The Last of Us 2 - Two cowgirls murdering each other's friends

[CharlesPhipps]

https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/review-the-last-of-us-2/

Ever get the feeling that you’re not in the majority of a public opinion? I feel like Grimdark Magazine‘s review is going to be this way because the rating I’m giving The Last of Us 2 is an extremely high one. 9 out of 10 and it would be higher if not for the fact that it is being compared to its predecessor. I’m a fan of the gameplay, the visuals, the stories, and the characters. The game is a real gut punch in places but that’s exactly what the developers were going for and they achieve it. I’m going to talk about what I think some of the reviewers have a problem with and why I think it makes the game better (at least to grimdark fans).

One thing to discuss before we begin with is the fact that this is a direct continuation of The Last of Us, which is a bit different than a sequel. Many of the themes, ideas, and storytelling beats depend on you having a familiarity with the first game. If you’re unfamiliar with The Last of Us, you basically shouldn’t play this game. That’s not necessarily the case with many other franchises as nothing really hurts you if you play Uncharted 2 or Dragon Age 2 separately from the first game. If you want to play The Last of Us 2, boot up the original game and play it first. If you don’t care, then I’m going to spoil the hell out of the first game and how it relates to the continuation below.

Do you consider yourself warned?

Okay then.

The ending of The Last of Us is a delicious use of what literature teachers like I used to be call dramatic irony. Joel and Ellie travel across a post-apocalypse Earth overrun with fungus zombies (called cordyceps) to deliver the latter to a group of scientist-terrorists called the Fireflies. Ellie is the sole human immune to the zombie plague and in her brain lies the secret to the cure. The Fireflies then reveal that to make the cure, they must chop up poor 14-year-old Ellie’s brain. Joel, in a fit of paternal instinct, murders all of them and carries Ellie away to a walled town called Jacksonville. It’s one of the best endings of all time and equally one of the most controversial because both sides believe they’re the right side.

Before we continue, I should state I’m with Joel and I hate every one of the Fireflies with a passion reserved for Walder Frey or the Southern Union in Mafia III. If you subscribe to Utilitarianism, then it’s a perfectly valid decision to chop up a little girl to save the world. If you don’t, then they’re a bunch of murderers. A lot of good science fiction has been made from this very premise including Cold Equations and Those Who Walk Away from Omelas. Joel’s act that restores his humanity is the same act that may doom humanity, but I don’t remotely condemn it.

The game picks up immediately after this as Joel does his best to reconnect with Ellie despite the gulf existing between them. Eventually, Joel manages to win her over and they forge a life together as father/daughter. Unfortunately, Joel can’t escape from his actions and he’s eventually tracked down by a girl named Abby (Laura Bailey) along with her friends. They’re here for revenge on the sonofabitch who murdered all the Fireflies. I won’t spoil what happens next but Ellie proceeds on a mission to murder Abby and her friends in a decidedly cyclical act of revenge.

In simple terms, I love this story and it reminds me a lot of the Coen Brothers’ version of True Grit. The Last of Us and post-apocalypse stories in general are very often reskinned Westerns. Hell, the title of my second most famous book is Cthulhu Armageddon: A Post-Apocalypse Western. I’m very much a fan of the latter incarnations of the Western like Unforgiven that highlight the hero being barely any better than the quarry they seek. Ellie’s survival in the rough and tumble world of the fallen United States has meant she’s become more like Joel than the child she used to be. I like that as it resonates me a lot with the same sort of themes that I enjoyed in the early seasons of The Walking Dead.

Part of what makes the story work for me is that we do get to follow Abby enough to understand that, essentially, she and Ellie are identical. Both are daddy-loving down-home girls who are forging their lives as best they can in the hellscape they’ve found themselves in. They settle on murdering the people who ruined their families, only to bring holy hell down each other’s lives as more people get involved in their vendetta. If you have any knowledge whatsoever of blood feuds in real life such as the kind that afflicted Sicily, Albania, or other nations then this is true to life. Real life rarely works like John Wick. It’s much more like Taken 2 where you find out that even scumbags have friends, family, and loved ones.

Some reviewers have expressed a disdain for the game’s narrative. They dislike Ellie’s journey from being an adorable innocent (which she never was) to someone who is willing to commit murder to avenge her loved ones. They also dislike the fact that Ellie very consciously chooses revenge over building a life for herself as well as other survivors. There’s also the fact that Ellie is an LGBT+ protagonist, one of the few in modern gaming, who goes through nine different kinds of hell to enact dreadful retribution on those who wronged her. Honestly, I think it’s a credit to Naughty Dog that they gave such a meaty story to not only a woman but a queer one. Arya Stark is beloved because she’s Death’s Chosen, not because she was a sweetie pie. Though she was both now that I think about it.

Gameplaywise, the game is fine. It’s pretty much The Last of Us with the addition of the fact that Ellie can now swim. There’s a bigger focus on mortal enemies than there is on the cordyceps but I’m fine with that. This isn’t a game about the fungus apocalypse but the effects on humanity after the survivors have managed to weather the worst of it. I think humanity will survive without a vaccine but it’s because we’ve become a bunch of hardass brutal survivors. We just need to keep the Ellies and Abbys of the world from killing each other. Visually, the game is gorgeous and a lot of it is just going to be you stopping to look at the “Fallout 4 if it was real” natural beauty.

So, ignore the naysayers and pick this up if you don’t mind a pair of blooded cold-blooded killer gals on a mission to take the other out. I certainly don’t.

[CmdrKing]

Truthfully, what I read of how the game treats Lev and where the focus of his story is (with of course the acknowledgement that he's a side character and thus will have fairly limited story time) was... so unrelentingly vile I'm honestly glad I never played the original either? The game sounds from front to back like the head writer liked the accolades they got for the first game's DLC, and wanted to recreate that, but decided that marinating in misery is the only "Artistic" story you can tell about queer characters.

I'm sure a lot of people did great work on the game, I hope they go on to bigger and better ( and less traumatizing to them https://kotaku.com/as-naughty-dog-crunches-on-the-last-of-us-ii-developer-1842289962 ) things, but... yeah, I'm bored of this kinda crap being the Art Games.

[ProfessorDetective]

Truthfully, what I read of how the game treats Lev and where the focus of his story is (with of course the acknowledgement that he's a side character and thus will have fairly limited story time) was... so unrelentingly vile I'm honestly glad I never played the original either? The game sounds from front to back like the head writer liked the accolades they got for the first game's DLC, and wanted to recreate that, but decided that marinating in misery is the only "Artistic" story you can tell about queer characters.

I'm sure a lot of people did great work on the game, I hope they go on to bigger and better ( and less traumatizing to them https://kotaku.com/as-naughty-dog-crunches-on-the-last-of-us-ii-developer-1842289962 ) things, but... yeah, I'm bored of this kinda crap being the Art Games.

Why the hell can't non-cishet folks just get happy endings? For once?

Also, yes, this game seems to be a mix of boring and depressing. Sounds like most of Sony's first-party output.

[CharlesPhipps]

Truthfully, what I read of how the game treats Lev and where the focus of his story is (with of course the acknowledgement that he's a side character and thus will have fairly limited story time) was... so unrelentingly vile I'm honestly glad I never played the original either? The game sounds from front to back like the head writer liked the accolades they got for the first game's DLC, and wanted to recreate that, but decided that marinating in misery is the only "Artistic" story you can tell about queer characters.

I'm sure a lot of people did great work on the game, I hope they go on to bigger and better ( and less traumatizing to them https://kotaku.com/as-naughty-dog-crunches-on-the-last-of-us-ii-developer-1842289962 ) things, but... yeah, I'm bored of this kinda crap being the Art Games.

Joss Whedon once said the issue of Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a Pandora's Box for him because he was very glad many people loved and were glad to have a lesbian couple on television. In fact, at the time in Season 6, they were the ONLY lesbian couple on television. However, it was a HORROR comedy series and that left him in a pickle because the whole point of the series was to put his characters through hell. In the end, that left him in a no win situation as even though Willow got a new girlfriend after Tara's death, the experience was traumatizing for a lot of viewers.

In the case of Lev and Ellie, they avoid the grave but its a post-apocalypse horror game and also based on Westerns like True Grit's remake as well as Unforgiven. It is a long and brutal story rather than a happy one.

Why the hell can't non-cishet folks just get happy endings? For once?

It's a post-apocalypse horror game. Plenty of cis-het people love stories of survivors who go through hell and brutality in these games.

* The Road
* Mad Max
* Unforgiven
* True Grit
* The Walking Dead (the non-shitty seasons)

Hell, the Last of Us opens with Joel losing his 10 year old daughter in his arms.

[CmdrKing]

A tragic or nihilistic ending is in keeping with the genre (one reason I don't watch/read/play zombie fiction), true, but the game goes deeper than that with the queer characters in ways that make less sense in the setting.

Like, correct me if it's been explained badly, but Lev is routinely deadnamed and misgendered by his allies? The bit of backstory he's given is how he was rejected and abused by his parents for being trans? And beyond that he's mostly just treated as a loyal, skilled fighter for Abby?

"Hyper-competent person who is so ~tragic~ because society ~doesn't accept them~ and they've been hurt by ~everyone they love~ since their ~parents rejected them~" is the sort of thing trans people joke about as the only stories cis people can tell about us, because we exist as motivational misery porn for them. There's a place in art to show misery and prejudice, but if you're not going to a) make that a central aspect of the story and b) show the good along with the bad, it amounts to voyeurism. And when that's the common, cliche story about a group of people in media, to the point it's difficult to find the happy stories... adding to the misery pile is just a hack move, y'know?

Actually I'll add on to this with the core plot, this part should be behind a spoiler tag? As long as this works like most forums.

Code: Select all

edit: I think Ellie's core concept in this game, of "went on a quest for bloody revenge and came home so used up and hurt from the futility of it the lover she left at home refused to be with her any more" is a perfectly valid story, and "also she's gay so it's a girl" is fine.  But by adding on a somewhat superfluous opening where the two of them are hounded for being gay, in addition to the stuff with Lev?  It just becomes more on the misery pile, like you went out of your way to make the ending more tragic BECAUSE she's gay rather than that just being an aspect of her character.  I doubt that's the case, but it creates that impression.

[CharlesPhipps]

Like, correct me if it's been explained badly, but Lev is routinely deadnamed and misgendered by his allies? The bit of backstory he's given is how he was rejected and abused by his parents for being trans? And beyond that he's mostly just treated as a loyal, skilled fighter for Abby?

No, that's all to show the Seraphites are a fundamentalist Christian cult. Except they're more like Comstock and Cthulhu worshipers in that they practice crucifixtion and human sacrifice. Their transphobia is meant to show they're EVIL and make sure we don't feel bad when Abby and Ellie kill the fuck out of them.

You're right that is an overused trans story and it'd be nice to have one where they're just trans and awesome.

I think Ellie's core concept in this game, of "went on a quest for bloody revenge and came home so used up and hurt from the futility of it the lover she left at home refused to be with her any more" is a perfectly valid story, and "also she's gay so it's a girl" is fine. But by adding on a somewhat superfluous opening where the two of them are hounded for being gay, in addition to the stuff with Lev? It just becomes more on the misery pile, like you went out of your way to make the ending more tragic BECAUSE she's gay rather than that just being an aspect of her character. I doubt that's the case, but it creates that impression.

One interesting element of Jackson is the fact that the one bigot in town is, the one bigot in town. Everytime he says something nasty, he's shamed and the town forces him to apologize to the lesbian and bisexual women in town he harasses. He even is forced to make them sandwiches. The absence of homophobia might have been stronger as a statement but this is also that it is just flat out utterly unacceptable in the community.

[ProfessorDetective]

Why the hell can't non-cishet folks just get happy endings? For once?

It's a post-apocalypse horror game. Plenty of cis-het people love stories of survivors who go through hell and brutality in these games.

* The Road
* Mad Max
* Unforgiven
* True Grit
* The Walking Dead (the non-shitty seasons)

Hell, the Last of Us opens with Joel losing his 10 year old daughter in his arms.

Point, but even in other genres it's ALWAYS either a tragic ending or a vague ending whenever non-cishet characters are involved. It gets tiring...

[clearspira]

Tbh, I thought the first game wasn't bad but it was overrated. I thought the gameplay was generic, the controls rather clunky at times, and the story was nothing that I haven't seen before. I guess someone who doesn't read a lot could be captivated by Joel and Ellie's story but that wasn't me.

I will however say that Ellie is honestly a great model for how to write lesbian characters... as she was never written to be ''lesbian character''. Its like what Chuck points out about the difference between Janeway and Sisko and how whilst she was written to be ''the woman captain'', he was never written to be ''the black captain''. He was just ''the captain who happens to be black''.

Ellie never comes off as being a token like so many other LGBT characters do because she was written to be a girl first and lesbian second. Just like heterosexual characters are.

And I think that was the first and greatest problem with the sequel. Because writers have a tendency to focus on the things that people love about the original story and deciding that all they need to do to make the sequel a success is to just give us 10X the amount of what they gave us before and call it a day. People loved The Force? Now they're a way to turn you into Naruto. People loved the metaphysical themes of The Matrix? Here's comes the Merovingian and the Architect to lecture you baby!

People loved LGBT Ellie? Lets load it in. Gays, lesbians, transpeople - its all good. People loved how she was a strong female? We've got a character that looks like She-Hulk for you. People loved how dark the first game was? Lets make it an horrific tale of revenge with an ending so fucking depressing it may literally spark actual suicidal thoughts in people.

Some may like The Last of Us 2 - and if you do, great - but for me, it is a textbook example of what sequels do wrong.

[CharlesPhipps]

Why the hell can't non-cishet folks just get happy endings? For once?

It's a post-apocalypse horror game. Plenty of cis-het people love stories of survivors who go through hell and brutality in these games.

* The Road
* Mad Max
* Unforgiven
* True Grit
* The Walking Dead (the non-shitty seasons)

Hell, the Last of Us opens with Joel losing his 10 year old daughter in his arms.

Point, but even in other genres it's ALWAYS either a tragic ending or a vague ending whenever non-cishet characters are involved. It gets tiring...

Yeah, it's kind of weird that only horror movies seem to have them as protagonists. Which could mean that horror is more progressive and less caring about breaking conservative taboos or that horror movies are more likely to do horrible things to them so they don't care.

Not a good pair of choices.

Be better to have a gay protagonist in something much less bleak. Like a gay Nathan Drake.

People loved LGBT Ellie? Lets load it in. Gays, lesbians, transpeople - its all good. People loved how she was a strong female? We've got a character that looks like She-Hulk for you. People loved how dark the first game was? Lets make it an horrific tale of revenge with an ending so fucking depressing it may literally spark actual suicidal thoughts in people.

There's Ellie, Ellie's girlfriend [who is bi], and Lev so I don't think that's the case. It was the internet being its usual collection of asshole selves that they assumed Abby was trans because the girl has a bit of muscular definition.

Mind you, I also remember how the internet blew its shit when Ellie was revealed to be gay by the DLC. Apparently, some of the guys who played the game shouldn't be allowed to breed because they were so angry over their internet daughter being gay.

[clearspira]

Incidentally, has this game gotten a Chinese release?

I don't know how many of you follow Jim Sterling, but his recent video about how hypocritical corporations are when it comes to LGBT characters and plotlines was bang on the money. I really did have to laugh when he showed how the lesbian kiss in the Rise of Skywalker was edited out for China.

It seems as if these corporations are only pro-LGBT when there is money in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUl674WXflc