i have been very frustrated with the lack of feminist critical analysis of the last of us and the last of us part ii. i know the stereotype is that few women play games, and perhaps that is partly responsible for the acclaim for the first game and the disdain for the second all-female playable character installment. for whatever the reason, there are many critiques on youtube that completely miss the point. and as i view this as what would be a literary masterpiece of our time if it were still the 20th century, we have a masterful narrative in the modern playable form. perhaps books are being aged out with our lack of literacy, but i digress, the video game can bestow emotional connections, moral quandaries, and shocking imagery that (hopefully) instill the player with empathy and compassion without having to live through harsh realities where such decisions must be made. and this is the story that last of us teaches us.
everyone knows how the first game goes: the world has been overcome by a sudden pandemic. the cordyceps virus, a fungus, which is passed through blood, saliva, and it also airborne due to fungal spores, has dissolved the world order literally overnight. major cities form quarantine zones, while people outside isolate and do what they have to to survive. the cordyceps virus is a zombie virus, and it is based on an actual parasitic fungus that mobilizes insects while growing spores inside of them. in this game, this is also what happens. for whatever reason, cordyceps zombies are aggressive and violent. in boston, joel our protagonist, is an illegal smuggler who exchanges goods inside and outside the qz zones. he was a dad before the outbreak, but his daughter died due to an execution gunshot from military personnel who didn't trust that she wasn't infected. joel is a silent, emotionally unintelligent, very masculine texan man in his 50s. he is asked to smuggle an immune girl to a renegade faction called the "fireflies," who oppose the post-outbreak martial law version of the government, and have scientists who can possibly develop a vaccine. the game takes you, Joel, and the immune girl, Ellie, through different cities in the United States and exposes the type of depravity that people will sink to in order to survive. in the end, Joel brings Ellie to salt lake city, to a firefly hospital, where a trolley experiment is forced on us. ellie must die in order to develop a vaccine, because her immunity is due to a mutation of the cordyceps fungus which has integrated itself into her brain. extracting what scientists need will kill her, BUT, for the good of humanity. however, you, joel, have spent the entire game seeing what humanity has become, and, you have experienced so much kindness and comradery in the simplicity of compansionship with this young girl who reminds you of, but cannot replace, your daughter who would have been the same age. in the end, what good is humanity as a whole if the people you love aren't a part of it. we have a moral obligation to return the world to pre-cordyceps virus, but, a world without our dearest friend?
the second game is much more complex with its moral narrative, because from the start Joel is killed and we play as Ellie. for this reason, many many people HATE this game because so many people identified with joel. but what this second game is trying to teach us is forgiveness. revenge will destroy a person. joel was objectively a bad man. he killed many many people, innocent people. we don't know how much depravity he engaged in to survive, but it is alluded to in both games. his brother tommy, said it was the stuff of nightmares. joel had given in to his basest instincts in order to survive, as the world around him had done, and he saw ellie as a redemption from all that. was it selfish? was it wrong?
Here's how to make a list:
To learn more HTML/CSS, check out these tutorials!