Abby Anderson: A Last of Us 2 character analysis
If any of you are ever so kind as to take a look at the other blog posts I have published on Medium, a theme is likely to arise. “Man, this guy really likes The Last of Us.” And, yeah, I do. I haven’t played the games in around a year or so, I’d say. I lost my Dad back in 2022, and that has made revisiting these games rather difficult.
However, the second season of The Last of Us TV show is nearly here. And this has brought the games to the forefront of my mind once again. One specific part of the games I’ve thought about is the second game’s controversial co-main character, Abby Anderson.
There are few characters in fictional media who elicit the sort of reaction Abby does. The Last of Us Part II is one of the most controversial games of all time because of her actions within the story. I vividly remember the fierce internet debates that took place in 2020 and 2021 when everyone was at home during the pandemic. It also helped that this game was still fresh in everyone’s minds.
Today, I want to examine Abby as a character. What is her story about? Why does she commit the acts she does? How does she change throughout the story? Does she change at all?
If you are a fan of The Last of Us, welcome! If you are new to the series and trying to get a gague on what to expect from this character (to be portrayed by Kaitlyn Dever), also welcome! However, I will caution now that this article will contain spoilers for The Last of Us Part I and The Last of Us Part II. If you wish to avoid these spoilers, click away now. Let’s get started.
How important is Abby’s story?
Abby’s story is often subject to a number of criticisms. The Last of Us Part II does not tell its story completely linearally. We switch perspectives from Ellie, a returning character from The Last of Us Part I, to Abby.
As a result, it appears on the surface that Abby’s story is largely disconnected from the broader narrative. In fact, Abby does not learn that anyone from the Jackson settlement has arrived in Seattle until her Seattle Day 3. For context, we only play through three days in Seattle for both Ellie and Abby.
However, I believe her story is more connected than most give it credit for. To condense this a bit, we rejoin Abby in Seattle Day 1 after initially seeing her holding Ellie and Tommy at gunpoint following Jesse’s death. The last time the player controlled Abby was right before she brutally tortured and killed Joel. To say this is jarring is a massive understatement.
We see her go through her three days without any real consideration for Ellie’s group in the city. She goes looking for her friend Owen on Day 1. On Day 2, she and Lev — a member of the Seraphite religious group she met the previous night — travel to a hospital across the city to retrieve medical supplies for Lev’s sister, Yara. Day 3 sees Abby and Yara travel to the Seraphite’s home island to retrieve Lev after he goes to speak with his mother.
All of this has little to do with what we saw Ellie do in her time in the city. That is, of course, until the end of Day 3. Abby and Lev return to the aquarium they were staying at only to find Owen and Mel — Owen’s pregnant girlfriend and Abby’s longtime friend — dead, along with their dog, Alice. Abby and Lev are able to track Ellie and her friends to a theatre in the city, where a violent confrontation ensues.
These final events tie Abby’s ordeal in with Ellie’s, connecting these two threads in a way only Naughty Dog can. However, I believe all of the seemingly unconnected points before this confrontation are extremely important. Especially considering how that violent confrontation ends: with Abby deciding not to kill Dina — Ellie’s pregnant girlfriend —and Ellie out of revenge for the deaths of Mel and Owen. In fact, the previous information is so important that I believe Abby’s choice to spare Ellie and Dina doesn’t make much sense without it.
The inciting incident
To truly understand what the events of Seattle mean for Abby, we must first understand what happened prior. Abby Anderson was a member of the Fireflies — a militia group in the world of The Last of Us who are shown battling the military and trying to cure the world of the Cordecyps fungus. Her father, Jerry, was a surgeon who trained medical personnel within the Fireflies.
Abby’s story truly begins in the Spring of 2034. Alarms blare out at St. Mary’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. Abby runs down a corridor toward the operating room she knows her father is in. When she opens the door, a gruesome sight awaits her. Her father is lying dead with a scalpel in his neck. She later finds out that Joel — the smuggler hired to bring an immune Ellie to the hospital — is responsible for her father’s death.
This incident, as one might imagine, as central to Abby as a character. The trauma from this incident fuels her forward. And how she deals with her grief is a key component to the acts she commits as well as how things unfold around her.
Abby spends the next few years searching for Joel and building herself up for the moment when she can kill him. Eventually, she learns of the settlement run in part by Joel’s brother, Tommy, in Jackson, Wyoming. She and her “Salt Lake Crew” — friends she made at the Salt Lake City outpost — travel to Jackson to kill Joel. They succeed in this quest as Joel is killed in front of an unconscious Tommy and a distraught, pleading Ellie.
The cost of violence and unresolved grief
The events of Abby’s story, as mentioned, seem largely unconnected to the broader story being told. But we can certainly read a lot of important information from what we see while playing through Abby in Seattle. The first question to answer: what is Abby’s story truly about?
A lot of thoughts on this have been thrown out there over the last five years. And far be it from me to call into doubt anyone else’s interpretation. However, for me, I believe Abby’s story is less about her moving on from her father’s death (though this is certainly an element of the story) and more about the cost of violence and unresolved trauma.
The cost of Abby’s actions is everpresent throughout this story. When we meet Abby in Seattle, we learn that she and Mel have not seen eye to eye since the incident in Jackson. Owen is avoident to the point Mel is concerned about him taking extra assignments. We also learned that Abby is still plagued by nightmares of finding her father dead in the Salt Lake City hospital.
Her situation with Owen and Mel becomes more complicated as time goes on. She has a one-night stand with Owen despite his relationship with Mel. This further complicates her relationship with Mel until it completely falls apart on the morning of Day 3. She loses Mel despite the progress she’s trying to make. And in the end, all of her other friends are killed by either Tommy or Ellie.
This is not to mention the cost paid to kill Joel in the first place. The things she likely had to do to get information on him. There’s also the lies she seemed to tell her friends, that all of this was about the cure to get them on board. Pushing herself to her physical limits as she prepared to face this monster in her nightmares. The mental cost of putting herself in a mind state that would allow her to do the things she did to Joel once she caught him.
All of this is on display throughout her three days in Seattle. And it’s something that she isn’t allowed to look away from. Owen throws it in her face at the end of Day 1. Lev unwittingly brings it up on Day 2. Mel uses it to scorn Abby on Day 3. She has to face the cost of her actions head on, and she has to deal with the consequences.
Abby’s story is a really brutal look, not at the cycle of violence, but its associated cost. It’s an unwavering insight into the mindset of someone who is unable to resolve their own grief. And it shows what happens when someone falls into the trap of believing there’s one quick fix to the grief one endures.
Black and White Become Grey
We know what Abby’s story is about, but how does this affect her? How does she change throughout her three days in Seattle? This is pretty straightforward.
On Seattle Day 1, we learn that Abby has a very black-and-white worldview. There’s good and bad, just and evil, and that’s it. She believes in an eye for an eye. In fact, we see her justify the WLF — the group she affiliates with following the disbandment of the Fireflies — killing Seraphite children because “they shot at us,” essentially.
This is not the only time we see this, either. In one of her flashbacks, she openly questions why someone would join the Seraphites. Owen tries to draw a parallel with their experience with the Fireflies. How people considered the Fireflies fanatic terrorists. Abby swears that no, this is different, which Owen does not buy.
Abby is similar to Ellie in the sense that when they have their mind set on something, everything else doesn’t matter. For Abby, she put blinders on to the WLF’s atrocities and what could draw someone to the Seraphites. The WLF was a means to an end in her pursuit to kill Joel, so she devoted herself to their cost since they provided something of value to her.
However, we see this mentality start to shift when she meets Lev and Yara. She isn’t sure why, but Lev and Yara make quite an impression on her. In fact, her nightmares shift on Day 2 to seeing her Dad dead behind the hospital door to seeing those two dead in the forest. She goes off to find them in the hope that Mel can use her medical expertise to help Yara.
Abby’s dialogue with Lev on Day 2 is crucial to her development. For the first time, she is truly interacting with a member of the Seraphites. She isn’t trying to kill him, she isn’t looking to torture him, there isn’t some sort of end goal here. She talks with him, and for the first time, she drops those blinders.
Abby learns why someone could join the Seraphites. She begins to understand what the faith of the Seraphites could do for someone. We see her ask questions such as why Lev, a transgender boy, would continue believing in the religion despite members of the group wanting to kill him for who he is.
All of this helps her realize that there is more to the world than a simple good-bad, just-evil dynamic. It unlocks a more empathetic side of her we haven’t seen since her first flashback with her Dad and the Zebra. She realizes what her father tried to do with his life: help those around him. That was his purpose as the head surgeon of the Fireflies, and that’s how she will find a purpose without him.
She commits to helping Lev save his sister. She opens up to him, and he does the same. We even see Abby admit to her feeling of guilt on Day 2. It is explicitly unclear what she’s referring to here. However, I believe this is her admitting to feeling guilt over how things went with Joel. He, like Lev and Yara, tried to save her life when they didn’t need to. She repaid that by caving his skull in. It’s a brutally horrific act that she likely will never truly repent for. But she can work to protect him in a similar way to how Joel protected Ellie in the first game.
This change in perspective helps deepen her bond with Lev. So much so that she entirely disregards Owen’s warnings about traveling to the Seraphite island on Day 3. Abby and Yara work to find Lev, and they eventually comfort him when they find him after he inadvertently killed his mom. When Yara dies shortly thereafter, Abby commits to being in his life and caring for him the way Yara did.
In a way, Lev is a representation of her journey through those three days. He is the one who helped bring out this new version of Abby. He is the light that she was looking for when lost in the darkness. And he was there for her when she relapsed back into the vicious killer she tried desperately not to be.
After the theatre confrontation, Abby and Lev essentially become a brother-sister duo. She embraces Owen’s dream of finding the Fireflies once again, which she had previously admonished and mocked him for. She wears his backpack as a way to keep him close. Abby actively puts her old life behind. None of this truly redeems her, this may never happen. But she has fully moved past her grief and is beginning to live her life with a purpose once again.
The ending
I would be remiss if I did not talk about the end of The Last of Us Part II. After searching a house and finding a lead to the Fireflies, Abby and Lev are ambushed by the Rattlers — a slaver group that has taken root in Santa Barbara.
The two are kept as prisoners before attempting to try and escape. They were caught and taken to The Pillars. Essentially, they were tied up to large wooden posts and left to roast in the California sun. How long they were there is unclear. However, we know they were in very bad shape before they were cut down from those posts by Ellie.
Abby carries Lev and leads Ellie to boats in the water by the shore. Before they leave, Ellie decides she needs to fight Abby. Abby refuses, but Ellie threatens Lev, so they fight. Ellie eventually tries to drown Abby. Abby bites two of Ellie’s fingers clean off, but she is still underwater. With seconds to spare, however, Ellie lets up. She allows Abby to leave, which she quickly does.
I’m not here to discuss the true meaning of the ending. This is something I will likely touch on in a different article. However, I do want to talk about Abby’s portion of this fight. This is one of the most visceral fights I’ve seen or played in a video game. And part of the reason — beyond Abby’s clearly deteriorated state — is her role in the fight.
Abby does not want to do this. She has moved past this whole thing with Joel and Ellie. She wants to take Lev, get him back to health, and continue their journey to the Fireflies. I’d go so far as to argue that her participation in this fight isn’t voluntary. She is coerced into this fight through the threat toward Lev’s life.
Walking away from that fight had to be surreal. Obviously, she gets out of dodge so quick because she doesn’t know if Ellie is going to change her mind about killing her. But I do think Abby sees herself in Ellie at that moment. Ellie has clearly gone through a lot, being a lot skinnier and lanky from the last time Abby saw her. Seeing her breakdown in the water like that likely brought back flashes of her grief in the wake of her own father’s death. It’s one last harrowing reminder of the damage she did and what’s she’s trying to leave behind.
The elephant in the room
There is one last thing I’d like to discuss. Abby is a very, very, very jacked woman. And this was a massive point of controversy online. This has come up in the discorse once again, though for a different reason. The Last of Us TV show is not going to focus on her physical build in the upcoming second season.
“In the game, you have to play both [Ellie and Abby] and we need them to play differently. 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,” Neil Druckmann, the creator of The Last of Us, said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly recently.
“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. It’s more about the drama. I’m not saying there’s no action here. It’s just, again, different priorities and how you approach it.”
This is rather disappointing. Abby’s physical stature has more meaning to the game than a gameplay mechanic. In fact, there is legitimate narrative weight to how buff she is. Perhaps Druckmann and the team at Naughty Dog didn’t intentionally write it into the game. However, the writing of the game certainly provides the narrative weight regardless. Reducing this down to a gameplay mechanic feels extremely shortsighted.
As mentioned, Abby built herself to be a killing machine in order to kill Joel. She believed him to be a monster and prepared herself to kill a monster. Her physique is a representation of this process. She isn’t extremely buff in her first flashback before her Dad’s death. In his first flashback in Seattle, though, we see she has built muscle. She even mentions to Owen that she set a new personal bench press record.
In another flashback before Joel’s death — years after the first Seattle flashback — we see Abby in the jacked state that we see her in for most of the game. However, after Joel’s death, there are signs that she isn’t exactly keeping up with her workout routine. When she eventually moves to Santa Barbara, she is clearly still muscular, but it’s also clear that working out is no longer at the forefront of her mind.
I am very open-minded, so I’m not going to say this change has destroyed the show for me. However, I wanted to mention this because I do believe it’s an important part of her character. I trust Druckmann and fellow showrunner Craig Mazin to find a way to make this work. In saying this, I am a bit skeptical that they can replicate this physical representation in the TV show. I do hope I am wrong, though.
Abby Anderson is an incredibly deep and interesting character. There is a lot I could have said here and maybe I will discuss her again in the future. I hope this gave you a new appreciation for Abby and her role within The Last of Us Part II. And I hope her character is done justice in the TV show when the second season begins airing on April 13.
