I loved the game. As much as I'm anti-woke, the complaining about this game never resonated with me. I never felt like they were being preachy about culture. Plenty of media does, and it feels gross, and I don't like it. But I just never saw TLOU2 that way - even if ND intended it to be woke preaching. It made sense that they introduced a new character who took out Joel. If we were just playing another game where Joel saves Ellie, that would feel like a boring, contrived repeat of the first game. I also thought it was powerful to make the audience hate a character, then take you into their world and show you their view. I remember loving that about the Song of Ice and Fire books.
I'm also in favor of getting an actor who can give a good performance as a higher priority than what they look like. I'm reminded of the people complaining about Chris Hemsworth being cast as Thor. I've been around the fitness community for many years, and there were a lot of meatheads saying they should have cast one of the big strongman guy (like Thor Bjornsson or a similar type person) and then gotten them some acting classes. I'm not a Marvel fan, but it's pretty obvious to me that would have been worse than starting with a charming actor.
If they wanted to get someone who looks like the game version of Abby, they'd either have to convince a regular woman to get on roids, or get a roided out lifter to learn how to act. Neither of those sound appealing. So just have her be threatening in other ways. Instead of choking people to death in the show, she shoots or stabs them - whatever. It will work fine.''
I thought the first season of the TV show was pretty good overall. I didn't like the race swapping they did for a few characters, but that was pretty minor. I thought the episode with Bill and Frank was much more interesting than how it was handled in the game. I thought it was a nice compliment to the game. Overall, I'm excited for Season 2.