Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Worksheets and Dinosaurs: Putting the Violent Actions of The Last of Us Part II’s Player Characters in the Context of Generational Trauma
The past two weeks have been a whirlwind for anyone who pays attention to video game journalism. Essentially daily a new piece attacking some element of The Last of Us Part II is released by a major outlet. As someone whose primary takeaway from the game was not “wow, there’s violence in this game” or “wow, this was probably prohibitively expensive to make and labor corners were likely cut” (because those things were also true of Final Fantasy VII Remake, Star Wars Jedi — Fallen Order, Yakuza 0, the Resident Evil 3 remake, and Yakuza Kiwami, all AAA games released in or immediately prior to the most terrible year 2020) but rather “wow, this game is entirely either about playing as a very noticeably lesbian character, or about defending a pointedly trans little boy, that is f — ing huge” and “the accessibility on this game is amazing and many more people will be physically able to play it than basically any game in history,” I find the fact that there have not been thinkpieces coming out at a steady pace about FF7R, Fallen Order, and the Yakuza games might say something about the ideological priorities of the people writing those pieces, and this might be bad. But I already wrote that piece.
I’ve addressed external, real-world reasons why I think it’s crucial that criticism of The Last of Us Part II keep in mind representation and accessibility, but that still leaves me with a lot of people who have good faith objections to the storyline. I want to be clear that I think overdoing the criticism of a bad storyline which happens to be a bad (but inclusive) storyline about a lesbian and a trans boy would be unfair if it didn’t note the importance of including those characters. Furthermore, as I noted in my other piece about the game, this makes sure to contradict some very dominant real narratives about trans kids that are being fed to people in the media (especially in the United Kingdom) and are causing real, incredibly harmful policy changes, and that’s both legitimately courageous (I’m truly shocked that there hasn’t yet been a bigger burst of outrage from the type of “feminist” that the author of Harry Potter is) and worth some kudos. But all that aside, it’s not a bad storyline, and I find that the reviews are ignoring elements internal to the narrative that contradict the dominant viewpoint that this is a Spec Ops — The Line type story about why, as Polygon critic Maddy Myers puts it, “the repeated lesson” is that “killing is bad” and that the game’s narrative simply wouldn’t happen “if Ellie could just let go, or learn to meditate, or find a cognitive behavioral therapy workbook, or something.” Leaving aside that cognitive behavioral therapy for trauma (like the main characters of The Last of Us Part II suffer from) is controversial even among clinicians who want to buy into it and is believed by more radical critics to be basically a way of getting people to blame themselves for what’s wrong with the world (a very topical thing I’ll get into later here), the point of The Last of Us Part II is in no way that killing is bad. Reviewers are, for whatever reason, choosing to blatantly misunderstand this game.
This article aims to be a breakdown of what the narrative of The Last of Us Part II is about. From this point on there will be full spoilers. I am going to attempt to do what a conservative United States Supreme Court Justice might call a textualist reading and look as much as possible at the original text of the game (and its predecessor The Last of Us) without digression into why it’s personally resonant for me or what it says about the real world, because I think that understanding what is happening in a plot this complex is crucial as a tool for reviewing or critiquing a narrative. I am sure someone will accuse me of “The Thermian Argument,” which is to say justifying some kind of political message based on things that only exist fictionally in the narrative, as the aliens in the film Galaxy Quest do by assuming that the television show Galaxy Quest is in fact “historical documents.” I’ve already made my clearly non-Thermian arguments that this game deserves grace in criticism because of its LGBT themes and its accessibility; I am now going to argue for why the game does not contain some of the elements it is being critiqued for, or that those things are misinterpreted. This will inherently involve taking the game on the terms it wants us to take it, which means treating the characters as real people (Myers and other critics who have commented on the way the game handles violence are absolutely correct that the game wants us to feel like literally everyone in the game is a real person; the conclusions they draw from this are, in my view, uncharitably off-base.)
Part I — Why Ellie and Abby Are So F — ed Up
Okay so the plot of The Last of Us Part II — again, full spoilers ahead — is as briefly as I can explain it as follows (I will tell it in the order it happens, rather than the order it is shown in the game, for clarity’s sake for people have have not played and/or do not intend to play the game).
Ellie, the fifteen year old surrogate daughter of smuggler Joel Williams, begins to settle into life in the town of Jackson, Wyoming twenty-one years after a zombie apocalypse caused by fungus has destroyed the world. About a year before, Ellie and her friend and first kiss Riley, a member of the revolutionary group the Fireflies, both contracted the cordyceps fungal infection which inevitably results in madness and a descent into monstrosity — except for Ellie, who waited out the infection’s one to two day course with Riley, and found that while Riley became a fungal zombie (“Infected”) she did not. (These events occurred in the standalone campaign released in 2014, Left Behind.) Ellie sought out the local Fireflies and, on the advice of local leader Marlene, was sent with Joel to find a Firefly research outpost that believed they could use Ellie as a research subject to create a vaccine and possibly end the cordyceps infection, saving humanity. Along the way, Ellie and Joel bonded, and Joel came to see Ellie as holding the same emotional place for him as his daughter, Sarah, who was shot by police on the day the infection became public as part of a quarantine measure.
In the most famous and final level of The Last of Us, Joel killed every Firefly who crossed his path in the Utah research institute where his and Ellie’s quest ended, including Marlene as well as (drumroll for those who’ve played Part II) the then-nameless surgeon who was going to do a biopsy on Ellie, after learning that creating the vaccine required surgery on Ellie’s brain that would kill her. The ethics of this action, which I’ve come to consider the prototypical “lesbian trolley problem” (later replicated in Life is Strange just two years later, but with less fungus) is heavily debated among fans, and I believe still left ambiguous even after the second game (many fans argue that Naughty Dog, the game’s developers, chose to emphasize or reemphasize the viability of the vaccine and the correctness of the Fireflies, but as I’ll get into later, I don’t think either of those things can be considered the central point). In any case, this is how Ellie and Joel end up back in Jackson, the town run by Joel’s brother’s wife Maria and a relative bastion of hope against the dystopian world. Ellie is suspicious from the start that Joel is leaving details out of what happens to the Fireflies, but she doesn’t come close to suspecting the enormity of what he did, and in any case, he swears at her request that “everything [he] told [her] about the Fireflies is true.” She accepts that — for now.
A couple of weeks later Joel confesses what happens to his brother Tommy, in the opening scene of Part II. Tommy says he would have done the same thing — but Ellie still seems bothered and distant when Joel comes to give her a guitar as a gift. The guitar plainly symbolizes the bond between Joel and Ellie, and Joel begins to teach her the song “If I Ever Were to Lose You” which will recur as a motif throughout Part II. Ellie seems to again suppress her reservations about Joel, and we next see them in what I believe to be the most pivotal scene of the game, one year later when Ellie is sixteen and they pay a visit to the Wyoming Science and Natural History Museum. The scene is a beautiful work of emotionally affecting art that made me cry, but I said I was going to leave out the personal anecdotes for now, so let’s just also note that it has incredibly unsubtle symbolism. Apart from showing that Joel and Ellie are on good terms and are behaving just like an ordinary father and daughter with slightly higher than average concerns about zombies, the scene also sets up a clear, grim, and stark narrative dichotomy between death and life, past and future, Ellie’s life and the world.
You see, Ellie is a giant nerd. Throughout the first game, Joel could collect comics for her to read, and in the second game, she has a Playstation 3 (the newest generation console, since the apocalypse happened in 2013) and stacks of comics up to the proverbial ceiling. She collects comic book trading cards in place of Joel’s comic-finding mechanic in the game itself. Although Ellie is into superhero comics, her heart really lies with the Savage Starlight comic series, a space opera about Dr. Daniela Star, who is trying to develop the world’s first hyperdrive. Ellie isn’t shown having any interest in Dungeons & Dragons type nerd stuff, but throughout the story she references various fictional properties. The closest things she has to interest in the past are her fascination with dinosaurs.
Which is what Joel shows her first in the museum. The two of them stroll around, talk about Joel having seen Jurassic Park and how he’s going to find a DVD of it for him and Ellie to watch, and put hats on dinosaurs (there’s a trophy for putting all the hats on all the dinosaurs!), and each other. Of course the real downer part of this scene, which creates something akin to actual dread, but doesn’t as far as I can tell have any scripted dialogue that notes it, is Ellie being able to observe the prominent notes on the museum wall about EXTINCTION — the end of the dinosaurs. The series is called The Last of Us, the thematic parallels are not even close to subtle.
But the dinosaurs aren’t all! Joel has also explored the museum in advance and prepared the real surprise for Ellie: the space part of it! At first this plays out similar to the dinosaur scene — Ellie can try on replica astronaut helmets from Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts, and tell Joel various facts about space. Over and over again, though, she repeats her desire to go there. Spinning a globe of the moon that depicts Apollo landing sites, she asks Joel if he knows how many times we’ve been to the moon (six) and declares “I’m gonna make it seven.” Of course, given that getting a car running is a feat of incredible accomplishment in this world, we already begin to feel bad for this girl — this dream seems impossible. Of course, if somehow the zombies were to go away…
The first big emotional kicker to this scene is when Joel has Ellie climb into a mock Apollo capsule, space helmet on, and hands her a tape for her Walkman that she always carries, Starlord-style. He asks her to sit back, press some buttons in the capsule, and close her eyes as she listens to it. It turns out that the tape is a recording of the launch of Apollo 11, and Ellie has a feeling of ecstasy as she watches it, imagining that she is “slipping the surly bonds of Earth,” to quote one of our worst Presidents in one of his best speeches. Joel is plainly overjoyed to have given his daughter this chance to escape into a world she’s always dreamed of. Again, though, as we see things within Ellie’s imagination — first, the burst of air against the spacecraft as it breaches the atmosphere, and then the glow of starlight against her face, we remember that’s it’s not real, her eyes are just closed and she has the imagination of a child still.
On the way out of the museum, Ellie tries to cut through a more boring section of the museum, filled with birds — and with the corpse of Firefly, who has written in his own blood prior to his death that the Fireflies lied. He recounts the atrocities he committed in their name, and regrets having ever joined. This begins to set wheels spinning in Ellie’s mind — after all, didn’t Joel tell her there were lots of other immune people the Fireflies had to work with? He said the cure wasn’t working, but this was extreme. She becomes cold to Joel again for the remainder of the time at the museum.
A year later, Ellie and Joel go on a quest to find strings for her guitar. Amusing bonding moments happen — Joel thinks she’s got a crush on Jesse, her best friend in Jackson, and not Jesse’s girlfriend Dina (you should cue up the song “Jessie’s Girl” before playing this game because you’re going to have it stuck in your head regardless), because he’s a well intentioned guy whose cultural everything stopped in Texas in 2013 and he hasn’t thought to consider Ellie might be gay. (Ellie has written in her journal that she is worried about coming out to him, but she’s plainly more bothered about the fact that she’s starting to doubt what he told her two years ago.) Joel is trying so hard to connect — he read Savage Starlight even though he’s not a nerd like her, and tries to talk with her about it. He’s met with little more than confusion. They come across the zombified corpses of a teenage couple that fled Jackson the previous year hoping to make the world better, but who instead became Infected. Joel’s talking about what a shame it is, and Ellie lets slip “if only they were immune.” It’s at this point that Joel loses it, clearly tipping his hand that he’s been hiding something, and saying the line (used to deceive the audience in the trailers promoting the game by placing it in a totally different context) “I know you wish things were different, but they ain’t.” He assures Ellie, however, that “there was no cure.”
Ellie doesn’t believe him. One more year later she returns to Saint Mary’s Hospital in Salt Lake City where Joel’s massacre went down, and discovers the truth, along with a recording by a Firefly who states that with the surgeon dead, there’s no hope of making a cure even if they find Ellie or someone else immune again. (Notably, Ellie also can find a note from a different Firefly who was ordered to destroy research gear and refused, believing it may still be useful — so the game is ambiguous on whether the recording is correct.) When Joel arrives, Ellie forces him to confess, and agrees to return to Jackson, but severs her relationship with Joel. Another year passes, Ellie continues to fit in the community, and Jesse and Dina break up — leading to a pivotal scene where Ellie and Dina kiss at a community barn dance, the one homophobe in town (seriously, one homophobe! In a Wyoming small town! Exactly how is this game presenting an unreasonably grim view of humanity?) calls them “d — ks” and Joel almost punches him out before Maria intervenes.
That night, Ellie seeks out Joel and confronts the issue head on. Ellie says her life has no meaning because of Joel, while Joel says that “if somehow the Lord gave me another chance at [the Firefly hospital]… I’d do it all again.” Ellie responds that she finds that impossible to forgive, but wants to try anyway, and the scene ends with the implication that they plan to reconcile.
Enter Abby. The next morning, while Ellie, Dina, and Jesse are out on a patrol which ends in doing weed and sex for Ellie and Dina, Abby, the daughter of the surgeon who would have operated on Ellie, who urged her father to do the surgery and said she would volunteer if it was her, is shown the heavily fortified Jackson by her ex-boyfriend Owen, a security guard who survived Joel’s assault. Both of them want revenge on Joel, and they know Tommy is there and might be able to give Joel’s location — but Owen makes sure to note that he does not want revenge “at any cost.” They’ve come with what is later called the “Salt Lake Crew,” a group of Seattle-based militia members from the Washington Liberation Front, who’ve been granted leave as former Fireflies to hunt down a promising lead on the killer of their friends, family, and colleagues. However, Owen wants to give up, and says the others will want to as well, leading to Abby making the questionable decision to try to solo the town of Jackson. It doesn’t go well for her — she’s beset by an unusually large horde of Infected — but she’s saved — by Joel and Tommy. Before she knows their identity, she invites them to the hangout the WLF folks have set up to wait out the ongoing winter storm, and then when they do reveal their names… the WLF goes to work. Abby shotguns Joel in the legs, then forces her companion Mel, who she’s recently learned is pregnant with Owen’s child, to tourniquet him to stop him from bleeding out while she tortures him to death with a golf club. Ellie arrives just in time to be forced to the ground to watch Abby swing the club that bashes Joel’s face in — the last memory she has of him, which she draws over and over in her journal for the remainder of the game.
Torn by trauma, Ellie begs Maria and Tommy for a squad to hunt down Joel’s killers (whose motives she suspects, but doesn’t tell anyone about because she still keeps her status as Infected secret). They can’t spare anyone, so she and Dina, now a couple, plan to sneak out, when they’re interrupted by Maria, who reveals that Tommy snuck out ahead of them and asked that Ellie not be allowed to pursue. Knowing Tommy has no chance on his own, Maria authorizes Ellie and Dina to pursue their revenge.
Ellie cuts a bloody swath through Seattle, as the reviews have mentioned, but unlike what is repeatedly claimed, she isn’t completely without concern for others. When she learns that Dina is pregnant with Jesse’s baby (a hilarious scene, due to her “what, how???” facial expression for a few seconds before she remembers that Dina was recently with Jesse) she accepts that they need to turn back for Dina’s safety, but not before they rescue Tommy. Ellie tries to spare a WLF guard not involved in Joel’s death who was just sitting around playing Hotline Miami for Playstation Vita, and only kills her when after releasing her, the guard attacks. It’s actually possible for the player to make Ellie more merciful by using stealth to bypass the WLF soldiers she encounters. In any case, we learn a lot that isn’t flattering about the WLF during the portion of the game where we play as Ellie, like that they exterminate neighborhoods for having any members of the “Seraphites” or “Scars,” their rivals, that they shoot people for leaving Seattle, and that they employ torture. Later, we see this up close, playing as Abby. These enemies are not innocent people. The fact that they have friends, and names, is a game mechanic that adds depth to the world; to read it automatically as a condemnation of the player for playing the game is an absurdity brought on specifically by the existence of one other game — Spec Ops: The Line — which this game is decidedly not. While Ellie’s quest for revenge is probably not justified for various reasons, these are video game combat scenes, they are challenges for the player to get through, I suppose they can also be roleplaying encounters if you want to have Ellie pick and choose who she stealths past and who she kills, but frankly, it is not about you as the player. Ellie’s willingness to do all this killing is an outgrowth of what we’ve seen up to this point.
Before I can get to “why is Ellie f — ed up,” I have to address Abby, the super secret other player character who everyone knows about by now, and come on, you literally do the tutorial as her, it’s not that secret. Abby is also f — ed up. Where Ellie sees Joel’s bashed in face when she closes her eyes (where she once saw space and dreams of the future), Abby sees her father, shot by Joel, face down on the floor of the Firefly hospital. Notably, Abby still experiences these flashbacks about her father even though after the tutorial level, she has fully taken all the revenge she wanted, choosing to let Ellie (whose significance as the test subject she doesn’t at that time know) and Tommy live, declaring to the other ex-Fireflies that “we’re done.” While Abby made that decision, neither killing Joel nor showing mercy later has brought her absolution or freedom from remembering what Joel did to her dad. So, it’s true that as Myers (and many other reviewers) have pointed out in their reviews that the game is making a pretty clear “revenge is bad” commentary (which according to game director Neil Druckmann, who is an Israeli immigrant to the United States, stems from his conflicted feelings on the conflict between Israel and Palestine). Revenge did not satisfy Abby, and it will not satisfy Ellie.
What DOES satisfy Abby is her own “side quest” which becomes her “main quest,” so to speak. The WLF, under their leader Isaac, who took in the Salt Lake Crew, is facing heavy attrition from the Seraphites, the homophobic primitivist religious bigots who occupy the island where Seattle’s Space Needle is located. Isaac wants Abby and Manny, another Salt Laker who spat in Joel’s mangled face after he died, to lead the assault on the Seraphite (“Scar” to their enemies) island. Abby, however, has learned that Owen (her ex, who got Mel, her dad’s top medical student, pregnant) has gone AWOL and may even have killed another of the Salt Lakers. As her closest friend, Abby doesn’t care — she just wants to find Owen, so she goes AWOL and travels through Seraphite territory, where she is about to be executed along with “apostate” Seraphite Yara, when Lev, the other “apostate” saves them both with his badass bow work. She then escorts the two rogue Seraphites out of an Infected-filled forest and into a hiding place. After locating Owen — and sleeping with him despite his ongoing relationship with Mel — Abby is overcome by guilt at leaving the two Seraphite teenagers alone, especially since Yara’s arm has been fractured with a hammer. Abby rescues them just before the Scars are about to swoop in and finish them, and takes them to the aquarium where Owen spends his time, where she finds Mel — who does not like her and blames her for making her complicit in Joel’s torturous death — is present. This turns out to be lucky, since Yara will die if her arm is not amputated, and Mel is a doctor. She needs medical supplies, though, so Abby infiltrates a WLF hospital with Lev’s help, learning along the way that he is trans (because they fight a group of Seraphites who shout Lev’s birth name). Upon arrival, Abby learns that she has been declared AWOL and is subject to arrest, but is freed by Nora, another of the Salt Lakers on Ellie’s kill list (and perhaps Ellie’s most brutal and least justified kill in the game). After fighting a massive, ancient Infected from the beginning of the pandemic, Abby gets the supplies needed and returns to the aquarium. After Yara’s successful surgery, she sees Lev and Yara safe (for now) and, knowing that she has done good, flashes back to the Salt Lake hospital again — but this time when she opens the dreaded door, instead of seeing her father’s corpse, she seems him smiling proudly at her.
This is really the end of revenge for Abby. After saving Lev from the Seraphite island and returning to discover that she is the last living member of the Seraphite crew, as Ellie has finished everyone else, including Owen and Mel, off, she does, with Lev’s help, track Ellie to her hideout at a theater (which, subtly, has signs everywhere for the fictional Cassandra: An American Tragedy, in which Cassandra of Troy has a gun), kill Jesse, try to kill Tommy, and almost executes Dina knowing she’s pregnant before Lev begs her to stop. She lets the survivors — Ellie, Dina, and a badly injured Tommy, who will never recover — go, saying to Ellie “don’t even let me see you again.” But this is an act of sudden rage, and one that she’s dissuaded from. Ellie is not dissuaded, and in fact even after all this does not know when to fold them, as one might say. Ellie returns to the Jackson area to start a farm with Dina, like Dina has always wanted, and to raise J.J., their & Jesse’s child.
This is the point where I suspect Myers probably was inspired to write the line which so frustrated me when I read it in the days prior to release, as someone for whom cognitive behavioral therapy is deeply ineffective, suggesting that the events of the game would have been prevented had Ellie had access to “cognitive behavioral therapy worksheets, or meditation.” The line made sense to me, although my reservations about the suggested methodology remained, when Ellie, herding goats into the barn, hears one of them bleat and flashes back to heading into the basement of the WLF hideout where Joel was killed, hearing him begging her for help (which didn’t happen in story; as in the very real sorts of complex post-traumatic stress that are being depicted here, Ellie is adding details to her inherently unreliable memories that make them more traumatic, just as Abby was able to move past hers by remembering something that never happened at all). She decides that she cannot remain with her wife and child and must instead follow a lead Tommy left her, suggesting Abby is looking for the remaining Fireflies in Santa Barbara, California.
I should be clear that this point of the story is one where Ellie’s arc moves well past righteous vengeance. Where Abby started out with a major dick move (not just torturing an old man to death, but doing it after he saved her and trusted her without question), Ellie proves herself a dick at the end. But the motive is the same — PTSD. She abandons her wife and child for an ill-thought-out adventure with the goal of strangling a woman who spared her twice. It does not pay off for her. (Ironically, it does pay off for Abby and Lev.) Ellie truly enters the halls of gaming and fiction-in-general fame as one of the iconic dirtbag lesbians. But I understand why.
See, here’s the reason Ellie is f — ed up, and also the reason Abby is in a more mundane way: both of them were promised a future, and both of them found out that they would not have that future. Both of them lost their fathers, and that’s important and Ellie’s personal arc with Joel means a lot to me as someone who has a complex relationship with my own father, but nothing in my or the vast majority of people who’ve lost fathers with whom they had troubled histories’ past would plausibly explain going on the kind of murder-quest that both Abby and Ellie do. Think about Abby: her father was just shot. That sucks, obviously, but they live in a world where killing is quite ordinary (Dina, one of the more well adjusted characters, killed her first non-Infected human when she was ten). It doesn’t make sense to me by itself that the daughter of a doctor, who grew up in fairly relative comfort given their world, would torture a man for, apparently, hours, with a golf club, to avenge a shooting — especially not when she’s a trained soldier who has killed many people and knows how to simply end someone’s life. Ellie has been through enormous trauma, so that she would kill or torture is believable to me — where she really, initially, lost me, really was the abandoning her wife and kid moment, and then the climactic moment where she threatens Lev with a knife to force an emaciated Abby to fight her.
But the issue both women — both 19, to be clear, not pinnacles of maturity — face is that they grew up believing that they would have a future, that the world would have a future, and then that was torn away from them. And also, they lost their dads violently. But both Abby and Ellie invested a huge amount of emotion into the idea of a vaccine/cure for the cordyceps. Abby presumably just wanted a normal life without all these zombies, Ellie wanted the Star Trek future. And it’s worse for Ellie — which is why it takes her so much longer to get over — because she feels it’s her fault, and there’s a reasonable case that it sort of is (or at least, that it’s because of her — she didn’t have any control over Joel’s decision to save her). Ellie’s dreams of becoming an astronaut will never happens, and it’s likely the human species will be extinct within a few generations (again, if you think this isn’t implied, take a look at the title of the series). So to her, essentially, based on the worldview she has internalized, all these people she’s killing? Already dead, because of her, so why does it matter if she shoots or stabs them or just… continues existing, since that’s the thing dooming them?
It’s a f — ed up way to view the world, but I think the flashbacks for both women and especially Ellie make it clear that that’s exactly why both of them are hardened killers at 19 and why Ellie can’t let Joel’s death go, why she feels she HAS TO kill Abby — because at this point, she has to rationalize that what Joel did was the only way in which her life does have any meaning, and so she has to avenge him, since she never really reconciled with him. Cognitive behavioral therapy worksheets and meditation aren’t going to get someone very far when they already believe that the deaths of billions are on their hands, they know for a fact that the deaths of hundreds or thousands are, and the worksheets are mostly about taking on a responsibility that they already have too much of.
Part II — Why Isn’t This “Misery Porn”?
A lot of negative press around The Last of Us Part II has leveled the accusation, either with this exact term or something similar, that the game is “misery porn.” Given what I’ve just recounted, obviously it’s a super grim story. I got in an argument the other day about whether it was “cynical” (as many folks view it) or “uplifting,” and I firmly maintain that The Last of Us Part II is actually uplifting. You have to get through all of the combat stuff to get there (and, as I’ve remarked, as a child who came of age at the literal turn of the millenium, it’s really hard for me to take moral panics about video game violence terribly seriously, because my generation seriously never did end up having any correlation whatsoever between playing Duke Nukem and doing school shootings however much the media pushed that narrative) and the ending is not happy, but Ellie finds the same peace that Abby did. It’s cathartic. It’s — dare I say it — “An American Tragedy”, but one where our two central characters are both alive and in pursuit of some kind of hope.
Abby and Lev are literally going to the Fireflies, Abby carrying Lev toward them just as Joel carried Ellie away from them. (As I noted in my other Medium piece about this game, Abby becomes Joel, and the game is not subtle in drawing the parallels. Someone on Twitter points out that she even gets Joel’s guitar theme music from the first game.) Ellie is alone, having, again, been a giant dirtbag lesbian who abandoned her wife and child, and can no longer play right-handed guitar because Abby bit two of her fingers off (but seriously, get a pick or a left-handed guitar, you can still play, girl!) But she still tries. She still has her comics. We don’t know what she’ll do next, but we do know that like Abby, she got her reprieve from her flashbacks: when she’s strangling Abby, and Abby is moments from death, Ellie suddenly sees just a brief flash of Joel, not with his face bashed in, but on his porch strumming his guitar. Ellie can’t finish it; she tells Abby to “take him and go” and sits on the beach sobbing. When she returns to her house, we see the scene I described earlier where she agrees to reconcile with Joel, even though he says he’d kill the Fireflies again. It’s a good memory, all things considered — it reminds Ellie that Joel loved her, that they were going to reconcile, that he probably died knowing she loved him too. She no longer hears his screams in the basement.
The first Last of Us game ended with deep emotional ambiguity and has sparked seven years of debate about Joel’s actions, and people’s interpretations of whether Joel was right in the first game haven’t tended to be changed by the second. In any case, we are asked to view this — like the first game — in the narrative sense as a tragedy, where the characters do what they are fated to do. And in fact, the nature of tragedy and fate is that, just as in Hamlet where Hamlet’s rather poorly thought out revenge plot leading to his death also leads to a better government for Denmark, in The Last of Us Part II Ellie’s obsession saves Abby and Lev from slavers. If she hadn’t hunted them down with the intention to kill Abby and presumably abandon Lev to die on his own, they would have been literally crucified. Within the story, there is an inevitability. Joel had to die for all the lives he took, and Abby was the instrument of that. Ellie couldn’t not begin her revenge crusade (and at its start, it’s arguably justifiable). Abby would not have been able to save Lev without Ellie’s obsession.
None of this is particularly new — what’s new is the deftness of the storytelling. It’s perhaps somewhat less subtle than the first game — which I think is an intentional choice by Naughty Dog reacting to what they perceive as misinterpretations by fans — but people who weren’t expecting a tragedy were playing the wrong game. And it doesn’t become “misery porn” because the ending is about coming out of pain, not necessarily as a stronger person or even a better person than you would have been without it, but with hope.
Again, I highly recommend anyone who wants to understand the actual pain at the core of The Last of Us Part II to watch a playthrough of the entire museum sequence, because it’s adorable and heartbreaking at the same time. This is a story that I think many of us can relate to, because for Millenials and the younger generation, we either are coming to realize the future we were promised was a lie, or (for the Zoomers) have always known this. It’s painful, for me, like a knife to the gut, specifically to think about how human space travel is no longer a tool for peace and international cooperation, but a game for guys like Elon Musk. It’s painful to think about what we’re going to lose to climate change. In The Last of Us Part II, the zombies aren’t “us”, like the cliche always alleges… the zombies are the things preventing us from having a future. Ellie and Abby are two different ways of experiencing that trauma of losing a future, and the blood, gore, and violence are there to heighten the emotions and because it’s a video game.
I have more respect for Maddy Myers’ review of the game now that I’ve played it, in the sense that I get why Ellie’s actions are so deeply frustrating. There’s a point where you want Ellie to just get out of the way and let Abby succeed. As I’ve noted, within the story and its tragic logics, that would have been worse for Abby. But I don’t think cognitive behavioral therapy would have solved Ellie or Abby’s issues, if they were real people, or frankly even if they were real people in our world with no zombies and no violently murdered parents, dealing instead with more mundane versions of the same problems. Sometimes the world is just so broken that you have to find that thing, that memory, that makes it worth it to not be a nihilist asshole to everyone. It’s easier for some people (Abby) than for others (Ellie). And we pay the price for the choices we make on the way up to that point. But to say we don’t need a video game about that at this particular moment, as we sit on the precipice of more than one real apocalypse, as so many real futures are foreclosed and as so many of us hate each other for reasons that truly make no sense — no, I can’t get behind this. The Last of Us Part II is precisely the game we need right now.
