Week 2: Ashley Johnson’s Character Saves Me with Her Switchblade

This week in my The Last of Us play through, the player character Joel and the NPC Tess had to guide A̶s̶h̶l̶e̶y̶ ̶J̶o̶h̶n̶s̶o̶n̶ Ellie through the ravaged city surrounding their quarantine zone in order to complete a mission, drop Ellie off with some Firefly contacts, and get their guns back from Marlene. There were a lot of zombies. I screamed a lot. Tess carried the team. For the first part of the section I played this week, it seemed like the characters, or at least Tess and Joel, were for the most part interchangeable. Ellie was obviously the object of protection, but Joel and Tess were equally protectors of her, regardless of their genders. However, this shifted a bit when Tess’s character was revealed to have been bitten and she sacrificed herself so that Joel and Ellie could get a head start. Not only did this involve Tess, a woman, begging her male partner to complete a task that seemed irrational and emotions-driven and then dying to help said male partner and to provide him with more angst, but also the narrative has now become big, strong man protects tiny, helpless girl.

Now, this is a bit of an exaggeration. Joel, despite his physical strength, is in a delicate state emotionally after the loss of his best friend, and he does tell Ellie which topics not to bring up as he knows that they will upset him. Similarly, Ellie, though she is female and young, is not delicate and helpless, and there were at least two times in my play through when her NPC spontaneously stabbed someone for me, which was extremely helpful and shows that she’s not some delicate little girl waiting to be rescued, fighting with a “handbag and riding crop” as Eileen in Silent Hill does, according to the reading this week. However, at this point of the game, the narrative does, unfortunately, boil down to “male protagonists rescuing non-playable female characters” as the reading brings up, so I wonder whether this theme will persist or if I we see a subversion of this trope.