The Last (Jedi) of Us Part II: Divided Fandom, Spoilers, and Morality
I’ve been a long time listener of Robservations: The Show about Something, so much so that rather than the Samuel L Jackson add-on to my Amazon Alexa, I’d pay for one with the voice of one Robert Meyer Burnett. I’m a relatively new Imagination Conoisseur, quickly making the jump from John Campea’s channel to his, as we seemed to park our shuttles in the same shuttle bay, with our shared love for DEVS and DUNE. I’m writing today because there has been a disturbance in the Force. And no, I’m not talking about The Last Jedi, but I will get to that later. I’m talking about The Last of Us Part II. This has been a video game 6(5 million years in the making, just kidding only six) years in the making and I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that for many gamers, this is the “Avengers Endgame” to The Last of Us’ “Infinity War”. The Godfather Part II to the first game’s Godfather.
The first game moved me immensely, to tears within the first fifteen minutes and at least three more times before the end credits came a scrolling.
Someone not affiliated with Naughty Dog or Sony Interactive Entertainment has leaked footage spoiling many of the game’s key moments (that we know of). But not having played the game, we don’t know how important these moments are. Some of them have to do with deaths of characters we’ve come to love from the previous game. And while yes, knowledge of these deaths may or may not come as confirmation for many of our vast theories regarding Naughty Dog’s second foray into their post apocalyptic world, we simply do not have the context with which to judge these moments. If it were spoiled that Thanos died at the beginning of Avengers Endgame or that Luke died in The Last Jedi, I don’t know how people would react. I don’t know if they would still boycott these movies like many fans are cancelling their preorders of the game as we speak. I don’t have a problem with this game and I can’t have a problem with it if I haven’t played it yet. Both Endgame and The Last Jedi made over $3 billion at the worldwide box office.
Video games are arguably a smaller market, especially The Last of Us being a PlayStation exclusive, and with a much higher price point as most launch titles retail at $60.oo USD. Being a self-proclaimed cinephile, the Uncharted series were the games that got me into video games, and I’ll never forget walking into a Best Buy with my parents and seeing a PlayStation 3 with a demo of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. That game starts with a train car hanging off of a cliff that was highly reminiscent of one of my favorite scenes from Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park. When I got my PlayStation it was with the special Uncharted Trilogy bundle and I was more than ecstatic. A few years later, I picked up The Last of Us on preorder about a week after my birthday, still to this day the best birthday present I’ve received. As soon as I heard another game was coming from Naughty Dog, I knew that I HAD TO HAVE IT. And I played the game and absolutely fell in love. An amazing story about finding something worth fighting for in a broken world. Within that sentence lies one of the most fundamental challenges that represents the human condition. It also reminds me of Victor E Frankl’s book “Man’s Search For Meaning”, a truly essential read about the meaning of life where Mr. Frankl recounts his horrific experience in the concentration camps during the Holocaust and how he never lost hope. And that’s what The Last of Us is about. Hope. Just like the S on Henry Cavill’s suit.
Now on to The Last Jedi. I personally loved it. From its quirky cell-phone humor in the opening to the epic Rey and Kylo Throne Room fight sequence, it’s the most fulfilled a Star Wars movie has ever made me feel. Yes, I didn’t care much for the whole war profiteering subplot, but I commend Rian Johnson for taking an established IP and taking some real risks that, as far as I’m concerned, paid off. The movie was well received by critics, and some of the fans. I remember going to see the movie a second time with one of the fans that did not like it so. He kept spewing facts and minutiae about canon and rules and ‘star destroyers can’t do that’, etc. At a certain level, I can get behind his concerns. If Star Wars (within the movie universe) had been as established in its worldbuilding as, say the Harry Potter series, I would have more of a cause for concern. It’s not like the whole series has had magic battles all the way through and then in the final battle of Deathly Hallows, Harry and Voldemort apparate to a busy London street, and Voldemort gets gunned down by a beat cop coming to Harry’s defense. But Star Wars wasn’t based on a book series, save for a few shades of DUNE? The Holdo ship sacrifice scene to me feels plausible within the world of Star Wars, but in a way like, hmm, why hadn’t anyone thought of this before?
It’s one of those moments where you feel smarter than the teacher because you pointed out something obvious that he/she overlooked. Or maybe it has happened before, as the galaxy is vast, and I’m sure there’s more than one creative soul within it. I personally don’t have problems with the Rey/Kylo Force-Skype conversations. It was a clever way to tie the characters together and expand the abilities the Force grants you. Now I haven’t read any of the extended lore and can’t verify whether or not any of the abilities are canon, or even tell you whether or not them being canon even matters. It all takes place in a world where people seemingly use religion as a justification for good and bad actions, albeit in space, with laser swords. A human story in a not-so-human world. Just like The Last of Us.
So the leaks have come, and I’ve read them and even watched some of the footage. Don’t worry, no spoilers here, but I do want to add an important caveat to the conversation around spoilers. I recommend everyone read the UC San Diego study concerning spoilers and the subsequent enjoyment of stories. To paraphrase, the study concluded that it’s easier to enjoy something when you know what’s happening as opposed to trying to figure it out as you’re going along. And I definitely do enjoy figuring things out as I go along, many of my favorite movies are psychological thrillers. But I think that telling someone that Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze or that Edward Norton is Tyler Durden only takes away a fraction of the masterful filmmaking at play in both movies. When we get to that point, we must ask ourselves if we value the journey or the destination. I’m a Journey man through and through. I want to experience The Last of Us Part II in its full HDR glory with my surround sound system and the lights off. The game looks staggeringly beautiful, only second to Red Dead Redemption 2. After the leaks though, an uglier side of the video game community began to surface.
People have tweeted at game director and Naughty Dog vice president Neil Druckmann that they loved The Last of Us and he should “keep his personal politics out of the sequel.” My response to this is that all the stories we tell are human stories, and what makes up our humanity is how we interact with the other humans around us. And how we treat people like us and especially people who aren’t like us. So his personal politics were something that were influential in him being able to tell the story he wanted to tell with the first game, so I don’t think it should be any different for the sequel. The spoilers may or may not depict a person of the LGBT community with having a villainous role in the game, and many people’s first reactions or responses were that Naughty Dog is trying to push a woke agenda with this game.
Once the game comes out, hopefully the game’s director will talk more about the protagonists and antagonists in the story, but I hate this idea that just because a completely fictional character in a piece of commercial art represents an underrepresented portion of the populace, it’s immediate cause for concern because there might be an agenda. As if being more inclusive and friendlier and accepting actually hurt someone. The game takes place in a 2038, post-pandemic United States! At a certain point people might ask, are the only people who survive in any apocalyptic scenario straight, white, “regular” people? I just see it as, oh there’s a “villain” in this game, and oh, they might be trans or something. Haven’t seen that before, okay cool, let’s get back to crafting Molotov cocktails and stealth killing infected. My final issue is with the spoilers and character deaths and the whole idea of protagonists and antagonists.
Joel and Ellie have killed many people. Not all of them in self-defense. From our day-to-day life, theirs is very bleak, very reminiscent of a Hobbesian “state of nature.” When you’re out in the open, and people who see you will either take you captive or kill you on sight to eat you, killing others becomes a lot easier. And how can you justify killing someone you didn’t really have to kill? As the needle gets pushed more and more in one direction, as the habit of killing becomes more and more routine, it could become hard to judge how much is too much and when in fact it’s necessary. Just like an addiction.
So in that regard, Joel and Ellie are the protagonists from the player’s perspective because we experience the story through them. As the first game was about hope and finding something that was worth fighting for, Part II is about the fight. The revenge, hatred, and violence you exact on your journey to seek justice in an unjust world for the people that were worth fighting for. So when it comes to actions and consequences, other people in the world of The Last of Us have just as much of a right as Joel or Ellie to get revenge on their own terms. Whether or not that fares well for our beloved characters, well we’ll just have to wait and play.
