Abby's Muscles Less Relevant to HBO's The Last of Us Adaption

Way to crap all over your own material for the sake of HBO Druckmann. Have a seat right next to Mr. Martin.

cough
Sellout
cough

I love TLOU part 2 and Abby’s big muscles. I’m a little disappointed to hear this, but I didn’t really vibe with season 1 and that cast so my expectations weren’t high anyway. I’ll still watch - maybe it will be good

Now Abby needs baseball bat instead of golf stick 😉

Sounds like a pretty feeble excuse to me. Something tells me it was because it would have been too difficult to turn the actress into the roid machine Abby was.

The character should be more important than the appearance.

I wonder what other good ideas they have. Maybe put the score in the corner of the screen?

probably because theres not many huge actresses that look like Abby about to cast.

even in the game abbys appearance was one women and then voiced by another

To this day I still can't understand why people why people liked Bella Ramsay and Pedro Pascal in season 1. So no surprise that Abby was miscast too.

@Deadp001 wrong, it should be both considering the solid already established background, they are already protecting themselves for the enviable failure of season 2, a main character already in a miscast. Maybe I'm wrong but not long to see

@Olmaz At no point did i buy Pedro Pascal as the hardened survivor type that Joel is meant to be. He was casted purely because of name recognition - the guy is in everything right now.
Compare Pascal to someone like Andrew Lincoln in The Walking Dead. When he bit off a guy's face, you believed it.

@Magatsuhi Yep. If you ever look at guys who have muscles through working a hard job such as construction, even they do not have muscles like Abby. Hard work alone will not get you a body like this.
Unless Abby has a warehouse out back full of testerone injections and whey powder, it is completely unachievable or maintainable.

@Deadp001 Sure, but the appearance had meaning in Abby’s case.

@Uromastryx the women characters won’t be the issue people have.

@LifeGirl They had cows and plenty of food in their community. I don’t understand why people keep using this argument. Just look at how this group is organised.

It's not really about anything that we said it was about... it's really because we're now a more different story (and people on HBO don't need to be confronted with a muscular woman)... Who the literal F thought that Abby was meant to be muscular as a proxy for Joel? I mean... Abby would have (and DID) kick Joel's ass to the curb. Edit - she is meant to be the protector of Lev, in the same way that Joel protects Ellie... the physicality was Abby re-creating herself for revenge. And to cut out the weakness of what was needed from her heart. To become death. Until...

I love the game - and I think Abby's character is one of the best in gaming (because her character is at odds with her physicality). However, that was an artistic choice - this just sounds like "you wanna do what now?" from the studio execs. I will be very disappointed if they make her anything other than hyper-focussed killer (hiding the reality of a hurt daughter she was). Edit - the muscles aren't essential to an Abby.... but they express what she was willing to do. To herself.

Is it because the loud minority throw an absolute hissy fit over women with muscles, the sort that would embarrass a toddler?

@Oz_Who_Dat_Dare while I agree with your assessment of her character in the game, I think there is still something cool to be done with her without the extreme physical aspect of her appearance. It really was a cool thing to have in the game, but i would take a more talented actress over the one that is physically matching. Like Katy O'Brian from "Love Lies Bleeding". Physically bad ass, not so much in the acting department (if you like her acting, that's ok, but I found her dull)

@Hyena_socks probably because there are not many (if any) great actresses that are built this way AND are matching in terms of age. If you have some examples, then please tell me.

@NeonTiger as I said - it isn't critical, but it's more about the character underneath the physique. Anyway - we'll see before too long.

In real life, females need to take supplements among other things to be “jacked” like a man could be naturally. Those supplements just aren’t worth it to take for an actress just for this role as the actress would have had to start a serious exercise regiment.

@LifeGirl Abby is actually jacked because TLOU2 is a video game so she doesnt actually have to focus on fitness and nutrition because she's not real, happy to help.

@LifeGirl Get a life its a videogame deal with it. That people can get so worked up about something that trivial is a joke.

@LifeGirl I always assumed that Abby (in the game) got her physique from a combination of working out and abusing some supply of anabolic steroids. Her physique is that of an enhanced female. (Having lifted very heavy weights myself for two decades as a non-enhanced powerlifter, and meeting non-enhanced female powerlifters, I can tell the difference between who is and is not abusing steroids.) I took it as implied that Abby did this to herself after she decided she would be taking vengeance, which seemed believable in the context of her story.

If Naughty Dog has said anywhere that Abby is not enhanced then I'd say they should have consulted with a sports physician or something if they were going for realism.

@NeonTiger there was an entire film built around muscly women, so take your pick from any actress in ‘Love Lies Bleeding’, Brie Larson I think would be great, Katee Sackhoff, even Emily Blunt. There’s plenty out there.

But I was being snarky, it may just be the actor physically can’t bulk up in the same way, and if you find the right actor that’s what matters.

I wouldn’t have chosen the lead 2 actors, but they do a great job and capture the characters despite physical differences, I’m sure it’ll be the same this time.

@StrickenBiged absolutely. Those muscles seriously broke my suspension of disbelief.

Those of us in the know are well aware of how you achieve such a physique.

A high protein and calorie diet with excellent nutrition, abuse of steroids (the model can deny it as much they like), and an abundance of spare time for training.

Three things that one generally doesn’t have in a zombie apocalypse.

For me it was ludicrous. Not sure why they went with that. I wonder if it was the plot and the requirement for the character to be physically imposing in story and gameplay.

That necessitates the physical appearance. They should have gone with a male character instead if that was the goal, but I suspect the gender was the first decision they made and non negotiable.

Very happy if the TV show goes for a more natural looking woman who uses brains and her leadership skills to get men to do her bidding physically, rather than unrealistic brawn of her own.

Amazed Druckmann would concede on that point, as I sense trenches were dug and they didn’t want to admit that maybe, just maybe, the game wasn’t perfect and they did make some poor design choices.

I've not played The Last of Us Part 2 but I loved all the memes. Abby was made out to be the literal embodiment of Gigachad lmao.

So it's a case now of the Virgin HBO Abby Vs the Chad game Abby.

Abby from the game goes to the gym, lifts weights everyday, is a great player at golf, regularly strikes bodybuilder poses and uses those poses as taunts during fights and simply doesn't care about realistic priorities during an apocalypse. She's going to get those gains one way or another!

I mean... look at the cast of S02... they "hollywoodified" the supposed diversity the game was striving for.
I have no problem characters looking different than the game, but the fact that it just feels like changing characters to be more of standard notions of pretty is just poor.

Hey, I've got an idea, instead of whining about it, why don't we just watch the show and enjoy it for what it is? No? Not possible?

It would have been impossible to find an actress that looked like Abby that also had the acting range to pull off the role. There just isn't such an actress available. Even finding a male (more likely to be that size and build) would have been extremely difficult. So I can understand why they have had to think outside the box.

I always assumed they made Abby look the way they did was to make her as diametrically opposed to Ellie as possible. Considering both characters are mirror images of each other with the same motivations, drives and moral values they had to differentiate between the two in some way and given Abbie's character arc they needed to make her appear far more menacing or "evil". I always considered it very clever visual story telling and a good example of "show not tell".

Clearly they have had to go a different way when casting Abbie's part for the series and I don't think for one second that casting an actress who has a striking resemblance to the main character is a coincidence.

@Cornpop76 "Not sure why they went with that."

Let's say it : we all know why they went with it, they wanted the controversy of a muscular woman being taken for a trans character before the game came out. This was free publicity, and added to the cultural dispute about this topic, about which Druckmann has been adamant as to where he stands.

Nothing else. They could have gone with a heavy muscular guy instead to make thinsg more realistic and believable, but we all know they wouldn't have gotten all the virtue signaling point for it.

This is one of my three most anticipated shows at the moment. Severance is finally out so that leaves 2:
-The Last of Us: Part 2, and;
-Yellowjackets Season 3.

Can👏not👏wait👏

@ChromaticDracula Same here! Along with Silo Season 3...

Interesting how much people complain or discuss the probability of a woman getting as muscular in the game as real life not caring the story involves a plague of zombies. They have no issue with that not being realistic. Or the fact a 14 year old (slightly older in part 2) girl has the ability to attack scores of fully grown men or over powered zombies. No complaints about that either. The biggest issue is when a woman works out they wouldn't be able to get quite that muscular? So much so that they spew hatred online about it? Seems odd to me.

LMAO! So predictable the ones who delve into scientific explanations to justify their “suspension of disbelief”. Like, you couldn’t suspend disbelief when people were being infected by plants and turning into zombies? Or being able to wrap your arm with gauze and become completely healed?

This reminds me of the guy who said “Scientifically speaking, Mermaids wouldn’t be Black anyway because of where they’d live in the deep ocean…” (When referring to The Little Mermaid being casted as Black) I’m like “Oh, so now you wanna get scientific about a fictional species?!” But any other reference to science is frowned upon? 👌🏾

@StonyKL always the case! It’s similar to how no one cared about time travel and historical accuracy in previous Assassins Creed games. But now there’s a (gasps and clutches pearls) Black guy in Feudal Japan and they’re pissed off as the historical inaccuracies.

@StonyKL totally. It’s a “chicks need to stay in their lane” thing. It tired and boring.

Abby’s a great character in the game. Her strength is a detail but not important. Her thirst for vengeance is the real story

I stopped watching TLoU around episode 8. I thought that the game did the characters, writing, tension and moodiness much better.

The show has been pretty badly casted since S1 anyway so don't see how it makes any difference for Abbey

The first season was pretty good but I'm really, really worried about season 2. I just don't see a way they could tackle the game's story, even if tangentially, without the show ending up as a train wreck.

And look, I'm not even craping on TLOU Part 2. It has its merits and its issues. It's bold and it's divisive for a reason. But it's evidently much harder to translate than the first game. Unless they deviate greatly from the source material, which I don't think egos would allow.

I may watch this second season, really not bothered, I hated TLOU2 and thought Abby looked stupid with all the muscles, it was utterly pointless and didn’t add a thing to the character, like Drukman did it for the hell of it or his sense of the modern world?

@AhmadSumadi oh dear /sigh

That's the same old flawed argument that is always rolled out by those who are ignorant as to how "suspension of disbelief" works. Lenny Henry did the same thing when people were eye rolling at Rings of Power.

Take your classic fantasy RPG. Let's use Witcher 3 as an example. There are all sorts of fantasy elements in that game. Magic, strange creatures and monsters etc.

Not something that is easily believable. The way it works and how they cause our disbelief to be suspended, is that the world is grounded in a healthy dollop of reality. They create a gritty medieval world with many realistic elements that match our understanding of what the 1200's were like, based on what we learned in history class.

That grounding - squalor, people riding on horses, using shields/swords/bows, castles, feudalism etc - form a foundation on which the fantastic elements sit. The foundations keep us grounded and allow us to buy into the fantastic elements. It helps us suspend our disbelief and accept that what we are seeing and doing is real.

How ignorant would a person have to be to say "Bruh, it's got Griffin's in it, it's hardly realistic, so why can't Geralt have a laser gun, fly in an F14 Tomcat and wear a pair of Nike Air Max".

Same applies with zombie apocalypse games. The zombies are the unbelievable fantastic element. The solid foundation that allows us to suspend disbelief and accept them, is the realistic way in which that post-apocalyptic world is portrayed.

The way in which nature is taking over, with our concrete jungles slowly decaying, the way in which humans have formed into competing factions, desperately fighting over resources in order to survive and of course the way in which the zombie apocalypse is explained via the cordyceps.

The Last of Us does an excellent job of portraying a highly believable world, which then sells the zombies, as well the "gamey" concessions you describe like bandaging, the weird reoccurrence of crafting tables and how shops that have clearly been looted bare, still somehow have useful items in plain view 20 years later...

There are limits though, and a woman absolutely jacked out of her face on 'roids, and eating a tonne of protein a day in a world of extreme scarcity (literally to the point that she'd be a top international body builder in normal times), is actually more hard to suspend your disbelief over, than the zombies.

@Cornpop76 really? You see she has big muscular arms. That’s basically it.

The implication is that what happened to her and her father lead her down this path of vengeance and needing skills and strength to achieve it. It’s a narrative hook.

“Look what happened to Abby as a consequence of Joel and Ellie”

I’m sorry this has somehow become important enough to ruin the reality of this science fiction story

@Puketapu no, the access to an infinite supply of roids, protein, calories and free leisure time in a zombie apocalypse ruined it.

Why can’t Ellie chop zombies in half with a light sabre, and kill Abby by throttling her with a force choke?

“But that wouldn’t make sense”

Bruh it’s got zombies in it and people heal broken legs in 5 seconds by wrapping gauze around their arm. It’s clearly not meant to be realistic.

@Cornpop76 Agree with you to an extent. Abby being muscly didn't break my immersion, personally, but like I say I had to come up with some plausible head-canon to explain it. It seems plausible to me that she would take anabolic steroids if she found some to prepare herself to achieve her goal. The only unexplained thing is where she got them, but finding something overlooked in a medical facility isn't totally out of the question in a world where people have apparently left the odd bullets and weapons lying around even years after the apocalypse.

I'd be getting into spoilers, and off topic, and probably start a whole thing if I mention what did break my immersion, so I'll leave things there.