Lies, Spore Zombies, and Queer Trauma: Don’t Believe the Negative Hype about The Last of Us Part II

This isn’t exactly the essay I had wanted to write about the Last of Us franchise. This franchise is probably the most personally impactful games-related entity that has had an impact on my life, with the possible exception of Dungeons & Dragons (which gave me a social life I simply wouldn’t have had as a teen and young adult). In so many ways The Last of Us (both parts) form the culmination of my lifetime relationship to video games that started when I was eight and has continued all the way to (I shudder to speak it) thirty-two. But above all, the first game played what is now a highly ironic role in helping me move past a block in my life that was keeping me trapped, through helping me conceptualize my relationship with my father in a new way.

I wanted to write an essay about that — about how the first game is this beautiful trick where you think you’re playing as this bulky, brutal man who is going to Do What It Takes to Protect His Surrogate Replacement Daughter Since His First One Got Shot Because of the Zombies, and that’s technically true, but really you’re always in the surrogate daughter’s position, building this relationship of trust which is then broken, but in a way that could not have happened any differently because of who Surrogate Dad is. That’s a really important story to me, I’ve saved the footage for a video essay from a recent replay, and maybe I’ll tell it someday. I did not want to write a critical response to objections to the second game and the franchise as a whole; I did not want to be put in what will be inevitably characterized as defending a piece of corporate art made under ethically questionable conditions when there are, allegedly, I’ve been told, equally good examples of outsider art that meet the same criteria (the narrator chimes in at this point, “there are not.”) I really didn’t want to write another essay that will potentially go viral about the political themes of a game that centers on a queer young woman in her somewhat small minded rural American town who has guitar minigames you’re intentionally meant to fail and asks questions about violence, because that did not go well for me last time and I’m still living with the consequences of writing that essay. But, here we are. Warning: this essay will contain full spoilers for the first Last of Us game, some spoilers for the second, and is going to be long as hell because there’s a lot to unpack. If you’re not a fan of the franchise, I promise I actually will offer a summary of what this is all about — but I need to paint a picture of the controversy and why this matters first.

I knew that The Last of Us Part II was going to generate an absolute Life is Strange-grade hurricane of controversy. I sure as f — didn’t expect the controversy we got though. And that’s because like Joel (the protagonist of the first game and the surrogate father to the second game’s surrogate protagonist, Ellie), Naughty Dog, LLC. are liars. They built an enormous web of deception about what this game was really about, and personally, I love it. I love the surprise and tension that arose from being truly unsure about what was going to happen next, I loved the feeling on first playthrough of having no idea who might die and who might live, I loved seeing things from marketing recontextualized around the game’s true plot rather than the implied plot we had all built up in our mind for the roughly three years since the game’s first heavily sapphic-themed trailer was released.

“Swear to me! Swear to me that everything in those trailers definitely doesn’t involve fake voiceovers and completely different characters than they appear to!”

Suffice it to say, quite a few people decidedly do not love it, and the game is under largely politically-framed siege from people ostensibly aligned with both the political right and political left. (It is worth noting that the various controversies I’m about to note appear to not be putting a dent in the game’s bottom line.) I’ll get to explaining the overall significance and importance of the franchises in a moment — but first I want to name the controversies that have arisen.

What Is Wrong With The Last Of Us?

Separating out the objections and hostile reactions to the game’s sequel that have come up in the past just-over-a-week since release, I feel as if the substantive ones from well-intentioned people in the discourse circles I participate in can be broadly categorized into the following three cases: 1) the games present a grim, cynical, potentially even right-wing narrative of apocalypse which is not what we need at this particular mini-apocalyptic moment, and/or is just f — ing depressing at any time; 2) the labor practices used by Naughty Dog and Sony in producing the games, and especially the second, were not good or ethical, and this is an endemic problem with so-called AAA (high budget, equivalent to “blockbuster”) games; and 3) the transgender representation in Part II, which is in the the game, is bad and constitutes an exploitation of transgender trauma for cisgender audiences.

I’m not going to refute point 2. If it’s true that Naughty Dog drove their animators to hospitalization through burnout, that sucks and it’s not something that I want to see happen in the name of making good entertainment for me as a consumer. I would gladly tell game director Neil Druckmann — represented in The Last of Us Part II as a supervillain from the pre-spore zombie apocalypse equivalent of Marvel comics, who also has poor labor practices — that I would gladly have a less smooth and “realistic” image of my player character hitting someone in the head with a spiked bat if it meant that people got to go home and get vacation time. That sucks. It’s endemic in the games industry. It’s also endemic to my former field, academia, and it’s why I personally am between careers myself. I can attest that I have seen the kinds of burnout described as happening to Naughty Dog animators happen to young, bright academics, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, over and over again. I’ve also heard stories of it from non-games coding (although people I trust tell me that games is worse than not-games, at least for programmers), medicine even long before COVID-19, and of course service work of all kinds. None of this is a justification, but, as I’m going to get into later in the essay, we live in a hellish wasteland already (which is one of the reasons the post-apocalyptic setting of these games seems, to me, to be very much “what we need right now” and not “what we don’t need right now.”) I acknowledge the problems are there, but I don’t think boycotting this particular game at this particular moment will be read the way people would want it to be, and I’d rather not see it happen. Your mileage may vary, but this essay’s purpose is not to engage with that.

Point 1 alone is an interesting one. On its own, I was actually abstractly worried about the potential impact on the success of what I presumed would be an excellent game on its own merits, when that game’s theme is “a world devastated by a pandemic that has robbed people of the normal lives they had before,” into a world devastated by a pandemic that has robbed people of the normal lives they had before. I was already predicting “no actual sequel to TLOU2 will happen, because people are going to be so freaking tired of apocalypses, zombie or otherwise.” I’m not sure if I still hold to that, the first-week sales numbers indicate I was wrong about it, and honestly this is going to tie in with objection 3 as well — in the sense that, maybe sometimes when you’re Going Through a Thing, you actually want to see that thing depicted. I suspect mileage varies based on individual on this one.

What began to frustrate me, as much of the plot of Part II was leaked in advance (more on that later) and gameplay demos began to release focusing on brutal melee and stealth combat and killing in a mud-filled landscape of broken buildings, and it became clear that the plot was very much one of vengeance in which innocents die and our heroes, such as they are, lack moral clarity, people began to suggest that this was somehow a right-wing political statement, that the game was saying that in the event that society’s institutions break down, people will revert to a Hobbesian war of all against all rather than cooperate. People began to point out that in this time of an actual pandemic which, I’ve myself pointed out is from a hard science perspective far more contagious and likely to disrupt society in a major way than spore zombies that work the way the games show them working, people have come together to protest police violence, actually take over part of Seattle without killing anyone, and form “mutual aid networks” (the last of which I’m skeptical of in real life for reasons outside the scope of this essay). Thus, the argument goes, The Last of Us games are ultimately a fantasy about a Texan redneck who probably would have voted for Trump if his world hadn’t ended in 2013 who uses guns and violence to protect his delicate daughter from danger, and is justified in killing anyone and everyone who gets in his way, and cooperation doesn’t happen, and isn’t valorized as good when it does. And all of this is a right wing political statement. Which it would be, if that’s what happened in the games. But it’s really, really not. Let’s put a pin in that and come back to this point in a minute.

One doesn’t tend to have giant barn dances without some form of social cooperation, just saying.

Finally, point three. The point I never expected nor wanted to address. Frankly, as a person who is transgender, I’ve reached the point of my transition (seven years on, which, yes, is also the distance between the original Last of Us game and today, and yes, the two are related) where I don’t really want to be defined by that. I don’t want to (nor do I have a chance at pulling off) go “stealth” and erase my past, but I also don’t want to be known as “that trans girl who blogs about cultural stuff.” I want to transcend my trans identity in this respect. So my original plan to write about the original Last of Us and its impact on my life was going to elide the specific transgender elements of the story of how the game impacted my life, and try to make a broader point about how the game came out at the apex of very similar “dad games” (including Bioshock: Infinite, which is in many ways almost beat for beat similar to The Last of Us apart from how it ends) but, I feel, subverted the medium by ultimately making itself a “daughter game.” I certainly didn’t feel as if discussing the game would require anyone who wasn’t transgender and didn’t have my very specific experience — which I will, reluctantly, detail later in this essay — to talk about transgender issues at all.

And then Naughty Dog pulled their ultimate shock move, the thing I truly didn’t believe any studio would do and in fact didn’t want them to do, because I expected if they did it would be, frankly, like the people arguing that the game is bad because of it think the game is like. They put a trans boy in the game, and they made his story a direct consequence of societal bigotry as a result of transphobia. I have almost never seen this done well and I understand why people are skeptical about it. I was ride or die for the franchise, but highly apprehensive about this when I was spoiled a couple of days before release that this would be a plot element. I’ve gone on record that as a writer myself, I usually avoid trans characters, because I feel as if there aren’t very many good models for how to handle our stories in ways that actually acknowledge that our experiences are different from those of people who are not transgender, but also respect our identities. I even grudgingly acknowledge, despite my reticence (again, for another essay and another time) about the strange and would-be-unbelievable-to-a-Bush-era-closeted-teenage-me trend for children’s cartoons to take the forefront in LGBT representation, that Steven Universe of all things has probably managed best at pulling off a trans narrative up to this point, and that had at least a thin layer of “actually it’s about transforming rocks who don’t even have gender” metaphor.

Steven’s plotline in the end of the show Steven Universe proper is actually remarkably similar to the dreaded TLOU2 trans plotline, but this hasn’t really been acknowledged.

However, since release, it’s become clear to me that many, if not most, of the people who are most upset about the inclusion of this plotline in The Last of Us Part II have incorrect information about it — some, because they simply are not interested in playing the game, which is completely fair, but others because they are willfully ignorant, and still others who are not playing the game and not learning more because they have been misled into believing that there is traumatic content that isn’t actually in the game. So I want to talk about all of this, but first I want to recap the entire situation surrounding the franchise for people who may just not be very familiar with what’s going on. So, like The Last of Us Part II itself, halfway through my whole thing, I’m gonna take us back to the beginning, leaving the plot threads I’ve just set up hanging for now.

Damn you Dr. Uckmann!

Why Do We Care About the Spore Zombie Games Anyway?

The Last of Us was a highly anticipated release from Naughty Dog, creators of the Uncharted and Jak & Dexter series, and coming on the heels of the somewhat problematic but highly praised Uncharted III: Drake’s Deception. Naughty Dog was known for highly polished, movie-like game experiences, eschewing role-playing elements and even highly detailed platforming in favor of combat and extremely well-choreographed cinematic sequences. While I can’t speak to Jak & Dexter games, never having played one, the Uncharted games were essentially pastiches of Indiana Jones, and extremely well-done ones (leaving aside the various racially insensitive elements which, I guess, technically also bring them closer to their clear inspiration). While these games were rated M for Mature or T for Teen by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) and were plainly aimed at a primarily adult audience, I have played all of them and did not in any way think that they had any pretensions to commentary on the real world (beyond some perfunctory “warlords exploiting developing nations is bad” sort of stuff to set up excuses to shoot the soldiers of said warlords) or to being anything other than highly detailed pulp adventure. As someone who historically has preferred games like those made by Bioware and Obsidian, where the player gets a hand in shaping the storyline, playing a game like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (my first exposure to Naughty Dog’s work) was a bit frustrating, because I found myself thinking the refrain that’s become increasingly popular about Naughty Dog’s work: why didn’t they just make a movie? (The obvious answer being that no one is going to give a game studio millions of dollars to “just make a movie,” but there’s complexities here for later.)

In any case, The Last of Us promised to be a new direction for Naughty Dog, because of its advertised darker tone and setting — a unique sort of zombie apocalypse, brought on by fungi — in a time when zombie apocalypses and dark narratives were sort of the in thing (The Walking Dead television show was huge, and so was the dearly departed Telltale Studios’ episodic game series based on it, which, we must acknowledge, shared a very similar premise to the original Last of Us, only with a more racially diverse cast). The title seemed to allude to an inevitable grim ending (the extinction of humans, we might imagine) and that sort of thing was still cool then, I guess. What was decidedly not on the table narrative-wise was LGBT themes, or so we thought.

So, the rundown. The Last of Us is, like other Naughty Dog games, a third person cover-based shooter game, but with added RPG elements which do not afford the player control over the narrative, but allow the main player character, Joel, to learn skills and to craft items. The narrative follows Joel, a Texas construction contractor who lost his daughter at the start of the fungus zombie apocalypse of 2013 not to a zombie (“Infected”) but to a military police officer ordered to fire on anyone leaving a quarantine zone (you know, the sort of thing that the US government definitely does in trying to control infectious disease, oh, wait.) Twenty years later, in military-controlled Boston, he’s an amoral mercenary, whose first mission along with his initial companion Tess (in the first game, no one has identifiable surnames) is to kill a bunch of Infected and also regular humans in a brutal, and failed, attempt to get a bunch of guns they were smuggling back from a partner who double crossed them. (You’ll note the much-discussed “cycles of violence” theme that has been so picked apart with regard to Part II starts here — it’s not new, the sequel just highlights it a lot more, possibly because Naughty Dog felt players missed the point in the first game.) Long story short, the only way to get the guns back is to do a mission for the revolutionary group known as the Fireflies — escort a girl named Ellie out of the Bostom city limits. During this mission, Tess is killed and Joel learns that Ellie is Infected, but immune to the effects of the disease, and that the Fireflies hope to create a cure by studying her. Tess pleads with Joel to overcome their mutual past as “shitty people” and to take Ellie all the way to the Firefly research base, and he reluctantly agrees, setting course for his ex-Firefly brother Tommy’s settlement in Jackson, Wyoming, where he hopes they can find information on where Ellie needs to go. Along the way, we encounter the game’s first canonically LGBT character, Bill, a gay man grieving the loss of his ex-boyfriend (priming audiences to expect “Bury Your Gays” from the subsequent game, I might note) and see Ellie learn to survive — and kill. We also learn she’s a gigantic nerd and that Joel did some really terrible things in his past. When they arrive in Jackson, Tommy has the information on where the Fireflies are supposed to be, and Joel wants Tommy to take Ellie, because he’s afraid of becoming attached to someone the same age as his daughter Sarah when she died. (Much like in Stranger Things, it seems like grizzled dad-dudes can trade in a dead daughter named Sarah for a superpowered replacement daughter named El-something at any time.) He gets over it though, and when he’s wounded in the search for the Fireflies, we get the trademark Naughty Dog protagonist switch where Ellie becomes the protagonist for a while, as Joel lies comatose and vengeful raiders attempt to kidnap and literally eat them. Because of Ellie’s actions, they are able to escape, and Joel goes on a violent rampage through the village looking for her, where we clearly see that the villagers, cannibals though they may be, are also people who are trying to protect their families, and notably, that they find Video Game Protagonists Joel and Ellie F — ING TERRIFYING.

The original game wraps up when they finally reach the Fireflies in Salt Lake City, Utah, where Joel asks Ellie if maybe they should just turn back and go live in Jackson with Tommy. He’s fully adopted her as his daughter at this point, and clearly both of them have some inkling that the research the Fireflies want to do won’t be great for Ellie. However, Ellie insists that “it can’t all be for nothing,” even as Joel reveals that, before accidentally having Sarah at a young age, that he wanted to be a singer, and that he can teach Ellie to play guitar when this is all over.

All of this is what I wanted to focus my essay on. I have really deep and complex thoughts about it, and I’m going to sum them up as simply as I can. The end of the game is a trolley problem, and in a huge number of games you would have the option of choosing if you divert the trolley or not. Red or blue morality. Whatever. It’s also an example of a specific narrative trope that’s appeared often enough that I kind of feel like it deserves a TV Tropes page, which is to say “sacrificial lesbian” or something like that — I first ranted about it years ago in my first Medium post, reviewing Life is Strange, a game which I will note I’ve come around on — where a lesbian character (we didn’t know Ellie was lesbian in 2013 when the game came out, but it was heavily rumored for various reasons, not least being her probably-likeness-rights-infringing resemblance in the first game to actress Ellen Page who was also at the time heavily rumored to be lesbian)’s death is the only key to saving a massive number of people. Lesbian trolley problem, whatever. Life is Strange has the same dilemma, albeit not with all of humanity, just one town. The point is that Joel learns Ellie will have to die to create the vaccine, and has a choice of whether to allow this. In Life is Strange we get to make this choice about its sacrificial lesbian, Chloe Price — we can save her or the town. In The Last of Us, we are “forced” to play as Joel as he follows the path he chooses, which is to mow down every Firefly in his path to rescue Ellie, including notably the surgeon who was going to perform the lethal surgery to remove the cordyceps fungus from her brain.

This made a lot of people mad.

Here’s the thing though: Joel couldn’t make any other choice. One of the big flaws of Bioware-style games, which I, again, adore, is that your character becomes a cipher. We know Commander Shepard is badass. Commander Shepard can have one of two genders, and can be attracted to people of one of two genders, and of several species. We have no idea what Commander Shepard’s reason for collecting fish is. Does it connect to a childhood trauma? We don’t know. We don’t know why Shepard chooses the romantic partners they do, within the confines of whatever we’ve decided their orientation is — why would Commander Shepard choose to leave long-time girlfriend Liara for Specialist Traynor in Mass Effect 3, if that’s how we chose to play her? We can come up with reasons, but the game doesn’t support (or oppose) them. Similarly, we don’t have a real reason why Shepard makes the moral calls they do, all the way up until the end. Does Shepard choose to become a Reaper rather than destroy all robots because they have robot friends, or because Shepard is power hungry, or something else? It could all go either way, which means that as iconic as Commander Shepard is, Commander Shepard is really an extremely vague character — and they’re one of the more distinct personality-having characters in branching games.

If a character could go either way on whether he’s going to lose a daughter a second time when he could prevent it, that character is not well realized. But Joel is well-realized. That doesn’t mean it’s right, it just means that the guy we’ve been tagging along with and controlling for combat segments couldn’t do anything other than what he does at the end of The Last of Us. You could not add Bioware-style mechanics to The Last of Us and have a game anything like what we have.

The game concludes with what I’ve generally felt to be Joel’s real sin — because, while this is somehow controversial among the game’s fans, I believe you can’t justify experimenting lethally on children regardless of how many lives are at stake — which is that he lies and tells Ellie that she isn’t unique, many people are immune, and that the Fireflies (who he definitely doesn’t say he killed) have no use for her as a research subject, and no hope of creating a vaccine. Ellie is skeptical, but accepts Joel’s answer for now in the very last scene of the game, where he swears to her that he’s told the truth. They go back and live in Jackson, like Joel wanted.

As we learn in TLOU2, that doesn’t work out well. Again, moderate spoilers for TLOU2 ahead — however, these spoilers mostly relate to details that were kept out of marketing for… generously, questionable reasons, and that do not in my opinion disrupt overall enjoyment of the narrative TLOU2 is about the direct consequences of the unavoidable choice Joel makes at the end of The Last of Us. This isn’t what we were heavily led to believe in the lead-up to release; for one to two years, the general assumption about the game was that it was going to be some kind of lesbian revenge story, as in, about a lesbian (Ellie) avenging the death of her partner. Again, Bury Your Gays. Naughty Dog really wanted us to think this, too, and it seemed like a foregone conclusion until plot details started to leak after the game experienced a COVID-related release delay. The official debut trailer, which contains absolutely nothing that is actually in the game, depicts Ellie playing a messed up version of a hymn, but making it about revenge, in a house full of corpses, and then Joel walks in and she says “I’m gonna find and I’m gonna kill every last one of them.” This came pretty close to the trailer which was just a full cutscene (which actually is accurate to the game, although the scene appears very late in the game) depicting Ellie and her love interest Dina dancing and kissing in a barn dance in Jackson. The immediate assumption is that Dina will be killed and Ellie will be seeking revenge for that, and literally everything that Naughty Dog put out to promote the game implied this as well, straight up to a scene that is actually in the game appearing in an “actual gameplay” trailer, where Ellie is violently hacking her way through some people (who, of course, we assumed were violent homophobes or something) and then she leaps off a roof and gets grabbed from behind, initially seemingly by an enemy, but then she turns around and it’s Joel, and he says “you think I was gonna let you do this alone?”

See, that happens in the game, but it’s not Joel. Because it’s not, in fact, a lesbian revenge story in that sense. The problem Naughty Dog was undoubtedly up against in marketing was twofold: first, Joel is a super popular character people are attached to; and second, Joel is Ellie’s only key attachment to another living person at the end of the first game, so she doesn’t exactly have a long list of people she might be avenging. With this in mind, Naughty Dog tanked a lot of preemptive criticism from LGBT folks about “bury your gays” by showing Dina in a lot of trailers — but never ones surrounding combat — while also revealing that an enemy faction, the Seraphites, are an LGBTphobic bigot cult. We obviously made the connection that this must mean that the Seraphites raid Jackson for being too LGBT-accepting or something, and Ellie goes on a homophobe-killing spree. But in fact, the Seraphites have nothing at all to do with Ellie’s revenge. Building up Dina as the person Ellie also cared about was a decoy to cover up that Joel dies in the tutorial segment of the game. Dina, who is madly in love with Ellie, accompanies her on her quest to leave Jackson (which doesn’t have enough people to send support with her) and kill Abby, the woman who beats Joel to death with a golf club without giving a clear stated reason. Homophobia plays almost no role in Ellie’s plot at all (beyond a background plot detail of a drunk guy calling her a slur and Joel being an overprotective dad toward him, which is used for an absolutely heartbreaking cutscene late in the game, but isn’t really important).

I don’t want to give a full rundown of all of the plot points of The Last of Us Part II, so I’ll just say that the other big thing Naughty Dog concealed from us — that the Laura Bailey-voiced Abby is a full player character who gets her own full single player campaign that interrupts Ellie’s story near its climax — is the reason for a lot of player outrage. However, the bait-and-switch was likely necessary in a lot of ways, because of gamers being terrible. The thing is, Abby has muscles. (When it leaked that there was going to be a trans character, and also images of Abby leaked, gamers FLIPPED because OBVIOUSLY she must be a trans woman, an enraged trans woman who killed our beloved Joel! *Narrator’s note: Abby just works out a lot.*)

Seriously, she sleeps by the weight room.

Abby is not conventionally attractive the way Ellie is. I’ve historically maintained that The Gamers, by which I mean the kind of people who tend to hang out on toxic forums and construct Gates if you catch my meaning, put homophobia above anything else and would rather play a straight woman than a gay one, but in this case that’s not true, probably because they spent four years getting used to the idea of playing as one specific lesbian, and this straight woman happens to look a lot more like they imagine lesbians or *shudder* trans people look. I understand why Naughty Dog hid her from us, although ultimately this game is a lost cause in terms of appealing to the toxic gamer crowd (and I think they knew that) — which is why disingenuous critiques from the left-wing side of things bother me so much.

I want to just run through the list of objections (minus the labor practices one, which as I noted is outside the scope of this article) and provide context. Again, some of these things constitute spoilers, but with one exception I believe they are all only spoilers because they were explicitly built up as spoilers, and minus the sociopolitical context they exist in, would have been revealed in the marketing.

Objection 1 is, again, that this game is not the kind of game we need right now, that it promotes libertarian or conservative values, and that it has a both-sides view of morality. Only the last point really has any substantive case to be made for it, but just to go through some points:

1. People are cooperating in real life to stand up to real life oppression, and that’s great. Real life oppression is also still happening, people are still suffering real life violence and trauma, so it’s not accurate to say that portraying a story where some people don’t cooperate in a post-apocalyptic scenario is erasing cases where people do cooperate in times of crisis.
2. The game is actually significantly more optimistic about society in a post-apocalypse than I am, frankly. As a marginalized person, avoiding anything that even vaguely looks like an apocalypse (something we are currently failing badly at) is a big political priority, perhaps my biggest. And The Last of Us Part II shows up Jackson and later the Washington Liberation Front (Abby’s faction), post-apocalyptic societies which nevertheless function (especially Jackson) based on mutual cooperation and aid (something my leftist friends love to talk up as an alternative to government in real life, but which frankly sounds more libertarian than that bogeyman “liberal democracy,” but again, rant for another essay). These factions are openly accepting of gay people and probably would be of trans people based on what we see later, by the standards of where they’re located (the WLF is in Seattle, it makes sense to me that they would have openly gay soldiers; that Jackson just has one guy who occasionally says a homophobic thing, in freaking Wyoming, is impressive).
3. Yes, “both sides” are presented. Notably, most of the Washington Liberation Front doesn’t give a sh — t about Joel or Ellie, Abby’s group is a small contingent of members that came from elsewhere and have a specific grudge. However, again, since this is not as initially implied a story about a lesbian fighting the homophobes who killed her girlfriend, but instead a story about a woman who is gay who teams up with her girlfriend and others to avenge her surrogate dad, who was killed by people who basically everyone in the discourse acknowledges had an understandable if not justifiable reason to kill him, that changes the context a lot versus if we played as Abby who was a Seraphite.
4. The “other side”’s story is really not about the other side all that much. It’s about Abby and Lev, the trans kid. It is basically the story we were advertised, only about transphobia rather than homophobia.

And that brings me to the big thing, the transphobia. Again, I didn’t want to talk about the fact that I’m trans here, but I feel I have to — both because I’ve seen non-trans critics who speak up dogpiled by trans people or people claiming to represent us for saying that Lev’s storyline is actually very good, and because since I have to re-out myself for that reason, I might as well talk about how weird this whole situation is for me because of how I related to the first game.

So first, this is the spoiler that I feel is an actual spoiler: Lev is a trans boy who Abby protects, in basically the exact same fashion as Joel protected Ellie in the first game. This is an intentional parallel — the Abby part of the game ends with Abby carrying Lev away from danger exactly like Joel carrying Ellie out of the hospital in Salt Lake City in the first game. The man’s killer ends up ironically becoming him. As you can derive from this, Lev faces peril, but he does not die. No LGBT character other than an incidental WLF soldier who refers to her girlfriend and is probably killed by the player-as-Ellie dies in the game. Zero non-incidental gays are buried. This alone should be a bigger positive point about the game, for folks who despise the Bury Your Gays trope.

Abby’s entire storyline is almost tangential to Ellie’s, with Ellie appearing as an antagonist (there’s a great boss fight, against Ellie, mirroring a boss fight from the original game). She’s not even the primary antagonist — that’s the transphobic Seraphites. Lev has always known he was a boy, but Seraphite society prescribes death for trans people. He confided in his sister, who told him to keep quiet about it. He did, until he was assigned an exclusively feminine social role, at which point he shaved his head, apparently a capital offense, and he and Yara (his sister) went on the run, eventually encountering Abby (who doesn’t realize Lev is trans until probably two thirds of the way through their adventure, and is extremely cool about it.) Abby and Yara have a conversation in which they discuss Yara’s efforts to force Lev to desist from transition, and agree that this was clearly abusive and wrong of her, and that trans kids aren’t going to desist. In the era when the author of freaking Harry Potter is out saying the exact opposite about this, I think this is freaking valuable. How many of the more than four million copies of this game that have sold so far have been sold to non-trans people in the UK, where stuff about how trans kids totally will desist is the front page of their newspapers daily and they’re about to ban trans people from public bathrooms?

The objection to Lev’s storyline from other LGBT people seems to be that it’s traumatic, and that the weight of existing traumatic storylines about trans people mean that “cis people shouldn’t depict any more trans pain/trauma,” as numerous Twitter accounts who don’t follow anyone I know keep saying every time I talk about this. The thing is, Lev is a badass and he undergoes comparatively little trauma compared to almost everyone else in the game. He’s morally clearly better than either of the lead characters. While he’s “deadnamed” by antagonists, it’s not clear that he’s particularly bothered by this, and it’s worth noting that in the context of the plot, he hasn’t told them that his name is Lev. They don’t have anything else to call him. He has a confrontation with his mother in which he acts in self defense and she dies, and this happens off-screen — which is extremely notable for a game that is in fact very violent and rarely pulls punches. But, importantly, this scene ends with Yara reassuring Lev that he protected himself and did nothing wrong. These are all really important messages. And speaking as a trans person who lived my life in daily terror that the US Supreme Court could rule our rights nonexistent until the Monday before the game’s release, when they thankfully did not, we are not at the point where all of us can be comfortable ignoring trauma, because we are faced with it every day.

This is mostly grist for another essay, but right now there is a lot of LGBT representation that is not dark. It’s true that if you go to the LGBT category on Hulu, you will find a lot of sad romance stories about people in the closet or facing homophobia, but those aren’t genre fiction. I wouldn’t watch them if they were about straight non-trans people, and I won’t watch them when they’re about us either, because they’re boring. A huge proportion of the stories currently being told about trans and other queer people are in animation aimed at children. As I alluded earlier, Steven Universe, the main show (not the movie and Steven Universe Future, which released separately) ends with basically the climax of Lev’s arc. We knew Steven was trans even though technically he’s “a biologically male human with a female space rock belonging to his mother that leads everyone to mistake him for his mother and call him by her name and pronouns”.) And it’s honestly rougher in some parts than Lev’s story — there’s WAY more use of the wrong name and pronouns, WAY more emphasis on the trans kid being told to change “back” — but the lack of blood and gritty aesthetics means that it seems more acceptable.

What there isn’t a lot of is LGBT representation in stories in the PG-13 to R rated (T to M for video games) range. And The Last of Us Part II is essentially two queer stories in one mainstream targeted game. That’s great. And I absolutely will not allow anyone to shout down critics who like the game in my name because “we [trans people] agree that we have too many stories about trans trauma” and “nearly everything about us is like this.” We don’t agree on the first thing, speak for yourself, and basically NOTHING about us is like The Last of Us Part II. But I wish that it were.

Last note, on my personal connection: I was in the closet, living under a male identity much later in life than I wish I had waited, when I played The Last of Us at release in 2013. This was largely due to my issues with my father, a cowboy-styled Texan man who has mannerisms incredibly like Joel’s to the point that nearly every scene with Joel makes me think he’s talking to me, and usually makes me cry — because I knew he wouldn’t understand or accept. When I originally played I was enraged at Joel’s choice to destroy the Fireflies and save Ellie, because I felt it “violated her agency” — which is almost exactly how Ellie phrases things in Part II. I had played as her during the part where Joel was in a coma and felt she had the right to decide for herself.

I quickly realized that the intensity of my anger at the first game’s ending was a result of my anger at my father for keeping me in the closet until age 25. I realized I couldn’t let him make decisions for me. I remembered that my mother had told me many times my name at birth would have been “Eleanor,” which was similar to Ellie, and when I chose that name upon deciding to come out of the closet three days after completing The Last of Us, I knew I would probably end up with the nickname Ellie. It seemed like a good symbol at the time. Of course Naughty Dog didn’t intend this, and the ending of The Last of Us has nothing to do with being trans. What I find amazing is that they then went and did a sequel where the character who basically picks up Joel’s mantle literally does defend their kid against transphobia, as the primary arc — what I always wanted, but never got, from my father. In many ways, apart from the tragic decision and lie and its consequences, Joel is the father I wish I had — certainly, almost punching a guy for being homophobic toward Ellie shows that even with his flaws, he’s more ideal in that respect than my own dad. But the idea that this series is not a deeply queer narrative now that we have both games, or that such a narrative shouldn’t be told, seems frankly obscene to me.

Don’t be like Ellie at the end of the first game. Don’t believe the lies.