… all of that is justified with this one act.”
“If this was your daughter, what would you do?”
Marlene is trying to force Jerry into her shoes. Marlene practically raised Ellie, only to find out that that little girl must die for a mission that could fail, and has failed in the past. Jerry seems immune to this. Not that he disregards Abby’s life or doesn’t care for his daughter, but because he sees an objective to be complete. He deflects it, he refuses to think of that reality. He doesn’t answer the question properly; he just doubles down on his point. Jerry is incapable of thinking of the people he has to hurt to make this cure. Not just Ellie, but Joel and Marlene. He is focused on a goal. This is directly parallel to Abby not caring about Ellie’s wellbeing, nor the entirety of Jackson for that matter and how they would feel, while killing Joel. It’s not like she doesn’t care, Abby has morals and she has the capacity to care about people, but she simply sees her goal, and she’s put too much into it to let go now. She’s not necessarily unscrupulous (to have no moral principles), she's driven; she’s machiavellian (believing the end justifies the means).
When Abby walks in, Marlene gives in and lets Jerry continue with the surgery. Abby then tells Jerry if it was her in Ellie’s place, she would want Jerry to continue with the surgery even if it meant her life. This further proves Abby is driven by her need for a good outcome, even at the expense of others
When we consider Abby’s relationships, we get a more detailed look into her character and personality. Starting with Owen, her relationship with him is deeply complicated and tragic. She clearly loves Owen, and Owen is so deeply in love with her that he disregards Mel despite getting Mel pregnant. Mel is clearly upset about this, but her own love for Owen makes her blind to seeing anything Owen does wrong. This creates tension between Mel and Abby. Abby is able to forget her love for Owen easily due to her drive for revenge on Joel, distracting herself with a mission. This is something she has spent her whole life trying to work up to, and we can see that Abby cares more about Joel’s demise than anything else.
When Owen first introduces Abby to the aquarium, their relationship is clearly loving and happy. By the end of the scene, after they share a kiss, Abby pulls away abruptly. She explains to Owen,
“I know all the leads have dried up… but… But Joel's still out there, you know?”
Her need for revenge directly impacts her relationship. She is obsessed with it, driven by grief and anger that nothing else can get in her way, not even love. Owen just wants a day out with his new girlfriend, and yet Abby is consumed by her training, to get as capable as she possibly needs for when she confronts Joel.
In an attempt to move on, Owen dates Mel. He ends up getting her pregnant and that scares him, so he actively avoids her. He takes up more patrols to try and stay away from her, he actively avoids social places and uses the aquarium as an escape from both Mel and WLF. Mel knows this, Abby knows it. Abby was able to move on from her love, focus on something else. Owen never did that. Mel is upset about this; her love blinds her and makes her hate Abby instead of Owen. She doesn’t believe the care Abby extends to Yara and Lev is genuine, she sees everything Abby does as a direct attack to her, even if it’s simply not true. She accuses Abby of trying to suck up to Owen, despite the fact it’s Owen sucking up to Abby. This makes the two hate each other, to read each other wrong and assume the worst. They are both hurting. Mel is jealous and heartbroken, Abby is completely rethinking her entire life with the introduction of Yara and Lev.
This shows us Abby is not heartless. It gives her humanity, something to focus on other than who we saw her before: just Joel’s killer. She cares about people and she still loves Owen to some extent. She doesn’t want Mel injured despite everything, nor does she want Mel to lose her child. She has a sisterly love to Lev and Yara, she cares about all her friends. She knows these people, these people have been kind to her. She’s seen the good they’ve done and the people they themselves have loved too. She never saw that part of Joel, Ellie, Tommy or Dina. She just saw grief and rage. She didn’t see the people we saw; therefore, she doesn’t think twice about her actions. This is why Abby has no problem killing Joel. She’s not ruthless, revenge is an ugly thing and it makes people think and do ugly things too. That does not diminish her empathic side at all, in fact, it simply reveals how tragic and troubled she is.
Moving onto Lev and Yara, who deserve an in-depth analysis. Abby is met with a huge fork in her road when she is brutally captured by the Seraphite’s. By miracle, she is saved by Lev indirectly as Lev saves Yara, who was captured along with Abby. We are given a more detailed look into not only the Seraphites, but Abby’s character. Abby trails along with these two children, even as she asks herself,
“What the hell am I doing?”
Earlier in this chapter, Abby was speaking with Manny and Mel about the end of the truce between the Seraphites and the Wolves, After a group of Seraphite children attack a group of Wolves, the Seraphites break the truce in retaliation. When Mel defends the children by saying it wasn’t their fault because they were only kids, Abby has this to say:
“Not our fault either. Those deaths are on them.”
Abby here shows a disregard to the death of these children, even when they were clearly acting irresponsibly just how a group of teenagers, or younger, would act. Maybe they panicked, maybe they were rebelling, maybe they were troubled. We don’t know for sure, but children are highly valued by many and while kids can do horrible things, they are not mature enough to know their wrongdoings and older kids are especially known for “rebelling.” Abby does not acknowledge this, perhaps she has never seen the truce before it was broken, but the most likely answer is that she is too focused on her goals to care about who gets hurt in the process. Her objective is to win this hopeless battle against the Seraphites, that’s what she’s been ordered to do, and she is loyal to her army. This is a trait we know to be common in Abby. However, as she gets a more intimate look into the Seraphites – being saved by one and actively being helped and aiding them in fighting off infected – she starts to get an attachment. She has never thought twice about the Seraphite lives she has killed before this, the families she’s torn apart, the people she’s hurt. Now she’s been separated from the people who have been ordering her around mindlessly, she can think for herself, and she can see two people worth saving, even if they are her enemies.
Yara and Lev continue being dear to Abby. Abby has been cast out from the Wolves just like Lev and Yara have been banished from the Seraphites, and they are now in the same boat. There’s no point trying to get rid of Yara and Lev now; she’d put a hole in the boat she’s in too. This relationship strongly resembles Ellie and Joel; particularly with Yara’s death and Lev and Abby being left with each other. They create a found-family bond, creating a friendship when their two worlds become eerily similar: Both rejected by their groups and even being hunted by them. Lev keeps Abby sane and stable, just how Ellie helped Joel’s traumatised mind settle. Abby acts as protection and a friend to confide in, just like how Joel takes care of Ellie in her hardest moments.
Speaking on Abby’s revenge now, her actions cause the death of all her friends as Ellie rampages to find her. As Abby is in Haven rescuing Lev, she fails to protect Owen and Mel back at the aquarium when Ellie finds them. Ellie murders them both in a blind rage, which she admittedly regrets because she does not get any information out of them and kills Mel and her unborn baby unknowingly. Abby is distraught with this. She is too late, she fails to save them, just like how Ellie fails to save Joel in his last moments. Ellie and Abby are two sides of the same coin, both lost their fathers and burning with a need for revenge. As Abby finds Ellie and fights her, we can see the deep and physical tole revenge has on a person. To Abby, Ellie was the loose end they should’ve tied off early. To Ellie, Abby is Joel’s murderer and nothing more. We as a player know this is not true, that these two characters are deep and loving and have so much to their person. This obsession with revenge strips them of their humanity, makes them unable to see the humanity in one another. Even if Ellie is left defeated in the first battle together, it’s not about who wins and who loses, even if they see it that way. It’s about what they’ve lost to get here, that everything they’ve sacrificed and everyone they’ve lost had led up to a bloody, ugly, useless fight that does nothing but leave a trail of blood behind them. This is especially true with Abby in her flashback dreams. Abby has continuous nightmares about the night she lost her father. After saving Yara, her nightmare shows the same sequence; running down the hallway, opening the surgery room door, but this time with a different and more hopeful ending. Her father is standing, smiling, a glowing light around him. This shows that revenge was never the answer. Revenge would only cause a cycle of endless loss and bloodbaths in order to try and “fix” the grief. Abby only shows true healing when she finds a purpose, when she finds her family and learns to live a better life with people she loves. The Wolves were never her escape, nor her revenge, nor the Seraphites. Finding someone to love, to care for, to heal with, was the only way she could ever find true peace and happiness.
Despite this, Abby is forced into another fight by Ellie, even after being captured by hunters and tortured nearly to death. Abby wants to refuse, she sees now that finding and killing is not the answer, but Ellie forces her with the threat of killing Lev instead. Abby has seen peace, she has cleared her troubled mind, and she knows revenge doesn’t fix anything. Her character has grown and changed, while Ellie’s stays rooted in her bloodlust and her grief. Ellie only ends up hurting herself, while Abby finds a better version of herself.
Abby is universally hated by nearly the whole of The Last Of Us fandom, however a deeper dive into her character shows her true struggles and the humanity she gains overtime. Abby is hated because she is a woman, a strong woman who beat a man and people don’t like that. Abby is called names, Abby is misread and people purposefully don’t read her character just so they can dislike her. Here’s what people say:
“Really? How can you like that fucking insane girl? She's only hate and lack of empathy. She's bad and a trash bag.”
“I didn’t like her, her part made me feel bored and frustrated. It’s not really her character, she’s just associated with the part which made me dislike the game.”
“The biggest problem is Abby's actions are so...synthetic, fake, bullshit.”
“She's a whiney nagging bitch how does no one have a problem with her attitude?”
“I only recently started abbys run on lou2. I've never been more disinterested in a character, her story or listening to what she says. I just muted the volume, turned on high contrast mode (blue, red, yellow) and stuck on some YouTube videos as background noise. I'm currently just ploughing through her campaign with no regards for the story at this point. I'll be glad to get back to Ellie.”
“Nope. Because the bitch killed Joel. I don't give a damn if she was skinny or muscular, emotional or emotionless.”
(response to someone defending Abby) “Bro, do you read what you write? You just said the most idiotic thing you could say, Joel did what was right for him, Abby was only a stupid bitch who started the fight, she could fuck off and acknowledge what she was about to start, that darned bitch.”
These are real comments. Left by real people. About a deeply emotional and beautifully written character. And why? Because she’s a woman, and women can only sit down and be inferior to the men around her. I hope, dearly, if anyone reads this essay, that you change your mind on Abby. I didn’t make this to be a message originally, but searching Reddit to get a range of people’s readings on her, this is what I’m met with. This is not only a huge middle finger to Abby’s character, but the developers as well. All this effort -- writing, animating, acting, composing, programming and designing -- is shoved down the drain because people refuse to understand complicated women. Let women be flawed, let women be ugly and brutal and deep, and don’t undermine them just because they’re not the gender you want.
Dolly Parton once said,
“Get past the boobs and listen to what I have to say.”