The Last of Us Part 2
Of the many stupid debates surrounding The Last of Us Part 2, one of the stupidest has been about Abby’s physique, with players critiquing her muscular build. Abby is a force of nature, incredibly strong and so much so, that she plays totally differently than Ellie in combat. But her build has been criticized as “unrealistic” by a vocal subset of players who have tried to make it a meme, in addition to the other pile of grievances they have with the game.
This has taken a truly hilariously dumb turn as players have discovered Abby’s workout schedule, an in-game asset, and have used it to try to pick apart why doing that workout, she simply could not have arms that jacked.
The workout schedule is lying around the Washington Liberation base, and shows two months of Abby’s workouts.
I blew it up and brightened it, but it’s kind of hard to read.
The schedule
Month 1 has
- Monday – Upper Body
- Tuesday – Rest
- Wednesday – Jogging
- Thursday – Full Body
- Friday – Rest
- Saturday – Yoga
- Sunday – Rest
Month 2 has
- Monday – Full Body
- Tuesday – Rest
- Wednesday – Lower Body
- Thursday – Weights (?)
- Friday – Rest
- Saturday – Yoga
- Sunday – Rest
The argument being if you followed Abby’s workout plan you would not be able to get arms like hers with only four upper body days the first month and maybe eight in month two.
While I am not going to debate the validity of that, the point is that people are studying a throwaway game asset to try and prove that Abby can’t be muscular. Gah.
Here’s the thing, as a dude, I actually fell into this trap a little bit. Not like in an “angry” way, but I did keep waiting for some sort of story explanation as to why Abby had gotten so jacked, but it was never directly addressed outside of one line about how she had just lifted a certain weight for the first time.
The Last of Us Part 2
But then when I stopped and thought about it, I realized when had I ever asked that question about a male character, or needed an explanation as to why they were “unrealistically” jacked (way more unrealistically than Abby, usually)? Never. It’s just assumed as “video game default” that men are jacked with huge muscles and if women are muscular they are also skinny. And yet it’s perfectly reasonable to think that a woman living in the post-apocalypse on a mission of revenge would indeed get…super jacked to be able to take on zombie hordes and enemy soldiers alike. There really isn’t any explanation past that needed. Once I saw a social media movement of other muscular women showing off their arms that looked close to identical to Abby’s I realized I was being dumb for even thinking about this as a story point that needed to be addressed. No, I wasn’t vocally mad about it online, and yet my own biases has made me internally question whether Abby’s appearance was “right.” That was stupid.
As is the workout schedule debate, obviously. Though hey, maybe I’ll do that “Abby routine” for two months and see how good of shape I can get in. I mean it’s better than what I’m doing now which is writing five articles a day and farming Destiny on my couch for eight hours.
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