The Last of Us Part II and the Perspective Prison
I saw a few quick impressions and the Metacritic score. Other than that, the only thing I knew about The Last of Us Part II before I began playing it was that a bunch of a drooling inbred dipshits were review bombing it because of its inclusion of a trans character. So I guess I also knew there would be a trans character at some point as well.
Spoilers below.
I played through the game slowly, partially because of its oppressive tone, partially because I insisted on scanning through each and every corner of every environment looking for supplies and graphical flourishes, but mostly because my roommate has a strong aversion to horror imagery, and I didn’t think it would be a particularly good idea to show her what a clicker looks like. Weeks passed before I even met Lev, the trans character in question. It didn’t take me long to feel an attachment to him.
I liked that he has a genuine capacity for selflessness, a trait we rarely see in this universe. I found it heartbreaking that so many of Lev’s better qualities were instilled in him by a religion whose teachings are also used as a weapon against his humanity. Moreover, I just found him nice to be around. Though the world has turned him and his sister Yara into killers, it has yet to break him to the extent that it’s broken Ellie and Abby. Of course, it eventually will. But for the time being, I found his presence comforting.
As we were scaling up to the crane bridge, I suddenly had a thought. I don’t know why I had this thought when I had it, but I had it nonetheless: Does Lev know the word “transgender?” Or “non-binary?”
In the lore of the Last of Us franchise, the world you and I live in effectively ended in 2013 when a mass outbreak of a cordyceps brain infection (or zombies or whatever you want to call it) brought upon the apocalypse. The first game takes place in 2033, and Part II takes place about five years later. For all intents and purposes, the old world is gone, including the tool most of us use when discussing issues such as gender or sex, the internet. What little non face-to-face communication remains is primarily done through radio, handwritten notes, and the occasional printout.
Lev is thirteen years old. He’s never seen the internet, he’s potentially never heard of it, and even if there was a functioning internet, he wouldn’t be allowed to use it due to the rules that govern his religion. However, if he were to find a newspaper article or a journal or anything detailing where we were as a society when it came to our relationship with gender, how would that knowledge make him feel? Would it change his relationship with his religion or his family? This would depend on what he found, which leads to another question: When it came to our understanding of these topics in 2013, where were we?
As a cis white male, I’m clearly the wrong person to ask. Moreover, in 2013, I was safely tucked away in the halls of my liberal arts college where topics such as these were brought up on a regular basis, which is to say that I may have had more schooling than some. But I did have the internet, and at the time, it seemed to me like we were making progress, if only insofar as more people than ever seemed to know the word “trans” and had an understanding of gender and sexuality as a spectrum. In hindsight, knowing what I know now, we weren’t nearly as evolved as I thought we were. Even if Lev found all we knew then, it’s impossible to tell whether or not that would’ve been enough for him to fully express himself.
I then thought about our own world, and suddenly, I felt a mild elation. How beautiful is it that we have more language to talk about these subjects now? Though I may be falling into the same trap I fell into all those years ago, it makes me genuinely happy that there are so many more avenues to have our outlooks enhanced by the trans and non-binary communities now that we have an evolving language with which to communicate. It seems like we’ve moved forward, and I felt a bit of hope for this species of ours.
That feeling lasted all of a few seconds before I remembered that a bunch of a drooling inbred dipshits were review bombing the game because of its inclusion of a trans character. Also, you know… everything else. (*Gestures wildly at the whole world.*) From my vantage point, it was peaches and cream. I’m sure those who have to bear the brunt of the world’s cruelty when it comes to gender discrimination feel much differently. As far as those people writing those reviews, well, I don’t know if I’m capable of understanding them. Of course, I realize that it’s not just horrible or just great. But I was reminded of how much further we have to go.
That frustration, to me, is what The Last of Us Part II is about. Read most reviews and they’ll tell you it’s a game about revenge and ceaseless cycles of violence, and it absolutely is. But to me, it’s more about perspective. How Abby finds a group fighting for freedom against cruel military rule and sees a place to call home while Ellie sees the same group as a bunch of fascist psychopaths. How our perceptions can both enhance and limit our worldview and effect our abilities to truly change and overcome. The constant give and the constant take.
The screenshots in this article were taken by my friend Henry, who I thank deeply for allowing me to use them.
Ellie and Abby were both formed, to varying degrees, by men of violence. In Ellie’s case, it was Joel Miller, the protagonist of the first game. A broken man who descended into barbarity after the death of his daughter. A man who, despite finding a new reason to live when he got to know Ellie, still imprinted his biggest flaws onto her. For Abby, it was Isaac Dixon, a cruel rebel leader who saw in Abby an opportunity to shape a grief stricken teenager into a weapon. Though the details of their relationship are a bit murky, Abby has a resolve that enables her to torture and kill, and we know who’s responsible for giving that to her.
Using the language and the skills their respective shitty father figures taught them, we control both as they commit horrible act after horrible act. The more killings we carry out, the more our relationship with them changes. What that means to each individual player depends entirely on them, but personally, it put me at just enough of a distance that I could see a more nuanced tragedy at play. One bigger than simple revenge.
As understandable as Joel’s actions were at the end of the first game, it was still a horrible decision, and I was never on his team. As hard as it was to watch Abby murder him, I was sure she had a defensible reason. I remember thinking that even if this killing had nothing to do with Joel’s actions in the hospital, who knows how many people have a grievance with him for something he did in the years before he met Ellie.
That said, Abby lost the moral high ground with me the moment she tortured him, as well as Tommy and, to a certain extent, Ellie. Nothing justifies torture.
To Abby’s credit, she finds a reason in Lev to stop herself from killing. To take the person she became after she carried out her revenge and channel that guilt in a healthier direction. But I don’t think this makes up for what she did to the innocent who had a connection to Joel, and despite her arc, I’m not convinced she wouldn’t do it again.
Ellie, meanwhile, embarks on what’s set up as a righteous revenge to kill Abby. If she had asked me for my opinion, I’d have told her not to do it. Healthy coping mechanisms for trauma aside, I’m a sucker for revenge stories, and most of them don’t end well for a reason. But I didn’t have the power to stop her or change her mind, so off she went to kill those who wronged her. Predictably, she doesn’t just hurt the WLF, but also herself and everyone in her life who cares about her.
Towards the end of the game, we flashback to Ellie and Joel’s final conversation. Joel has revealed to Ellie that he saved her at the expense of humanity. Ellie tells Joel that she wanted to die, and though she doesn’t say this part out loud, I think she still does. It’s the moment I finally understood that Abby only played a small hand in breaking Ellie. She was mostly broken already by Joel a long time ago, and at the end of the game, she understands that she’s fully transformed into the person she was trying to forgive.
That said, like Abby, her revelation doesn’t make up for anything that she does, and the further I went along as Ellie, the less allegiance I felt to her. We like morality in our narratives, and in our lives, to be simple. You’re a bad person, but you change, so then you aren’t. Rarely, however, is this the case. As the audience, we know more about Abby and Ellie than they know about each other, and probably themselves. If you sat Ellie down and told her about Abby’s growth, would it have made a difference?
There’s a sequence late in the game that occurs after Abby spares Ellie in the theater. In it, we play as Ellie as she and Dina live out a seemingly idyllic life on a farm they’ve called their own. It was the most nervous I felt while playing the game. (Yes, including the rat king.) If you want to improve at guessing what’s going to happen in a story, all you need to do is follow the thematic arc, and the tea leaves read to me that Ellie was due for a reckoning. So I played the farm sequence thinking that at some point, a bullet was going to rip through her head. Maybe while herding her sheep or playing with her stepson on the tractor. Maybe it would miss her only to hit Dina.
Who would be behind the trigger? Who knows. Maybe a member of the WLF. Maybe a Seraphite. Maybe a loved one of the countless unnamed you killed along the way seeking their own righteous revenge. After all, this started because you killed an unnamed doctor in the first game.
After I completed the game, I thought about the dipshits again. I wanted to hurt them. Not physically, mind you. But there was a part of me that wanted to hop on Metacritic or find some dweeb on Twitter and try to ruin his day. “You worthless sack of shit.” “You transphobic scumbag.” “I hope somebody takes your copy of Mein Kempf and rams it up your asshole, you fucking nazi rat.”
I didn’t end up doing that, but if I did, my only reward would be maybe three minutes of satisfaction, tops. Regardless of my hypothetical righteousness, it would help no one. Not me. Not them. Not anyone in the trans community or anyone in between. All it would be is another failure to see past myself and understand the bigger picture. I’d be spinning the same wheel Ellie and Abby spend their stories turning.
To the audience, revenge stories are about morality, but to the wronged party, the traumatized, revenge is about emotion. Not what is right, but what feels right. A purging of destructive thought. Imagine if a person does something so terrible to you that it truly ruins your life. Your abilities to be happy and function like an emotionally healthy human being are gone. Then someone tells you to just move on. That violence and anger won’t solve anything. Even if they’re right, do you listen? How do you stomach the idea that you’re just supposed to just walk away?
At some point, I decided I didn’t believe in god. The hardest part of going from a world with an all-powerful deity to one where its decrees don’t matter is coping with the knowledge that the wicked are going to go unpunished. Hitler isn’t roasting in a boiling vat of blood in hell. He’s dust, just like everything else. But cope with this knowledge I did. It was hard. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done to a limited extent. But my perspective changed, and now I’m happier.
