Revisiting The Last of Us Part II

It is no secret that The Last of Us Part II has been one of the most controversial video game releases of 2020. A dissension that has been brewing far prior to its June 19th debut. For the past five months, I too have spent countless hours analyzing and engaging in my own interpersonal dispute over Naughty Dog’s highly anticipated sequel. After a multi-month sabbatical from actually playing the game, I decided to revisit it out of curiosity about whether or not the strong convictions I had still held up. In The Last of Us Part II, I see a beautiful, undoubtedly poignant story of love, loss, and healing. Unfortunately, I simultaneously cannot shake an omnipotent feeling of unfulfilled potential and a lack of delicacy in regards to representation that Naughty Dog, especially lead writers Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross have prided themselves on. I cannot find any proper verbiage to describe how I feel about The Last of Us Part II in its entirety, but I certainly have a multitude of opinions on the many pieces of this comprehensive puzzle.

Twin Stories?

Try as many might, you cannot possibly ignore the perceived antagonist turned secondary protagonist, the ultimate decider of Joel’s fate, Abigail “Abby” Anderson. As strange as it may be, considering I am indifferent to almost nothing that exists in The Last of Us Part II, I have no intense feelings for Abby in particular. I don’t despise her for killing Joel, nor do I possess any overwhelming feelings of admiration for her redemption arc. Excluding those who express their disdain for her through violent misogyny, I understand why Abby is such a polarizing character. It is easy to feel rage at the brutality she inflicts on the protagonist of The Last of Us, and half of one of the most beloved father-daughter relationships stretching across all forms of media. It is additionally easy to respect the way she nurtures Lev as she struggles to rehumanize herself after all she has done to Joel, and the countless other acts of violence she has committed as a member of the militia she pledged her loyalty to after the collapse of the Fireflies, the Washington Liberation Front. The detachment I hold towards Abby has little to do with her actions as a character, and far more to do with the relevance I feel she plays to the overall story. The Last of Us Part II, just as its predecessor, begins and ends in a perfect parallel. The sequel begins with Joel and Ellie attempting to bustle through the tension Joel’s fateful decision at the of The Last of Us left their relationship in. The prologue lends the player a touching scene of Joel keeping his promise to teach Ellie guitar, and as a result, Ellie finds a way to reconnect with Joel after basking in the guilt of not having been able to save humanity. While many may not identify the epilogue as a moment congruent to this due to the lack of Joel’s physical presence, Ellie’s character journey remains the same. Due to Abby biting off her ring and pinky finger, Ellie struggles to play guitar and strums it weakly, the same way she did the night Joel first gave it to her. Through reminiscing about Joel’s last night on earth, Ellie once again discovers how to tame her survivor’s guilt, and let Joel back into her life as a loved one, although she cannot do so in a material way. With this being the ultimate conclusion of the game, it makes the hours we spend with Abby feel a tinge insignificant. Her story is not poorly written, but it is awkwardly sandwiched between the greater story of Ellie and Joel. The attempts for Abby to parallel the aforementioned are almost laughably transparent and thus borderline unconvincing. We are supposed to believe Abby and Ellie are virtually the same person because they share the identical trauma of losing a father, but that is quite literally the only thing they have in common. The violent journeys they embark on in attempt to cope with their respective situations have caused them to view themselves as less than human, but their motives and relationship to violence are dissimilar. Abby was hellbent on revenge for Joel murdering her father, the apparently extremely important, gift-to-humanity Firefly surgeon from the first installment whose job was to kill Ellie in order to engineer a vaccine. While Abby’s circle of ex-Fireflies turned WLF supported her due to their thirst for justice for the remaining members of the human race, Abby doesn’t express concern for avenging a cause other than her father. This is all fine and understandable, it doesn’t make me believe Abby is a fundamentally horrible person. It just does not make Ellie and Abby two enemies with a common goal. We spend much of our time with Ellie thinking she wants revenge as her endgame, but the story ends with the player learning Ellie’s ultimate objective was to seek forgiveness in herself and in Joel. The pursuit of revenge is not her desire but a scapegoat, and Abby, being Joel’s killer, was the obvious target of the misguided approach Ellie took.

If Abby were to function as a mirror, she would be much more successful as Joel’s reflection. While all 25 hours (give or take) of gameplay share the same basic foundations as The Last of Us, the experience of playing as Abby is most akin to what it felt like to play as Joel. Their relationship to violence is pragmatic and methodical. They don’t hesitate to kill their enemies and it does not invoke much of an emotional display. They’ve traded the pain of losing the people they loved most in the world in for the life of a toughened, apathetic survivor. They learn to allow love back into their life in the exact same way : through a child that has not yet been tainted by the evils of the world. The majority of Abby’s character arc is a three day version of The Last of Us squeezed into a few hours of gameplay. It is no chore to begin to commend the relationship between Abby and the boy she begins to care for, Lev. They share various sweet moments and it serves its purpose in proving that Abby isn’t defined by the worst moments of her life. The problem so much isn’t with whether or not Druckmann and Gross were able to achieve redemption for Abby, the problem is that it feels like a disruption to the story. It would have been far more interesting to begin to gather bits and pieces of Abby’s life after her return to Seattle through Ellie’s perspective, and have Abby’s perspective serve as a DLC. It could have provided an increasingly greater fleshing out of Abby’s feelings towards all she has done and how she strives to rediscover her humanity, rather than having her spend a whole day looking for her ex-boyfriend before coming across Lev and deciding to dissect her feelings. Which is then followed by rapid development of their relationship masked by the best set pieces and combat sequences of the entire game. The clunky transitioning between the two stories creates haphazard pacing, and the lack of clarity about who Abby was supposed to be similar in characterization to, adds a dead weight to the story. The overwhelming feeling that you are playing two separate games is seldom interesting or refreshing.

Parenthood

Okay, I’ll be blunt, Druckmann’s obsession with fatherhood is at the core of every narrative weakness in The Last of Us Part II. I’m aware this may seem to be a ridiculous perspective given that the heart of the The Last of Us series is a father-daughter relationship, and the primary connection between Abby and Ellie is the trauma of their fathers’ being murdered, but it is also what creates the biggest wedge between these characters. The lack of prior establishment of Jerry leads to hours of clumsy character exposition through flashbacks to coax the player into trying to forget how minuscule his importance was to The Last of Us. The fact that Jerry was a father, and somehow, against all logical probability the only Firefly capable of engineering a vaccine, is supposed to be enough for us to care. There is nothing about Jerry that truly unites Abby and Ellie’s stories. It is beyond frustrating to think about how The Last of Us Part II spends so much of its time with ex-fireflies, yet they focus not on a Firefly that had profound relevance to Ellie’s story and who was simultaneously proclaimed “Queen Firefly” (Marlene), but yet another contrived sad-dad storyline that contributes little to connecting the protagonists. There weren’t many moments of Jerry’s backstory where I felt that Druckmann and Gross did the proper work of earning the reaction they wanted. The concept of fatherhood alone as a redeeming quality feels dull. I don’t begin to understand Abby by knowing she had a father, I begin to understand Abby by witnessing what she felt she needed to do to redeem herself in her own eyes. While that may have involved becoming a parental figure of her own, it didn’t necessarily justify the existence of Jerry. It is never mentioned what happened to Abby’s mother or how that affected the trajectory of her or Jerry’s life. I felt a bare-minimum throwaway comment that she had died due to cordyceps would have sufficed, and would have even made me sympathize with Jerry more. His adamance to kill a 14 year-old Ellie would have been far less unsettling to watch had I been under the impression he had experienced a tremendous loss of his own. Alas, the existence of mothers is grossly undervalued in The Last of Us Part II.

Ellie’s story is too plagued by the absence of considering how motherhood has affected the way she navigates her trauma. While The Last of Us, and its DLC, The Last of Us : Left Behind, inform us that Ellie was indirectly raised by Marlene, close friend of Ellie’s late mother Anna, neither of these women are mentioned in Ellie’s chapters of the game. There is no further mention of Anna, who Ellie was shown as formerly longing to know about, and the only appearance of Marlene is in one of Abby’s flashbacks. While we spend one of Ellie’s flashbacks exploring the Salt Like Firefly hospital where she had been taken in an attempt to fulfill her journey in the first game, she never once expresses curiosity about Marlene’s fate. When she learns the truth about what Joel had done, we aren’t given any time with Ellie to witness how she may have processed the loss of the woman who had watched over her her entire life, and the singular remaining connection she had to learning about her biological mother. This may have seemed like an insignificant aspect to explore in the eyes of Druckmann, but Ellie is defined by her survivor’s guilt in both Part I and Part II. Her greatest emotional turmoil stems from the fact that she continues to outlive those she loves due to the unforgiving nature of the post-apocalyptic world she was born into, and when given the chance to prevent this, it is taken from her without her consent. Ellie having no interest in what happened to Marlene feels disingenuous to her character, especially given the significance Marlene played as a mother-figure, Ellie’s existing connection to Anna and her best friend Riley, and the character who brought Joel into Ellie’s life in the first place.

In the penultimate chapter of The Last of Us Part II, titled “The Farm”, the game flashforwards about a year after Ellie’s brutal three days in Seattle. We see Ellie embrace the role of motherhood herself, by becoming the adoptive mother of J.J., the son of her girlfriend Dina and lamented close friend Jesse. The time we spend with Ellie as she has settled into caring for a child is heartwarming and beautiful. A welcomed juxtaposition to the dreariness of her life beforehand. A glimpse of hope and meaning other than the trailing of death and destruction. With the knowledge that Ellie was never able to receive closure in her quest to avenge Joel, it is obvious to the player that this newly established peace will be temporary. The problem is of course not that Ellie is so traumatized she can no longer sustain this charade of bliss. The issue is that this ultimately leads to another instance of Druckmann devaluing motherhood. In the game’s final moments, her days as a mother are treated as a detour in her larger arc of recovery. Ellie’s decision in the end to choose to forgive Joel and thus move on from the suffering the events of The Last of Us Part II have caused her is admittedly my favorite moment of the game. However, I can’t help but feel it is burdened with the continuous disregard for motherhood. The closing shot of the game shows Ellie walking away from the farmhouse where she once resided with Dina and their son. The house has been long abandoned since Ellie’s expedition to Santa Barbara to find Abby and end this agonizing cycle once and for all. All that remains is a collection of Ellie’s things, and most importantly the guitar that Joel gifted to her. Her decision to leave her possessions behind her and sever the unhealthy attachments she cultivated to them in order to cope with the loss of Joel is undoubtedly her smartest decision. She has no choice but to gracefully lay him to rest, and she knows now this is what he would have wanted. However, in leaving the farmhouse behind, and walking away with no implication as to where she is headed, you can easily interpret this moment as Ellie viewing her motherhood as another object of her journey to be disposed of. While co-writer Halley Gross had originally planned for Ellie to carry one of J.J. ‘s toys with her on her way out, Druckmann insisted this was too revealing. I struggle to understand what this reveals other than the fact that Ellie loves her child, a fact we already knew. It doesn’t say that Dina is ready to accept Ellie back as her life partner. Everybody knows that nothing is that effortless in life, especially in The Last of Us universe. It simply validates the fact that Ellie is a mother, and that fact of her life was not a contributor of her suffering, but a salvation.

Representation Matters

The mainstream discourse surrounding representation in The Last of Us Part II is generally dominated by immature bigots who respond to any iteration of diversity with “get woke go broke”, and have infamously renamed the game “The Woke of Us Part II”. While droves of gamers argue the representation in the game pushes unheard of boundaries and goes much too far, I argue Naughty Dog hasn’t gone far enough. The AAA gaming industry is notoriously rigid. Video games without cishet white male protagonists are unfortunately still an anomaly. It would be objectively wrong to state that Naughty Dog hasn’t taken large risks, and they have certainly attracted the attention of audiences. The issue is precisely that inclusivity is simply not enough, and proper execution is equally as important. I have already spoken about the double standard of gender dynamics and motherhood, but there almost must be a conversation conducted surrounding the portrayal of LGBT characters and characters of color. The reactions from marginalized communities has been by no means monolithic, but it is important to raise the concerns about the dead-naming of trans characters, the disproportionate violent deaths given to characters of color (especially Black characters, who have never lived to see the end of either installment in the series), and the common usage of the sad ending trope to conclude a romantic relationship between two women. Naughty Dog, especially Druckmann, have celebrated the doors they began to open in AAA games, but if they wish to set an example, I feel they need to do much more work in regards to making sure they do not succumb to reusing historically harmful storytelling tools when writing marginalized characters. Telling the stories of oppressed people in a violent world has to be treated with extreme delicacy, because the stories we tell do not exist in a vacuum.

Hate or Healing?

The Last of Us Part II has been ridiculed to the highest degree for its misleading marketing, from the changing of character models to the entire narrative deception. Perhaps the most prominent example of this is the repetitive declaration that this was a game about hate. While hate is undoubtedly an emotion that consumes the protagonists and their allies, it isn’t the fundamental theme of the narrative. In its greatest moments, The Last of Us Part II is a game about the intricate entanglement of love, loss, and healing, set against a backdrop of a vicious post-apocalyptic world. It’s a love letter to those of us who need reminders that our humanity is not determined by the way we have responded to trauma, but rather the people we decide to become in the lifelong journey of recovery. To label it as a hateful, failed revenge plot feels insulting. Hate, revenge, and violence are no strangers to this game, but they are not what defines it. It is the ways in which the protagonists chose to cope with these broader ideas that pave their paths. The Last of Us Part II doesn’t always succeed from a narrative perspective, especially in a large portion of its second half, but at its best, it offers a story that expands on the core of its predecessor in a heart-rending, provocative way. The esteemed relationship between Ellie and Joel meets its nemesis in an unquestionably melancholy way, but the strength of the love they have for each other transcends physical presence, and provides this story with its most solid foundations.