The Last of Us II is Good, Actually (Patreon)

The Last of Us Part II is about moving on from what we had before. On one level it’s about grief - how we cope with the pain of losing someone - on another level it’s about what we choose to keep and what we choose to leave behind.

I would probably call this game a masterpiece. It’s not without its problems. Nothing ever is. This game though, is really something special.

But you wouldn’t fucking know it looking at twitter, would you?

The Last Of Us II is Good, Actually

(Spoilers for TLOU1, TLOU2)

Now I am going to get to my analysis, I am going to talk about what is so good about this game, but first, unfortunately, this one is going to be largely about discourse. Nothing to be done about it. No way around it. This video is going to be about the discourse. I’m sorry.

We’re going to have to wade together through some discourse - some bullshit, some lies, some bad faith takes, some nonsense, some valid criticism, but mostly, just bullshit.

Some time before the game was actually released a fairly comprehensive summary of the plot was leaked online. Probably the most shocking detail of the leaks - also fairly arguably the most shocking detail of the game itself - was that the protagonist of the first game, Joel, is murdered fairly early on in the first act of the game, by a new character, Abby, who you will later play as.

Fans of the original game were incredibly pissed. Look, I have some sympathy for the distress it’s caused people, I’m a big Joel fan. A fan of Joel, a big fan, of Big Joel. 

However, pretty quickly this devolved into a messy, toxic, in some cases actively harmful discourse around the game, claiming all sorts of gibberish rumours about the plot, the development, and the intentions of the creators, which has lasted on even past the release of the game, with Laura Bailey, the voice actor who plays Abby, receiving death threats.

This discourse is incredibly messy and I think it’s honestly going to be hard to track so I’m going to group it by topic.

The discourse episode 1: The trantom menace

So according to popular discourse in the days and weeks directly leading up to the game’s release, Joel is graphically murdered early in the game by a character called Abby who is a transgender woman who hates Joel for killing her father in the events of the first game. Clearly, posits the discourse, this is a direct attempt by the creators to spit in the eyes of the most dedicated fans of The Last of Us Part I by cramming in forced diversity and murdering the player avatar character Joel. Who wrote this? Anita Sarkeesian? The tiny goblin men who run my brain won’t allow me to have original thoughts so I can only assume it must be literally Anita Sarkeesian.

What are Naughty Dog thinking? Neil Druckmann more like Neil Cuck.. trans...

There was a lot of anger, there was a lot of feeling of betrayal, but let’s be crystal clear here - there was a fucking lot of blatant transphobia.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/abby-the-last-of-us-part-ii 

As you might expect specifically from 4chan and generally from Angry Gamers Online, there was a level of ridicule of anything about the game that was slightly outside of the norm, Abby being muscular, Ellie not looking like a supermodel, a whole bunch of focus on Dina having a big nose. In some of these cases this happens to coincide with actual bigotry - some of the people edgily memeing about Dina’s big nose knew that the characters was jewish and were trying to signal to other antisemites that they’re one of the cool kids, doing the cool… antisemitism… but some of these attacks were just generic policing of how women’s bodies should look.

We should try to be understanding of what these guys are going through though. When you’ve never seen a real woman in your entire life, the reality can be pretty shocking. They don’t look anything like Asuka Sohryu, and their bodies have a whole 3 dimensions. Women can be all sorts of shapes and sizes, and some of them have penises. I know it can be hard to accept that some women have the physical strength to pick you up and crush you like a grape, but I’m not asking you to accept it, because it’s just the truth - I’m asking you to admit it’s kinda hot.

Probably the biggest issue with all the transphobia directed towards Abby, though was that she isn’t actually trans. There’s nothing in the game that indicates that she’s trans, so um… oops? I think it’s pretty clear to see how we arrived here. Plot leaks indicated that one of the characters was going to be trans - Lev, the boy Abby takes care of who is a runaway from a religious cult - and these very smart and intellectual Gamers rubbed their powerful brain cells together and decided the trans character must be the muscular woman you can see in the trailers. I think this is a pretty interesting example of how transphobia is just an extreme form of gender policing and how that gender policing affects everyone cis or trans. Would Abby be allowed in a women’s bathroom? Well, are you gonna stop her, she’s fucking huge!

There was, actually, some discourse around the trans representation in the game from trans people too - the actual trans representation in the game, to be clear, the actual trans character who is actually trans. 

Lev, who ran away from his community in a religious cult is a trans boy. The group he comes from - the seraphites - are worshippers of someone called The Prophet who led a revolutionary action against the powers that be in Seattle and the story of her life has become folklore and even religious scripture. The Seraphites are extremely culturally conservative, and when Lev shaved his head like the men in the Seraphites, they all freaked out and he and his sister had to run away. I like Lev a lot, I think he’s a well written and fun character and on a personal level I have a lot of sympathy for the struggle of not being accepted because you’re bald.

The trans discourse around this character has been pretty interesting I think - some trans people feel that showing Lev get misgendered and deadnamed by the people who are searching for him is a uniquely trans pain and that the cis writers making the game were appropriating trans suffering by using it. More generally in media this is an issue of trans characters always being abused in some way in every story they’re in, and never getting to simply be. 

Now, I personally think it’s pretty appropriate to show this stuff here - these characters are textually transphobes, and bad guys, and you murder them shortly after with your gun or maybe a big knife, it’s up to you. I think it makes sense for these characters to be engaging in this behaviour even if it’s something we’re sick of seeing all the time, but can I just take a minute to appreciate how much more interesting and worthwhile this discourse is than haha Abby muscles trans bad… 

There is also a lot of discussion about the orientalism of the Seraphites, being a majority east asian group with alien cultural practices and beliefs, and an enforced “primitive” culture - they reject modern technology as a sinful vice that caused the apocalypse.
It does fall into some casually racist tropes and I feel like the really obvious move for a religious cult in post-apocalyptic America would have probably been to have it founded by evangelicals, but then again, maybe they didn’t wanna go in too hard on white conservatives - they do already have a gang of gun-nut slavers in Santa Barbara whose insignia is a rattlesnake around a skull and who call themselves The Rattlers.

It’s um, not too subtle.

Returning to Lev, though, through the whisper-telephone of twitter there was a rumour going around that he suffered extreme targeted transphobic violence in the game. Some people were calling it “torture porn” even, and the narrative seemed to be a conflation of a bad time that Lev has in the late game - physical abuse, starvation, imprisonment - with the discourse to do with the appropriation of trans suffering. I was actually pleasantly surprised to get to the end and realise Lev didn’t get horribly murdered by transphobes or something. I was really expecting him to.

I think it’s worthwhile warning people against content they may find deeply upsetting or triggering, and for many people the act of misgendering and deadnaming will be enough, because there is a lot of associated trauma, but a huge amount of the response I’ve seen from transmasculine friends and trans men online has been really positive. 

A lot of people have felt really affirmed by seeing a trans man, especially a trans man of colour represented in a Triple A blockbuster game and played by an asian trans man. There is like, no representation of trans men in media. There’s Buck Vu in The OA, and he’s played by the same actor!

I want media creators to confront this pattern of always making trans people suffer in stories. I want people who might be seriously hurt by seeing that suffering to be effectively warned so they can decide if they want to avoid them. I also want people not to be driven away from stories they might find really uplifting and positive because people are misrepresenting them.

I think we should probably confront the way social media affects our discourse and the way we approach art, but first:

Discourse 2: Electric Boogaloo

So with the notion that Abby was trans debunked, the anti-Abby discourse needed a new focus, and something in the discourse drove a deep-seated need to show that Abby couldn’t realistically overpower Joel. It’s bad storytelling - it must be! It doesn’t make sense. They just did it for no reason. Aha, here’s the take: No woman could realistically be as muscular as Abby.

This one really took hold for a little bit. If Abby isn’t trans (read: secretly a man) then there’s no explanation for her enormous muscles. No woman could ever look like that! Have Naughty Dog ever seen a woman? Neil Druckmann more like Neil DRUNKman.

This is an easy enough one to sort out, right? Abby’s body is based on Colleen Fotsch, an athlete and bodybuilder who if anything is even beefier in real life than Abby is in the game. Besides that, there are loads of female bodybuilders in real life much more buff than Abby. You can just google female bodybuilding.

But hold up - if we’re talking about realism, if we’re talking about the post-apocalypse, right, we can’t realistically say that real women could look like Abby does in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Nobody would have the diet and exercise opportunities to put on that much mass under those conditions, right?

Abby would have to literally live in the gym to be this buff right? Which she does. She literally lives in the gym. For three years. To prepare for her revenge quest against Joel. It’s probably fair to say that seeing her dad die of being shot in the face has not had the best psychological effect on her, and she’s gotten a little um, obsessive.
When you start the section of the game where you play as Abby the first thing you see is that she was asleep in the room next door to a huge gym. Her people, the Washington Liberation Front, have occupied a sports stadium and have a whole town going in there with farming and jobs and yes, lots of exercise equipment.

More than anything though, I find this particular facet of the discourse a little bit telling. There is this pathological need to prove that the game must be wrong, it must be unrealistic, it must be implausible, because the story must be bad, because the story takes Joel away.

I just think at its root, this facet of the discourse tells us that folks were just really mad that they didn’t get to play as a man any more, and had to play as women, and they knew they couldn’t just say that. They had to find some other narrative. They had to seek out some other way to find someone to blame.

Disc-Trek III: The Search for Druck

https://twitter.com/Neil_Druckmann/status/1275103339907178496 

https://twitter.com/Neil_Druckmann/status/1279841603843051520 

There has been quite an intense focus on Neil Druckmann and the creators of the game, essentially as the perpetrators of the crime of The Last of Us II. It’s an interesting representation of the kind of layman’s media criticism we see all the time online - an auteur theory on steroids that often credits all good things to some sort of hypergenius savant creator but far, far, more often blames anything bad - especially anything bad and woke - to a sinister cabal of SJWs menacing the games industry, or the television industry, or cinema with their sinister agenda that puts ideology above good art.

Neil Druckmann, the creative director behind the game has been the particular butt of many jokes and the target of many angry gamer rants, with accusations of him using the game to not only perpetuate his woke agenda, but also to polish his own ego. Druckmann, according to twitter and 4chan, wrote the character of Owen as a self-insert literally modeled off himself so that he could have a nude sex scene with Abby.

Neil Druckmann more like Neil Fuc--

The justification for this particular rumour seems to be totally circular. We know Neil wrote in a self-insert character because the character has sex. At the same time the thing that he did wrong was writing in a self-insert character just to give him a nude sex scene. We know it was a self-insert character, you see, because he gave the character a sex scene.

Owen doesn’t even look like Neil Druckmann, he looks more like Dave Rubin.

Now if we’re going to talk about Neil Druckmann, as a representative of the management of Naughty Dog, there is a pretty fair and legitimate thing to discuss here namely worker exploitation, because it’s actually pretty well known that Naughty Dog, like many triple A game studios, engage in shitty worker practices like crunch, making their employees work overtime, sometimes late into the night every day of the week so that the game can be delivered on time without having to spend money on additional staff.

But no, that’s not the narrative being used to attack Neil Druckmann and Naughty Dog, instead it’s that Druckmann wrote the game deliberately to champion LGBT people and people of colour and to attack christian conservatives and to blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

My white hot take here is: if Druckmann did purposefully direct the game to be an attack on conservatism (and it’s not inarguable that parts of the game are that) that would be a good thing. Conservatism, let’s just be super real for a second, fucking sucks. Contrary to what you may have heard online, it is not “the new punk rock”. But let’s be even realer for second, that’s obviously not what the game is about. The creators of The Last of Us II didn’t put in thousands of hours of work creating a game with as much to it as this game has just to shit on chuds. Who are they? Me?

Discourse 4: Are there any good subtitle jokes to make about the 4th film in a franchise I kind of want to go back to Star Wars and do a New Hope thing here but it would probably be weird if I’ve done different franchises for all three and then I just go back to Star Wars right?

Okay I looked it up and the code name they’ve been developing The Matrix 4 under is apparently Project Ice Cream so 

Discourse 4: Project Ice Cream

There is something pretty clearly… funky going on here. How did all this discourse get so full of, well, lies?

Now that the game has been out a little while a lot of the popular critique has shifted to praise. That is to say, I think a huge number of the people who have actually played the game feel more or less how I feel about it.

I think there were several instigating factors here that created a kind of perfect storm. First, the game is full of minority representation - gay, poc, trans characters, and even for Abby’s part, a powerful muscular woman in this type of game is a fairly rare thing. Second, the shocking death of the protagonist from the first game. This was always going to be incendiary for some people. Thirdly, of course, is the plot leaks. 

The first two factors didn’t have to be as much of a problem for the discourse if they were only transmitted through people playing and enjoying the game, these things probably wouldn’t have caused nearly as much of an upset.

As soon as people were mad online it was too late to actually engage with what the game is about. Especially with only the leaks to go on and not the actual game, nobody gets to argue that the game is actually about anything. Obviously Joel was only killed for shock value. These SJW hacks are so desperate to subvert expectations they’ll do anything just to shock you.

Meanwhile in reality, honestly even the leaked plot was enough to tell what the game was about. It’s about revenge. It features 4 whole revenge quests. You wouldn’t believe how much revenge you can fit in this baby.

But the online narrative demanded, as it is wont to do, that every reaction should only be the angriest, most extreme, most binary good or bad take possible.

Just to get really Black Mirror on you for a second, this is the problem with how social media encourages us to approach art. Everyone has to have a take. Whether they’ve played the game or not. Whether they’ve played the first game or not. Whether they remotely care about this game, or the previous, or the studio, or games in general, or not. Everyone has to have a take as soon as they possibly can.

The studio can’t run late, because the game was promised for a deadline, and the hot-take industrial complex will suffer without content shot directly into the content hole on time, so the workers have to be forced to work late, to never leave the office, to never see their families.
The plot has been leaked, so everyone must discuss it. Nobody can not have a take about the plot even though nobody has played the game yet. Simply saying you’ll wait for the actual game to come out is boring, and doesn’t get clicks, and it doesn’t get shared and so it doesn’t become the popular opinion that everyone is talking about.

The game is out, so now everyone who has a copy must play it live to give their opinions and reactions live, knowing full well that simply finding the game to be fine, or excellent, or even just not as bad as people have been saying won’t get shared, so it won’t become the popular opinion everyone is talking about.

Something about our mode of consuming and discussing art is fundamentally broken here, and it has to do with a drive for both financial and social profit.

https://twitter.com/LackingSaint/status/1274424293544337410 

https://clips.twitch.tv/AuspiciousPlausibleMagpiePunchTrees 

Like this streamer who got to Joel’s death, really early in the game and ejected his disc and cut it in half, and then cut up his TLOU1 disc too. You can’t even really experience Joel’s death until you play the rest of the game because there are so many flashbacks and extra details but this gamer is so pressured to have a reaction that indicates that this is offensive terrible storytelling that he cuts up the disc right away. This happens so early in the game. He hasn’t even played the game.

The Analysis 

The Last of Us Part II is about moving on from what we had before. On one level it’s about grief - how we cope with the pain of losing someone - on another level it’s about what we choose to keep and what we choose to leave behind.

The Last of Us concerns itself primarily with one popular facet of post-apocalyptic media. Namely: What is a societal luxury, and what is basic human nature? Or in other words what is optional and what is necessary? It’s typical in many post-apocalyptic stories to make this distinction using the “old world” before the apocalypse contrasted against the present. The things people have now, in the survivalist wasteland, tend to be necessary basic human needs, and the things that they used to have in the “old world” but don’t any more are generally considered optional.

This is really interesting when applied to queerness. There is a homophobic and transphobic trope that tells us that queerness is a luxury, and your concern about queer characters in a story like this might be that it would paint queerness as optional. So how does The Last of Us II approach this?

Well, in both the first game and the second, the post-apocalyptic world presents a subversion of the usual narrative device - It isn’t modern liberal capitalism contrasted against zombie wasteland - the “old world” that contains the luxuries are actually new human settlements that are springing up. Boston in the first game, Jackson, Seattle and Santa Barbara in the second. These settlements are all different but they all use this same thematic device to tell us what is optional and what is necessary.

In Jackson an old man is homophobic towards Ellie and Dina. In Jackson Dina is with Jesse but she wants to be with Ellie. In Seattle, in the seraphite world Lev is forced to live an inauthentic gender, and his community is policed by strict conservative norms and traditions.

But out in the wasteland, Ellie and Dina are together, Lev gets to present his authentic self, and continues to be religious but without all the baloney. Queerness is necessary, bigotry is optional. Spirituality is necessary, conservative norms and traditions are optional.

To some degree it just carries the message forward from the first game. A lot of people felt that Joel's character arc in Part I was basically going from only caring about himself to only caring about one other person and that's basically true, but it's the point. Seeing things from Joel's perspective you understand it as a choice between losing humanity in a literal sense, by not developing the cure, and developing the cure by sacrificing Ellie, and therefore losing humanity in a different way. If Joel's in-group contained everyone in the world, maybe he would make a different decision, but his "us" is just him and Ellie, and he'll always choose her first, and that's how everyone acts. It's not necessarily wrong, it's just human, but it keeps driving us toward cruelty and destruction.

A perfect example from the first game would be David, the main antagonist from the Winter chapter. When Ellie first meets him he asks to trade for the deer she shot, because he is from a larger settlement that needs more food. His friend goes back to get supplies to trade, and in the meantime he and Ellie have to defend themselves from an infected attack. This simple situational change, making them need to survive together, makes David a sympathetic character. He becomes one of us for as long as they work together.

Through the rest of the chapter though, David’s men hunt Ellie, and capture her, and eventually he and Ellie have to fight to the death. Who’s in the in-group and who isn’t is everything to the first game, and that’s what informs the final decision - Joel’s choice between saving all the people in world and saving the only one who matters to him.

It's about the last of "us".

This second game is extremely about revenge. Abby’s dad was killed by Joel in the events of the first game, and so she kills him, and then Ellie seeks her out to get revenge on her, killing a bunch of her friends along the way. Abby meanwhile meets Lev, a trans boy on the run from his transphobic community and she saves him from them, but his quest to get revenge against them costs him his sister. Abby comes back, finds her friends dead, does some revenge on Ellie’s friends, but Lev makes her let them go.

Ultimately Ellie chooses to go after Abby again rather than live a peaceful life and her girlfriend Dina can’t abide that. When Ellie gets back from finding Abby - even having decided ultimately not to kill her - Dina is gone.

See how much gosh darn revenge is in that plot?

See how the revenge is never good?

Revenge is never good.

Going in I was actually a bit worried I was going to be smacked over the head by Abby’s huge arms, and by Abby’s huge arms, I mean the revenge themes. I was worried it was going to be quite over the top, because between Abby revenging on Joel, Ellie revenging on Abby, Abby revenging on Ellie and Lev revenging on his transphobic mum, it seemed like it was going to be about as subtle as a poke in the eye, but when I got round to playing it it's legitimately powerful in the way it constructs the different perspectives of people you play as.

I was shocked by how much Abby, this person I first met as a cold, angry, antagonistic character came to be sympathetic, and sad, and sweet and caring, and ultimately I think I like her more than Ellie (although Lev is too good for this world and inarguably the best character). As an aside, after Abby hears Lev get misgendered, Lev asks her if she wants to ask him about it, and she says “do you want me to ask you about it” “not really” “ok”. Which I have to say is some S tier cis allyship.

The fact you see Abby as this villain - this monster - when she kills Joel, before you know anything about her, before you know why, is for my money, pretty fantastic. She’s from another world. She grew up among the fireflies, the resistance fighters from the first game, and when her father was killed and the fireflies disbanded she joined the WLF, Washington Liberation Front.

Fundamentally Abby comes from this big project, this world of collaboration and working to rebuild society. Her in-group is much bigger from the start. When her dad argues with Marlene, during the events of the first game, he wants to sacrifice Ellie to find the cure to the disease, but Marlene puts it to him that he wouldn’t do it if it were Abby. Just after she leaves though, Abby, who was listening in, tells him that if it were her she would want him to go ahead.

This isn’t meant to paint Abby as morally superior, but as with the first game, she’s just a part of an in-group, but where Joel and Ellie are loners, Abby’s group is much bigger.

Ellie, even, having lived in Jackson for a few years, growing more used to a bigger community, is furious at Joel for his decision when she finds out what he did.

In many ways, Abby is a reflection of Ellie, and Joel. She reflects Ellie’s quest for revenge, just a little further progressed, a few months further forward in time, and She and Lev are clearly a reflection of Joel and Ellie’s dynamic from the first game.

It’s the simple but powerful storytelling trick the game does that teaches us about retributive justice, and the desire to seek revenge. Like I said, when you first meet Abby there’s little reason to care for her, and then she kills Joel and becomes the absolute villain of the first act of the game. But starting over at the crucial moment and seeing things from her eyes really changes everything. That reflection of Joel & Ellie’s relationship changes everything. It’s fantastic.

There’s this cliche often referred to, kicking the dog, where writers will have a character who they need to show is evil do something incredibly evil early on or at the point of their moral corruption to show you who they are. Something, for example, like kicking a dog.

If you’ve ever seen…

Hm…

If you’ve ever seen Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, the character Dio literally kicks a dog in the first scene where he meets the protagonist, just to show how evil he is. A dog is an unambiguously innocent and lovely creature. Loyal. Sweet. Kicking or harming a dog is something surely only the lowest, most vile person would do.

Throughout survival and action games like The Last of Us you have to defend yourself against dogs. Wolfenstein makes the dogs mechanical to reduce the upsetting nature of it, but ultimately it’s not that necessary - when a dog is attacking you the loyalty and the sweetness are a lot harder to see behind all the teeth and so on. At the end of the first act of The Last of Us Part II, Ellie sneaks into Abby’s base at the aquarium, and kills everyone she finds there, including Owen, his pregnant wife, and Abby’s dog.

At the start of the next act, as Abby goes out on the patrol that will lead her to Owen, and the aquarium, and eventually Ellie, you, as Abby, pick up a dog to go with you. You can pet the dog. You can play fetch with the dog. A dog is an unambiguously innocent and lovely creature. Loyal. Sweet.

In one way, the dog is the perfect demonstration of the in-group out-group dynamics of The Last of Us - from the inside, there is nothing as lovely as out canine pals. They unthinkingly, unconditionally love and protect us. From the outside, they become one of the scariest things. They unthinkingly and unconditionally protect your enemies.

From Ellie’s side, killing the dog to get to the woman who killed her old man is just a practicality of her mission. From Abby’s side, well, she killed the fucking dog what the fuck. She literally did the most villainous thing.

I saw someone saying that the game makes you do bad things and then tries to guilt you for them, and heck, I definitely feel that - on Ellie and Dina's ranch, knowing what's coming, holding JJ and looking out over the fields, or up in the night watching Dina and JJ sleep, I never want to leave. I want to make Ellie stay forever. I don't want to play another second of the game. But the thing is, the game isn't trying to shame you for anything, it's trying to show you how the characters feel about the decisions and actions they make, and I think it just does a fantastic job of that. I don’t feel like I’m making any of the decisions in the game, but it breaks my heart all the same when Ellie leaves Dina and JJ on the farm.

As heavy handed as The Last of Us II is with its messaging about revenge, at first I thought it was kinda funny - it doesn’t really apply to real life, does it? I don’t generally go on revenge quests to hurt the people who have hurt me. It should be obvious enough, right? You don’t gain anything from esoterically seeking out ways to hurt the people who you feel have wronged you, not even any kind of justice.

But then, my good friend smart boy Jack Saint pointed out that if anything the reception the game has received shows us that a lot of people do believe in retributive justice. They do think they can make things right if they hurt the people they think have hurt them. Sending death threats to Laura Bailey. Accusing Neil Cuckmann of being a sinister plotting SJW.

And it made me think of the end of the game, when Ellie has Abby overpowered and beaten - when she’s choking the life out of her and holding her under the water. I was shaking a little watching this scene, watching these two characters I’ve been made to empathise with fight to the death, brutally and horribly. And then as the camera closes in on Ellie, she pictures Joel sitting on her porch, with his guitar.

And it’s not just that doing this won’t bring Joel back, she knows that. But when she sees him, what really clicks into place is that Joel wouldn’t want this. Joel wouldn’t want any of this. None of this is what Joel would have wanted you to do.