Would you like to offer an actual rebuttal, or are you just going to be snide because you don’t like what I said and can’t actually offer any argument to it?

Lev’s entire character was “I am trans and everyone hates me for it”. Personally I don’t give a damn, be whoever you want, but one, singular trait doesn’t actually make a character good just because it’s a hot-button issue. It’s a very common trope that bad writers use to justify a bad character, “just make them be LGBTQ+ because any negativity towards them is (x)phobic”.

The singular, sole functions that Lev has in the story are to raise issues of identity and gender politics, and to further sanctify Abbey in the eyes of the player by giving her a naïve child to look after in a poor attempt at the Joel/Ellie dynamic from the first game. Their literal and actual character arc was “I want to be accepted for being trans by the people, more specifically my mother, who actively want to kill me for being trans, and actively put everyone in danger so they have to pay attention to the fact I’m trans by attempting suicide by stupidity (going back to his mother)”.

The primary theme of the game is “Violence and revenge are pointless pursuits that accomplish nothing”, and yet it plays Abbey’s entire story off as “Abbey is the good guy, and is fully justified in taking revenge against Joel, and in any and all violence she perpetrates on others”. Because she’s a new protagonist (with Ellie functionally being an antagonist), the story needs to endear the player to her, but the only way the game actually does this is by making her a virtuous and pure person, no matter who she kills, how she kills them, and how many people she kills. The story actually has to create nonsense reasons, which further lay out the Fireflies to be braindead morons, so that Abbey’s father (who, scientifically speaking was a terrible scientist) was a completely indisputable “good guy messiah”, just for Abbey to have more justification to kill Joel beyond “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die”, and make a weak attempt at lessening the attachment people had to Joel by making him a worse person in retrospect through information that he literally couldn’t possibly have had to make decisions from.

Take a look at the way the game actually portrays Abbey’s violence against Ellie’s. Ellie is largely portrayed as vicious, merciless, brutal, sickening, and in many cases outright spiteful. Abbey, with exception to Joel’s death, is nearly universally portrayed as not only in the moral right, but almost always quick, clean, and critically, in self-defence. She only actually attacks Ellie’s group once after Joel, and only in retaliation for killing her adulterous lover and her dog and a pregnant woman, and the only kill she actually makes in that attack is Jesse, who dies instantly from a shot to the head by surprise. She literally lets Ellie go at the end of that sequence and lets Tommy and Dina go because she’s portrayed as “merciful” after being interrupted by Lev.

Even Abbey’s betrayal of WLF is portrayed as morally correct, because it’s done in defence of Lev, and Abbey does everything she can to prevent killing before WLF starts opening fire on her.

Ellie is the one to go after Abbey again, despite the situation being over, not the reverse, further laying the “Abbey good/Ellie bad” plot more firmly into the stone it’s beating the player over the head with.

The game can’t pretend that it’s saying “violence is bad” when one of the characters is nearly always being portrayed as fully justified in the violence they’re committing. It flip-flops between “violence bad” and “violence is justified” between Abbey and Ellie and refuses to come to an actual conclusion on either side, because the game ends with “I won’t take revenge on the nearly-dead Abbey… No wait, I totally will… She bit my fingers off, so I won’t” and only has actual consequences for Ellie, the character portrayed as an outright villain through the whole thing, who pulled a 540 kickflip to reverse, then unreverse, then reverse again on her decision in the span of 30 seconds for literally no reason.

But no, go on and tell me how this is a “bad read” because you said so without actually giving any examples or reasoning yourself.