This isn’t good. Looks like Lazarevic’s men caught up with us while we were exploring the temple. If they’re fighting us now, then that means that they got passed Elena and Cameraman Jeff!
What if something happened to them!? We can’t lose Cameraman Jeff! We’ve grown so close over his less than five minutes of total screen time!
I can’t believe they would introduce a character as loveable as Cameraman Jeff and then so cruelly take him away from us like this. It’s almost as if the entire point of Jeff’s character was to sell how cruel Lazarevic is by giving him a non-essential deadweight member of the cast to shoo…
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh! That makes sense! I’ve played so many games, read so many books, and watched so many movies, and yet this is the very first time I’ve seen something like this happen!
Joking aside, it’s easy to poke fun at this exact trope because it’s used often and once you see it, it’s hard not to feel the writer’s attempt to pull at invisible heartstrings, but the reason the trope is so heavily relied on is that it works. When we give the bad guy a target like that, and let him shoot the man in cold blood, it communicates to us immediately that he does not value human life the way someone like you or I might. They don’t have to tell us because we just saw it.
And because characters like Flynn and Chloe work with him, even if in Chloe’s cast she’s doing it just to stay alive, his deeds reflect on them and their morality. With Flynn, his eagerness to work alongside such a man shows us he is also not willing to sacrifice other people in the name of profit (if you somehow got the opposite impression despite everything he’s done). And as for Chloe, while it’s clear she’s not happy with it, her willingness to put that aside because she’s afraid of standing against him as a genuine, credible threat.
It’s another case of the team at Naughty Dog using limited screen time to communicate as much as they can quickly and efficiently.
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