Week 4: It’s Verging on Creepy that Ashley Johnson’s Name is in All of My Blog Titles but I’ve Started a Theme and It’s Too Late To Stop
So first of all, I totally read the wrong article for last week, but we’re gonna take another look at the graphics and visualization of The Last of Us, in terms of the promotional material, as one thing the Dill and Thill paper mentioned was how “women are underrepresented in video game magazine articles and advertisements.” Now, this statement was definitely talking about the video game market as a whole and not just individual games’ marketing and advertisements, but I wanted to see if The Last of Us also fell prey to this under-representation. Therefore, I googled “last of us promotional art,” and I selected a few to take a look at.
This first one is the one I see most often in relation to The Last of Us, probably because it’s the cover of the game. Here we see Ellie and Joel both looking over their shoulders in some swampy, abandoned town. Both are armed and look wary. However, it’s interesting since, going off of size and the rule of thirds, Ellie seems to be the focus of the image, not Joel.
This next one would probably what it looked like if The Last of Us was the second album by a father/daughter folk music duo. However, the focus is definitely put on Ellie and Joel equally, and they both have relatively enigmatic looks on their faces. What are they reacting to? Who are they looking at? We have no idea, but I do think it’s interesting how young Ellie and how old Joel look. I feel like teenage girls and old men are never the focus of video games, and they usually just serve in “little sister” and “wise mentor” roles, respectively, so it’s interesting to see that these two are not only the focus of this game, but also portrayed in such a stripped-down way.
This last one is interesting because it does remind us that this is, in fact, a violent game in which both Joel and Ellie will be expected to fight. On one hand, I think it still breaks the mold a bit, as we see a female character posing with a weapon not in a sexual or glamourous manner, but in a way that clearly shows she’s about to stab this dude in front of her. Not only that, but she’s stabbing this person in order to save Joel, who, by all expected tropes, should be the one saving her. However, this promo image, along with every other more “aggressive” image I found in my simple google search, portrayed the unnamed NPC antagonists as very “masculine” men. This is definitely reflected in-game, and most of the female looking and sounding characters are either named NPCs with whom the player actually interacts or infected zombies screaming at me as they try to bite my throat out. It definitely says something that most, if not all, of the uninfected (and therefore still thinking, feeling, and logical) people you have to fight in this game are male.
