Abby Anderson
Abby is ISTJ. She is defined by a specific debt she intends to repay, a specific set of people she will protect, and a willingness to walk through anything to do both. Her arc is one of gaming's most divisive because it asks the player to understand an ISTJ operating from a moral framework that looks identical to the protagonist's, just aimed at a different object. Her relationship with Lev is the ISTJ learning that duty and love are the same thing.
Abby Anderson and the ISTJ Mind
Abby Anderson is ISTJ. The type is defined by a hierarchy of cognitive functions - not a checklist of traits but an ordered stack of mental processes that determines how someone perceives the world and how they make decisions. For Abby Anderson, that stack leads with Si (Introverted Sensing) and is supported by Te (Extraverted Thinking). Understanding that order explains not just what Abby Anderson does but why - and why they respond the way they do under pressure, in relationships, and at the turning points of their arc.
Abby Anderson is built around Si (Introverted Sensing) - a comprehensive internal library of accumulated experience, precedent, and established procedure. What has worked before is the most reliable guide to what will work now, and Abby Anderson trusts that library above almost anything else. Te (Extraverted Thinking) as the auxiliary translates this into clear action: defined duties, measurable expectations, and unambiguous accountability. The result is someone who is reliable, thorough, and deeply trustworthy - the person who will still be there when everyone else has moved on. The inferior Ne (Extraverted Intuition) is where Abby Anderson is least comfortable: in the face of novelty, ambiguity, and change, they can become rigid or catastrophise in ways that seem disproportionate to outside observers.
What makes Abby Anderson a compelling example of ISTJ is not that they demonstrate every item on the type description, but that the function stack holds under pressure. In the moments that define their story in The Last of Us Part II - the decisions under stress, the failures of judgment, the rare moments of genuine growth - the pattern is consistent. The dominant function is what Abby Anderson reaches for first. The inferior function is what catches them off guard.
How ISTJ Processes the World
Every ISTJ operates through the same hierarchy of cognitive functions. Here is how that stack maps onto how Abby Anderson actually thinks, decides, and acts.
Abby Anderson: What the ISTJ Profile Explains
Abby Anderson's ISTJ profile is The Last of Us Part II's most demanding character study: the specific obligation, accumulated across years of loss, implemented with the comprehensive capability the Te has built in preparation, at maximum cost to every relationship the inferior function had been accumulating simultaneously. She kills Joel not from savagery but from the Si library's most complete outstanding entry: her father died, the person who killed him is identified, the outstanding obligation requires resolution. The Te implements the resolution. The Si closes the entry. What follows is the cost the inferior function was accumulating in parallel.
Her relationship with Owen and Mel, with the Wolves, with Lev and Yara: the inferior Ne and inferior Fi finding, while the Te's primary programme was running, the specific people the inferior functions have designated as worth protecting. The game is the ISTJ discovering that the Si library has entries the Te's primary programme was not accounting for - the specific people who were accumulating alongside the obligation. When the programme's implementation destroys those entries, the library requires revision.
Her eventual choice - releasing Ellie in the water, refusing to complete the final kill - is the Si library's most complete revision: the Ellie entry has accumulated sufficient weight to override the Joel entry's completion requirement. She does not forgive Ellie. She recognises that the outstanding obligations in the Lev entry, which require her survival for their resolution, supersede the Joel entry's remaining implementation steps. The ISTJ's most precise moral calculation: which outstanding obligations are more outstanding.
Why Abby Anderson Is ISTJ, Not ISFJ or INTJ
Abby is sometimes typed ENTJ - the physical dominance, the apparent strategic management of the Wolves operation, the command presence. But ENTJ builds toward a Ni vision. Abby's operation is Te implementing the Si library's outstanding obligations. She did not build a vision of what the post-Joel world would look like. She built the capability to resolve the outstanding entry. The capability and the resolution: Si-Te, not Ni-Te.
The ISTP argument comes from her physical competence, the precision of the combat. But ISTP is Ti dominant: the analytical framework precedes the engagement. Abby's physical capability is Si-accumulated: years of training, building the specific capability the record of her father's death identified as required. The capability was built from the library's entry, not from Ti analysis of what the encounter would require.
The clincher is the aquarium. She goes back for Lev. The Te's primary programme is complete. The Si library has no remaining outstanding obligation from the Joel entry. The inferior function's entries - Lev, Yara, Owen, Mel - have been accumulating across the full duration of the primary programme's implementation. The aquarium is the ISTJ discovering that the inferior function's accumulated entries are, collectively, the outstanding obligation that supersedes everything else in the library. She goes back. That return is Si-Te completing the more fundamental outstanding obligation.
The ISTJ Personality
Reliable, thorough, and committed to established standards. ISTJs do what they said they would do, on time, correctly. They are the backbone of any institution that actually functions.