Game Theory: Ellie Is NOT Immune! (The Last of Us Part 2)

no cutesy jokes here let's just cut to the chase ellie isn't immune period end of story and today i'm gonna prove it to you because the implications of what this means for the entire franchise are huge [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello internet welcome to game theory the show that was bit by an infected nerd back in 2009 and hasn't been showing any symptoms of nerd rage since honest no at least box stacking makes sense [Music] but today i'm not here to talk about my rage i'm here to talk to you about a game that's either causing you to rage or making you think it's all the rage depending on which perspective you're coming from that's right friends today i'm tackling the last of us part d the game with 8 plus 10 out of 10 ratings from some zero stars out of 5 from others and a big fat debunked from yours truly that's right today i'm not here to take sides on whether this is a good game or an awful game i'm just here to tell you that there is something serious that we've all overlooked in the game and it rocks the very foundation that this franchise was built on more specifically the main character of the game ellie is not the linchpin in the story that we're told in fact there's nothing special about her she most likely is not immune to the zombifying fungus plaguing the last of us universe and the craziest thing of all is i think that the developers might know this you thought you were mad about the story decisions made by this game before just wait until you hear about the decisions that they've been hiding in plain sight the entire time but let's back up to fully understand what i'm talking about today we need to rewind briefly to catch everyone up on the last of us part one so we can immediately dismantle it right afterward the last of us part you know takes place in a universe where the fungus cordyceps a real world fungus that we've already talked about on the channel mutates to use humans as hosts if you aren't familiar with the fungus it's the closest you'll ever get to a real-life version of the movie alien in the game cordyceps takes over a huge portion of the human population and protagonist joel loses his daughter in the initial outbreak becoming a smuggler to survive in the post-apocalyptic wasteland one day he's asked to smuggle ellie a 14 year old girl who was bit by an infected zombie but who magically never turned into a monster suddenly the whole hope for humanity rests on this one girl as she needs to get across the country to a bunch of scientists so they can create a vaccine using her to solve the outbreak once and for all again i just covered that topic in a recent theory and talked about the fact that it's not only a bad idea but a complete scientific whoopsy daisy since you create vaccines to combat viruses and not fungal infections but you know what for today's theory we're just gonna roll with it anyway since there's the last of us part two you can imagine that things don't quite go as planned at the end of that first game turns out the scientists are gonna kill ellie to get her blood for this impossible vaccine and she's a protagonist so that's not going to fly would have killed you so i stopped joel decides to save ellie's life from the stupid dum-dum vaccine doctors which you know doesn't make ellie too happy in the sequel when she finds out i was supposed to die in that hospital my life would have mattered but you took that from me from there the last of us part two is basically ellie's revenge drama which i don't really have to spoil in order for you to understand this theory suffice it to say the game devolves into a violent killing spree because i mean this is a video game so unless you're flexing your interior decorating muscle on your own private island you're going on a killing spree also it's worth noting that pretty much everything we see ellie do throughout the last of us part two would be scientifically impossible based on the information that the game is explicitly giving to us but we're about to get to that right now so no more pussyfooting around it's time to get into the nitty-gritty let's talk about ellie's so-called immunity she's the only person with it and both games hinge on the idea that she has some special medical magic going on inside of her that can help save the rest of the world after you took me out of the firefly hospital you said there were dozens of people like me i've never met another immune person before but you see even though that's all we understand about it that's not all the game tells us about it the last of us part one actually has a single recording from a surgeon that gives us a much greater understanding of ellie's condition the girl's infection is like nothing i've ever seen the cause of her immunity is uncertain that's we've seen in all past cases the antigenic titus the patient's cortisol blood culture is taken from the patient rapidly in the lab however white blood cell lines including percentages and absolute counts are completely normal there is no elevation of pro-inflammatory cytokines and an mri of the brain shows no evidence of fungal growth in the limit regions which would normally accompany the program of aggression and infected patients ah yes some high quality medical gobbledygook my friends very insightful very intriguing i'm sure that if you're like 99.9 of the gaming population without an advanced medical degree you heard the word titers giggled that it looked like titters then look for the skip conversation button to get on with the zombie killing turns out though there's a lot of information hidden inside that little paragraph enough to tell us that ellie isn't having a normal reaction to the fungal infection and also that something's not right about the way the science is being scienced let's break down what this audio log is actually telling us we know that cordyceps is the fungus that infects people so we already know one word we're on our way an antigenic titer is just a test to see if the thing that's infecting you is really infecting you so in the first sentence here he's basically saying we tested for cordyceps yep it's there this line here about serums and fluids tells us that it's in her brain and in her spine if you keep going it basically translates to should be turning her into a zombie but oh look it's not this one's important here her white blood cells the ones that usually go crazy when they find an infection in your body aren't doing anything the rest of the recording basically says that everything that should be swollen elevated angry and zombie-like in her body just isn't even though she's technically infected in short her immune system isn't reacting to this infection at all they go on to say that this is like the biggest medical breakthrough ever yadda yadda turns out that these guys did not exactly graduate at the top of their medical school class or at the very least they flunked out of their course on immunology immunology is kind of exactly what it sounds like the study of how and why people are immune to things and how your immune system works under normal circumstances your immune system regulates itself your body discovers something that shouldn't be in there and everybody rallies together in your bloodstream to kick it out get off my lawn and by lawn i mean out of my body this involves an inflammatory response including your white blood cells getting produced in overdrive to eat up the invading bacteria virus fungi or whatever sometimes there's lots of other inflammatory reactions like your body giving you a fever swelling turning red around the infection all of that is your immune system doing its best to fight off something that shouldn't be in your body in the last of us universe the cordyceps fungus attacks your body and your body has a big inflammatory response while you turn into a zombie so what is different about ellie as we just listened to in that audio log her immune system isn't reacting so is that the reason she has this magical medical protection against the fungus no but we don't know that until the last of us part two you see again just like in the first game we get the briefest of glimpses as to the detailed inner workings of how ellie's condition functions here we get ourselves a look at ellie's medical records and immediately we start to see something that doesn't quite add up again we're presented with what looks like scientific junkie junk but what it really is is a pretty intelligible cbc blood panel that we've seen in every major medical drama ever most of us have had one of these charts made for ourselves when we get our blood work done and it shows the various levels of stuff in your blood system you'll notice several things on this chart labeled with an l that means that their levels are low relative to normal in ellie's blood work we see that her wbc her white blood cells her rbc red blood cells her hct or hematocritical cells and her hemoglobin or hgb are all low bit of a head scratcher for a girl who's supposed to be infected with a fungus that's causing an inflammatory reaction in fact she's supposedly infected with this fungus but she's experiencing the reverse of what you would expect what we would call immunosuppression and uh by the way it's worth pointing out that these numbers in themselves are a bit outlandish even for a video game if these were real life numbers ellie would be almost non-functional with a red blood cell count this low you can see on this chart that the lowest red blood cell levels should be about 4.0 microliters ellie is half of that meaning that she is suffering from some serious anemia in reality she would be freezing cold incredibly weak her hands would be numb her lips would be blue also notice that her white blood cell count the cells fighting off infections are also half of their normal range meaning that the deadliest thing to ellie in this game isn't abby or zombies or anyone coming after her it's catching a cold so anyway we're taking it on faith that she's still standing right now but back to the zombies because here's the big reveal friend the truth of all of ellie's medical information points us to one conclusion she does have cordyceps she just has the wrong type of cordyceps you see cordyceps the magical zombie fungus isn't a single fungus at all not even close cordyceps is actually a family of fungi that contain about 400 different species some of which turn animals into zombies some of which believe it or not cause the exact symptoms that we see present in ellie the last of us developers most likely modeled the in-game fungus on the species of cordyceps unilateralis which is the real fungus that actually turns ants into zombies like you see what happens with people in the game right down to the fungus sprouting straight out of the head but cordyceps brings a lot more to the party meet a different species totally piccladium inflatum which sounds like a fungus-shaped pool float or a forgotten harry potter spell this separate brand of cordyceps is used to create the medicine cyclosporin the world's most commonly used immunosuppressive drug or in normal people terms a drug that gives you all the results that we see in ellie's medical chart lowers your white blood cell count prevents all your inflammation in short wipes out your immune system and all from a cordyceps fungus normally this fungus can't interact with the human host but remember in the last of us universe it's well established that these fungi have mutated so they can infect humans if the zombie strain of cordyceps can do it why not any strain of cordyceps including the one that wipes out your immune system the fact is that this is a more reasonable explanation for why ellie isn't responding to the zombie fungus like everyone else yet still reads positive for cordyceps she's not magic she's just not infected with the same strain and you see this explains everything remember in that first recording the surgeon says that she tests positive for cordyceps the antigenic titers of the patient's cordyceps remain high in both the serum and the cerebrospinal fluid well if she was indeed infected with this other branch of the fungus this would be true she is testing positive just not for the zombie species of cordyceps a different one to get that sort of false positive the antigen test that the surgeon is giving her just isn't specific enough to tell the difference between the two closely related fungal strains not that hard to believe and there's more not only does this explanation address her weird medical chart it also explains why she continues walking around in the game without ever getting infected remember that bite and the fact that she doesn't wear a mask when walking around to protect her from fungal spores we know all too well these days the importance of wearing a mask so why isn't ellie just picking up the deadly strain of cordyceps along with the ones she already has even if ellie isn't initially infected with the right species of fungus you would think that at some point she would pick it up since she's walking around inhaling spores left and right right no actually not at all it turns out that even if ellie were infected with the bad version of the fungus from the first bite from the spores whatever it couldn't have turned her into a zombie because cyclosporin is also an anti-fungal medicine that's right the good version of cordyceps that i'm theorizing that she has not only suppresses her immune system like we're seeing in her blood work but also wards off other fungi doesn't even feel badly about it either cyclosporin a produced directly by the totally poccladium inflatum is used to treat even severe fungal infections including serious ones in the eyes which we know from the game is the first area that the zombie cordyceps attack so having one version of cordyceps is actually keeping ellie from getting any other version this also also explains how ellie can continue to walk around in game without a mask she's not immune to cordyceps in the sense that she can't get infected she's immune in the sense that she's already infected with another closely related fungus from the same family that kills off any of its brothers and sisters again those white blood cell counts of hers aren't looking too good so she should probably avoid like pretty much everything else but otherwise she's a walking anti-fungal machine so the one thing and only thing that she doesn't have to worry about in this world is becoming a zombie so there you have it friends the key to stopping the cordyceps zombie apocalypse in the last of us universe was more cordyceps it wasn't about becoming immune to the cordyceps fungus it was just about being infected by the other correct strain of it the upshot here is in a global zombie pandemic study up on your fungi and don't assume anything about who's immune and who isn't just like wear a mask and keep a safe distance from anyone who could have been exposed is there like a lesson to be learned about the current state of the world from this theory nah can't be it i mean walking around wearing a mask that's just that's just a theory right no that's a fact but as for ellie and her immunity that was a theory a game theory thanks for watching or who knows maybe you're just listening i've been saying thanks for watching since the very first episodes of this channel but more and more people are just listening to youtube and watching it no that's actually how i do the bulk of my youtubing these days and if you want to listen to your favorite youtube channels with premium earbuds at a not so premium price i recommend to you raycon's everyday e25s our sponsor for today's episode let's just talk about what they do right shall we one most importantly they fit in your darn ears they stay comfortable in your ear and they're discreet i use my earbuds most when i'm working out yes i do 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Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 3,395,089

Keywords: the last of us, the last of us 2, the last of us 2 trailer, tlou, tlou2, the last of us part 2, the last of us 2 ending, the last of us part II, the last of us part 2 walkthrough, the last of us part 2 ending, the last of us ending, the last of us 2 leaked gameplay, the last of us 2 gameplay, the last of us 2 gameplay leak, naughty dog, ellie, joel, the last of us ellie, the last of us joel, the last of us leaks, the game theorists, game theory, matpat, the last of us part ii

Id: DOtXhr0EoTU

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/I_Did_not_sleep]

I'm a simple man.

I see Game theory.

I don't watch it because the channel is garbage. And it went under the same "ree no critique allowed" deal.

[u/LuluViBritannia]

Since when is "interesting" a synonym of "stupid"? Of course Ellie is immune, it's the whole point of the first game.

Game Theory is garbage. It's fun to watch, but definitely shouldn't be taken as a clever or interesting take on anything.