[Spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen all of season 1 of The Last of Us you may want to skip this.]

[So the story ends with Joel having delivered his sort-of-surrogate daughter Ellie to a medical center where it’s believed she is the key to beating the infection that has turned everyone into zombies. Joel gets knocked out and wakes up to learn Ellie is being prepped for surgery. The doctors are hopeful she’s the cure for the entire world but, unfortunately, they’ll have to remove her brain to find it.]

When Joel finds out about the plan, he reacts reasonably: by killing nearly every single person in that hospital and taking Ellie away from there…

I was not at all surprised, then, when the game’s creator and the series co-showrunner Neil Druckmann said in the companion podcast that when they tested the game, those who didn’t have kids were evenly split on Joel’s murderous response. Fifty-fifty, some thought he was a villain, some sympathized with him. Those who had kids?

“A hundred percent with zero exceptions they agreed with Joel,” Druckmann said. “Zero exceptions.”