The perspective has been fully doubled by this session. The player who has spent ten hours with Ellie now has equivalent time with Abby, and the categories that seemed stable at the beginning — protagonist, antagonist, justified, unjustified — have been deliberately dissolved. Both women are villains in each other's story. Both women are victims of a world that keeps asking them to do things that cost them themselves.

The game does not resolve this by declaring a winner. It sits in the dissolution and asks whether the categories were ever adequate to what actually happened. Villain and victim are legal and narrative constructs. What Joel and Abby and Ellie are to each other is something older and messier that neither word fully names.