Spoiler Alert
Joel deserved better, and I think most people who played the original ‘Last of Us’ would agree. In that game, Joel was a paranoid (yet competent and effective) survivor with long experience in zombie land. He also had a very relatable plotline where you protected your adopted daughter Ellie from murderous psychos. His climatic battle to kill a group of mad scientists trying to rip her brain out cemented a happy father daughter relationship. So far so good.
Ellie
Things start to get…. odd… in The Last of Us 2, when Abby (daughter of said murdered brain-pilfering mad scientists) decides to murder Joel. Joel, of course, was far too paranoid to trust her… haha, no. Actually he took a bunch of idiot pills between games, and thus went with Abby for no reason whatsoever. She then beat him to death with a golf bat. Ellie then seduces a pregnant woman (Dina) into cheating on her boyfriend with her, and they charge off to get vengeance for Joel – killing everyone between her and Abby.
We also get to play as Abby and kill wacky jungle Christians expies with an adopted trans kid called Lev, while the game works hard to make us like her. Abby has dry anal sex with a married man, beats up a pregnant woman, and generally makes people dislike her a lot – probably including the player. Meanwhile – Ellie finishes murdering Abby’s crew, and then meets Abs herself for fisticuffs. At that point – having killed literally thousands – Ellie, of course, meekly forgives the person who caved her father’s head in because forgiveness is good. Roll credits.
Of course, that leaves us with a slightly pressing question:
“What The Fuck Just Happened?”
Well fear not – this article is here to explain. You see: far from being a crippled and incoherent mess of a story, The Last of Us 2 is actually founded on clear feminist principles. In other words: it actually has an amazing script – shut up, it makes total sense – and if you disagree you better be immune to pitchforks.
Druckmann, the director, is (of course) a keen feminist who fires anyone who disagrees with his vision (this is very feminist). He also makes sure to include progressive views throughout the game, with a core vision of “bizarre cultists pretending to be Christians who are mean to our (tragic and/or noble) cast of LGBT heroes”. You may be shocked to learn he was strongly inspired by Anita Sarkeesian – the formerly popular feminist video game commentator…. who hates playing video-games. But what has feminism got to do with Joel being an idiot, and Ellie sparing the random chick who teed off his entire head with a golf club? Why is the jungle full of dodgy trans-hating weirdos? Why does it gaslight us with claims that our mass-murdering antagonist Abby is a hero worthy of our love – yet spend half the game beating on Joel for somehow not being nice enough?
Because Men Are Bad (Of Course)
Feminists believe in a concept called toxic masculinity. The idea is (basically) that men are trained by society to be violent, rape filled, and cruel. This social pressure supposedly makes men (and only men, of course) want to hurt, rape, molest, and kill women. It claims men force their sons, and other men, conform to a cruel and violent kind of ‘thug society’ that is evidenced in everything – from the male pursuit of success, and sex, to them not ‘opening up’. Basically, it’s pretty much a watered down 1950s stereotype of black men applied to all men.
In the game, this Toxicity is embodied by Joel – who is guilty of violently murdering an honest doctor who only wanted to brutally extract Ellie’s think-noodle in a very fatal way. He was a toxic man, who killed people – and we all know that violence is bad (when men do it). So, he had to die. He also couldn’t be competent – because only women can be competent – and so he had to arrive at his skull-flogging in the dumbest way possible.
None of this morality applies to Abby, by the way – it’s perfectly fine when they murder several thousand people, because Feminism. Men and women have to be held to different moral standards because men are evil, women are good, and none of this is the least bit hypocritical. After all, Feminism’s primary method of achieving Gender Equality is to hold the genders to completely different standards at all times.
This is why Abby – the woman who murders Joel – is very forcibly portrayed as a good person. She plays with dogs (a common Hollywood method of making you like a character), kills Straw Men (I mean, evil transphobic jungle Christians), and saves kids. And, since SJWs think that transgender friends are little more than status symbols that Virtue Signal how Woke you are, she has a mother-son relationship with a trans man. The game very clearly wants you to think she’s a Good Woman who we should sympathize with and support, despite literal murder being her number one problem solving tool. It should be stressed at this point that LGBT/Q+ inclusion is NOT the issue here. Gay and trans rights are partly under the umbrella of Men’s Rights. MRAs are also far more likely to be on that spectrum than average, and we appreciate the inclusion. MRAs are also fine with games involving murder or antagonists.
The Real Problem with Last of Us 2 Is…. Gaslighting
This game commits actual, literal, Emotional Abuse against the player. It does so by portraying some of the worst people imaginable as good and righteous, while maligning and killing a good father – whom it dubs evil. This isn’t even scratching the surface of the moral and social mess that is The Last of Us 2. There are plenty of actions that Abby and Ellie take that most would see as evil – but, under a feminist light, they are good because women are good. For example: an old man takes Abby in and helps her, and then she beats him to death with a golf club while his daughter screams to spare him. Some may see this as despicable – but remember: he’s a man. Murdering him is ok because (mumble bad mumble mumble). You see: Toxic Masculinity only applies to males, and has no real official female equivalent under Feminism. The concept of Toxic Femininity mainly exists as an anti-feminist satire of Toxic Masculinity.
But maybe men really are just are evil. Maybe Joel was somehow a bad guy, despite what we saw in Last of Us One. Maybe men just deserve to be hit, and killed, and so on – when a woman does it. Okay then. What about that time when Abby beats the crap out of a pregnant woman? She stops in time, so Naughty Dog says it’s okay. And then they reframe it to be about showing ‘women can stick together and help each other out’. This is a big theme throughout the game. As you slaughter your way through hordes, you build to the conclusion that murder of women is bad and you shouldn’t kill women. Men, and jungle transphobe Christians (of both genders) are fair game of course. But that really isn’t the only bad thing the game tries to swing as good. Content warning: here comes the sex!
Cheating Is Good?
After Owen (a married man) criticizes Abby for being violent, she slams him into a wall and has dry anal sex with him. She then gets angry when he doesn’t want to leave his pregnant wife to be with her. If that collection of words confuses you, just imagine playing it. This is sold as a positive scene because cheating is a feminist choice, and a women should be free to sleep with whoever they like (even if they are in a committed relationship). Indeed, the freedom of women to cheat on their partners has been a core part of the movement to improve video games and make them more woke.
Ellie had a more complex arc. She opened by cheating with Dina – a pregnant manic pixie girl who couldn’t control her sexuality if you paid her, and who was in a loving relationship. This is a positive opening again, because a woman is leaving a man for a woman – reducing the influence of toxic masculinity – and women are following their emotions rather than being bound by ‘patriarchal hegomonic masculinity’. (Translation: women don’t need to respect male feelings because feminism)
We also see Ellie having more tension, and retcon flashbacks of a bad relationship with Joel. This is good – despite totally destroying the storyline of the previous game – because father daughter relationships are bad per feminism as men are toxic. Fathers spread a toxic patriarchal ideology, and so need to die. This dislike of her father figure helps her cheat with a woman. Cheating, and murder of a man has freed a woman from toxic masculinity.
Murder Is Good Too?
Ellie goes on a killing spree – and you, the player, are forced to comply. The Last of Us 2 makes you, with no other options: murder a pregnant woman, kill a dog, and murder people as they scream and wail and their loved ones cry for mercy. This seems intended to show ‘the toxic influence of men’ on Ellie. Of course, Ellie shows guilt for some of these elements because she knows she’s been a bad person. This is kind of jarring simply because of the shear number of other people she kills with no guilt or care – these are simply ‘bad people who don’t matter’, and thus not worth empathy. Granted, these are wacky jungle transphobe ‘Christians’ who torture her – but, again, it speaks to a larger choice made by the designers to demonise certain groups of people instead of building bridges with them.
Ellie’s vengeance story finally ends with her challenging Abby to a catfight involving hair pulling and without her gun or knife, because weapons would be dishonourable somehow. She loses her fingers as Abby bites them off, and decides that because vengeance is wrong, Ellie will spare Abby, and walks off to raise her baby with Dina (who has left because violence is bad). This is a positive moment because now Abby can help raise Lev and support the LGBT cause, and because Ellie didn’t murder an LGBT ally. The toxic influence of Joel which made Ellie hurt and injure those around her is finally ended, and we have moved from a message of hate to one of love and forgiveness between a lesbian and her pregnant bisexual girlfriend. Hate and murder against everyone else including men like Owen (who actively tried to restrain the sadism of Abby) is still woke.
Hatred Is Very Good
Perhaps the most jarring and out of place part of this entire game is the fact that its message seems designed to hurt LGBTQ people, and stir up division between them and Christians (the clear source of the Seraphites) in particular. It certainly does not show LGBT people in a good light, what with all the random murders they commit and then justify. Worse: instead of building bridges for LGBTQ people and Christians, it burns them by setting the two up as natural enemies. And they do so in a way that is highly reminiscent of old racist films depicting black people as a wall of gibbering savages.
This theme is made very explicit by gameplay mechanics. You can’t shoot Jewish religious symbols, because Judaism is woke – but can shoot jungle Christian religious symbols (like angels) because Christianity is bad. You have no need to forgive jungle Christian people you murder, because forgiveness is only for LGBT allies.
A Massive Missed-Opportunity
Imagine, instead, that the LGBTQ heroes were forced to team up with Christian allies – a friendship forged under fire would have sold the message of trans acceptance. Instead, the creators chose wreck their own message by sewing tribalism, division, hate, and bias. This is a deliberate choice on the part of Naughty Dog. Nobody could come out of this game thinking that a message was anything other than ‘we want you to hate real people’ – and it is very striking just how far the game is willing to go to stoke that hate. Naughty dog is clearly very aware of hatred’s power, and what they are doing. If it was not, you would be able to desecrate every single religious symbol in the game, instead of only the ‘right’ ones. The aim is very clear: to demonise Christian and Conservative groups, setting them up as the natural enemies of the LGBTQ. This is exceptionally sad because, despite the common perception, lots of Christian & conservative people with LGBTQ children react compassionately when they find out. The owner of this site is a gay Christian with conservative Christian parents who did just that – a lot like most of the Christian parents in this video.
This Is, To Put It Mildly, Not Helping
You do not gain allies and make friends by setting up very specific groups of very real people as enemies and objects of hate. You would think that an LGBTQ friendly director would realise the level of damage this game could do to LGBTQ people by making them the enemies of Christians in a heavily Christian world. Imagine a trans guy sitting down with his Christian friends to play this game, and walking right into this narrative where his friends are a weird trans-hating Nazi Jungle cult. Imagine playing through the scene where Abby is brutally tortured by them to ‘cut the sin out’. That seems like a very uncomfortable situation for everyone involved. Perhaps it could even end their friendship.
Designing a game to stoke tribalism and division is a terrifyingly bad idea – and tit gets even worse when you read the subtext. Anti-Semitic communities will notice the special treatment for Judaism over Christianity, and weaponize it as proof that ‘the Jews are in charge’. They will notice that it was not a Jew or a Muslim who tried to ‘cut the sin out’ of an LGBT woman. They will likely bring up the number of gay men thrown off of rooftops in Muslim countries. And thus their numbers will grow, and hate will stew.
This is why you must be VERY careful about the message you put forth in any kind of media – especially the popular kind. The implications of that media set ripples flowing across the world, and that affects real life people. Not just the targets of your hate, but the people you set up as so good they can murder butcher their way through hundreds and not be morally stained by it. This is not just a case of it being better to spread compassion than hate with your story – it’s about not handing weapons to actual Nazis.
Why The Last of Us II Took Such A Weird Left Turn
“Did nobody in the studio complain about this bizarre storyline? Or the crazy character changes? Or making out entire groups of people as evil?” you may be wondering. Well, the truth is they couldn’t. Naughty Dog worked writers in near slavery conditions, fired people who complained, and most of the people working on the story were junior developers who didn’t have the social power to protest the whims of their feminist overlords. The writers and actors had to sacrifice their families to make this female supremacist video game.
But was there no one more experienced to help out? No because Druckmann forced out Amy Hennig, an extremely experienced and skilled story writer with a long record of successful games and stories. She’s widely known as one of the best writers in the industry. She made three amazing Uncharted games, The Legacy of Kain series. She is a genius. She got forced out by Druckmann likely because she wasn’t willing to be woke enough and much of her Uncharted 4 script was scrapped in favour of having a muscular black woman beat the crap out of the protagonists. Last of Us II was written under the whip of Druckmann, free from guidance.
You might think that – as a woman, and this as a feminist storyline – Amy would be a positive influence. Per woke theory Amy’s a bad woman – she notes that men gave her many opportunities in the video game industry, and is positive to the existence of men. Only hate to the toxic masculinity of men is allowed in the video game industry. If she had written Last of Us II, it would have probably been a masterpiece to all, but because of the feminist Druckmann, that couldn’t be.
This theme of anti femininity was continued through the story, to the point that many people were confused as to which characters were meant to be trans and which were not as they de feminized a lot of the characters. This is because women with feminine proportions and large breasts are bad people, and so need to be showed less in video games (per feminist perspectives) as they attract too much male attention. Women are allowed, but only if they have the right political beliefs and appearance.
A Game Built For The Modern Age
This story could have been much better without any skimping at all on the heavy female presence or LGBTQ representation. There was no need for all this dumb added wokeness which several of our MRA women and trans friends called tired and annoying. They could have simply had lesbians and trans people murdering zombies and survivors. The game did not need to divide people with a heavy-handed Straw Man tactics. Compassionate male characters, and Christian characters who love LGBT people would have sold the message that LGBT people are good and we should be good to them. An army of weird transphobic jungle Christians simply redirects hate. “No.” The Last of Us is saying. “You shouldn’t hate LGBT people – you should hate these OTHER people!” And thus the cycle of hate and tribalism continues, with plenty of commentary suggesting that murdering a father was awesome.
I do not think “we should eliminate hate” is controversial idea outside of woke circles. However, Naughty Dog is nothing if not woke.
The ‘pandemic’ storyline is very emotive, especially in these modern times, and could help carry and important message of togetherness…. But, instead, Naughty Dog went with “When woke people slaughter those you love, you should forgive them and apologize for not being woke enough rather than protecting your family!” Which is, oddly enough, a message totally opposed to the first Last of Us game – where Joel will do anything to protect the one he loves.
This all sums up to a clear point – this mess of a game is a feminist masterpiece, and embodies all the threads of feminism, woke culture, and all things modern. The plot points that many have criticized as incoherent or dumb were very intentional. Perhaps in Last of us 3 they can continue this, by having Dina, Abby, and Ellie taking a dump on Joel’s grave and having a threesome. One thing is for sure. The future of video games is a very narrow and prescribed vision of female.
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Well.
That was dumb.
Before I go into why this video game is dumb, I would like to point out something.
I looked up the character Lev when I first heard of it (from you) thinking it was a trans woman. When I learned it was a trans man, I was like, “Wow, someone picked a trans man instead for once.” As a trans man, I was like, “Huh.” But when I learned what he does with Ellie, well, it made me mad. Trans men rarely ever get representation (while trans women get a bunch), and for some people playing this game, it may be the first time they ever see trans men. So to see us being represented this way is absolutely horrible.
Now, onto why the video game sucks.
Let’s start with the representation of Christians.
Even though some Christians aren’t that great, most Christians (at least in the US) are. Most people are willing to vote for a gay or lesbian president. And most people in the US are Christian. And while some of the acceptance of gays may be due to the rising number of atheists in the US, it still doesn’t negate the fact that most US citizens are Christian.
Representing Christians this way, by saying that all Christians are anti-LGBT Nazis (come on, most Christians aren’t Holocaust-era German Christians), would be like saying that all Jews are greedy, that all black men are criminals, or that all Muslims are terrorists or extremists that want to hack atheists with machetes and/or clevers.
Also, Christianity isn’t even the worst religion out there. While some of the religion is indeed built on hate (mainly the hatred of gay or bi men), it is still from some absolutely ridiculous passages of the Bible that no one follows anyway.
I may not like certain Christians, but that does NOT translate to me hating all Christians. I do in fact love or are friends with some Christians.
And you know what? If the stupid creators of The Last of Us 2 had shown just some Christians as bad while showing others as good, the video game would be immensely less dumb.
Now, let’s move onto LGBT people.
God, this one is absolute TRASH. Dividing LGBT people and Christians as you point out, showing LGBT people as slaughter-happy freaks, and more. GOD. I don’t even believe, and these people already have me praying.
Abby is a rapist who beats up and kills everyone around her, and then Ellie forgives her for beating her father’s skull in with a golf bat because “feminism.”
Well, since I’m bit tired of writing out this comment, I shall try to end it here.
Let’s just say that the representation of both the LGBT characters and the Christian characters was some of the worst possible that anyone could come up with.
Pretty well thought out criticism. Thank you. I think the large percentage of Christians in America are lovely people, as much as some genuinely don’t like LGBT people such as us. Plus, I can’t imagine Jesus acting the way we see hateful Christians acting.
Yup! I’m not a Christian, but hating Christians (when most are good people) without a real reason is kind of dumb.
I’m gonna make a post on this game, and I’m gonna use your article so I can point out some things.
What do you suggest for it, though?
For the Christian part, or a more general article like ours? For the Christian part, I think that the best thing to do would be to compare the actual reaction from Christians to trans people (fairly mixed) to the reaction in the game (crazed Nazi screaming). It’s up to you, really.
For a more general part. I want to do an article on the game.