Rules of the Father in The Last of Us: Masculinity Among the Ruins of Neoliberalism (Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender) 303089603X, 9783030896034

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN (RE)PRESENTING GENDER SERIES EDITOR: EMMA REES

Rules of the Father in The Last of Us Masculinity Among the Ruins of Neoliberalism J. Jesse Ramirez

Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender

Series Editor Emma Rees Director, Institute of Gender Studies University of Chester Chester, UK

​ he focus of Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender is on gender and T representation. The ‘arts’ in their broadest sense – TV, music, film, dance, and performance – and media re-present (where ‘to represent’ is taken in its literal sense of ‘to present again’, or ‘to give back’) gender globally. How this re-presentation might be understood is core to the series. In re-presenting gendered bodies, the contributing authors can shift the spotlight to focus on marginalised individuals’ negotiations of gender and identity. In this way, minority genders, subcultural genders, and gender inscribed on, in, and by queer bodies, take centre stage. When the ‘self’ must participate in and interact with the world through the body, how that body’s gender is talked about – and side-lined or embraced by hegemonic forces – becomes paramount. These processes of representation – how cultures ‘give back’ gender to the individual – are at the heart of this series. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16541

J. Jesse Ramirez

Rules of the Father in The Last of Us Masculinity Among the Ruins of Neoliberalism

J. Jesse Ramirez School of Humanities & Social Sciences American Studies St. Gallen, Switzerland

ISSN 2662-9364     ISSN 2662-9372 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender ISBN 978-3-030-89603-4    ISBN 978-3-030-89604-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Luna and Ronja

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following colleagues and friends for their intellectual and moral support during the writing of this book: Bryan Banker, Sandra King-Savic, Jörg Metelmann, Sixta Quassdorf, Alan Robinson, Florian Schulz, Roy Sellers, Thomas Telios. A special thank you to Sarah Stulz, who pushed me to think more critically about gender, inspired many of the book’s arguments, and provided incisive feedback. I could have cited her on almost every page. A book about parenting and care must also recognize the family members who have nurtured and supported me: my father, Jessie; my mothers, Elvia and Lisa; my grandmothers, Lupe and Sophia; my tías, Mari, Socorro, Olivia, Esperanza, and Roberta; my tío, Gabriel; and my siblings, Sam, Max, and Mila. Finally, this book would not have been possible without my daughters, Luna and Ronja, whose creativity and courage inspire me to be a better father.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Spoiler Alert  1 2 Prologue: Father Fails 15 Part I Summer  35 3 Quarantine Zone: American Dystopia 37 4 The Outskirts: Fridging Tess 53 5 Bill’s Town: No Country for Gay Men 61 6 Pittsburgh and the Suburbs: Sacrificial Blackness 71 Part II Fall  83 7 Tommy’s Dam and the University: The New Frontier 85

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Contents

Part III Winter  93 8 Lakeside Resort: Reversal 95 Part IV Spring 107 9 Bus Depot, Firefly Lab, Jackson: What a Dad’s Gotta Do109 10 Conclusion: Good Riddance, Joel!123 Bibliography135 Index145

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3

“Don’t Do This To Me.” Sarah dies in Joel’s arms. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author) 29 Tess the Mediator and Dispatcher. Tess’s role is to trade places with Ellie. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author) 55 Joel and the Off-White Hunter. A dark-skinned hunter attacks Joel. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author) 73 Ellie’s Whiteness. Ellie’s white face glows after saving Joel. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author) 74 The Giraffe. The player can interact without violence. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author) 111 Joel Saves Baby Girl. Joel takes Ellie from the Firefly hospital. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author)116 Joel Murders Marlene. Ellie’s surrogate mother begs for her life before Joel shoots her in the head. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author) 118

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Spoiler Alert

Just a few months prior to the release of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II (2020), a spoiler revealed that Joel, the first game’s primary playable character, suffers a brutal death in the sequel. Many fans were incensed. Some called for a boycott of Naughty Dog; others sent death threats to Neil Druckmann, the game’s director, and Laura Bailey, the actress who voices the character who bashes Joel’s head in with a golf club. When The Last of Us Part II was officially released on June 19, 2020, reactions were polarized. While some critics and players hailed the game as a masterpiece, thousands of users participated in a review bomb of the game on the review-aggregating platform Metacritic. “I knew people would get upset at a character they loved dying,” Druckmann confessed, but he “never thought it would reach this kind of hate.”1 According to its most common definition, a spoiler ruins a media consumer’s sense of surprise by giving them advance knowledge of plot details. Review bombers of The Last of Us Part II were furious because videogames are cultural commodities and because one of the latter’s primary marketing promises, the thrill of the new, was spoiled. But more was at stake in the revelation of Joel’s death than the pleasures of a plot twist. 1  Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, and Troy Baker, “Last of Us 2 Spoilercast w/ Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, Troy Baker—Gamescast Ep. 26,” interview by Greg Miller, YouTube, June 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6rRfK-V2jY.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_1

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While criticism of The Last of Us Part II has taken many forms, the most venomous reactions have come from rightwing players and critics who were outraged that Druckmann injected gender politics into the game. In a sample of hate messages that Druckmann shared on Twitter, one user accused Druckmann of “destroy[ing] so many people’s expectations and experiences just because you prioritized a political narrative.”2 Conservative podcaster Andrew Klavan praised the first game’s positive depiction of fatherhood and mocked the sequel as a “crazy SJW [Social Justice Warrior] mess.”3 More specifically, rightwing critics interpreted Abby, the muscular female character who kills Joel, as transgender. Other Twitter messages threatened the director with violence and murder for being “gay and trans loving” and a “radical feminist.”4 Joel’s death sparked belligerent indignation in rightwing gamers because it violated gender norms that were reinforced by their experience of the first game. What was spoiled was not just consumer surprise but also a compelling way of playing fatherly masculinity. And while the rightwing critique isn’t representative of all, or even most, gamers, it does starkly register the fact that The Last of Us Part II subverts the masculine common sense of videogames—including The Last of Us (2013). This book uses Joel’s death as an opportunity to examine the first game’s gender politics. The Last of Us Part II was the highly anticipated sequel to a game that is widely regarded as one of the best ever produced for the Sony Playstation. The Last of Us is remarkable for offering players a narratively and emotionally rich experience within the parameters of genres—zombie apocalypse, action-adventure, shooter—that are commonly associated with mindless violence. But what makes the rightwing critique of the sequel’s politicization so ironic is that The Last of Us was also supposed to be a feminist game. It is a milestone among mainstream, big-budget (AAA) games because Druckmann and Naughty Dog self-­ consciously turned away from hyper-sexualized Lara Crofts and damsels in distress. Shortly after the game’s release, Druckmann acknowledged his “secret agenda”: “I wanted to create one of the coolest, non-sexualized female protagonists, and I felt like with The Last of Us there was an 2  Neil Druckmann, Twitter post, July 5, 2020, 8:15  pm, https://twitter.com/Neil_ Druckmann/status/1279841603843051520. 3  Andrew Klavan, “The Last Of Us 2 Is A Crazy SJW Mess,” YouTube, July 3, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w13cvbMotrs. 4  Neil Druckmann, Twitter post. It should be noted that nothing in the game’s narrative suggests that Abby is transgender.

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opportunity here to change the industry.”5 The co-protagonist of The Last of Us, Ellie, is a strong, savvy, emotionally sophisticated teenage girl who is revealed to be queer in The Last of Us: Left Behind (2014). Yet most of The Last of Us revolves around Joel, Ellie’s paternal protector. And there’s the rub. This book will show that, despite Druckmann’s noble intentions and laudable achievements, The Last of Us encodes patriarchy, the rule of the father, in its procedures and conventions. Videogames are rule-based models of reality; they reduce the world to a set of computational procedures that contain the designers’ rhetorical claims about how the world works, and solicit players to act within their models. The combination of design, play, and historical-political context produces a game’s “ludopolitics.”6 It was Naughty Dog’s ludopolitical model of “good” patriarchy that created the conditions for the subsequent revolt against Joel’s murder. The powerfully appealing gamification of fatherly masculinity in The Last of Us made its spoiling in the sequel explosive; the positive patriarchy in the first game made the second game’s negation of the patriarch enraging for gamers who felt that something precious had been stolen from them. For this positive patriarchy not only provided “fun” gameplay but also modeled solutions to contested gender relations within gamer culture and the neoliberal gender order. With this argument, Rules of the Father is attempting to answer Nicholas Taylor and Gerald Voorhees’s call in Masculinities in Play (2018) to examine how masculinities are “reconstituted and reconfigured through games” and “how games mobilize the industry’s historically privileged base—cisgendered men, mostly straight, mostly white—toward supporting the neoliberal state’s projects.”7 5  Neil Druckmann, “IGDA Toronto 2013 Keynote: Neil Druckmann, Creative Director & Writer, Naughty Dog,” YouTube, October 2, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Le6qIz7MjSk&t=0s. 6  Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); Liam Mitchell, Ludopolitics: Videogames Against Control (Washington: Zero Books, 2018). 7  Nicholas Taylor and Gerald Voorhees, “Masculinity and Gaming: Mediated Masculinities in Play,” in Masculinities in Play, eds. Nicholas Taylor and Gerald Voorhees (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 7, 4. While there are many useful studies of gender and videogames, Taylor and Voorhees note that the specific study of masculinity and videogames is “by comparison, underdeveloped and fairly ad hoc” (4). Other entryways into the literature include Derek A.  Burrill, Die Tryin’: Videogames, Masculinity, Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Megan Condis, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018); Melissa Kagan, “Walking, Talking and

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Rules of the Father will unpack its arguments in the form of a critical playthrough. In contrast to strategy guides, which detail the steps necessary to beat a game, the contemporary playthrough is typically an edited or live-streamed video that documents an individual player’s experience of an entire game. The playthrough shows us that gaming is a social conversation that extends beyond the individual couch and screen, that players and non-players find value in experiencing a videogame through intimate engagement with another’s play and opinions, and that a single videogame is worth the focused and extensive commentary that is routinely afforded to other cultural commodities like novels and films. Like a typical playthrough, Rules of the Father guides readers through the entirety of The Last of Us and subjects everything from the title screen to the final cutscene to analysis. But while I draw on amateur game criticism, my playthrough goes beyond the usual strategy and color commentary and invites readers to experience The Last of Us with the aid of academic videogame studies, gender studies, and theories of neoliberalism. The goal of my playthrough is not to present the single, conclusive meaning of The Last of Us but to intervene in metagames about, with, around, and beyond it. For Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux, metagames are more than just games about games. The “meta-” in “metagame” includes “everything occurring before, after, between, and during games as well as everything located in, on, around, and beyond games.”8 The concept of metagame is a useful tool for thinking about the larger contexts of meaning and practice, ideology and habitus, that shape the prevailing cultural and economic uses of videogames. While there are numerous metagames, Boluk and Lemieux argue that there is a “standard metagame,” an ensemble of cultural conventions, tacit beliefs, and unconscious bodily comportment. These inconspicuously govern the “normal” Playing with Masculinities in Firewatch,” Game Studies 18, no. 2 (2018), http://gamestudies. org/1802/articles/kagen; Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003), chap. 11; Marcus Maloney, Steven Roberts, and Timothy Graham, Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit’s r/gaming Community (New York: Palgrave, 2019); Soraya Murray, “The Last of Us: Masculinity,” in How to Play Videogames, eds. Matthew Thomas Payne and Nina B. Huntemann (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 101–109. 8  Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux, Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 9, 11.

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or “correct” way to play and are in a constant feedback loop with game design, marketing, and hardware.9 Playing the standard metagame on a PlayStation includes holding the controller between your thumbs, understanding that the “x” button will mostly likely allow you to advance through menus, centering your face in front of a screen at a particular distance, appreciating the latest resolution and frame rates, and, crucially, consuming the ludic experience as a leisure-time commodity that is distinct and protected from the rest of social reality. Boluk and Lemieux explain that the standard metagame is “a widely held, naturalized system of beliefs that conflates the fantasy of escapism with the commodity form and encloses play within the magic circle of neoliberal capital.”10 It is here, at the border of the “magic circle” with which the standard metagame demarcates gamic and extra-gamic life, that we find the meaning of Druckmann’s “politics.” For Druckmann’s rightwing critics, “politics” initially appears to be an intrusion of an extra-gamic reality—call it “social justice”—into the commodified escapism of play. But upon closer inspection, “politics” signifies exactly the opposite. The problem for Druckmann’s haters isn’t that The Last of Us Part II comes too close to reality but rather that social justice strays too far from the gender conventions that the standard metagame reproduces and celebrates. While accepting the farfetched fiction of a post-apocalyptic world, Druckmann’s detractors were unable or unwilling to pretend that Abby could kill Joel, and that Abby’s character is worth playing later in the game, because a “trans” woman should not be able to murder a powerful father. For the act threatens the standard metagame’s pact with hegemonic masculinity, the historically constructed and shifting pattern of masculine ideology and practice that legitimates inequalities among masculinities and femininities through a combination of consent and coercion.11 The conventions of hegemonic masculinity specify, among other things, that men and women are naturally binary—hence transgender identity is an illusion—and that straight, cisgender men like Joel are inherently more aggressive and powerful than the feminine and gay masculine subjects over 9  Boluk and Lemieux, 36, 281; See also M. D. Schmalzer, “Janky Controls and Embodied Play: Disrupting the Cybernetic Gameplay Circuit,” Game Studies 20, no. 3 (2003), http:// gamestudies.org/2003/articles/schmalzer. 10  Boluk and Lemieux, Metagaming, 8. 11  R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2005); James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity: Formulation, Reformulation, and Amplification (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

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whom they should rule. Adding insult to injury, Abby kills Joel with a gulf club—an ironic affront to Joel’s weapon skills and hegemonic masculinity’s norm of technological mastery.12 The standard metagame is where the hegemonic uses of videogames and the hegemonic uses of gender converge. Opposition to “politics” in The Last of Us Part II is a screen for maintaining the standard metagame’s existing political bargain with the rules, codes, and practices that define “real” manliness and authorize social inequalities among genders; it is a defense of one kind of gamified gender politics over another. To liberate videogames from “social justice warriors” like Druckmann wouldn’t mean to produce apolitical games but rather to preserve the status quo relationship between the most lucrative AAA videogame genres and hegemonic masculinity; to uphold character systems and narrative types that center hegemonically masculine subjects and their interests, thus relegating other genders to the stereotypes critiqued by Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women in Video Games13; and to preserve gameplay that proceduralizes performances of masculine authority and validates the rule of some men (and a few women) in the world beyond the screen. It would also mean to reinstate the standard metagame’s ability to function as an “antimetagaming metagame,” that is, a metagame that conceals its status as a metagame and organizes play around the enthralling fiction that it is the only way to play with videogames, gender, and power.14 When such a fiction becomes hegemonic, it functions as a pervasive common sense, an ensemble of taken-for-granted knowledges that “giv[e] the illusion of arising directly from experience, reflecting only the realities of daily life.”15 12  Connell, chap. 8. Connell notes that while there is a split between dominance and technical expertise as versions of hegemonic masculinity, the two “coexist as gendered practices, sometimes in opposition and sometimes meshing” (194). A similarly dialectical tension exists between hegemonic masculinity and geek masculinity. Although geek masculinity arose in opposition to hegemonic masculine ideals of physical strength and athleticism, it shares hegemonic masculine ideals of competition and technical mastery. In its toxic form, geek masculinity polices core videogame culture to exclude women and other nontraditional gamers. See Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, eds., Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (New York: Palgrave, 2017); T.L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012). 13  The entire Tropes vs Women in Video Games series can be found on the Feminist Frequency website: https://feministfrequency.com/series/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games/. 14  Boluk and Lemieux, Metagaming, 281. 15  Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea, “Common-Sense Neoliberalism,” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture 55 (Winter 2013): 8–9.

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The stakes of the standard metagame’s compact with hegemonic masculinity have sharpened in two historical contexts. The more recent, conjunctural shift is the emergence of the casual era of videogaming. Amanda C. Cote periodizes the era as beginning in the mid-2000s, when Nintendo introduced the DS handheld system and the Wii console. Departing from the industry’s traditional focus on “core” gamers—white, male, straight, cisgender, young, able-bodied—Nintendo’s new strategy emphasized casual, easily learnable games that appealed to core gamers and broader, nontraditional audiences, including women and the elderly. This strategy has spread throughout the console and mobile gaming markets and has led to a diversification of players and games. But Cote also emphasizes that the casual era is contradictory. As gaming culture becomes more inclusive, new and intensified exclusions and hatreds have emerged to protect the old core and its preferred play styles and games. GamerGate, the 2014 harassment campaign against female game designers and media critics, including Sarkeesian, was only one of the most visible forms taken by the backlash against women and other nontraditional gamers.16 The dynamics of the casual era are a microcosm of a second, epochal context: neoliberalism. Since neoliberalism is a multifaceted concept, I want to specify that, for the purposes of my playthrough, I follow scholars who treat neoliberalism as both an economic project and a conservative moral philosophy. On the one hand, neoliberalism refers to a set of economic ideas and policies that became globally hegemonic by the end of the 1970s in response to that period’s capitalist crises. Its hallmarks include deregulation, free trade, privatization, union busting, and the stripping of the welfare state down to its capacity to create and protect the conditions for market freedom.17 One result has been massive concentrations of economic power, including in the console videogame industry, which is dominated by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. On the other hand, neoliberal economic policies have been motivated by a moral vision of individuals and families tied together by traditional values. Melinda Cooper has shown that neoliberal thinkers and policy makers joined forces with social conservatives to shore up the traditional family against the perceived threats of 16  Amanda C. Cote, Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games (New York: New York University Press, 2020). 17  David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford, 2005). It doesn’t follow that the state simply withers away under neoliberalism. Since market freedom requires large expenditures on military and police to discipline neoliberalized populations, segments of the state grow under neoliberalism.

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the redistributive state and insurgencies against the Fordist family’s gender, racial, and sexual inequalities. Their shared goal was to shift responsibility for welfare from the state to responsible individuals and self-sufficient, patriarchal families.18 But the neoliberal project to reinvigorate morality has been a disaster. Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019) argues that neoliberal policies and practices have catalyzed antidemocratic, far right revolts by demonizing society. For Brown, society is the bedrock of democratic political life because it is “the place where we experience a linked fate across our differences and separateness.” Society is the domain in which a democratic people can address the inequalities that undermine formal political equality; it is where “citizens of vastly unequal backgrounds and resources are potentially brought together and thought together […] and where historically produced inequalities are made manifest as differentiated political access, voice, and treatment, as well as where these inequalities may be partially redressed.”19 By denying not only the validity of the state as an instrument of social welfare, but even society’s very existence, neoliberalism has given ammunition to far right movements that reject gender, racial, and sexual equity as “politically correct,” dictatorial impositions on liberty and traditional morality. If society doesn’t exist, as arch neoliberal Margaret Thatcher once claimed, then groups whose own rights and privileges were socially produced are freed from obligations to acknowledge and remedy the social inequalities that shape the lives of others. Moreover, neoliberal liberty transforms their screeds against uppity feminists, undeserving people of color, and job-stealing immigrants into free speech: “It anoints as free expression every historically and politically generated sentiment of (lost) entitlement based in whiteness, maleness, or nativism while denying these to be socially produced, releasing them from any connection to social conscience, compromise, or consequence.”20 Opposition to society and social justice unites the most toxic segments of casual-era videogame culture and the contemporary far right. The 18  Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017). 19  Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 27. 20  Brown, 45. Brown claims that the far right revolt is an unintended consequence of neoliberalism. For a critique, see Arun Kundnani, “The Racial Constitution of Neoliberalism,” Race & Class 63, no. 1 (2021): 51–69.

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connection is especially clear in the case of GamerGate, which brought together aggrieved core gamers, men’s rights activists, neo-Nazis, and Trump voters. The various factions share anti-feminist, transphobic, and racist politics, a political vocabulary of “redpilling” and “cucks,” and online spaces such as Twitter, 4Chan, Reddit, and Steam.21 Videogames are an ideological touchstone for such coalitions because many games allegorize rightwing sensibilities about the defense of borders, protection of autochthonous community from contamination, and restoration of traditional harmony.22 But while The Last of Us Part II is a rather obvious target for rightwing vitriol, it is not immediately clear why The Last of Us, which appeared on the cusp of GamerGate, was largely spared.23 After all, The Last of Us is also a product of the casual era. Druckmann has connected his passion for storytelling and character development to casual-era indie games like Journey (2012), Gone Home (2013) and Papers, Please (2013). Cote observes that these games have challenged “the expectations of core games’ historical focus on straight, white, male audiences and genres like first-person shooters,” “deliberately told new stories, exploring the experiences of immigrants and gay women,” and “targeted new audiences, extending past ‘gamers.’”24 Druckmann’s goal was to bring indie game storytelling and inclusivity to the AAA market. He was also directly influenced by feminist videogame criticism and has been a strong supporter of Sarkeesian. Druckmann introduced Sarkeesian and presented her with the Ambassador Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2014, crediting her Tropes vs Women in Video Games with helping him improve the story of  Condis, Gaming Masculinity, chap. 4.  Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 54–55. 23  But see Chris Suellentrop, “In the Same Boat, but Not Equals,” New York Times, June 14, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/arts/video-games/in-the-videogame-the-last-of-us-survival-favors-the-man.html. Druckmann and Straley’s reactions to gender critiques of The Last of Us were defensive. While Druckmann celebrated Sarkeesian’s critique of tropes against women in other games, this very critique allegedly became simplistic and failed to account for nuance when others applied it to his game: “the criticism has to become more sophisticated. We have to dissect these subtleties, instead of just pointing to these tropes and saying, ‘Well, you have a woman dying, so you have a game where the death of a woman fuel’s this man’s story.’ The discussion has to go deeper than that.” Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley, “The Definitive Interview with the Creators of Sony’s The Last of Us (Part One),” interview by Dean Takahas, VentureBeat, August 5, 2013, https:// venturebeat.com/2013/08/05/the-last-of-us-interview-part-one/. 24  Cote, Gaming Sexism, 51–52. 21 22

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The Last of Us.25 “I think before [Sarkeesian] you would have had a hard time talking about tropes and how women are represented in games,” Druckmann explained in a 2013 interview, “or how characters of color are represented in games.” He was not only “excited by the discussion and the kind of criticism games are getting,” but also questioned the viability of game studios that “don’t engage in that discussion, who don’t try to appeal to audiences that are coming on. [They] are going to be left behind.”26 Here we see not only Druckmann’s moral principles but also how diversity is a means to expand a cultural commodity’s market. In Druckmann’s telling, the creation of The Last of Us is a frustrating, enlightening, and ultimately successful tale of making a female-affirming game. The story starts with “Mankind,” a revealingly named early version of The Last of Us that combined inspirations from three main sources. From the PlayStation 2 game Ico (2001), Druckmann borrowed the idea of a playable male character who ushers a non-playable female character through a dangerous gamespace; inspired by the police officer John Hartigan in the comic Sin City (1991–2001), Druckmann imagined the protagonist of “Mankind” as a gruff older man who must protect a young girl, but whose poor health forces the girl to eventually project him; adapting the zombie virus from George Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (1968), Druckmann populated the game with zombie-like enemies infected by a fungal virus.27 But since only women were infected in “Mankind,” the game was essentially about a male player killing women. Women in the Naughty Dog development team helped to convince Druckmann that “Mankind” was “misogynistic.”28 He and co-creator Bruce Straley failed to sell the game. When they changed the story so that all humans were infected, they made Tess, Joel’s smuggling partner, the primary villain, effectively “fixing” misogyny by replacing a universal female threat with a single femme fatale. Yet, ultimately, Druckmann has 25  The transcript of Druckmann’s presentation can be found on Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency website: https://feministfrequency.com/video/the-2014-game-developerschoice-ambassador-award/. 26  Neil Druckmann, “The Last of Us Dev Says AAA Can Learn from Indies,” interview with Brendan Sinclair, gamesindustry.biz, September 13, 2013, https://www.gamesindustry. biz/articles/2013-09-13-the-last-of-us-dev-says-aaa-can-learn-from-indies. 27  Druckmann, “IGDA Toronto.” 28  Andrew Webster, “The Power of Failure: Making ‘The Last of Us,’” The Verge, September 19, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/19/4744008/making-the-lastof-us-ps3.

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framed these early failures as valuable lessons that helped him make the final version of The Last of Us more progressive. When he discussed his creative process at the International Game Developers Association in late 2013, Druckmann proudly showed a slide of girls cosplaying as Ellie.29 Druckmann, Straley, and the rest of Naughty Dog deserve credit for their efforts to create an inclusive game. While my playthrough is critical, sometimes even severely so, my intention is not to dismiss The Last of Us, much less attack Druckmann. I agree with Amanda Phillips that “it is better for developers to keep trying and failing at these efforts rather than not risk failing at all—as long as they keep failing in good faith.”30 Since I share Druckmann’s good faith commitment to greater diversity in videogames, Rules of the Father unapologetically wears the “gay and trans loving” and “radical feminist” labels that Druckmann’s rightwing trolls lobbed at him. I want to make clear that I wouldn’t bother writing a book about The Last of Us if I didn’t admire and enjoy the game very much. But enjoyment is interpretation’s starting point, not its end. As a cultural interpreter, I find The Last of Us’s contradictions more noteworthy than its sheer successes. Karl Marx theorizes the capitalist system of commodity production and circulation as being rife with contradictions, and he suggests that the commodity form “does not abolish these contradictions, but rather provides the form in which they have room to move.”31 I find Marx’s idea that form puts contradictions in motion without resolving them to be a powerful framework for the critique of videogames in general and The Last of Us in particular. For The Last of Us tells a captivating story and indulges standard violent gameplay. It contributes to the greater diversity of the causal era by featuring intelligent, complex, non-­ sexualized female characters and centers the white male protagonist whom the core gaming market demands. It learns from feminist criticism of tropes against women and kills off (“fridges”) Joel’s daughter early in the game in order to give him a primary motivation. Most importantly, The Last of Us challenges the standard metagame’s bargain with hegemonic masculinity and asks the player to restore the father’s protector role by performing antisocial, neoliberal masculinity. In the game’s  Druckmann, “IGDA Toronto.”  Amanda Phillips, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 169. 31  Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 198, my italics. 29 30

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post-­apocalyptic world, the state, society, and social justice have finally been destroyed, unleashing a freedom that is, in Brown’s words, “release[ed] … from any connection to social conscience, compromise, or consequence.” In the gamified ruins of neoliberalism, straight white men like Joel can fight back against all those others who make them feel like “strangers in their own land.”32 As Soraya Murray argues, The Last of Us mobilizes a “traumatized, frustrated white masculinity,” a “desperate whiteness set against ruin and abolished social structures.”33 Even when The Last of Us finally invites the player to examine the costs of restoring patriarchy in its notorious open ending, the latter’s ambiguity allows the anti-social-justice gamer to feel that no “politics” have been forced upon his play. Indeed, many players interpret the ending as a vindication of Joel. These contradictions reveal less about the personal faults of the designers and more about the tenacity of core gaming culture and the standard metagame; the durability of videogaming’s contract with hegemonic masculinity; and the pervasiveness of neoliberal antisocial freedoms. They also reveal the concessions that are necessary to sell the ludic experience at a profit to predominately white male consumers, many of whom have grown up with videogames and are now playing as fathers.34 The compromises were also wildly successful, satisfying a broad range of fans and critics through the ideological process that Roland Barthes calls “inoculation.” According to Barthes, striptease gives the viewing public only a “touch of evil,” a dash of sexuality that is “absorbed in a reassuring ritual which negates the flesh as surely as the vaccine or the taboo circumscribe and control the illness or the crime.”35 Similarly, by including small, manageable doses of feminism and diversity, The Last of Us incorporates and neutralizes the casual era’s threat to core gaming culture; by adding caring fatherhood to hegemonic masculine performances of 32  See Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: Free Press, 2016). 33  Soraya Murray, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 115, 119. 34  On the “dadification” of games and gaming culture, see Mattie Brice, “The Dadification of Video Games Is Real,” Mattie Brice (blog), August 15, 2013, http://www.mattiebrice. com/the-dadification-of-video-games-is-real/; Sarah Stang, “Controlling Fathers and Devoted Daughters: Paternal Authority in BioShock 2 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt,” First Person Scholar, December 7, 2016, http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/controllingfathers-and-devoted-daughters/. 35  Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), 84.

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strength and violence, The Last of Us hybridizes hegemonic masculinity and gives it a renewed purchase in the era of the fractured neoliberal family.36 Ideological inoculation is how The Last of Us not only weathered the GamerGate storm but emerged as a rightwing counterexample to the sequel’s “politics.” Indeed, who is Ellie, a sympathetic female character who is playable during only a small portion of the game, if not a vaccine against feminist critique?37 Rules of the Father starts from the premise that the arrival of videogaming as a hegemonic cultural commodity means that we must take greater political responsibility for our play and for the gender fantasies encoded in algorithmic entertainment. Instead of seeking to neutralize gender trouble, my playthrough will foreground the relations among The Last of Us, the standard metagame, and hegemonic masculinity. Since masculinities are multiple and relational, I will examine not only the game’s representations and proceduralizations of hegemonic masculinity but also its broader gender system. Along the way, I will also address several key issues in videogame studies: Can game designers remain true to their progressive sensibilities while facing the market imperative to create profitable games for core gamers? Is it possible to combine gender-inclusive game design and the masculine power fantasies of the zombie apocalypse, action-adventure, and shooter genres? How do rules, narrative, play, and context combine to create a game’s ludopolitics? How are players’ expectations conditioned by a game’s embeddedness in a media ecology of post-apocalyptic videogames, comics, films, and novels? The payoff of my playthrough is double: a thematization of the gendered metagame that The Last of Us invites us to play, and a model of another, more critical metagame. But if games are narrative journeys through a virtual space,38 then a playthrough can only map one itinerary. The meaning of a videogame emerges from the interaction of procedural rhetoric and player interpretation, a process of “subjectivization” that creates a player-subject “in”/“of” the game.39 This subjectivization can also become an object of reflection and evaluation for the player-subject “outside” the game—a subject who 36  On hybrid masculinities and how they incorporate and neutralize alternatives to hegemonic masculinity, see Tristan Bridges and C.J.  Pascoe, “Hybrid Masculinities: New Directions in the Sociology of Men and Masculinities,” Sociology Compass 8, no. 3 (2014): 246–258; Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity, 82–85, 137–38. 37  I would like to thank Sarah Stulz for this idea. 38  James Newman, Videogames, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), chaps. 5 and 6. 39  Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).

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always brings a particular identity, embodiment, and history to bear on play. Thus, the critical metagame that constitutes Rules of the Father actualizes a set of gamic affordances that inevitably reflect my own choices, evaluations, education, and identity as a cis-heterosexual Chicano gamer. My Mexican American heritage alienates me from hegemonic white masculinity and the settler colonial fantasies that I critique in later chapters. But as Adrienne Shaw has shown, identification with videogame characters doesn’t neatly align with the ways gamers identify as members of social groups, especially since social identities are multiple and contradictory.40 I’m not only a Chicano; I’m also a father, and thus the primary addressee of The Last of Us’s invitation to identify with Joel. My playthrough documents my experience of being conscripted into the rules of the father— and the possibility of breaking them. The playthrough follows the linear sequence of The Last of Us. We begin with the Prologue, proceed through the game’s four seasons, and end with a conclusion that synthesizes the book’s main arguments. Since it establishes primary themes, the first half of the book, dedicated to the summer season, is the longest. The playthrough aims for comprehensiveness but not completeness, so I forego cataloging every item, location, or plot detail.

40  Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Kindle.

CHAPTER 2

Prologue: Father Fails

Playing with Apocalypse Birds chirp. Wind blows. A fly buzzes. Upon loading The Last of Us, the player is greeted with atmospheric sounds and a black screen. As Naughty Dog’s corporate logo comes and goes and the game’s title appears, I’m reminded of how the poet Emily Dickinson said she could hear a fly buzz when she died.1 Dickinson’s idea that it’s possible to hear something at the moment of death, and thus to experience death, captures the contradictory lastness invoked in these initial non-playable sequences of The Last of Us. The atmospheric noises are post-apocalyptic. Perhaps this is what the world sounds like when nobody is left to hear it? The image that provides the backdrop for the subsequent start menu, a lush vine poking through a broken windowpane and into a dilapidated room, suggests a “world without us,” a natural world that is overtaking the human-built world.2 But this cannot be a world without us

1  Emily Dickinson, “I Heard a Fly Buzz—when I died,” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 265. 2  Druckmann has said that the Naughty Dog team read Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2012). Neil Druckmann, interview by Ted Price, December 20, 2017, in The AIAS (Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences) Game Maker’s Notebook, podcast, https://interactive.libsyn.com/neil-druckmann.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_2

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because the system acknowledges the existence of at least one survivor, the player, and asks for their first input: Press Start.3 Let us conceive of the contradictory relationship between the player and apocalypse as a ludic contract that is common to post-apocalyptic speculation across various media. H.G. Wells described his speculative fiction as a game that he played with readers, the goal of which was to fool them into believing that his time machines and alien invasions were plausible: “For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader to play the game properly, he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis. He must trick him into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds.”4 In The Last of Us, the impossible hypothesis is that the world has ended. Like all post-apocalyptic representations, The Last of Us puts us in a preposterous imaginary relationship with the end of the world. We are simultaneously after the end and prior to it; we see and hear what remains after the human world fades, but this also means that the human world hasn’t really faded and that there are at least some humans left, the “last of us,” who can see and hear. But unlike Wells’s day, when science fiction was just beginning to solidify around a set of generic conventions, most people today have encountered so much post-apocalyptic science fiction and horror that they hardly need to be bamboozled. Many of us are ready and willing. A few generic props, such as an image of nature reclaiming human structures, will suffice to set up the ludic contract. The ludic contract that opens The Last of Us is an invitation to play with apocalypse. Apocalypse is a total negation of the world; its result is an anti-­ world. But science fiction and horror are rarely interested in anti-worlds as such. Since, by definition, nothing happens in an anti-world, it cannot support narrative and action. To play with apocalypse requires that the player domesticate an anti-world and pretend that the world has ended (but not really). This domestication enacts the negation or “anti-form” that David Myers describes as an essential characteristic of play: “when we 3  I use the terms “the player” and “Joel” interchangeably to mean “the player and/as Joel.” There will always be a tension between a player’s interpretations and Joel as a designed affordance. The playthrough is one possible synthesis. I also use “we/us” to designate the player and/as Joel. “We/us” is not an assertion of the sameness of author, player-subject, and reader, but rather an invitation to the reader to follow my particular player-subject’s itinerary through the game. 4  H.G.  Wells, “Preface to The Scientific Romances,” in Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, ed. Rob Latham (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 14.

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ride a stick horse, it is not a horse, it is something else—something like a horse, but not a horse: an anti-horse, which requires but does not fulfill its reference to a horse. Likewise, during play we might pretend a box is a house, or stacked wooden cylinders are a king, or a finger is a gun.”5 To shape your hand like a pistol and say “bang!” is to negate a real gun so that you don’t actually kill anyone while simulating the device that can and does kill. Similarly, when The Last of Us points at the world and says “bang!”, it both simulates and negates the end of the world. The result is an anti-anti-world, a speculative-fictional space in which to explore the effects of a virus that has not annihilated but simplified human life. Moral simplification is one of the primary points of critique in Susan Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965), an essay that responds to the first genre cycle of apocalyptic science fiction and horror film in American cinema. Since they cannot be reasoned with and deserve no sympathy, the aliens and monsters in such films can only be killed. More importantly, they can be killed righteously and beautifully, granting the viewer permission to express their own aggression and enjoy spectacles of violence that might otherwise trouble their conscience. Sontag observes that aliens and monsters “provide a fantasy target for righteous bellicosity to discharge itself, and for the aesthetic enjoyment of suffering and disaster.”6 Similarly, the zombie-like “infected” and the post-apocalyptic setting of The Last of Us sanction an exit from everyday morality and into a liminal zone that is analogous to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the state of exception: “a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens.”7 Tom Mac Shea’s enthusiastic review of the game shows that beneath its grim surface, The Last of Us is about the joy of categorical killing beyond moral restraint: “The downfall of civilization redefines moral boundaries. […] Morals won’t put food in your mouth or a roof over your head. Morals are for the weak. And you’re not weak.”8 But there is an important difference between Sontag’s films and The Last of Us. Sontag notes that the experience of science fictional apocalypse is “dispassionate” because we cannot enter the characters’ emotional lives. 5  David Myers, “The Video Game Aesthetic: Play as Form,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, vol. 2, eds. Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 47. 6  Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary, October 1965, 45. 7  Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 8  Tom Mac Shea, “The Last of Us Review,” Gamespot, October 15, 2014, https://www. gamespot.com/reviews/the-last-of-us-review/1900-6409197/.

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Plot predominates over subjectivity. As a result, “we are merely spectators; we watch.”9 This spectatorship is what the machine’s invitation to press start transforms, if incompletely (we will still watch much of The Last of Us via cutscenes). By inviting the player to press start, The Last of Us incites the player not only to watch Sontag’s post-apocalyptic moral simplification but to perform it.

Music at the End of the World As the machine waits for input, Gustavo Santaolalla’s “All Gone (Seasons)” plays. The song is minimalistic, subdued, and contemplative. A critically acclaimed Latino rock musician and film composer, Santaolalla created the game’s score by using detuned guitars and a ronroco, a baritone version of the Andean charango. To produce discordant sounds that evoke the anti-­ anti-­world’s strangeness, he used tin cans and PVC pipes and struck an electric guitar with a violin bow. The accompanying orchestra used several bass instruments and had no violins.10 The effects are subtle but powerful. The music of The Last of Us is understated, dark, uncanny, resonant, and poignant, communicating to the player that while the game will be about violent struggle in a state of exception, this violence will be different from the violence that typifies both Sontag’s films and the zombie apocalypse, action-adventure, and shooter game genres. “With this music we’re trying to get emotion,” Druckmann explained when The Last of Us was still in development. “We’re not going for horror. There’s going to be horrific things happening in this game, but that’s not the focus of it. The monsters aren’t the focus of it, it’s the relationship between Joel and Ellie.”11 Druckmann overstated his case against horror—as we will see, the game has several horror elements—but he nonetheless clarified that the game’s “horrific things” are supposed to serve a higher moral purpose: the player’s  Sontag, “Imagination of Disaster,” 45.  Gustavo Santaolalla, “Gustavo Santaolalla and The Last of Us on Top Score,” interview by Emily Reese, Classical MPR, September 19, 2013, https://www.classicalmpr.org/ story/2013/07/03/gustavo-santaolalla-the-last-of-us-on-top-score. Since Santaolalla was involved in the making of The Last of Us at an early stage and influenced Druckmann’s writing, he could be considered one of the game’s co-authors. 11  Johnny Minkley, “The Last of Us Scored by Oscar-winner Gustavo Santaolalla,” Eurogamer, December 13, 2011, https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-13the-last-of-us-scored-by-oscar-winner-gustavo-santaolalla. 9

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emotional investment in the father-daughter relation. Santaolalla’s score is more than background music; it is essential to Naughty Dog’s management of the game’s moral aesthetics. This game will not be as frightening as the Resident Evil (1996–) zombie games or as bombastic as Call of Duty: Black Ops: Zombies (2011). If the anti-anti-world is a place of moral simplification, post-apocalyptic music helps to re-moralize The Last of Us and give the game the complexity and emotional depth that Sontag found lacking in science fiction film. Music is thus integral to Naughty Dog’s aestheticization of videogame violence and its reinforcement of the father-­ daughter relation with beautiful, justified killing. As one reviewer of the soundtrack aptly notes, “Santaolalla’s [score] will make you believe that there’s still something worth fighting for.”12

Sarah After pressing start, a cut scene shows Joel’s daughter, Sarah, asleep on the couch. While early concept art shows that Sarah was once around 5 years old, the character that eventually made it into the game seems to be on the cusp of puberty. Having lost her bow and bangs, she now wears her hair short. Her jewelry and rock and roll T-shirt indicate that she has her own style and tastes and is, in the words of voice and motion capture actress Hana Hayes, “tomboyish.”13 Sarah must be young and innocent enough to elicit the player’s protectiveness14—she is the original girl whom Joel considers worth fighting for—but the father-daughter relationship that the cutscene establishes here is not between a daddy and his little girl, at least not on the surface. After Joel comes home late and settles beside Sarah on the couch, we see the two affectionately tease each other as if they were “best friends [rather] than father and daughter,” as Hayes puts it.15 The gift that Sarah gives to Joel for his birthday, a wristwatch, is 12  Chris Kerr, “Soundtrack review: The Last of Us,” Side One, December 8, 2014, https:// www.webcitation.org/6YYT2Qeuo?url=http://www.sideone.co.uk/soundtrackreview-the-last-of-us/. 13  Hana Hayes, “Joel’s Daughter Speaks Up: An Interview with the Last of Us’ Hana Hayes,” interview by Matt Oliver, Pixelvolt, June 26, 2013, http://pixelvolt. com/2013/06/26/joels-daughter-speaks-up-an-interview-with-the-last-of-us-hana-hayes/ (site discontinued). 14  Nate Wells, Arne Meyer, and Eric Monacelli, The Art of The Last of Us (Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2013), 33. 15  Hayes, “Joel’s Daughter Speaks Up.”

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thoughtful and suggests that her love is more self-conscious than a little girl’s spontaneous adoration of an idealized father. As is revealed by a birthday card for Joel that the player can later find in Sarah’s room, Joel is not a perfect father; he is often absent because of work. Nonetheless, Sarah’s note in the card describes Joel as the “best dad,” suggesting that Sarah’s love is something that Joel has earned through good parenting.

Joel the Father Yet we hardly see Joel parent. When he arrives, he is in a heated conversation on the phone with his brother Tommy. Joel is a white man in his late 20s or early 30s, plainly dressed in T-shirt and jeans. His strong build and brief mention of a contractor suggest that he is a manual laborer, perhaps a construction worker. Later he will tell Ellie that he never went to college. His speech is simple. We hear only a few details about the topic of his conversation with Tommy, but we get a clear sense that money is tight when Joel says, “I can’t lose this job.” He is exhausted from work when he joins Sarah on the couch. It’s late and she’s still awake, but he isn’t a disciplinarian and he neither scolds nor sends her to bed. Instead, he allows her to remain on the couch and watch television with him until she falls asleep. Joel’s parenting style is so casual, permissive, and “cool” that he might as well be Sarah’s older brother or uncle (an association reinforced by the references to Tommy). Perhaps this is the sort of effortless relationship to a girl, stripped of awkwardness, that Naughty Dog imagined would appeal to core gamers. Parental authority is so attenuated in the scene that the interaction might work just as well if Sarah were not Joel’s daughter but his romantic partner. Yet there will be no mention of Sarah’s mother until late in the game, and Joel seems to have no love interest. More than a background detail, the absence of the mother/wife/lover figure is precisely what allows the game to focus on the father-daughter relation. A mother might split Joel’s attention by expecting him to spend the rest of the evening with her; a lover might be jealous of Joel and Sarah’s closeness. Similarly, the absence of Ellie’s birth mother will later help to focus her relationship with Joel. Joel appreciates Sarah’s gift, but he responds unsentimentally, using the heart-felt moment as an opportunity to pretend that the watch is broken. There is clearly love between Joel and Sarah, but it’s understated and expressed through sarcasm. Perhaps Joel has not quite figured out how to

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express love openly while still being manly. Only later, when he carries the sleeping Sarah to her bed, highlighting his strength and stature as well as his protectiveness, can Joel express his love directly. Santaolalla’s beautiful “The Last of Us (Goodnight)” theme plays, shifting the tone of the scene from sarcasm to sincerity. Beneath the humor and coolness, Joel is a caring father who still sees his daughter as his “baby girl,” the term of endearment that he uses as he places Sarah on her bed and gently touches her forehead. It is this fatherly love and original harmony between father and child that the player will be asked to remember every time Santaolalla’s theme plays. And it’s this Joel that the player will be asked to restore through principled killing. In Druckmann’s words: “The story is not about Joel changing; this is about Joel returning to who he truly is.”16

Joel and the American Family As a social type, Joel represents a hybridization of masculinities in an America that is increasingly characterized by fragmented families and a neoliberal “insecurity culture.”17 Joel is a “man’s man”—cis-heterosexual, working-class, a Texan with a slight southern drawl, strongly built, capable of violence. Game designer Jacob Minkoff described Joel as “warm yet kind of dangerous.”18 Joel’s clothing is plain and functional; he is ruggedly and effortlessly handsome, suggesting that he is the sort of man who thinks that paying too much attention to physical appearance is feminine.19 He was designed to signify “rural Americana” and the “cherished American values of self-reliance and ingenuity.”20 Joel is also a breadwinner, a provider of financial security whose job keeps him away from home. The 16  Troy Baker, Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, and Anthony Newman, “‘Your Watch is Broken.’—Summer Part 1,” interview by Christian Spicer, June 9, 2020, in The Official Last of Us Podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-watch-is-broken-summerpart-1/id1514792212?i=1000477283148. 17  Alison J.  Pugh, The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (New York: Oxford, 2015), 4. 18  Playstation, Grounded: The Making of The Last of Us, YouTube, Feb 28, 2014, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH5MgEbBOps. 19  The contrast between Joel’s masculinity and that of voice and motion capture actor Troy Baker is instructive. Whereas Naughty Dog initially considered Baker too young and “pretty” to play Joel, Druckmann and lead game designer Jacob Minkoff changed their mind when they heard Baker’s voice, which contained the “grit” and implicit aggression that they associated with Joel. See the Grounded documentary. 20  Wells, Meyer, and Monacelli, Art of The Last of Us, 10.

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breadwinner role solidified as a hegemonic masculine ideal during the New Deal order, when the economic security of the white, heterosexual American family was bolstered by state subsidies for education and home ownership and by what Melinda Cooper calls the “Fordist family wage,” or a wage that enabled a single male breadwinner to support a stay-at-­ home wife/mother and children. “The Fordist politics of class was itself a form of identity politics,” Cooper writes, “inasmuch as it established white, married masculinity as a point of access to full social protection.”21 But Joel’s masculinity is intersected by competing forces. Joel is not the patriarch of a Fordist family because he is missing that social form’s counterpart, a wife defined by domestic labor and care. Joel is a single father and primary caregiver. He stands in for the growth of father-led households against the backdrop of the remaking of the American family. Recent studies by the Pew Research Center show that fewer than half of American children are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage, down from 73% in 1960 and 61% in 1980. Single fathers make up almost a quarter of single-parent households, up from 14% in 1960. More generally, Americans are having more children outside of marriage, cohabiting and delaying marriage, and foregoing marriage altogether. Marriage itself appears to have become a marker of class privilege: uneducated men like Joel are not only more likely to be unmarried than educated men, they are also more likely to divorce before reaching their 20th anniversary. Most Americans have come to accept these changes. More than half believe that while marriage is important, it’s not essential to a fulfilling life.22  Cooper, Family Values, 23.  Gretchen Livingston, “The Rise of Single Fathers,” Pew Research Center, July 2, 2013, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/07/02/the-rise-of-single-fathers/; Wendy Wang and Kim Parker, “Record Share of Americans Have Never Been Married,” Pew Research Center, September 24, 2014, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/09/24/recordshare-of-americans-have-never-married/; Gretchen Livingston, “Fewer than Half of U.S. Kids Today Live in a ‘Traditional’ Family,” Pew Research Center, Fact Tank, December 22, 2014, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/22/less-than-half-of-u-skids-today-live-in-a-traditional-family/; Wendy Wang, “The Link Between a College Education and a Lasting Marriage,” Pew Research Center, Fact Tank, December 4, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/04/education-and-marriage/; Kim Parker and Renee Stepler, “As U.S. Marriage Rate Hovers at 50%, Education Gap in Marital Status Widens,” Pew Research Center, Fact Tank, September 14, 2017, https://www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/14/as-u-s-marriage-rate-hovers-at-50-educationgap-in-marital-status-widens/; Amanda Barroso, “More than Half of Americans Say 21 22

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One of the great contradictions of the neoliberal project to restore the traditional family is that neoliberal economic policies have placed families under immense strain. Alison Pugh’s The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity (2015) connects changes in American family structures to the dismantling of the welfare state, the rise of precarious work, and the dominance of the market. When Americans feel abandoned to market forces and expect only the bare minimum from employers and the state, their understanding of family obligation shifts. While Pugh documents a number of ways that men and women respond to the culture of insecurity, I want to focus on her presentation of two types of father and their responses to neoliberalism’s challenge to the Fordist breadwinner. Represented in The Tumbleweed Society by the interviewee “Gary,” a working-­class tradesman, the “angry white man” feels that he has been robbed of job security and the ability to support his family with his income alone—all socially and politically produced privileges that the angry white man imagines were the natural entitlements of his forefathers. But instead of criticizing the source of his economic insecurity—his cost-cutting employer, a hollowed-out welfare state, and neoliberal policy makers—the angry white man internalizes neoliberal responsibility, paradoxically believing that his insecurity is unchangeable and that he could have changed his fate by making better choices. Viewing domestic life as a moral haven from the heartless world of low-paid, precarious work, he expects more from his children and his wife or girlfriend, whom he feels should make up for the lack of commitment that he encounters in his public life. “The guilt and self-blame he feels at work,” Pugh writes, “transform themselves into something closer to anger and outrage at home, where he feels the loss of other people’s obligations—particularly, the personal and dedicated care of women—acutely.”23 In place of a restored traditional hierarchy between husbands and wives, neoliberalism has turned Fordist husbands into aggrieved ex-patriarchs, wives into scapegoats, and children into saviors.

Marriage is Important But not Essential to Leading a Fulfilling Life,” Pew Research Center, Fact Tank, February 14, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/14/ more-than-half-of-americans-say-marriage-is-important-but-not-essential-to-leading-a-fulfilling-life/. 23  Pugh, Tumbleweed Society, 8. See also Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (New York: Nation Books, 2013). Connell also notes that the connection between hegemonic masculinity and breadwinning “will come under pressure when it becomes impossible for men to win the bread.” Connell, Masculinities, 90.

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In contrast to the angry white man, Pugh spotlights men who take insecurity as an opportunity to redefine gender roles and expand their parental obligations. These fathers embody a “care work ethic,” “a system of values (like the work ethic) that prioritizes caregiving dedication and effort and that imbues such work with the moral valence of duty, maintaining that it reflects and enhances good character.”24 Building on cultural shifts in the post-World War II period toward feminist fathering and recognition of dads as caregivers, men who practice the care work ethic reject the idea that fathering is optional and regard “responsibility for primary care” as “nothing more than their duty as humans.”25 Since nurturing fathering violates hegemonic masculinity’s gendered division of labor and its norm of emotional detachment,26 caring fathers show that hegemonic masculinity is only one masculinity among many, and that its hold on the gender order is not absolute. Joel begins The Last of Us as an economically insecure, post-Fordist father who combines elements of hegemonic masculinity and the feminized caregiving duties of Pugh’s care work ethic. But it’s crucial to the game’s representation of Joel’s masculinity that, firstly, most of his care is only indirect and implied, and secondly, apocalypse transforms care into violent protectiveness. The player can find evidence, such as a picture showing Joel at Sarah’s soccer match, that Joel dedicates time to Sarah, but we never see Joel doing her laundry, cooking for her, or performing other domestic labor.27 The core gamer would probably consider Joel too feminized and weak to survive the struggles of the post-apocalypse if they saw him performing too much care labor. Conversely, the violence of the  Pugh, 100.  Pugh, 104. On caring fatherhood in postwar America, see Lawrence R.  Samuel, American Fatherhood: A Cultural History (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 26  “In hegemonic masculinity, fathers do not have the capacity or the skill or the need to care for children, especially for babies and infants, while the relationship between female parents and young children is seen as crucial. Nurturant and care-giving behavior is simply not manly.” Mike Donaldson, “What is Hegemonic Masculinity?”, Theory and Society 22, no. 5 (1993): 650. 27  A note in the kitchen instructing Sarah to order food is telling: if Joel is often away at work, who usually feeds Sarah? Who keeps Joel and Sarah’s house so tidy? The note implies that Joel outsources some of this labor. He thus parallels male game developers, many of whom can withstand the extremely long hours of “crunch time” only by outsourcing domestic and care responsibilities to paid care workers. On the composition of the videogame workforce, see Jamie Woodcock, Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 61–90. 24 25

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anti-anti-world allows the player to participate in care—the protection of Ellie—while still feeling manly. Joel’s hegemonic masculinity must be just below the surface so that after Sarah dies, it can easily become his dominant gender identity. Later I will show how this masculinity contains the angry white man’s fatalism, his redemptive investment in his children, and his hostility toward mother figures.

Playing as Sarah Surprisingly, gameplay begins not with Joel but with Sarah. The cutscene ends with Sarah receiving a frantic late-night telephone call from Tommy, who says he urgently needs to speak to Joel. After the line suddenly goes dead, the camera settles into a familiar third-person point of view, just above Sarah’s right shoulder. Gameplay is simplified: there is no heads-up display (HUD), and since Sarah has just awoken from deep sleep, her movements are slow and imprecise. The player can explore her tomboyish room, which is filled with sports items and rock posters, before exiting into the hallway in search of Joel. If Sarah was previously more of a friend to Joel than a child, her calls for “daddy” confirm that she really is Joel’s baby girl after all. A strange phone call hinting at danger, a vulnerable girl walking through a dark house at night, the possibility that something could jump out at you from behind every corner, the safety of domestic space suddenly punctured by insecurity—these are the elements of horror film, procedurally adapted for an algorithmic system that makes the horror space actionable.28 Environmental storytelling further proceduralizes horror conventions. The first room that Sarah can enter is the bathroom, where the player can find a newspaper whose headlines announce a “mysterious infection” and describe a “crazed woman” who killed her husband. The next actionable room is Joel’s bedroom. Joel is gone, but the television is still on, turned to the news. A reporter speaks of “riots” connected to a “nationwide pandemic.” There is an explosion behind the reporter and the channel turns to static. The player can see another explosion from the bedroom window, telling us that the report came from the nearby city. 28  On procedural adaptation in horror videogames, see Matthew J.  Weise, “How the Zombie Changed Videogames,” in Zombies are Us: Essays on the Humanity of the Walking Dead, eds. Christopher M.  Moreman and Cory J.  Rushton (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 151–68.

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Like in so many zombie films, the sudden outbreak of an apocalyptic infection is happening in the background of everyday life. News media both communicate the apocalyptic event and fail to do so, further heightening our sense of mounting chaos. If mass media connect us to one another and to the public world, helping to establish what nationalism scholar Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community,” zombie horror often uses the media’s failure to destroy the viewer’s imagined community and reduce us to isolated and frightened individuals.29 The player can eventually find Joel in the downstairs den. He rushes inside covered in blood, quickly closes the patio door behind him, asks Sarah if she is okay, and grabs a gun from a drawer. When an infected neighbor crashes through the glass door, a cutscene takes over. Sarah cowers behind Joel, who once again shows us the nuances of his masculinity. Instead of quickly pulling the trigger, Joel hesitates, repeatedly warning his neighbor to stay back (he doesn’t seem to understand that the neighbor has been “zombified”). Joel shoots only at the last moment, just before the infected man pounces on him and Sarah. Joel may be a caring father, but his violent masculinity is ready to hand when he needs it. He owns a gun and is willing to use it to protect himself and Sarah, but he is not a killer and instead attempts to negotiate his way out of a conflict.

Zombie Ethics Limited gameplay continues after Tommy arrives. Joel and Sarah get into Tommy’s car and the three attempt to flee the area. Controls are now even more limited as the player can only choose whether Sarah looks straight ahead or out of the backseat or rear windows. Tommy reports that the chaos is spreading across the United States, but when he mentions the grisly murder of a family, Joel intervenes to protect Sarah again, this time from the potential psychological trauma of Tommy’s story. The zombie outbreak has radically simplified Joel’s caregiving. When Tommy attempts to pull over to help a family on the side of the road, Joel sternly instructs him to keep driving. “They got a kid,” Tommy protests. “So do we,” Joel retorts, showing us that in a time of crisis, his fatherly 29  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991). I develop this theme at length in Un-American Dreams: Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Disimagined Community, and Bad Hope in the American Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022).

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duty applies only to his child. Here the meaning of the “us” in the game’s title takes on a new valence: everyone outside Joel’s circle of concern, no larger than the cramped space of a car, is not “us” and must be abandoned. Society has collapsed not only in the imagination but in practice. Gerry Canavan calls this type of moral reasoning, which is typical of zombie apocalypse, “zombie ethics”: “pitiless self-interest as a necessary and Malthusian pragmatism.”30 In contrast to the neoliberal dream, the destruction of society does not strengthen traditional morality but cruelly limits the scope of moral obligation to the closest blood relations. Zombie ethics is one of the dominant ideological uses of the post-­ apocalyptic ludic contract. We pretend not only that the world has ended but also that civilized behavior is nothing but a thin, highly flammable veneer that will ignite upon contact with crisis, laying bare the immutable truths of the human condition: we are selfish, illiberal, insular, loyal only to our own “tribe.” Druckmann described zombie ethics and its antagonism toward society plainly: “it doesn’t take much to return us to a very primitive state. The tribalism we feel, how we want to protect our own, whether it’s some political affiliation or our own family, takes over everything. That’s part of the theme, very much the core of the story, of Joel: family versus society.”31 Although Joel is already on his way toward zombie ethics, he will learn its lessons completely only at the end of the Prologue.

“Please, Don’t” A quick time event (QTE)—a cinematic sequence with limited gameplay options—gives us our first chance to play as Joel. The three travelers have been in a car crash and the player must press square to kick out the windshield and exit the car. The subsequent cutscene reveals that we are now in a town that is being overrun by the infected. Tommy tells Joel they need to run, but Sarah broke her leg in the crash. Joel hands Tommy his gun, picks up Sarah, and gameplay resumes. There is still no HUD. The player can only run and attempt to steer clear of burning buildings, cars, panicked citizens, and enemies. We have seen the latter a few times now, and they appear to be variations on the running “rage” zombies from Danny 30  Gerry Canavan, “‘We Are the Walking Dead’: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative,” Extrapolation 51, no. 3 (2010): 445. 31  Druckmann, AIAS interview.

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Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002). Unlike the zombies from George Romero’s films, these monsters aren’t slow-moving reanimated corpses. Instead, a virus has driven them insane. But they still bite like zombies, are mindless like zombies, multiply like zombies, and throng and collapse society like zombies. Whereas the player has previously experienced Joel’s fatherly masculinities only in cutscenes, they are now actionable. As we carry the helpless Sarah, we are daddy protecting baby girl. We perform Joel’s physical strength, stamina, courage, and selfishness. Helping others who stumble or are attacked by infected is procedurally out of the question because the player doesn’t have the option of putting Sarah down. Fatherhood is a simple, ironclad rule: hold on to your baby girl and get her out of harm’s way. The player is “free” to move Joel through the gamespace, but this freedom takes the form of accepting an algorithmic destiny. In one of his most quotable formulations, Marx says that “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited.”32 In The Last of Us, fathers make their own history under circumstances given by computational procedures. If the player is too slow or takes a wrong turn, a cinematic death scene shows an infected biting and killing Joel. Crucially, while Joel’s masculine strength is essential to this sequence, Joel lacks hegemonic masculinity’s violence. Care takes precedence over confrontation; the player cannot engage in combat and must rely on Tommy to kill an infected who attacks in the middle of the sequence. Joel’s pacifism is the undoing of his fatherhood. No sooner does the player find a path leading out of town than a cutscene shows a soldier appearing on the path and shooting the infected who have been hot on Joel’s heels. Joel is immediately trusting. Believing that this representative of the state is here to help, he reassures Sarah that they are now safe. Joel’s trust in government is a grave mistake. As Joel moves toward the soldier and asks for help, the soldier raises his rifle and orders Joel to stop. Even after the soldier receives radio orders that the player can easily interpret as orders to shoot, Joel steps forward once more and tries to negotiate with the soldier. By the time he realizes that the soldier is going to shoot, it’s too late. Joel and Sarah are struck down by the soldier’s bullets. 32  Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 32.

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Fig. 2.1  “Don’t Do This To Me.” Sarah dies in Joel’s arms. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author)

As the soldier stands over Joel and prepares to finish him off, Joel can only pathetically mutter “Please, don’t.” Tommy reappears and again supplies the necessary violence, killing the soldier. Sarah cannot be saved. She dies in Joel’s arms as Santaolalla’s tragic “All Gone (Aftermath)” plays (Fig. 2.1). The game title reappears, followed by a cinematic title sequence that borrows zombie cinema’s use of news montage to quickly summarize the total collapse of society and finish setting up the anti-anti-world. The Last of Us has only just begun. There are two major lessons to draw from the Prologue. First, the Prologue’s ending forces the player to fail in a way that implicitly sanctions neoliberal fatalism, violent masculinity, and zombie ethics. Daddy couldn’t save baby girl because he naively believed that the state owed him protection. When a representative of the state threatened him and his daughter, Joel’s faith in government and its capacity to serve the common good stopped him from pursuing his self-interest. Perhaps if he had been more aggressive and immediately resorted to violence—if the player had been able to enact the militarized masculinity that typifies the standard

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metagame—Joel could have overcome the soldier and saved Sarah instead of pathetically pleading for their lives.33 As Bertrand Lucat observes, “Joel’s initial failure in fatherhood is his comparative lack of violence, or his refusal and incapacity to commit to preventative violence.”34 Along with Joel, the player is invited to learn that, as President Ronald Reagan famously put it in his first inaugural address, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”; that active violence is superior to passive trust; and that ruthless pursuit of self-interest is the gospel of survival. Joel will eventually love and father again through his relationship with Ellie, but this will be a selfish, antisocial love that requires the very brutality that Joel failed to display in the Prologue. Is it coincidental that the truths of The Last of Us sound like maxims of the cut-throat culture of insecurity, the very reality from which the game’s speculation is supposed to depart? If the post-apocalypse is where society doesn’t exist, where nobody owes you anything, where you must take radical responsibility for yourself, and where the only source of meaning in a risky and heartless world is duty to your closest kin (wives/mothers notwithstanding), then The Last of Us may be nothing but the rules of our own deformed neoliberal present in a purer form. We will not be able to fix the world, which is governed by an autonomous and immutable logic, but if we play the game right—selfishly and violently—we might eventually find some private redemption in fatherhood. The second lesson is revealed by Joel’s remark during Sarah’s death: “Don’t do this to me.” It’s a curiously self-possessed idea that suggests, in the words of critic Michael Thomsen, that “being shot [is] a thing kids did to their parents.”35 But for all its absurdity, dying really is something that Sarah does to Joel. Since Sarah exists primarily to wound Joel’s fatherly masculinity and shape the all-important relationship between Joel and Ellie, her death is a textbook example of Sarkeesian’s Women in Refrigerators trope, a “plot point for the male hero to seek revenge or 33  On militarized masculinity, see Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter, Digital Play, chap. 11. 34  Bertrand Lucat, “Playing with Patriarchy: Fatherhood in BioShock: Infinite, The Last of Us, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt,” DiGRA ‘17—Proceedings of the 2017 DiGRA International Conference, 5, http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digitallibrary/144_DIGRA2017_FP_Lucat_Playing_with_Patricarchy.pdf. 35  Michael Thomsen, “The Dreams in Which I’m Dying,” The Paris Review, August 29, 2014, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/08/29/the-dreams-in-whichim-dying/.

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further his heroic journey.”36 Druckmann knew about the trope while developing The Last of Us. In an interview given shortly after the game’s release, he conceded that “Sarah’s death at the beginning of the story is like the ‘woman in the fridge’ trope, when you have a female character and all she’s there to do is to die so she can affect the male character. You could make that argument that Sarah serves no other purpose.”37 I am making that argument. Although Druckmann went on to claim that he and his colleagues made Sarah playable at the beginning of the Prologue in order to flesh out her character, this strikes me as a way to inoculate the game against the trope by adding a pinch of representation. It is also an obvious instance of what psychoanalysis calls disavowal, a mechanism by which a subject can protect itself from the consequences of a realization by saying, in effect, “I know very well that X is true, but I will act as if I don’t know X is true.” Similarly, Druckmann seemed to know very well that The Last of Us fridges Sarah, but that very knowledge allowed him to act as if he didn’t know. There are certainly more or less compelling ways to reduce the value of a female character to her impact on a man’s life, but the reduction persists all the same. The more interesting question as we go forward is whether The Last of Us will critique the instrumentalization of children in an equally compelling way.

Press Start to Continue Before continuing with the playthrough, I want to stress that I haven’t reached my conclusion about Sarah’s fridging from a position of intellectual superiority. I was wounded by her death. Since our uses of videogames are always contextual, and since my reaction to Sarah’s death has shaped my playthrough, I want to end this chapter by describing and interpreting the situation in which I first played The Last of Us. In 2016, I bought a PlayStation 4 because I was writing a book on apocalyptic science fiction, and I recognized that an understanding of the genre required an engagement with videogames. That was, at least, my pretext. I had been gaming since I was a boy, but I hadn’t owned a console 36  Feminist Frequency, “#2 Women in Refrigerators (Tropes vs. Women),” YouTube, April 7, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DInYaHVSLr8. 37  Neil Druckmann, interview by Rob LeFebvre, Creative Screenwriting, August 6, 2013, https://creativescreenwriting.com/the-last-of-us/.

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for several years because I felt that gaming would distract me from my graduate studies. I was also supporting my wife and two daughters, and I couldn’t justify the expense. Getting a better-paying job allowed me to satisfy not only an academic interest in genre studies but also a lifelong enjoyment of videogames. I chose the latest PlayStation console because I wanted the most advanced graphics and could afford to splurge. I had also read about The Last of Us, was intrigued by the story, and knew that the game was available only on the PlayStation. In sum, when I pressed start, I activated not only the game’s algorithms but a dense network of relations that encompassed my childhood, my career, my economic position, and my self-understanding as a breadwinning husband and father. During my first playthrough, I thought Sarah’s death was my fault. Since I hadn’t played a complex narrative console game like The Last of Us in several years, I was uncertain of its conventions and believed that Joel had several routes of escape from the town. I must have picked the wrong one, triggering the death cutscene. When the title sequence played, I interpreted it as the closing credits and thus a game over. My experience combined the failure of my geek masculinity in gameplay—I had not mastered the game—and Joel’s failure as a fatherly protector in the cutscene. His failure was mine. My relationship to Joel evolved through the interplay of gameplay and cinematic narrative, proximity and distance. Playing as Joel, I had performatively become him; while watching and listening to him (and Santaolalla) in the cutscenes, I could connect with Joel as a complex character who I was not. As Adrienne Shaw points out, what is often called identification in gameplay is better understood as an absorption that brings the gamer so close to the playable character that identification becomes difficult, perhaps impossible. Shaw reports that the media users whom she interviewed “needed to see a game character as a distinct entity from themselves in order to feel as though they could identify with it.”38 Identification isn’t identity; it’s a bridging of non-identity that requires an encounter with narratively rich characters with intricate inner lives. The Last of Us is a compelling ludic experience because it powerfully combines the immediacy of gameplay and the distance necessary for identification. For me, gameplay and the cutscenes worked together to form a strong affective connection with Joel. While I didn’t recognize myself in his Texan whiteness, I, too,  Shaw, Gaming at the Edge, chap. 2, Kindle.

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considered myself a caring father. I, too, was a breadwinner. I, too, knew economic insecurity, which my purchase of a Playstation and The Last of Us underscored by way of contrast. I again follow Shaw in calling this an “affective connection” with Joel because the term encompasses the multiple ways that gamers and other media users form attachments with fictional characters that don’t neatly match their social identities.39 I connected with Joel despite not identifying as a white man. In fact, my affective connection with Joel was so strong that I mirrored Joel’s reaction to Sarah’s death by crying with him. I hesitate to report this detail because, well, it’s embarrassing. Men aren’t supposed to cry. Neither are scholars, especially in response to a cultural commodity with such historically low prestige. Yet tears are appropriate to The Last of Us’s preferred meanings. Echoing Boluk and Lemieux’s concept of metagame, Stuart Hall defines preferred meanings as “rules of competence and use” that condense “the whole social order […] as a set of meanings, practices and beliefs; the everyday knowledge of social structures, of ‘how things work for all practical purposes in this culture,’ the rank order of power and interest and the structure of legitimations, limits and sanctions.”40 Naughty Dog knew that, for all practical purposes, crying is unmanly—that it brings subjects to the limits of hegemonic masculinity. But The Last of Us is also a game about caring fatherhood, and it solicits our belief that the problem with Joel is not that he cries but rather that he is helpless. In his study of melodrama and the psychology of tears, Jonathan Frome reports that “crying occurs in situations where the crier perceives themselves to be helpless; crying indicates surrender to the situation causing emotional arousal and the cessation of actions aiming to change it.”41 Crying is The Last of Us’s favored emotional response to Sarah’s death because, after reducing the player-subject to empathetic helplessness, the game can justify violence to prevent Joel from failing again. When the player eventually arrives at the Firefly hospital, where Joel chooses to forcefully take Ellie from the operating room, The Last of Us will remind us of Joel’s initial failure in order to legitimate his antisocial aggression. Given the heteronormativity of the father-daughter relationship that Joel defends, we  Shaw, chap. 2.  Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (New York: Routledge, 1980), 124. 41  Jonathan Frome, “Melodrama and the Psychology of Tears,” Projections 8, no. 1 (2014): 28. 39 40

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might reverse Jack Halberstam’s term and call the game’s preferred meaning the “Straight Art of Failure.”42 What follows is an immanent critique of The Last of Us’s preferred meanings, its rules of competence and use, its straight art of failure. In my initial playthrough, I largely accepted the rules of the father. I understood that caring fatherhood needs a violent supplement. But then I replayed the game. And replayed it again and again. Matt Knutson’s analysis of Life Is Strange (2015) shows how rewinding and replaying can disrupt the (hetero-)normative temporality of core gaming.43 While rewinding isn’t a distinctive narrative element or game mechanic in The Last of Us, replaying the game can similarly throw its preferred metagame out of joint, giving players additional opportunities to revise their original attachments and interpretations. The proceeding playthrough documents my attempt to play and replay The Last of Us with and against its prescriptions. I aim to be sympathetic enough to The Last of Us to understand the father it wants us to be, and disloyal enough to imagine the fathers it leaves undreamt.

 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).  Matt Knutson, “Backtrack, Pause, Rewind, Reset: Queering Chrononormativity in Gaming,” Game Studies 18, no. 3 (2018), http://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/knutson. 42 43

PART I

Summer

CHAPTER 3

Quarantine Zone: American Dystopia

Joel and Tess A knock awakens Joel from unsettling dreams. Twenty years have passed since the events of the Prologue, and time has not been kind. Joel’s face is bearded and weary; his hair is streaked with gray; his clothes are dirty; his apartment is dilapidated. Bleary-eyed, Joel opens the door to let in Tess, his partner in crime. That’s apparently the only kind of partner she is to Joel. As Tess explains that she was ambushed after trading pills for ration cards, giving the player hints about the existence of illicit markets and some form of government, Joel tends to her bruised face and tenderly takes her chin in his hand. For a moment, the player can imagine that Tess is Joel’s girlfriend. Will a kiss ensue? But since Joel’s heart is only big enough for daughters in The Last of Us—a caring father cannot also have sexual desires?—there is nothing romantic about Tess. Later she will wisecrack that she and Joel are on a date, but her sarcasm makes clear that romance with Joel is a joke. Tess is wiry, her brow stern. When Joel asks if the two men who jumped her are still alive, her mirthless smile (“that’s funny”) shows her ruthlessness. She was the main villain in “Mankind,” and many of her traits carried over into The Last of Us. The Naughty Dog team wanted Tess to look and act tough not only so that she is “an equal to Joel,” but also because they wanted her to seem especially aggressive and probably “willing to go © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_3

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farther and be more cutthroat than Joel.”1 If Joel is equal to or weaker than a woman, she is off limits as a romantic interest. Tess removes Joel’s hand to focus his attention on an occasion for violence. She tells him that their rival, Robert, sent the men, and that she knows where to find him and pay him back. Thus begins the chapter’s first mission.

The Boston Quarantine Zone After Joel and Tess exit the apartment, the scene moves outside. An establishing shot shows an armed man in riot gear patrolling the rooftop of a brick building with broken windows, then the camera tilts down into an alley full of trash. An American flag sags from an adjacent and equally derelict-looking building. Tess tells Joel that the checkpoint is still open, but the two will have to hurry to reach Robert before curfew. The player can now follow Tess through the alley and into a thoroughfare, where gameplay is briefly interrupted as Joel takes in his dystopian surroundings: soldiers guarding a Rations Distribution Center; barbed wire; surveillance cameras; Wanted posters on the walls. A loudspeaker warns everyone to carry ID at all times. As the player guides Joel down the street, Joel automatically turns to watch soldiers execute a civilian who tests positive for the virus and another who tries to run. This is America, or what’s left of it: a dirty, impoverished, bleak police state. Joel says nothing about the executions. He has stopped being surprised by them, or caring. “He’s pretty much dead,” Druckmann explained in an interview. “He’s a very different person from the father you saw in the beginning of the story.”2 Only Ellie can bring the father back. Posters indicate that the Boston Quarantine Zone is run by the Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA). According to the title sequence and various artifacts that the player can find throughout the game, FEDRA and the military replaced the civilian government in the early stages of the viral outbreak. FEDRA’s name and logo are clearly allusions to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was subject to intense criticism in 2005 for its failed response to Hurricane Katrina. If government cannot protect us from hurricanes, the player might ask themselves, why should it be able to stop a zombie apocalypse? Government 1 2

 Wells, Meyer, and Monacelli, Art of The Last of Us, 44.  Druckmann and Straley, “Definitive Interview (Part One).”

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in The Last of Us is inept. Zombie apocalypse more broadly is an ideological vehicle for anti-state futures. That zombies overwhelm the state and expose its inability to protect society is the first premise of zombie apocalypse. Otherwise there is no anti-anti-world, no story. Worse still, governments in zombie apocalypses often combine ineffectiveness in combating zombies with effectiveness in oppressing survivors. With its armed guards, checkpoints, and high walls, the Quarantine Zone is an extrapolation of the contemporary neoliberal state whose social welfare functions have been replaced with militarized policing and border security, all the while failing to deliver on the promise of revitalized traditional morality and fair markets. Jordan T.  Camp and Christina Heatherton’s description of “a shift in state capacities away from the production of social goods and towards ‘security’ concerns produced in their absence” works as an account of both neoliberal policing and the Quarantine Zone.3 FEDRA will emerge as one of the game’s enemy factions. In a sense, the securitized neoliberal state is the first and most fundamental enemy in The Last of Us because it was a soldier who murdered Sarah, thus creating Joel’s character and motivations. The antagonistic government that we fight in the game is a narrative and thematic extension of that initial betrayal. For this reason, I don’t fully agree with scholars who interpret Joel as an embodiment of militarized masculinity, a widespread form of videogame masculinity that combines “themes and representations of warfare, fighting, combat, and conquest along with the subject-positions of aggressive, active male characters.”4 While this clearly describes The Last of Us and Joel, it doesn’t capture Joel’s fundamental antagonism toward the military (what we might call his “anti-military militarized masculinity”). More importantly, it risks obscuring the anti-state grievances that animate the game’s political unconscious—the wounded expectation of a social contract between government and white patriarchal masculinity; the outrage of being treated with the same suspicion and violence that police and military routinely train on racialized, immigrant, and colonized peoples; the 3  Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, introduction to Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, eds. Jordan T.  Camp and Christina Heatherton (New York: Verso, 2016), 4. 4  Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter, Digital Play, 194; Gerald Voorhees, “Daddy Issues: Constructions of Fatherhood in The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 9 (2016), https://adanewmedia.org/2016/05/ issue9-voorhees/.

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indignity of living in conditions similar to those of a “Third World” country. But stating such grievances negatively is misleading, for they provide the positive basis for the game’s plot and action. They authorize Joel’s selfish and violent retreat from the possibility of a common good, which culminates in his decision to condemn all of humanity for the sake of Ellie. They also make private familial life with Ellie his only source of hope. There is at least one political alternative available to Joel. Numerous graffiti slogans in the alley and along the thoroughfare reference fire and light. While the player might vaguely recall the title sequence’s messages about a terrorist group called the Fireflies, who seem to have been fighting FEDRA and the military dictatorship since they took power, we are rudely introduced to the Fireflies when they attack the checkpoint. An explosion slightly injures Joel. For him, the Fireflies are not a chance at liberation; they’re just one more threat. Joel and Tess will soon enter into a temporary alliance with the Fireflies, but Joel will never relinquish his bothsidesist opposition to them and FEDRA.

Tutorial The blast triggers the HUD, which appears for the first time to show Joel’s health on the bottom right of the screen. It also initiates the in-game tutorial. A message appears and tells the player how to turn around and sprint away from the checkpoint. As she runs ahead and instructs Joel to follow, Tess effectively becomes the tutorial. Throughout the chapter, Tess will model the player’s formal objectives (find Robert, take an alternate route around the checkpoint, fight Robert’s henchmen, etc.) and learning objectives (how to use health packs, move objects, climb ledges, etc.).5 She will also communicate major plot points and ideological positions (“Goddamn Fireflies”). Tess, in other words, is a translator between the standard metagame and The Last of Us. Designers rely on implicit knowledge of the standard uses of games6—we are expected to know, for example, that the yellow in Joel’s health bar means moderate damage—but they also need tutorials to explain how to play this particular game. As a character, Tess is Joel’s non-romantic partner; as a bundle of “machine acts,”

5  Louis-Martin Guay, “Objectives,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, eds. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2014), 190–196. 6  Newman, Videogames, 74–75.

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or actions performed by the game’s software and hardware,7 Tess is a mouthpiece for rules and the procedural rhetoric they embody. The Firefly attack forces Tess and Joel to take a more dangerous path that leads through secret tunnels and outside the Quarantine Zone walls. Tess tells Joel to help her move a large cabinet to access the tunnel entrance, and when the player moves close, a triangle icon indicates the button to press to move it. Moving objects is an adventure/puzzle element in The Last of Us that periodically interrupts the shooter pacing. Down in the tunnels, Tess and Joel arrive at a table upon which Joel’s backpack, flashlight, gas mask, and pistol sit. As the player moves closer to the gun, a small circle appears on top of it, then changes into a triangle button icon. The circle alerts the player that an object will become actionable when Joel gets closer and that Joel can pick it up and either use it immediately or store it for later. The circle/triangle also identifies actionable surfaces. It appears on a ledge after Tess instructs Joel to boost her up, and again on a ledge leading outside of the tunnel and into the next section of the chapter. Learning to play The Last of Us means learning to read environments for actionable objects and surfaces. To be Joel is to develop an intuitive feel for the rules of movement and engagement that govern Joel’s relationship to the gamespace. What James Newman says of Snake from the Metal Gear games applies equally to Joel: he is “equipment for play; a vehicle through which the player gains access to the gameworld.”8 Yet Newman’s instrumentalist language both undervalues the significance of narrative character and implies too much of a distinction between player and avatar in gameplay. I don’t intend to rehash debates in videogame studies about the relative importance of narrative and ludology here; I consider the debate a draw. Joel is both a failed father looking for redemption and a potential for boosting, running, punching, shooting, throwing, storing, or using (among others). He is not so much a tool as a prosthetic extension of my own hands, via the controller, into the gamespace.9 With practice, Joel’s actions can become so intuitive that the tool will seem to disappear, and the link between my body and Joel’s will feel immediate 7  Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 4. 8  Newman, Videogames, 137. 9  Rune Klevjer, “Enter the Avatar: The Phenomenology of Prosthetic Telepresence in Computer Games,” in The Philosophy of Computer Games, eds. John Richard Sageng, Hallvard Fossheim, and Tarjei Mandt Larsen (New York: Springer, 2012), 17–38.

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and spontaneous. When this link is especially smooth and dynamic, videogame scholars and players call the experience “flow.” An obvious purpose of the circle icon is to facilitate the player’s ability to identify and acquire useful items such as health kits, ammunition, crafting materials, and weapons. But it also enmeshes gameplay in Joel’s political sensibilities as a narrative character. The circle icon proceduralizes a way of seeing that scans environments for their utility for survival and inculcates expectations of brutal competition for scarce resources. Ammunition is limited; players won’t be able to shoot or punch their way through most encounters with enemies. This isn’t Halo. Druckmann “didn’t want [players] to just go in there and blast people in the face. If you’re going to engage in combat, you have to be very conscious of how you’re going to do it. Look at your ammo, line up your shots.”10 The Last of Us is slower than most shooters, more tense and desperate, more attuned to the anti-anti-world’s privations. Joel is weaker than the standard super-­ soldier with a rocket launcher. Murray observes that “[o]ne never feels the definitive domination of one’s enemy, the rush of combat, or pleasure of highly technologized and fetishized weaponry. Whereas some military-­ oriented games can be almost balletic in their elegantly executed action, The Last of Us refuses to replicate this convention.”11 The result is a peculiar freedom among the ruins of neoliberalism: freedom as weakness, but also as plunder; freedom as the absence of protection, but also as the right to assert the value of my life and my needs against others. The longer I play The Last of Us, the more automatically I feel that life is fundamentally insecure, so I better grab what I can, when I can. It doesn’t matter if this bottle of rubbing alcohol belongs to or is needed by someone else. I find, I take. To hell with others. There is no such thing as society. But while exceptionally skilled players can turn Joel into a killing machine, even fans of The Last of Us have to admit that, compared to avatars in other action-adventure games and shooters, Joel is rather pedestrian. In “Naughty Dog’s Game Design is Outdated,” the popular YouTube gamer Jacob Matthew Christensen (NakeyJakey) offers a compellingly simple critique of the mechanics of The Last of Us: whether looting, boosting, or pushing furniture, the game often boils down to pressing

 Druckmann and Straley, “Definitive Interview (Part Two).”  Murray, “The Last of Us: Masculinity,” 104. It should be noted that resource scarcity in The Last of Us changes according to the difficulty setting. 10 11

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triangle.12 In contrast to a game like Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), The Last of Us offers a narrow range of action possibilities. Such limited gameplay usually fails to appease what Christensen amusingly calls his “goopy goblin gamer brain” (GGGB). The GGGB is one of the reasons that videogames are unfairly viewed as mindless and addictive entertainment, and yet many gamers have probably experienced its demands. The GGGB is the primitive and irascible part of the brain that enjoys videogames below the register of meaning. The GGGB wants stimulation and is quickly irritated whenever gameplay is interrupted by cut scenes, tutorials, or limited movement. In other words, the GGGB demands flow. It is why we feel compelled to keep playing, the culprit behind the disappearance of hours, even entire days, of our lives in front of screens. And the GGGB can often get more flow in games that are the mirror opposite of The Last of Us: games that prioritize dynamic action and straightforward formal objectives (rescue the princess, defeat Ganon) over round characters and narratively and emotionally complex stories. Link, after all, barely speaks and has only the thinnest subjectivity in Breath of the Wild. Yet, surprisingly, the GGGB didn’t reject The Last of Us. Christensen reports that he enjoyed the game because he found the story and characters so convincing that even the GGGB was satisfied. Since The Last of Us succeeded at eliciting his emotional investment in narrative relationships, pressing triangle became more than pressing triangle. It was scavenging supplies for Joel and Ellie. Their relationship transformed even the simplest button pushing into narratively meaningful action. Thus, under the right conditions, the GGGB can enjoy meaning after all. If the GGGB is pleasure-­maximizing, then The Last of Us taught it to enjoy higher pleasures by offering Christensen a synthesis of Joel-as-character and Joel-as-­ avatar, story and action, meaning and visceral sensation. When the sequel failed to achieve this synthesis, Christensen pronounced Naughty Dog’s game design outdated. Christensen’s analysis is a case study in how The Last of Us conscripts players into fatherly masculinity. Since play is voluntary, videogames must 12  NakeyJakey, “Naughty Dog’s Game Design is Outdated,” YouTube, October 1, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCYMH-lp4oM. I think Christensen’s criticism captures the experience of many players (though obviously not all). Several students expressed similar criticisms when I taught a seminar on The Last of Us. The statements of agreement in the comments section of Christensen’s video (which currently has been viewed 4 million times) are another potential indication of at least a subset of gamer opinion.

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convincingly and continuously solicit the player’s free time and attention to maintain the ludic contract. But winning the player’s consent becomes difficult when they expect the flow of AAA action-adventure games and shooters and are instead given the triangle button. The Last of Us solves this problem by embedding even the simplest and most routine actions in a rich fictional context where they take on additional significance as acts for the sake of Joel and Ellie’s relationship. At the crux of The Last of Us as a hegemonizing machine is a potent blend of gendered prosthetic embodiment and fiction: the habituation of Joel’s survivalist ways of seeing and acting, and their symbolization as antisocial violence in the service of fatherhood.

Beyond the Wall: The Beauty and Horror of Nature Joel and Tess emerge from the tunnel and into an abandoned pizzeria as the midday sun streams through the open doorway. The color palette shifts from the Quarantine Zone’s dark grays and blues to warm greens, oranges, and yellows. This is our first glimpse of the post-apocalyptic world outside the Quarantine Zone—a world of triumphant nature, bombed out buildings encased in vines, and flowers blooming among rusted cars. It’s dangerous out here, but the world without us also calls for aesthetic admiration, even ethical approval. The virus has not only created a dystopian police state but also returned the world to its original pristineness. While civilization is dirty and oppressive, nature is beautiful and free; civilization is decrepit, nature is vivacious; civilization is scarcity, nature is abundance. For these reasons, many players probably feel the same “absurd hopes” that stirred in William Morris when he first read Richard Jeffries’s After London: or Wild England (1885), an early example of the “return of nature” motif in apocalyptic science fiction.13 The American dystopia in The Last of Us is matched by a utopian desire for restored nature—a backward-­looking desire that, like Joel, gives up on society and finds hope only in the recovery of an original harmony, be it in the natural world or his own soul. Having learned another adventure/puzzle task—Joel must find a ladder and prop it against a wall to reach the next area—the player enters a 13  Letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones, April 28, 1885, in The Collected Letters of William Morris, vol. 2, part B: 1885–1888, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 426.

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crumbling apartment. An infected corpse in the basement is attached to a large fungal growth that is filling the room with spores. Druckmann and Straley got the idea for the fungal virus from an episode of the television series Planet Earth that shows the Cordyceps fungus invading the brains and bodies of ants. After “zombifying” an ant and directing it to a high point, the fungus sprouts from the ant’s dead body and releases infective spores. Taking their cue from the episode narrator’s suggestion that this real fungus is “something out of science fiction,” Druckmann and Straley imagined a near future in which the Cordyceps fungus has jumped from the insect world to humans. The Cordyceps Brain Infection (as it’s called in the “Safety Pamphlet” that can be found in “The Outskirts”) drives the human host insane, causing them to aggressively try to spread the virus, then progressively transforms the host’s body into a sporing fungus.14 According to the FEDRA pamphlet that comes preloaded in Joel’s backpack, there are four types of infected: runners, stalkers, clickers, and bloaters (the latter is revealed only in a later level’s boss fight). The Cordyceps fungal virus is the dark side of nature in The Last of Us. Nature is pretty to look at, but looking requires distance. The virus signifies the threat of absorption into nature, the reduction of subjectivity to its organic base, the transformation of the human into a sheer thing, a parasite’s host. Ultimately, the human becomes mere seeds in the wind. This incorporation into the natural environment is a subtle but important difference between the infected and conventional zombies. As walking corpses, zombies represent an uncanny blurring of life and death. The infected, however, are not dead. They are transmitters of a nonconscious organism that is too alive, too effective at colonizing other life for its own purposes. This control by an external power should sound familiar to the player. Doesn’t it also describe how it feels to play The Last of Us?

“Human Struggle in a Harsh, Cruel World” A curious thing happens when the player enters the next room. A man calls out from beneath a pile of rubble. He is trapped, has breathed in spores, and begs to be killed before the virus takes hold. The tutorial continues and shows the buttons to aim Joel’s gun and shoot. But what’s 14  Game Informer, “The Inspirations for The Last of Us,” YouTube, April 5, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZkCBHmeeMg.

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unique about this moment is that it affords something that is relatively rare in The Last of Us: choice. Tess asks, “What do you want to do?” No sooner is the player prompted to use their gun for the first time than they are invited to choose between two ways of prosthetically inhabiting Joel. If the player shoots, they decide that Joel uses violence for a higher moral purpose (in this case, a mercy killing). If the player doesn’t shoot, they decide that Joel will avoid killing unless absolutely necessary. Fittingly, the next several sequences put these decisions to the test by introducing combat. The first enemies are runners. The tutorial teaches us two new actions: listening and grabbing. Listening is a stealth tactic that allows the player to see enemy silhouettes through walls, thus giving the player the opportunity to grab them from behind and quietly strangle or shiv them (by pressing triangle) or evade them altogether. Subsequent battles are with Robert’s thugs. During these encounters, the tutorial reinforces the game’s anti-shooter design elements by prompting the player to use stealth to conserve ammunition, or throw bottles and bricks to distract or lure enemies into traps. Tess advises: “Let’s be smart about this.” When all else fails, Joel can use his pistol, melee weapons, or his fists. According to Naughty Dog game designer Anthony Newman, combat in The Last of Us should convey “human struggle in a harsh, cruel world.”15 The camera displays combat from a tight, close-up perspective, especially when Joel strangles or shivs enemies. Facial expressions of dying human enemies are detailed and personal. When Joel performs a cinematic kill move, such as bashing an opponent’s head into a wall, the head doesn’t move upon impact, suggesting that the blow’s trauma has gone inward. Newman discovered this detail while watching knockouts in mixed martial arts tournaments. It is one of many ways that The Last of Us communicates the anti-anti-world’s brutality. It’s also very satisfying. How much brutality can the player avoid? If the player chooses to spare the trapped man, can they continue to avoid killing throughout the game, effectively making Joel nonviolent? No. Naughty Dog would not have put so much effort into combat design just to make it superfluous. The average player who commits to stealth will repeatedly bungle it and be forced to fight. Even the expert stealth player will discover that it’s impossible to play The Last of Us without killing. To the best of my knowledge, there are at least 17 necessary kills in the game, and the gamer who achieved this 15  Anthony Newman, “Unsynced: The Last of Us Melee System,” YouTube, October 29, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox2H3kUQByo.

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minimal body count did so only by painstakingly arranging for non-­ playable characters to kill enemies and by using glitches to skip portions of the game. This gamer, who goes by “Dante Ravioli” on YouTube, is what Bernard Suits calls a trifler, a player who plays a metagame that treats a game’s standard objectives as uninteresting.16 Dante’s metagame might be called “can you beat A with/without B?” His videos document his attempts to complete videogames in purposively restricted ways, such as using only one kind of weapon. By showing the impossibility of a pacifist or “no kill” run in The Last of Us, Dante’s trifling revealed that stealth is a way to vary the frequency of violence, not an alternative to it. The rules of the father are ineluctably violent rules. Most importantly, Dante’s pacifist metagame didn’t count Joel’s (or Ellie’s) kills in cutscenes. The Last of Us is a “game of progression,” not a “game of emergence.”17 That means gameplay is linear, the path through the gamespace is set, and the story’s beginning, middle, and end are as unchangeable as the anti-anti-world itself. If the player sneaks by Robert’s men, Joel will still break Robert’s arm and Tess will shoot him dead in the cutscene that ensues after you catch him. Compare this game design to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004), in which the player will have to face the spirits of the people whom they’ve chosen to kill in gameplay, or Dishonored (2012), whose in-game dynamics and ending change according to how violently one plays. The encounter with the trapped man notwithstanding, The Last of Us is different from such games because it’s not about player choice. This gives new meaning to James Newman’s term “vehicle”: the player can steer Joel, but we are ultimately passengers in Joel’s journey. When asked about the lack of player choice, Druckmann described the player as being “along for the ride”: “Whether you agree with it or not, Joel is on this rampage. It’s ultimately his decision, but if you’re along with the story, you’re going to have to commit these acts.” Straley underscored Druckmann’s point: “It’s not about interactivity or non-interactivity. It’s being able to explore something that you are not.”18 16  Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (New York: Broadview Press, 2005), chap. 4. Dante Ravioli, “How Many Enemies Can You Avoid Killing in The Last of Us?”, YouTube, October 7, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCDQPry3lmI. It is debatable whether Dante is a trifler or a cheater. He insists that glitches are part of the game and distinguishes them from cheats and mods. 17  Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 5. 18  Druckmann and Straley, “Definitive Interview (Part Two),” my emphasis.

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The Last of Us, then, solicits a peculiar kind of consent. The game resembles participatory cinema: the script is already written, the scenes have all been shot, but they need my input to be realized. In her critique of the videogame shibboleth of interactivity, Sarah Stang concludes that “although technically computers are more reactive than interactive, videogame play nevertheless affords a strong illusion of interactivity.”19 Joel will stand around and tug at his backpack if I don’t press any buttons. Once I do press them, I play an active role in realizing the game’s affordances, but I also experience Joel like I experience a cinematic or literary character whose choices I perceive as the choices of another, someone who is not-I. Joel cannot become me by reflecting my intentions; I can only become Joel and try on his intentions, which are in fact Naughty Dog’s intentions mediated through code. I go along for the ride as if I were the driver. I turn fate into the semblance of choice; I express my unfreedom by pretending to be free. There is hardly a better illustration of the fusion of consent and conscription in the hegemonic process.

Marlene and Ellie Before his death, Robert revealed that he tried to have Tess killed because he couldn’t deliver the guns that he owed her and Joel. Instead, he gave them to the Fireflies. Enter Marlene, the “Queen Firefly,” as Joel calls her. Marlene is wounded. The Fireflies are losing their struggle against FEDRA. Marlene promises to give the guns back to Joel and Tess if they smuggle something out of the Quarantine Zone and into the Capitol building in downtown Boston. After a few encounters with FEDRA soldiers, Marlene leads Joel and Tess to a room and stumbles inside. As Joel attempts to help Marlene to her feet, a girl yells “Get the fuck away from her!” and comes at Joel with a knife. It’s Ellie. She’s the cargo. Tess easily stops Ellie’s attack, but our first impression of her is that she’s no sweet little girl. Her T-shirt and jeans are reminiscent of Sarah’s tomboyish style, and she seems to be roughly the same age as Sarah when she died. Ellie’s age is of vital importance because she has to look “old enough to be credible as a precocious and resourceful teenager capable of surviving in our postpandemic world.”20 Crucially, Ellie cusses and is ready 19  Sarah Stang, “‘This Action Will Have Consequences’: Interactivity and Player Agency,” Game Studies 19, no. 1 (2019), http://gamestudies.org/1901/articles/stang. 20  Wells, Meyer, and Monacelli, The Art of the Last of Us, 19.

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to use violence to protect Marlene. Naughty Dog knew they had to thwart any indication that Ellie is a helpless child and that The Last of Us revolves around one of the most disparaged videogame conventions: the escort mission. Just prior to the release of The Last of Us, an editor at the pop-­ culture media company Complex spoke for many core gamers when he wrote that “gamers of every stripe can agree” that “escort missions suck.”21 Straley was well aware of the problem: “in gamers’ minds, one of the biggest fears they have when they hear about a 14-year-old girl and a middle-­ aged man is the escort mission thing. You’re going to have to babysit her.” By pulling out her switchblade, Ellie shows how Naughty Dog’s assessment of core gamers’ expectations framed their pursuit of gender inclusion. From the very moment she appears on screen, Ellie must assure core gamers that she is “resourceful.” Thus, a game that places so much importance on the restoration of caring fatherhood needs to minimalize care (“babysitting”) while also converting care into the violent action that core gamers expect. Protection is the motor of this conversion. Joel will not cook for Ellie, nurse her when she’s sick, or sustain her spirits by consistently listening to her hopes and fears and providing reassurance and guidance. His primary form of care is protection from physical harm. While most parents seek to protect their children, we must also recognize how The Last of Us reproduces what Cecilia Åse calls the “gendered myth of protection.” Åse writes that “at the core of the protection myth is the creation and preservation of a gender binary. The association of women/femininities with that which should be protected—such as the family/household, the territory/homeland, and the in-group’s culture and tradition—is decisive, as is the incorporation of manliness and masculinity into the identity of the protector.”22 What The Last of Us has to say about fatherly love is intwined with gendered, hierarchical binaries of protection and dependence. To be a caring father and man is to use violence to protect a dependent daughter from violence, mostly (though not exclusively) the violence of other men. On other hand, Ellie cannot be too mature. Ellie looked like a slightly older teenager in early artwork and in the 2011 debut trailer, but was then 21  Hanuman Welch, “The 10 Worst Video Game Escort Missions Ever,” Complex, May 8, 2013, https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/05/ten-of-the-worst-video-gameescort-missions-ever/. 22  Cecilia Åse, “The Gendered Myth of Protection,” in The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Security, eds. Caron E.  Gentry, Laura J.  Shepherd, and Laura Sjoberg (New York: Routledge, 2019), 274.

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redesigned to appear younger.23 If Ellie has to look older than a child who must be babysat, she also needs to look younger than a girlfriend. Druckmann once described The Last of Us as essentially a “love story.”24 To tell this love story between Joel and Ellie, The Last of Us has to ensure that the father-daughter relationship is not the slightest bit romantic. It’s Marlene who initially joins Joel and Ellie. The plan is for Marlene to show Tess the guns, which are back at the Firefly camp, while Joel takes Ellie to wait at a safe location. From there, Joel and Tess will deliver Ellie to a group of Fireflies at the Capitol building, then come back to receive the guns from Marlene. We don’t know yet why Marlene wants to have Ellie smuggled out of the Quarantine Zone, only that it must happen now and that she is too injured to do it herself. Joel and Ellie immediately protest the arrangement. Joel probably wants nothing to do with a teenage girl who instantly reminds him of Sarah. Tess wants the guns; when she attempts to persuade Joel to do his part by emphasizing that Ellie is “just cargo,” she may also sense that Joel’s hesitation is more about his painful past and less about the terms of the deal. “Jesus Christ,” he responds, sighing. Ellie doesn’t want to be left alone with this strange and surly man, but Marlene says a former Firefly, Tommy (Joel’s brother), assured her that she could trust Joel. When Ellie continues to protest, Marlene quickly silences her: “No more talking. You’ll be fine. Now go with him.” Joel concedes and issues another order to Ellie: “And you—stay close. Let’s go.” From this moment to the very last cutscene, adults will make all of Ellie’s most important decisions for her. If playing Joel offers a mix of freedom and unfreedom, Ellie represents sheer heteronomy. She will eventually become an effective killer in her own right, but she will never have true control over her fate. On the way to the safehouse, Ellie is usually behind Joel and out of sight unless the player deliberately rotates the camera to check on her. “I’m just following you,” she tells Joel, reminding us of her lack of control. 23  Neil Druckmann, “The Last of Us: New Trailer, New Ellie,” interview by Greg Miller, IGN, May 16, 2012, https://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/15/the-last-of-us-newtrailer-new-ellie. The transgender actor Elliot Page accused Naughty Dog of stealing his likeness for the original design of Ellie. The allegation may have been another reason for changing Ellie’s appearance. 24  Johnny Minkley, “Naughty Dog Wants to ‘Change the F***ing Industry’ with The Last of Us,” Eurogamer, December 13, 2011, https://www.eurogamer.net/ articles/2011-12-13-naughty-dog-wants-to-change-the-f-ing-industry-with-the-last-of-us.

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Joel and Ellie chat during gameplay. Ellie tells Joel that Marlene is her “friend.” She knew her mother and has been looking after her. Readers of the comic The Last of Us: American Dreams (2013) learn that Ellie’s switchblade belonged to her mother, Anna, and that it was Marlene who passed it on to Ellie after Anna’s death. Marlene can be as ruthless as Tess, but since she is also Ellie’s symbolic mother, she has a gentle side that Tess lacks. Naughty Dog wanted the Firefly leader to “look capable and in control,” but also “convey a sense of compassion so that the players would buy that she deeply cares for Ellie.”25 Marlene will return late in the game, when the solidification of Joel’s fatherhood requires the elimination of the game’s strongest mother figure and its only prominent Black woman. When Ellie suggests that Joel is trying to get her to divulge the reason Marlene wants her smuggled out of the Quarantine Zone, Joel tries to make clear that he doesn’t care: “Be honest with you, I could give two shits about what you’re up to.” Maybe it’s true. Perhaps at this point, Joel sees Ellie as nothing but cargo. But when the two finally reach the safehouse and Joel lays down for a nap, Ellie observes: “Your watch is broken.” It’s Sarah’s gift, busted but still fastened to Joel’s wrist in remembrance. Joel seems to doze off at precisely this moment, so he probably doesn’t hear Ellie. Yet we hear a snippet of Santaolalla’s ronroco, reminding us of the night when Joel received the watch, Sarah’s death, Joel’s own brokenness, and the emotional risk of getting close to Ellie.

 Wells, Meyer, and Monacelli, The Art of the Last of Us, 47.

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CHAPTER 4

The Outskirts: Fridging Tess

Tess as Mediator and Dispatcher When Druckmann and Straley began working together on The Last of Us, one of their primary goals was to create a game that facilitates the player’s emotional bond with a non-playable character. But a problem arose: Joel was modeling this bond with Ellie too quickly, changing from “a hardened survivor to this father figure in an instant.”1 We can see Druckmann and Straley’s solution to the problem in the back-and-forth of Joel’s feelings toward Ellie, and especially in Tess’s demise. Joel awakens again from bad dreams, but this time Ellie is there. “I hate bad dreams,” she says. Joel responds without any trace of hostility: “Me too.” She and Joel now have something in common. Night has fallen and the two are still waiting for Tess. Ellie is gazing out the window at the city beyond the Quarantine Zone walls. When Joel joins Ellie at the window, she reveals that she’s never been outside. She expresses wonder at the darkness of the city in the distance and hope that, at the very least, what’s outside the walls can’t be worse than the police state inside. It’s the moment when Joel first allows himself to recognize Ellie as more than cargo. She’s a child—naïve but optimistic, unknowing but not yet so corrupted by the anti-anti-world to have lost all optimism. 1

 Druckmann and Straley, “Definitive Interview (Part One).”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_4

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He reverses his earlier statement about not giving “two shits” and asks why the Fireflies are so interested in her. A tiny light of care has started to flicker. Tess’s entry postpones the budding relationship. She confirms that Marlene has the guns and that the deal is still on. After the player leaves the room and reaches the outer perimeter of the Quarantine Zone wall, a cutscene shows the trio captured by two soldiers. In a way, it’s a repetition of the night when the soldier shot Sarah. The soldiers hold Joel, Tess, and Ellie at gunpoint while they scan them for infection. But Ellie isn’t Sarah. She stabs one of the soldiers with her switchblade, giving Joel and Tess the opportunity to kill them. Ellie is shaken, showing us that while she is resourceful, murder doesn’t come easily. If Joel and Ellie had a moment of closeness earlier, it evaporates when Joel and Tess discover that the soldier scanned Ellie before she stabbed him. She’s infected. To the outraged Joel, Ellie is now just an “infected girl” whom he’s been tricked into smuggling. Tess menacingly stands over Ellie and waves her gun as she demands an explanation. Ellie is forced to reveal what makes her special: she was bitten and never “zombified” because she’s immune. In a long sequence of gameplay, the player must sneak through ruins and sewers while avoiding the heavily armed soldiers who arrive. Being spotted unleashes a barrage of machine gun fire that makes me feel that I am indeed in a traditional shooter … as a target who cannot effectively shoot back. If being killed repeatedly isn’t enough of a lesson in the virtues of stealth, Joel’s in-game dialogue also discourages direct confrontation: “There’s too many, Tess.” Once the player navigates out of the sewers, a cutscene returns to the issue of Ellie’s immunity. Something has changed in Tess. Joel is dismissive when Ellie explains that the Fireflies think she is the key to a vaccine, but Tess listens intently. The survivor who is even more cutthroat than Joel wants to continue with the plan to deliver Ellie to the Fireflies if there is a chance of creating a vaccine. Tess’s change of heart is the narrative technique that solves the pacing problem in Joel’s relationship with Ellie. If, as Druckmann suggested, Joel is dead inside, he has no reason to risk his life for a girl he just met. He has even less interest in saving society. But he does have a friend’s and partner’s loyalty to Tess. I’ve described Tess’s machinic role as mediating between the standard metagame and The Last of Us. In narratological terms, she’s a mediator

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and “dispatcher,” the term used by Vladimir Propp in his structuralist analysis of character roles.2 When Joel advocates for abandoning the mission, he stands opposite of Tess while Ellie stands between them (Fig. 4.1). Like in the initial meeting with Ellie, Tess implicitly identifies Joel’s woundedness. After he warns Tess about the dangers awaiting them on the way to the Capitol building, Tess pauses, turns to look at Ellie, then says knowingly, “I get it.” What she gets is that Ellie reminds Joel of Sarah, and that the danger of Ellie’s death is his true reason for wanting to return home. Tess’s structural function is to indicate Joel’s fear and overcome it by figuratively trading places with Ellie as the middle and binding term between her and Joel. As we will see, Tess’s sole purpose in the narrative is to provide an excuse for Joel to take care of Ellie. After Tess says “I get it,” she proceeds into the ruins of downtown Boston. She seems to assume that Joel will follow her lead, and after an exasperated sigh, he does. By getting Joel to continue, Tess dispatches him on a journey away from home and lays the groundwork for his quest to deliver Ellie to the Fireflies.

Fig. 4.1  Tess the Mediator and Dispatcher. Tess’s role is to trade places with Ellie. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author) 2  Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd ed., trans. Laurence Scott, ed. Louis A. Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).

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Downtown The cityscape around the Quarantine Zone is a labyrinth of busted concrete and toppled skyscrapers. Tess explains to the bewildered Ellie that FEDRA bombed the area to kill the infected. The player can find an evacuation notice that warns people in the area that they must leave before the bombing begins, but cannot seek shelter in the Quarantine Zone, which is not accepting anyone. In other words, FEDRA refused to provide collective safety and instead urged individual citizens to take responsibility for themselves. These are indeed the ruins of neoliberalism. The way forward leads through a slowly collapsing skyscraper and down into the subway. These areas introduce one of the most common and deadly types of infected, clickers. They are less human-looking and creepier than the runners because the fungus has taken over their entire heads, turning their faces into grotesque mushrooms. They are blind and use clicks to echolocate the player. They can be evaded if the player stays still or moves slowly, or distracts them with bottles or bricks, but if a clicker attacks and gets close enough, it will initiate a gruesome death sequence in which it tears out Joel’s neck. Gameplay in the skyscraper and subway forces the player into the first extensive and complex combat encounters with infected. The encounters were designed to be difficult and solidify the necessity of stealth, especially when multiple clickers are present. Before finalizing the clicker’s design, Druckmann and Straley noticed that game testers were not using stealth and were moving through combat with the infected too easily. By reconfiguring the clicker to kill with one hit, thus causing an instant game over, Naughty Dog raised the stakes of direct confrontation with infected, increased the reward for using stealth—players live longer—and made combat more tense.3 These combat sequences are thus crucial for strengthening the fiction of a cruel anti-anti-world and for teaching the player to obey the game’s rules. They also teach its blend of unfree freedom. Most players will die at least once here; many will die over and over again until they devise a workable strategy. I can restart after dying, gaining a degree of control over the situation because I have an opportunity to correct my

3  Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley, “Zombies, Women & Citizen Kane: Last of Us Makers Defend Their Game,” interview by Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku, July 5, 2013, https:// kotaku.com/zombies-women-citizen-kane-the-last-of-us-makers-de-679053634.

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mistakes. But once again my agency takes the form of learning to conform to something I cannot control, the game’s combat algorithms.4 Yet there is another logic in The Last of Us that works against the limitations imposed on players. By the time the player exits the subway, they have been able to scavenge two types of item that reverse the game’s emphasis on Joel’s weakness: Supplements and Parts. Both are essentially power-ups, the game’s version of the classic mushroom that allows Nintendo’s Mario to grow and become stronger. Supplements enable the player to boost Joel’s maximum health, hearing range, and crafting and healing speed; reduce weapon sway; and finally become a “shiv master,” which gives Joel the chance to fend off a clicker’s one-hit kill. Parts can be used at workbenches, the first of which appears in a room beyond the subway. Workbenches enable the player to upgrade weapons. Besides the pistol and bow, eight other weapons, including a flame thrower and assault rifle, can be strengthened at workbenches. Additionally, the player can craft bombs and Molotov cocktails (introduced in the subway) and enhance some melee weapons with spikes. Thus, when the player gets to the later levels, they can have almost superhuman abilities and possess the firepower of a small army. Perhaps this reversal of limitations is a reward to the player for enduring scarcity, a final concession to the core gamer’s desire for manly technological mastery. In other words, The Last of Us might not be a deviation from the power fantasies of AAA games but rather a more subtle power-up, a set of techniques for reinvigorating power fantasies by taking them away and making the player slowly earn them through struggle.

The Museum of Settler Colonialism The final obstacle before the trio reach the Capitol building is a history museum that contains clickers and runners. It’s trashed, like the rest of downtown Boston, but many of the items and exhibits are still standing. Perhaps modeled on Boston’s Old State House, the museum is full of artifacts of the colonial and revolutionary period: a frayed, thirteen-star Old Glory, colonial army uniforms, a bust of George Washington, and what looks like a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Stripped of their national-historical context, the museum artifacts have become just more detritus alongside the broken glass on the rotting floorboards. 4

 Karin Wenz, “Death,” in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, 313.

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Ironically, a space that preserves the public memory of the nation’s birth has survived the nation’s death and become a mausoleum without a public. This is what has happened to the fictional gamespace in its entirety. The museum is a microcosm of The Last of Us as a non- or post-American place haunted by America’s disappearance. The museum is also a symptomatic space in which the nation’s settler-­ colonial anxieties and fantasies are on display.5 Canavan argues that zombie apocalypse is a cultural metaphor for white settler society’s genocidal wars against colonized and racialized others. Since the violence of Manifest Destiny can no longer be celebrated in popular culture and official discourse as openly at it once was—recall the Declaration of Independence’s demonization of “merciless Indian Savages”—zombies “repackage the violence of colonial race war in a form that is ideologically safer.”6 A zombie virus is an equal-opportunity disease that usually spreads without regard for race, color, class, or creed, providing an outlet for fantasies of indiscriminate killing that are protected from charges of bigotry. The museum places the nation’s celebrated birth through violence against “Indian savages” in the midst of a post-apocalyptic future, creating a palimpsest upon which the player’s struggle against infected and hostile survivors can be written on top of the old settler colonial fantasies and ethnonational myths while keeping these safely in the background.7 These are the same myths unlocked by the neoliberal collapse of society and the repudiation of social justice. In the museum, the late neoliberal present, negated and reconstituted in The Last of Us as the post-apocalyptic future, collides with the settler colonial past. Joel, however, is not a patriot, and the culmination of his journey— which leads westward, the course of empire—isn’t the rebirth of the United States. In The Last of Us, myths have lost their power to constitute new collectivities and can only service individuals or, at most, families.

5  It’s not coincidental that Druckmann himself hails from a settler society. He was born in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank in 1978 and moved to the United States in 1989. In interviews, he often connects his experience of violence in the West Bank to the themes of The Last of Us. 6  Canavan, “We Are the Walking Dead,” 439. 7  For an elaboration of the concept of palimpsest in videogame studies, see Murray, On Video Games, chap. 1.

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Capitol Building On the rooftops beyond the museum, Joel takes a step back toward Ellie. The player must find a plank and set it down to bridge the rooftops. Ellie crosses in a cutscene, then stops, wide-eyed, and admires the sunset. Remembering the optimism she expressed back at the safe house, Joel asks, “Well, is that everything you hoped for?” Santaolalla’s ronroco plays softly as Ellie expresses wonder at the skyline. The child’s innocence again stirs something in Joel, and he distractedly looks at his broken watch, giving the player the most direct sign yet that Ellie reminds him of Sarah. Once more, Joel’s symbolic adoption of Ellie is interrupted and delayed. The trio arrive at the Capitol building only to discover that FEDRA soldiers have killed the Fireflies. Tess frantically searches the bodies for a map and asks Ellie for the location of the lab to which the Fireflies had planned to take her. She suddenly appears desperate to extend the journey and ensure that Ellie gets to the lab out west. Joel, however, wants to go home and perhaps even abandon Ellie. When Ellie asks what they will do now, he doesn’t answer. “This is not us,” he tells Tess—by which he means that the two are survivors, that survivors don’t needlessly risk their lives for strange girls and pie-in-the-sky stories about a vaccine, and that “the last of us” doesn’t include Ellie or the Fireflies. Tess’s retort reveals that beneath the tough veneer, she still has a strong moral compass that allows her to see that “survival” has been an excuse for Joel and her to become “shitty people.” Ellie and the vaccine are so important to her because “this is our chance,” that is, it’s an opportunity to atone for past cruelty. But if there is redemption for Tess, it can only be in death. She was bitten somewhere between the skyscraper and the museum. The speed of her infection, which is already beginning to bloom over her shoulder, convinces her that Ellie’s three-week-old bite proves Ellie’s immunity. Tess urges Joel to take Ellie to Tommy, an ex-Firefly who will know where to find the group. “Look, there’s enough here,” she tells Joel, gesturing to the space between them, “that you have to feel some sort of obligation to me. So you get her to Tommy’s.” It’s unclear what “here” means. Are they a couple after all? That still seems unlikely, given that in place of a parting kiss, or any sort of tenderness, Tess shoves Joel and says “just fucking go.” Soldiers have arrived, and Tess has chosen to sacrifice herself in battle to buy Joel and Ellie time to escape. Tess has now completed her narrative function of giving Joel a reason to journey west with Ellie, even though he doesn’t particularly like Ellie

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yet. Having fulfilled her mediating/dispatcher role, she can now exit the game like a properly fridged woman. Druckmann is clear on Tess’s purely instrumental value to Joel’s character development, though he doesn’t mention the trope: “That’s the whole reason Tess is in the story: to get to this point.”8 Tess’s death is supposed to be noble, and in a sense, it is. By giving her life to aid Joel and Ellie—and ultimately all of humanity—she stopped being a “shitty person.” But it’s also problematic that, besides providing a motivation for the male lead character, the most heroic thing a female character can do is die. We will see that this is also Ellie’s biggest potential achievement. Joel may now have an alibi for traveling with Ellie to Tommy, but he doesn’t have to enjoy it. The chapter ends when Joel and Ellie’s relationship hits a new nadir. After the player flees with Ellie from the Capitol building and out of another spore-infested subway, a cutscene shows Joel and Ellie alone again. Ellie feels responsible for Tess’s death and tries to apologize, but Joel silences her and tells her never to mention Tess again. He, too, seems to believe that Ellie is to blame and is determined to repress Tess’s death along with Sarah’s. Joel issues a final directive that confirms Ellie’s heteronomy: “you do what I say, when I say it.” He orders Ellie to repeat it, and she complies: “What you say, goes.” In this forced consent, the player can again see their own unfree freedom in the game. And perhaps the germ form of a critique.

8

 Baker, Druckmann, Johnson, Newman, “‘Your Watch is Broken.’—Summer Part 1.”

CHAPTER 5

Bill’s Town: No Country for Gay Men

Children Are the Future? James Berger states that “the zombie apocalypse is a story of procreation. It condenses the problem of the future to an opposition between the zombie and the child.”1 Whether it manifests in the unnamed son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) or Carl in The Walking Dead comics (2003–2019) and TV series (2010–), the figure of the Child represents the biological future of the species. If there are children, there can be copulating pairs, more people, more “us,” more world. The Child also signifies human continuity through the transmission of memory, history, and culture from one generation to the next. In these ways, the Child embodies play in my concept of the anti-anti-world, for it shows that the world’s end is not fully real, thus unfinished and potentially reversible. Conversely, zombies are a corruption of biological continuity, the living-­ dead endurance of “us,” and the past’s devouring of the future. When zombies kill or zombify the Child, its demise “signifies the end of the human project, the end of this world.”2

1  James Berger, “Propagation and Procreation: The Zombie and the Child,” in Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, ed. Barbara Gurr (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 153. 2  Berger, 154.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_5

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Although the infected aren’t walking corpses, they similarly represent the past—they are the result of the virus’s circulation in the twenty years since the Prologue—and threaten not only to kill off humanity but also to corrupt human propagation. The virus turns the human into nothing but a host for further viral transmission. Ellie, the Child, stands opposite the infected in the game’s figural system as the vaccinated future—the promise of an uncontaminated, non-viral reproduction of the species. “Bill’s Town” repeatedly thematizes childhood. Joel’s plan is to drive Ellie to Tommy, and he thinks Bill, a smuggling partner who owes him a favor, will help him find a car. As Joel and Ellie take a shortcut to Bill’s town through a stretch of woods, Ellie’s in-game dialogue again communicates her childish innocence and wonder. She tells Joel that she’s never been in the woods before. She pauses to take in her surroundings, which she describes as “cool.” At later points in “Bill’s Town,” Ellie gets excited about fireflies (the insects, not the political group) and tries to learn to whistle. Depending on how quickly the player walks at the beginning of the woods section, Joel can enter a clearing just as Ellie finishes talking. Golden, late-afternoon sunshine is streaming through the trees and shimmering on a pond where a white crane is resting. Santaolalla’s score blends soothingly with the atmospheric sounds of running water, insects, and chirping birds. It’s a beautiful setup that invites the player to view the world through Ellie’s astonishment, a perspective that recognizes that there is still magic in the world, that the apocalypse is still incomplete, and that people can still find peace, even if only in enclaves on the fringes of civilization. In the words of software engineer Max Dyckhoff, Ellie “is seeing landscapes, cities, and actions as the player would, instead of through the world weary eyes of Joel.”3 Indeed, just as the woods are a utopian enclave, a peaceful “nowhere” set apart from the surrounding brutality— there is no combat in the woods—the Child is also an outside. Because the Child is not fully beholden to the fallen world, it can point beyond apocalypse and toward something better. Bill’s town, Lincoln, is abandoned—except for infected and Bill. A sign in the main street shows that FEDRA evacuated the inhabitants to the Quarantine Zone before the infected arrived. Prior to finding Bill, the 3  Max Dyckhoff, “Ellie: Buddy AI in The Last of Us,” in Game AI Pro2: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals, ed. Steve Rabin (New York: CRC Press, 2015), 431.

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player can explore some of the deserted buildings, one of which is a record shop. Ellie is impressed with the store, but if the player presses triangle to initiate an optional conversation—one of 37 scattered throughout the game—Ellie will describe the store as “sad” as she thumbs through albums. When Joel asks for an explanation, Ellie says: “All this music that’s just sitting here. No one’s around to listen to it. […] Doesn’t seem right.” The remark highlights the cultural loss of the anti-anti-world. Like the museum in downtown Boston, the record shop is a repository of cultural memory that has become orphaned in the post-apocalypse. The records are a message without a receiver. Ellie’s dismay, her sense that the music’s fate is not “right,” indicates not only her desire to hear the music—she is generally obsessed with popular culture—but also the Child’s purpose to bridge old and new worlds. If the Child can receive the past’s message, humanity can endure. The scenes in the woods and in the record store illustrate how the Child in zombie apocalypse vacillates between two kinds of hope. On the one hand, the Child is difference; on the other, sameness. The Child can symbolize a new beginning because it has one foot outside the anti-anti-­ world and its cynicism. It has not fully internalized the anti-anti-world’s monstrosity and can still see a crane, marvel at fireflies, and delight in whistling. To use the language of science fiction studies, the Child embodies estrangement, a point of view that distances the player from their everyday perception and asks them to see aspects of reality as if for the first time.4 And since a better world requires different people with different sensibilities, the Child’s estrangement carries the seed of a new humanity and reality. But the Child is also burdened with the old generation’s music and its desire to see its own world restored, its own history reconstituted and continued. Measured against the old generation’s yearning for continuity, the Child’s difference can signify too much of a break and thus another kind of apocalypse. Joel is the figure in The Last of Us who most strongly bends Ellie’s arc toward sameness. Joel is utterly uninterested in a different future, for his utopia lies in the past, in the original harmony of his relationship with Sarah. When Joel promises to teach Ellie how to play guitar at the end of The Last of Us, he implicitly answers Ellie’s remark in the record store and 4  Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

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affirms that Ellie is a Child who can make things right by receiving and carrying forth the cultural memory of the past. But the more Joel transfers his knowledge of the old world to Ellie, shaping her interests and possibilities, the more he diminishes her difference and the potential for a future that is more than just the return of the same. A comparison between Joel and the unnamed father in The Road is instructive. The father realizes that “to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. […] [H]e could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.5” No such revelation will ever come to Joel. He will try to reconstruct the lost world for Ellie and, by offering her Sarah’s place in it, use the restoration of the father-daughter relationship to patch up his loss and sweep away the ashes in his heart. Fatherhood is another Child-eating zombie in The Last of Us because it consumes the Child’s difference for the sake of its own propagation. Ellie’s job is to make post-apocalyptic Joel, a bad man, good again. The sociologist Michael S.  Kimmel reminds us that women, in particular women’s innocence and virtue, used to serve as the external force that makes men good. By loving virtuous women, bad men could pivot away from the extremes of hegemonic masculinity without appearing emasculated. But under neoliberalism, the aggrieved ex-patriarch’s perspective has shaped cultural narratives of fatherhood that blame working, sexually progressive women for seeking their own fulfillment and neglecting their duty, namely, to make men and children decent. Since mothers and wives are scapegoats for neoliberalism’s heartlessness, children must step into their role as the external innocence and virtue that transforms men.6 This is why Joel is surprisingly similar to Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire (1996) and Jim Carey’s in Liar Liar (1997): all three morally suspect men become more caring through their relationships with children. While the “daddification” of videogames reflects specific shifts in the videogame market, The Last of Us is also part of a broader cultural evacuation of the trope of woman’s virtue and a corresponding “childification” of masculinity. Both have their social basis in the fractured neoliberal family.  Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 129–130.  Michael S. Kimmel, Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), chap. 2. 5 6

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A scene that foreshadows Ellie’s subjection to Joel occurs in another abandoned building in Lincoln, a pizzeria with a single arcade game called “The Turning.” The machine is broken, but Ellie still approaches it with fascination. After the player initiates the optional dialogue, Ellie explains that a friend told her about “The Turning” and its playable character, Angel Knives, who punches a hole in her victim’s stomach before kicking their head off. Ellie says she wishes she could play. Joel is unimpressed: “Well, I was never a big fan of these things.” It is an ironic role reversal. Joel says he doesn’t like videogames, but he’s precisely the one with whom we’re playing a similarly violent game. In contrast, Ellie cannot play either “The Turning” or The Last of Us … yet. Joel ordered her to follow his directions, and she is doing just that. Although she will eventually “turn” and become a playable character and a violent Angel Knives in her own right, Joel will still make Ellie’s most important decision for her. She can play, but only by the father’s rules.

Bill, or, Joel to the Nth Degree After Lincoln’s inhabitants were evacuated, Bill stayed behind and turned the town into his own personal fortress. The town is full of Bill’s barricades and traps. He enters the game when he helps Joel and Ellie escape from one such trap, a rope that suspends Joel upside down as the infected attack. Though Bill ultimately saves Joel, Ellie also helps Joel during gameplay by cutting the rope. Combined with the player’s ability to boost Ellie to open locked gates, this sequence serves to block the player’s impression of an escort game and begins to solidify Ellie’s function as a helpful sidekick. If Ellie “helps the player out of a tight situation,” Dyckhoff explained, “then the player feels thankful, grows to appreciate her presence, and has an improved opinion of the game in general.”7 Bill is the ultimate survivalist. Joel may have forsaken society, but he still lived among other people in the Quarantine Zone and was partnered with Tess. Bill, in contrast, is a more radically antisocial loner. He’s bearded and heavy-set, and his backpack, tactical vest, and gas mask show that “just about everything Bill wears doubles as a survival tool.”8 Bill’s survivalism has also warped his mind; in him, neoliberal anti-sociality becomes pathological. Before we meet Bill, Ellie says his numerous traps suggest that he’s 7 8

 Dyckhoff, “Buddy AI in The Last of Us,” 432.  Wells, Meyer, and Monacelli, Art of The Last of Us, 61.

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“paranoid.” Joel then warns Ellie during in-game dialogue that Bill isn’t the “most stable” and “don’t take too kindly to strangers.” This proves to be an understatement. After Bill guides Joel and Ellie to safety, he immediately handcuffs Ellie to a pipe and forces Joel to drop to his knees at gunpoint. He wants to ensure that they’re not infected and is angry that they’ve jeopardized his security by setting off his traps. He is belligerent, especially with the Ellie, whose irascible nature and teenage attitude become ever more apparent as she breaks free of the handcuffs, hits Bill with the pipe, and antagonizes him about his weight. After Bill reluctantly agrees to help Joel repair a car, the player can periodically overhear him talking to himself, reinforcing the impression that he’s crazy. Druckmann intended Bill to serve as a more extreme version of Joel— and as a warning. In Druckmann’s words, “Bill has taken Joel’s philosophy to the nth degree.”9 While Joel insisted on his identity as a survivor in his final exchange with Tess, Joel’s commitment to survival pales in comparison to Bill’s. Bill takes the neoliberal rejection of society to its logical conclusion: he is an individual who is responsible for his life alone. When the trio take a short break to gather weapons, Bill tries to convince Joel to abandon Ellie by giving him the following advice: “Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time I had someone I cared about. It was a partner. Somebody I had to look after. And in this world that sort of shit’s good for one thing: gettin’ ya killed. So, you know what I did? I wisened the fuck up. And I realized it’s gotta be just me.” This is essentially Joel’s selfish thinking at the beginning of The Last of Us, only stated more directly and completely. With the exception of Tess, Joel has looked out solely for himself, society be damned. Now that Tess is dead, Joel could potentially become as solitary—and crazy—as Bill. All that holds him back is his promise to Tess. And yet keeping this promise exposes Joel to exactly the risk that Bill identifies, namely, that caring for Ellie will get Joel killed, be it physically or emotionally. Joel must travel between Scylla and Charybdis: either become as antisocial as Bill and risk utter isolation and madness, or get closer to Ellie and risk another heartbreak or even death.

9  Troy Baker, Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, and Erick Pangilinan, “What Are you Scared Of?—Summer Part 2,” interview by Christian Spicer, June 16, 2020, in The Official Last of Us Podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-are-you-scared-of-summer-part-2/id1514792212?i=1000478144498.

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The Meanings of Bill’s Homosexuality Bill’s term “partner” is ambiguous. Does he mean a non-romantic partner like Tess?10 Before he says the word in the cutscene, he briefly pauses. His eyes evasively dart left and right. After a series of clashes with the infected, culminating in a boss fight with a bloater, we learn that Bill is gay. Bill’s partner was his lover Frank, whose body is hanging in the house to which the trio retreat after the bloater fight. Having been bitten, Frank chose to hang himself instead of turning. If the player searches the house, as Bill instructs, they can find a letter in which Frank bitterly explains that he stole the car battery that the trio were seeking. He wanted to escape the town and Bill, whom he’d grown to hate. An optional dialogue allows Joel to give the letter to Bill, whose voice trembles as he reads: “That’s how you feel? Well, fuck you too, Frank.” We now know the origin of Bill’s selfish philosophy. He loved Frank, but Frank abandoned him. Frank’s death and his parting shot in the letter only magnify what must feel like the ultimate betrayal to Bill, whose wounded love parallels and amplifies Joel’s. Before he killed himself, Frank installed the car battery in a pickup truck. The final playable portion of “Bill’s Town” tasks the player with pushing the truck and fighting off infected together with Bill while Ellie attempts to start the engine from the driver’s seat. It’s a big responsibility, and when the plan succeeds, Joel counters Bill’s criticisms of Ellie by saying “you gotta admit, she did hold her own back there.” Ever the cynic, Bill repeats his judgment that Joel’s attachment to her will get Joel killed. He helps Joel one last time by gifting him a hose with which to siphon gas, but after confirming that his debt to Joel is paid, he tells Joel to “get the fuck out of my town.” The imperative comes just as Joel is trying to muster a few words of condolence for Frank. Bill is a bitter loner to the end. A final cutscene shows Joel and Ellie on the road. Joel is driving, and Ellie pops up from the back seat to gush about a comic she stole from Bill. Paralleling the beginning of the Prologue, when he gently disapproved that Sarah was up late, Joel asks in his best fatherly voice: “Hey, what happened to sleeping?” Joel’s attempt to mandate sleep for Ellie and her 10  Bill’s remarks about Tess are perhaps the strongest evidence that her and Joel’s relationship was more than professional. Bill asks why Tess is not with Joel, given that the two are “inseparable.” When Joel evasively says that Tess is “busy”—he doesn’t reveal Tess’s death to Bill—Bill wisecracks that there is “trouble in paradise,” as if Joel and Tess were a married couple.

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rambunctious refusal create the most familial moment between them yet. The ordeal of “Bill’s Town” has brought the two together. So has Bill. The crazed survivalist models a total individualism and hostility toward Ellie that Joel will progressively leave behind. Crucially, Bill’s sexuality also bonds Joel and Ellie, who reveals that she stole a porn magazine along with the comic. A muscular man is on the cover. As Ellie rotates the magazine to get a complete view of the centerfold, Joel again tries to parent: “Now, Ellie, that ain’t for kids.” Ellie knows she is making Joel uncomfortable and is having too much fun to stop. She expresses exaggerated shock at the size of the centerfold model’s penis, and says she wants to “know what all the fuss is about.” Joel becomes especially uneasy when Ellie pretends that the magazine pages are stuck together with semen, but she finally releases him from her teasing: “I’m just fucking with you.” Like in the Prologue, this father-daughter relationship is unsentimental and resembles a friendship. In a 2013 interview with Gay Gamer, Druckmann explained that Ellie’s original joke was about a female model with large breast implants. After it was established that Bill is gay—whether Druckmann intended this from the beginning is unclear—Naughty Dog changed the magazine and Ellie’s reaction. Instead of consciously making a political statement about the inclusion of gays in videogames, Druckmann thought Bill’s homosexuality strengthened the story by deepening his relationship with Frank, and he wanted the magazine to give the player clearer evidence of Bill’s sexual orientation.11 That the player might need this proof testifies to the subtlety of Bill’s queerness. To Naughty Dog’s credit, Bill isn’t portrayed stereotypically; he isn’t hyper-feminine, overly sensitive, flamboyant, or fashionable, and he doesn’t speak with a dramatic lisp. Since his homosexuality is barely thematized, Bill is less a token gay man and more a person who happens to have had an intimate relationship with a man. The Gay and 11  Neil Druckmann, “On Bill: An Interview with Neil Druckmann of Naughty Dog,” interview by Sam Einhorn, Gay Gamer, September 27, 2013, http://gaygamer. net/2013/09/on-bill-an-interview-with-neil-druckmann-of-naughty-dog/. The Gay Gamer website no longer exists, but the link can be accessed via the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine. In this interview, Druckmann claims that he wrote Bill as gay. In other interviews, he attributes Bill’s homosexuality to the decision by voice and motion capture actor W. Earl Brown to portray Bill as gay. But if Naughty Dog had to revise the cutscene in the truck to confirm that Bill is gay, this suggests that he wasn’t originally conceived as such. Druckmann suggests as much in his interview with Creative Screenwriting. This seems to be the more plausible explanation.

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Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) ranked Bill among the “Most Intriguing New LGBT Characters of 2013”: he is “as deeply flawed but wholly unique a gay character found in any storytelling medium this year.”12 But Bill’s queerness has less sanguine implications. The magazine notwithstanding, Bill passes as a straight man who performs the ideals of hegemonic masculinity: weapon skills, mechanical knowhow, physical and mental toughness, and most importantly, suppression of care and emotional vulnerability. The latter sensibilities are especially significant as points of contrast to Joel, who shares most of Bill’s hegemonic masculine traits but not his coldness, especially as regards Ellie. Having seen the true, original Joel—the caring father—the player knows that he is most at home in the world if he has a daughter to love, and that he will symbolically adopt Ellie in due time. In other words, while both Bill and Joel represent hegemonic masculine norms, Bill is ultimately differentiated from Joel by way of Joel’s fatherly masculinity. Joel likes kids; Bill calls Ellie a “punk” and “brat.” Ironically, the “feminine” sensibility with which Joel revises hegemonic masculinity—his fatherly care ethic—is what sets him apart from Bill and marks gay masculinity as the threat of total antisocial cynicism. Thus, one function of Bill’s homosexuality is to ideologically inoculate and stabilize Joel’s fatherly masculinity by giving Joel a dash of the stereotypical gay man’s emotionality, the “feminine” side of masculinity, while Bill’s gayness stands in for the emotional callousness toward children that is often associated with gay men, straight bachelors, and deviant women. Next to Bill, Joel appears straighter, saner, warmer, and less toxically masculine. Queerness, in turn, represents a more extreme and undesirable form of masculinity—selfish, uncaring, anti-Child, futureless. As Lee Edelman has powerfully argued, the Child is a heteronormative ideology that makes the future thinkable only as heterosexual procreation.13 Wherever we find the figure of the Child, there is not only a normalization of heterosexual procreation but also an ontology: the being of humanity depends on straight sex that creates children who can go on to have more straight sex, more children, and so on. Since kids are the future, 12  Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, “The Most Intriguing New LGBT Characters of 2013,” glaad, December 26, 2013, https://www.glaad.org/blog/ most-intriguing-new-lgbt-characters-2013. 13  Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

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nonreproductive queer sexuality symbolizes apocalyptic non-futurity. Bill embodies this sort of queerness in The Last of Us. The Child-hater has no future; he will most likely die alone in his fortress. We can now understand the ideological function of Ellie’s joke about Bill’s homosexuality more clearly. Although Ellie is revealed to be lesbian in The Last of Us: Left Behind, her queerness is never mentioned in The Last of Us because she wasn’t originally written that way.14 By treating gay sex as a joke and suggesting that she’s interested in all the fuss about the phallus, Ellie distances herself from homosexuality and sanctions the player’s assumption that she is straight15—that she is a non-queer Child and thus the future. While Bill’s homosexuality is a win for diversity in videogames, it also shores up Joel’s and Ellie’s more conventional identities. Yet we must note one final twist in how The Last of Us represents the Child. While Ellie embodies the Child’s futurity, she doesn’t do so by virtue of procreation. Just the opposite: we will learn in “Firefly Lab” that Ellie must die to create the vaccine. To end one form of reproduction, the circulation of a virus, Ellie must give her life before she reproduces; to open up a general future, she must concede her own future as a mother. Tellingly, when Naughty Dog changed the gender of The Road’s and The Walking Dead’s redemptive children, it created a sacrificial Child, a Child who makes the future possible for everyone except herself.

14  Elise Favis, “A Child in a Dangerous World: Inside the Creation of Ellie,” Washington Post, June 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/06/11/ ellie-origin-the-last-of-us/. 15  Daniel Sipocz, “Affliction or Affection: The Inclusion of a Same-Sex Relationship in The Last of Us,” in Queerness in Play, eds. Todd Harper, Meghan Blythe Adams, Nicholas Taylor (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 86–87.

CHAPTER 6

Pittsburgh and the Suburbs: Sacrificial Blackness

Hunters Joel and Ellie’s westward journey stops in Pittsburgh when a cutscene shows a Black man stepping into the road and begging for help. In the ruins of neoliberalism, aiding strangers is not only unnecessary; it’s a direct threat to your own survival. Guessing that the man is faking his injury, Joel speeds ahead. He is proven correct when the man begins to shoot, and several others emerge from hiding places to attack the truck. Before Joel and Ellie can escape, a bus rams the truck and causes it to crash into a small store. One of the ambushers pulls Ellie out of the truck while another grabs Joel and nearly pushes his neck into broken glass. A QTE ensues, and if the player presses square quickly enough, Joel throws the man into the glass, slashing his neck. Meanwhile, Ellie’s assailant is strangling her. A red life meter appears over her, and she will die if the player takes too long to come to her aid. Although Ellie’s vulnerability in gameplay is an important proceduralization of the player’s fatherly protection, it also reiterates the tension between the game’s emphasis on care and Naughty Dog’s need to protect the core gamer from the annoyance of having to actually care for someone. In an earlier iteration of the game, enemies could grab Ellie often and the player would have to save her every time. The design solution was to minimize these situations—they appear for the first time in “Bill’s © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_6

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Town”—so that the player “want[s] to protect Ellie, just not so often that it [is] irritating.”1 To further inspire the player to want to protect Ellie, the chapter includes several moments of bonding. For example, Ellie finally learns to whistle, to which Joel responds: “Oh, good. Something else you can annoy me with.” It’s the same sarcasm he used with Sarah. After defeating more hunters in the store, the player can enter a room filled with piles of clothing and a few dead bodies. The hunters are organized predators who rob and kill all “tourists” who enter the city. Their history unfolds throughout “Pittsburgh” as the player pursues the chapter’s objectives, namely, to kill/sneak past hunters and infected and reach a bridge that leads out of the city. Judging from political graffiti, collectable artifacts, and conversations that the player can overhear when in stealth, the hunters are a degenerate version of the Fireflies. They emerged in a Firefly-led revolt against the “tyranny” of the Pittsburgh Quarantine Zone. The revolt was brutal in its own right; the decayed bodies of executed and lynched soldiers litter the city. Eventually, the uprising forced FEDRA to abandon Pittsburgh, but the rebels then turned against the Fireflies because they didn’t share their goal of linking the revolt to a broader revolutionary movement. With FEDRA and the Fireflies purged, the rebels became even more oppressive than either. An authoritarian leader took control and forced all former inhabitants of the Quarantine Zone to systematically hunt and rob other survivors for supplies. This has been the hunters’ modus operandi ever since. I mentioned that the first hunter in the level is Black for a reason: race is difficult to overlook in “Pittsburgh” and “The Suburbs.” Naughty Dog seems to have put some thought into the hunters’ racial makeup. A close analysis of early promotional trailers reveals that the hunters who attack Joel and Ellie in the store and in another cutscene in “Pittsburgh” underwent several changes. The hunter who tries to push Joel’s face into glass in the QTE changed his appearance at least three times, while the hunter who later tries to drown Joel changed at least twice. In both cases, Black hunters became white.2 Or rather, less Black. It is sometimes difficult to describe hunters as white because many of them are rendered with darkish,  Dyckhoff, “Buddy AI in The Last of Us,” 438.  Compare the QTE in the final release of the game to footage of the same QTE in the following trailers: Playstation, “The Last of Us—2012 Gamescom Trailer,” YouTube, August 14, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX6eqoCLbTc; Playstation, “The Last of Us—Story Trailer,” YouTube, December 10, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W01L70IGBgE. 1 2

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or perhaps dirt-covered, skin. The faces of the hunters who attack Joel and Ellie are brownish or ruddy. Perhaps this is an attempt at social realism; after all, post-apocalyptic scavengers probably spend long hours in the sun and cannot shower regularly. But Joel and Ellie are also often outdoors and probably shower just as rarely, and yet their faces are remarkably whiter (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2).3 Thus, while Naughty Dog may have revised the Blackness of the hunters who attack Joel and Ellie in order to de-racialize the conflict between the player-character and human enemies, there is still a significant contrast between the game’s heroes and darker, killable antagonists. It is fair to say that the hunters are intended to be an “equal opportunity” group whose ruthless survivalism is more important than its racial makeup, but it’s also fair to say that the hunters are quasi-racialized as Black/Brown/off-white in contrast to Joel and Ellie’s more stable whiteness. This ambiguous racialization will make more sense when we relate it to the game’s settler-­ colonial palimpsest.

Fig. 6.1  Joel and the Off-White Hunter. A dark-skinned hunter attacks Joel. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author)

3

 Murray has also noted Sarah’s glowing whiteness. Murray, On Video Games, 99, 111.

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Fig. 6.2  Ellie’s Whiteness. Ellie’s white face glows after saving Joel. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author)

The Trouble with Tribalism The depiction of the hunters clarifies what Druckmann meant when he said that “it doesn’t take much to return us to a very primitive state. The tribalism we feel, how we want to protect our own, whether it’s some political affiliation or our own family, takes over everything.”4 An anthropological theory that solidified during the height of European and US colonialism underlies the genre conventions of post-apocalypse. The pervasive assumption in speculative depictions of the collapse of American society is that human history progresses through stages of development from savagery to civilization. Believing that races progress through history at different speeds, colonizers from white civilization believed that native peoples occupied lower and older stages, effectively showing the colonizers their own primitive past.5 While the United States is at the highest stage in this schema, civilization is also the most artificial because it can  Druckmann, AIAS interview.  John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012). 4 5

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barely tame the older, and ultimately immutable, savagery in all humans. That’s why the nation’s swift descent into clannish dog-eat-dog violence is a wellnigh universal convention of post-apocalypse: science fiction creators tend to reproduce the anthropological stage theory when they depict civilization falling back into savagery. To play with apocalypse usually means to play a metagame that we might call “de-progress,” whereby we pretend that all humans share a primitive, parochial, and violent past that returns in the wrecked future. We don’t always have to wait for the apocalypse to see our nature return. Druckmann’s term “tribalism” is telling in this respect. “Tribalism” has become a keyword in contemporary political commentary to theorize polarization and the resurgence of the racist far right, especially during the Trump era. “Humans are tribal” declares Yale law professor Amy Chua in her book Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018). In a special issue on race, National Geographic compares warring tribes in Nigeria and white supremacists at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, concluding that “We can’t help it: We’re wired from birth to tell Us from Them.” George Packer of The New  Yorker explains that tribalism, not ideology, illuminates our political moment: “American politics today requires a word as primal as ‘tribe’ to get at the blind allegiances and huge passions of partisan affiliation.”6 On the one hand, “tribalism” is a useful way for centrist and moderate commentators to freshen up their perennial bothsidesism, for the term usually applies to positions to the right and left of whatever they deem sensible. On the other hand, like other ideas of a fixed, identifiable, and universal human nature, tribalism claims to clarify the ideological fractures and myriad contexts of a messy historical-political conjuncture by showing that the latter are only the surface expressions of a deeper, more primordial, and ultimately ahistorical truth. If the political field is polarized, this is because partisan passion is, and always has been, our natural inclination. The hunters crystalize the overlapping discourses of primitivism and tribalism. This interpretation became especially clear to me when, during my seminar on The Last of Us, a student objected that the depiction of 6  Amy Chua, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (New York: Penguin, 2018), 1; David Berreby, “Why Do We See So Many Things as ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’?”, National Geographic, March 12, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/ things-that-divide-us; George Packer, “A New Report Offers Insights into Tribalism in the Age of Trump,” The New Yorker, October 12, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/ daily-comment/a-new-report-offers-insights-into-tribalism-in-the-age-of-trump.

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hunters in “Pittsburgh” and “The Suburbs” was implausible and irritating. He found the hunters “stupid” because he believed that after twenty years of a pandemic, people would be working together to restore civilization, not relentlessly robbing and killing one another. The student was right; the idea that humans are inevitably “tribal” is stupid. Our nature is more diverse and variable than the discourse of tribalism admits. But the student reached his conclusion because he wasn’t playing the metagame of de-progress; he wasn’t thinking like Druckmann or like the gamers Naughty Dog imagined during the design process. These gamers are supposed to remain credulous and immersed in The Last of Us because they are expected to assume the plausibility of colonial anthropology and theories of tribalism as explanations of who we are and how most people would act after the collapse of civilization, namely, like hunters obeying a brutal, intolerant Us vs. Them impulse that reappears from the depths of our anthropological past whenever the bonds of civility weaken. We can start to see the trouble with tribalism once we resist the concept’s naturalization and place it in a broader historical context. The contemporary prominence of tribalism discourse is yet another instance of how settler-colonial societies suppress their violent history only for the past to return in strange disguises. “Tribal,” a term that settlers have used to designate the barbarity of native peoples and attribute to themselves a common civility, now returns to explain contemporary society’s fragmentation.7 That which justified a specific relation of power—settlers’ dispossession and attempted genocide of native peoples—has become a transhistorical property of the whole human species. On my reading, the hunters have three less universal meanings and functions. First, they obliquely activate settler-colonial fantasies. As I argued in my analysis of the colonial museum, zombie apocalypse taps into settler-colonial sensibilities while providing them with an ideological cover. The anti-social-justice gamer can repel a critique of The Last of Us by pointing out that neither the infected nor the human enemies represent a particular racialized or colonized people. Yes, the first hunter we meet is Black, but many hunters appear to be white or off-white. Since a gamer of 7  Paul Spickard observes: “At its base meaning, tribe is a lineage-based system of social organization. But it takes on other connotations as well. Indians come in tribes—primitive, animal-like—and so we are not bound to respect them. They are not like Europeans who come in families and communities, modes of social organization that we are committed to support.” Paul Spickard, Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 26.

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this type also finds it unremarkable, for example, that the orc hordes in The Lord of the Rings films (2001–2003) have darker skin than the white heroes, he thinks it’s a mere coincidence that the white protagonists of The Last of Us battle their enemies while following in the footsteps of the nation’s white settlers as they traveled west from Boston, expelling Indians, Chinese, and Mexicans; or that the post-apocalypse sanctions the same sort of collective violence against Others; or that viral contamination is an apt metaphor for settler nativist thinking about foreigners and miscegenation. Zombie apocalypse is an excellent dog whistle: it transmits its racial messages at a frequency that is both effective and allows for plausible deniability. Second, the hunters strengthen the game’s rhetorical claim, embedded in story and gameplay, that it’s always already too late for politics. There is no political solution to the world’s most pressing problems because even the most liberatory political revolt will only unleash more tribalism and perpetuate the very forces against which it fights. FEDRA is tyrannical, but when the Fireflies win, they produce hunters, who are worse. Political indifference is a logical conclusion to draw from all of this, and Joel models it for the player. When Joel and Ellie come across corpses in front of the Pittsburgh Quarantine Zone entrance, Joel explains that FEDRA killed civilians instead of risking letting the infected inside. He states this as a sheer fact, and when Ellie calls it “shitty,” he responds with a noncommittal “yeah.” Once inside the now abandoned Quarantine Zone walls, Joel describes how FEDRA in Pittsburgh and most other cities kept rations for themselves. Although the statement might suggest that the revolts against FEDRA were justified, Joel doesn’t take a stance. The player can find an artifact called “Mother’s Letter” that explains how a mother joined the rebellion after her son was executed by FEDRA for protesting. Joel’s reaction is classic bothsidesism: “Well, with that kind of thinking, no one wins.” Whether it’s through Joel or Theo in Alfonso Caurón’s Children of Men (2006), speculative popular culture shows its lack of political imagination by repeatedly muttering the slogans that power corrupts, all sides are tainted, and the only alternative is individual conscience or, at most, the sanctuary of family. Joel also knows firsthand that the hunters are no alternative. He reveals to Ellie that he predicted the trap at the beginning of the chapter because he used to be a hunter, a fact about which he seems neither proud nor ashamed. Survival just is; it affords no moral or political judgment. Ellie

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suggests a slogan, gleaned from her comic book reading: “endure and survive.” Joel reacts aloofly, but it fits him perfectly. Third, it’s worth noting that the hunters are gendered in a peculiar way: they are an all-male group and have no children among them.8 Like Bill, they are anti-Child; unlike Bill, they are a collective. Thus, the hunters’ symbolization of primitivism and tribalism is folded into their homosociality and negatively contrasted to Joel’s individualistic, apolitical fatherly masculinity.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun Since “Bill’s Town,” Ellie has been advocating for Joel to give her a weapon. Ashley Johnson, the voice and motion capture actress who plays Ellie, interprets Joel’s hesitation to arm Ellie as a sign of his parental conscience: “That feels real. … There’s no way you’d give your fourteen-year-­ old kid a gun on day one of the apocalypse.”9 By withholding a weapon, Joel not only expresses his fatherly responsibility but also preserves Ellie’s innocence and her status as a Child. The issue comes to a head when Joel falls down an elevator shaft and is momentarily separated from Ellie. After battling through one of the more difficult and frightening combat sequences in the game—the dark, spore-infested basement area introduces a new infected type, the stalker, and includes another bloater—the player is ambushed by a hunter (one of the two who changed from Black to off-­ white). Just as the hunter is about to drown Joel in the cutscene, Ellie appears and shoots him dead with Joel’s gun. She’s shocked about what she’s done: “I shot the hell out of that guy, huh?” It’s her first kill. As I’ve already noted, her illuminated face is rather white. Although Ellie has just saved Joel’s life, he’s not grateful. Instead, he scolds Ellie for not following his directions and waiting for him at the top of the elevator shaft. The ensuing argument seems to be about Joel’s assertion of authority and Ellie’s expectation that Joel will recognize and 8  In a 2013 question and answer session in a Playstation forum, a Naughty Dog representative claimed that memory limitations are the reason that there are no female hunters. I find this unpersuasive. The rationale conceals design choices about how to use given memory capacity. The forum can be accessed via the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine: https:// web.archive.org/web/20160221221118/http://community.us.playstation.com/t5/ Naughty-Dog-General-Discussion/UPDATED-Q-amp-A-with-Naughty-Dog-JulyEdition/td-p/45239680/page/4. 9  Baker, Druckmann, Johnson, Pangilinan, “What Are you Scared Of?—Summer Part 2.”

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thank her for saving him, but a closer analysis of the cutscene reveals something else. Joel only begins to reproach Ellie after he sees how much the murder has shaken her. “I feel sick,” she says as she sits down to get her bearings. That’s when Joel’s facial expression changes to anger. What appears to truly upset him is not that Ellie disobeyed him—the strictly authoritarian nature of their relationship has changed since Tess’s death— but rather that she has psychologically harmed herself by inserting herself more fully into the brutal adult world. Now that she is a killer, she is less of a Child. As a father at heart, Joel probably wanted to protect Ellie’s innocence and blames her for his own failure. But Joel soon reverses course. When the duo come across a large group of hunters, Joel decides to finally give Ellie a rifle and tasks her with providing covering fire while he takes on the men. He also indirectly thanks her for saving him earlier. During the ensuing gameplay, Ellie assists the player by shooting hunters who have spotted Joel. Once the player eliminates all hunters, a cutscene shows Joel giving Ellie her own handgun “for emergencies only.” He has accepted that enduring and surviving requires a sacrifice of at least some of Ellie’s childhood. The design decision to give Ellie a gun was yet another way to square the circle of a game about fatherly care that also wants to avoid irritating players with caregiving. This decision requires a diminution of the figure of the Child. Originally, The Last of Us preserved Ellie’s innocence by placing her first kill at the very end of the game. This meant that Ellie was often out of the player’s way, and thus easy to forget, or else required the dreaded escort mechanics. Either way, gameplay was not facilitating the player’s attachment to Ellie.10 Giving Ellie a gun earlier in the game helps to establish trust between her and Joel and reassures the player that they won’t always need to save her. Ellie can even occasionally use her gun to assist the player during gameplay. But when the Child is involved in the anti-anti-world’s violence, some of its utopian otherness is lost. Berger notes that when Carl gets a gun in The Walking Dead, he ceases to be a Child and loses his futurity.11 Similarly, Ellie has joined Joel in the present as yet another person willing to kill in order to endure and survive. With 10  Druckmann, AIAS interview. Johnson identifies as a gamer and understands the “burden” of the escort mission. This motivated her to advocate for making Ellie more “capable” and “helpful.” Baker, Druckmann, Johnson, Pangilinan, “What Are you Scared Of?— Summer Part 2.” 11  Berger, “Propagation and Procreation,” 158.

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Pandora’s box now open, perhaps she could even follow in the footsteps of the hunters who killed the first “tourists” and set the group on its course of robbery and murder. According to the artifact called “Trial Note,” they, too, were teenagers.

Sacrificial Blackness One of the functions of the appearance of the survivors Henry and Sam is to counteract Ellie’s new capacity for violence by reaffirming her sociality—and her childhood—in contrast to Joel’s individualism and the hunters’ tribalism. Joel and Ellie meet Henry and Sam toward the end of “Pittsburg.” After the player escapes hunters who have stolen a FEDRA Humvee, a cutscene shows Joel climbing through an apartment window. He is attacked from behind by Henry. Just as Joel starts to pummel him, Sam, Henry’s younger brother, holds Joel at gunpoint. Noticing Ellie, Henry deescalates the situation by assuring Sam that Joel cannot be a hunter because Joel has a child with him, and hunters have no children. After Henry explains that he and Sam are also trying to escape from the city—they were part of a group of “tourists” who were ambushed by the hunters—Ellie sets up the bond between the two groups. “We can help each other,” she tells Joel, reaffirming the Child’s faith in humanity. When she goofs around with Sam, who is nearly her age, the player might even forget that Ellie has killed. Henry is Joel’s double. They both are symbolic fathers who combine hegemonic masculine toughness with care. Although Henry is Sam’s brother, he treats Sam more like a son. Joel and Henry are also both heading west in search of the Fireflies. But Henry is different from Joel. While Joel’s role as Ellie’s father is still inchoate—Ellie corrects Henry when he calls her Joel’s daughter—Henry has already fully embraced his fatherly responsibility. In fact, he has embraced it so much that he temporarily abandons Joel and Ellie just as the group is about to escape Pittsburgh because he prioritizes Sam’s safety above all else. Moreover, the younger Henry is enthusiastic about joining the Fireflies and doesn’t share Joel’s world-weariness. He smiles more often and more easily. According to voice and motion capture actor Brandon Scott, Henry represents “hope” and “faith.”12 12  Retro Replay, “The Last of Us | The Definitive Playthrough—Part 8 (ft Troy Baker, Nolan North, Brandon Scott),” YouTube, January 7, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4eGHzqNYRig.

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Joel and Ellie reunite with Henry and Sam after successfully crossing the bridge out of Pittsburgh. Joel and Ellie had to jump into the river to escape the hunters, and Henry saves both from drowning. In a fit of anger, Joel nearly kills Henry for abandoning them, but he ultimately accepts Henry’s justification: he didn’t want to put Sam at risk. The four survivors travel together through sewers and the Pittsburgh suburbs, battling infected and a hunter sniper as they approach a radio tower where they’re supposed to meet other members of Henry’s group.13 Along the way, Joel invites Henry and Sam to join him and Ellie on their trip to Tommy in Wyoming. A subsequent cutscene shows Joel and Henry resting and bonding over motorcycles. When Ellie visits Sam in another room, he is solemn and talks about his fear of becoming infected. Ellie, who says that her biggest fear is ending up alone, tries to reassure Sam that he doesn’t have to worry because “we’re a team now.” But the player can already sense that the team will be short-lived; after all, The Last of Us is about Joel and Ellie. After Ellie leaves, Sam raises his pant leg to reveal a bite. In the morning, he turns and attacks Ellie. Henry shoots him, then, racked with guilt, takes his own life. Henry’s and Sam’s deaths are the closing act of the game’s summer season. This section of the game ends on a note of suffering and defeated hope that proves the truth of Bill’s warning. Druckmann explained: “It’s a huge change in Joel here. ‘Cause now he sees, this is what’s going to happen to me […] if I’m going to keep going and let Ellie get hurt.”14 Like Joel, Henry is a failed father. Sam’s death not only repeats Sarah’s but also portends Ellie’s. If Joel has been harboring any ideas of building a relationship with Ellie, he now becomes more determined to get Ellie to Tommy and cut all ties with her. Yet by drawing this analogy between Henry and Joel, The Last of Us ignores his and Sam’s most obvious difference from Joel and Ellie: Blackness. Joel and Ellie don’t mention it, and Henry and Sam don’t seem to be aware of it, either. TreaAndrea M. Russworm points out that Black characters in The Last of Us “are all presented without a diegetic awareness 13  Artifacts in the sewers tell the story of Ish, a survivor who formed a small community in the sewers that was eventually overrun by infected. Ish’s story might serve as yet more evidence against cooperation and for the necessity of selfishness, but Ish escapes and affirms his belief in human kindness. 14  Troy Baker, Neil Druckmann, and Ashley Johnson, “Commentaries,” The Last of Us Remastered, Naughty Dog, Sony, Playstation 4, 2014.

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of their racial and cultural backgrounds.”15 To be sure, as I suggested with regard to Bill’s subtle queerness, there is something progressive in remaining silent about Henry and Sam’s difference. In this silence resides a rejection of popular media stereotypes of Black men’s hyper-physicality, criminality, and sexuality. Henry and Sam aren’t bucks, sports stars, gangstas, or sexual predators. Neither are they instrumentalized for the sake of an overt racial message. Since their Blackness isn’t tokenized, Henry and Sam can just be people instead of stand-ins for their whole race. But by treating white and Black fatherly masculinities as basically the same, The Last of Us conceals the historical subordination of Black to white masculinities while claiming to tell a story of undifferentiated “human” survival.16 In Russworm’s terms, Henry and Sam illustrate the game’s reliance on “sacrificial blackness.”17 Just as Tess’s primary purpose in The Last of Us is to bond Joel and Ellie, and Bill’s is to be a warning to Joel and bolster his straight fatherly masculinity, Henry and Sam serve to teach Joel another lesson about the pitfalls of love in the anti-anti-world. Ellie will also learn from Sam’s death. Since the Black Child has no future, its meaning resides in the white Child’s strengthened desire to redeem past suffering by providing a vaccine. For Joel and Ellie alike, Black lives matter primarily as supplements to their own.

15  TreaAndrea M. Russworm, “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us,” in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, eds. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M.  Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 112. 16  Black men have historically been portrayed as intellectually inferior but physically superior to white men, thus dangerous and requiring white control. Bell hooks also points out that while Black male slaves were dominated by the slave master, they also came to idealize and reproduce the slave master’s patriarchal power. See Arthur F. Saint-Aubin, “A Grammar of Black Masculinity: A Body of Science,” The Journal of Men’s Studies 10, no. 3 (2002): 247–270; bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2004). 17  Russworm, “Dystopian Blackness,” 113.

PART II

Fall

CHAPTER 7

Tommy’s Dam and the University: The New Frontier

Little Brother Knows Best Santaolalla’s “All Gone (Seasons)” continues to play as the screen goes black on Henry’s suicide. Onscreen text announces the new season: fall. By organizing the narrative around four seasons, The Last of Us underscores the theme of nature’s triumph—human time has given way to natural time—and suggests that its story is as cyclical as nature. Like the seasons’ return, Joel’s path leads back to where he started, caring fatherhood. But he can’t get there too soon. In “Tommy’s Dam,” Joel’s journey momentarily comes to a total impasse. Joel and Ellie are now much further west, in the rainy mountains near Jackson, Wyoming. Tommy and his wife, Maria, have started a community in the town. Ellie asks Joel at the beginning of gameplay if he’s nervous about seeing his estranged brother again. He answers evasively: “I don’t know what I’m feeling.” But Joel does know. The player can find a clue about Joel’s thinking after crossing a hydroelectric dam and finding a child’s grave. An optional interaction with the object allows Joel to mutter: “That’s too small of a grave.” The grave is yet another reminder that children die in the anti-anti-world. Ellie could die and Joel could end up like Henry—worse, in fact, since Ellie would be his second lost child. Seeing the grave, Ellie begins to talk about Sam’s death, but Joel shuts her up: “Things happen. And we move on.” This is precisely what he’s decided © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_7

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to do. He will hand off Ellie to Tommy and move on. She’s become cargo again. Tommy appears when Joel and Ellie attempt to cut through the hydroelectric power plant where Tommy and his community are attempting to restore electricity to Jackson. The reunion between Joel and his brother is initially warm, but old tensions flare up when Joel explains the purpose of his visit. Joel tells Tommy that Ellie is immune, and that he wants “little brother” to “finish the job” of delivering Ellie to the Fireflies. When Tommy questions Joel’s assumption that he will simply do this favor for him, Joel becomes aggressive, insisting that he is in fact doing a favor for Tommy and his “damn cause.” The Firefly cause is what split the brothers at some point after Sarah’s death. On the way to the power plant, Joel explains to Ellie that he and Tommy saw the world differently, and that it was Marlene who exposed this rift because she “promised him hope.” By describing Marlene’s hope as a damn cause, Joel not only shows his cynical contempt for political projects but also his lingering grudge against Marlene. But Tommy has also broken with Marlene. “My cause is my family now,” he retorts. Tommy is the game’s object lesson in the virtues of depoliticization. Tommy is like Joel because he, too, has abandoned society at large, but Tommy contrasts sharply with Joel because his bothsidesist rejection of FEDRA and the Fireflies doesn’t lead him to the hunters or cutthroat smuggling. He tells Joel that he has “nothing but nightmares” from his time surviving with him. Tommy believes Jackson “gives us all a second chance”—a second chance that he falsely attributed to the Fireflies’ revolution, but now locates in the domain of family life and small-scale community (the latter being nothing more than a collection of families). Indeed, since Tommy has already been a Firefly, his rejection of the group is even more damning than Joel’s. Tommy isn’t just apolitical; he’s matured beyond politics. And this maturity is why Tommy, the little brother, can reverse the hierarchy of brotherhood and eventually become Joel’s masculine role model. According to Naughty Dog, “Tommy shares Joel’s gritty masculinity but has a gentleness that Joel has almost completely lost.”1 Joel’s trajectory in The Last of Us is to recover the family bonds that characterize Tommy and his small community. This is why Joel will return to Jackson with Ellie at the end of the game.

 Wells, Meyer, and Monacelli, Art of The Last of Us, 90.

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In the meantime, what holds back Joel is the hegemonic masculinity that Bill modeled, in particular the anti-Child refusal to work through loss and vulnerability. Although Joel has been slowly opening up to Ellie, Sam’s and Henry’s deaths have closed him off again. He refuses to talk to Ellie about Sam and Henry, just like he refused to talk to her about Tess’s death. It’s likely that Joel hasn’t had a single extended conversation about the trauma of Sarah’s death in the last twenty years. This trauma is embodied in the photograph of Sarah that Tommy tries to gift to Joel shortly before their heated exchange, only for Joel to rebuff it, foreshadowing his attempted abandonment of Ellie. In the words of Troy Baker, the actor who voiced Joel, Joel’s talk with Tommy is “a moment of cowardness,” “a complete abdication of … who he was as a father.”2

The Western and the New Frontier A bandit attack on the power plant interrupts Joel and Tommy’s dispute. After the player helps Tommy and his people kill the bandits, a cutscene shows Tommy watching Ellie as she excitedly explains her experience of the bandit attack to Joel. Tommy, like Tess before him, can understand Joel better than he is able or willing to understand himself. As an inarticulate man who flees from his feelings, Joel relies on others (including the player) to serve as interpreters of his inner life. Tommy realizes that Joel cares about Ellie and that his attempt to rid himself of her is a defense mechanism. Tommy agrees to take Ellie, but before Joel can break the news to her, she steals a horse and flees. As the player hops on a horse and pursues Ellie with Tommy, it becomes clear that, in addition to its other genres, The Last of Us is a western. The search and rescue mission on horseback is a staple of the western. So is the tough, taciturn male hero like Joel. So are the symptomatically named “bandits” who attacked the power plant and again confront Joel and Tommy on their rescue mission. So is Wyoming, the setting of paradigmatic westerns like Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1902) and George Stevens’s film Shane (1950). So are Santaolalla’s twangy tracks “Smugglers,” “The Path,” and “The Path (A New Beginning).” 2  Troy Baker, Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, and Alexandria Neonakis, “‘You Have No Idea What Loss Is.’—Fall and Left Behind,” interview by Christian Spicer, June 23, 2020, in The Official Last of Us Podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/you-have-no-ideawhat-loss-is-fall-and-left-behind/id1514792212?i=1000479222130.

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The Last of Us invokes the affects and sensibilities of the western so precisely that Jane Tompkins’s West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (1992) might as well be an analysis of the game. Tompkins argues that westerns offer an encounter with the real, and that the genre celebrates the male hero’s endurance of pain and suffering because these emotions are the real’s touchstones. The west is a place where men become purer and realer by struggling to overcome harsh environments and enemies. Readers and viewers can take pleasure in the hero’s struggles not because they provide an escape from the everyday grind of work but rather because they show work at its most intense, challenging, exciting, and rewarding: “hard work is transformed here from the necessity one wants to escape into the most desirable of human endeavors: action that totally saturates the present moment, totally absorbs the body and mind, and directs one’s life to the service of an unquestioned goal,” namely, survival.3 Similarly, The Last of Us invites the player into a post-apocalyptic reality that is older and deeper than civilization—a reality that lays bare the truths of nature and humanity. Through violence, Joel becomes a realer and simpler man, for violence puts his character to the ultimate test and compels him to prioritize a singular goal. And this violence is a pleasurable effort. Not only does The Last of Us make killing and surviving meaningful as work, but as a videogame it might be said to offer a satisfying simulation of work in which action is even more saturated, absorbing, and goal-­ oriented than in Tompkins’s novels and films. The western is the mytho-poetry of settler colonialism. Thus far I’ve argued that The Last of Us is a crypto-settler colonial adventure that vaguely invokes the settings, racialized peoples, and violence of westward expansion, but I haven’t accounted for one of this crypto-form’s major historical conditions of possibility: the end of the frontier. By this I mean not simply the closure of the American frontier at the end of the nineteenth century but rather what Greg Grandin calls the “end of the myth.” Symbolizing the nation’s unique birth in conquest of the wilderness and its continual rebirth through further expansion, the frontier was perhaps the United States’ most powerful cultural metaphor. It explained America’s difference from class-conflicted Europe, the nation’s special love of freedom, its second chances and opportunities for self-fashioning, the origins of its democratic values, its innovative spirit, its boundlessness, its futurity. 3  Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 12.

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But Grandin argues that the myth of unlimited growth has given way to a new figure, the border wall, and a new parochial common sense: “the world’s horizon is not limitless; not all can share in its wealth; and the nation’s policies should reflect this reality.”4 The apocalypse’s job is to unbuild the wall, reopen the frontier, and draw a new map of expansion onto the ruins of neoliberalism. This layered frontier, which writes the past onto the post-apocalyptic future, explains the palimpsestic quality of the game’s narrative and forms of combat. In the near future, Joel and Ellie venture beyond the Quarantine Zone walls and travel into the west, which the virus has turned back into a wilderness brimming with barbarous peoples, ample opportunities for contact with the real, and hope for what Tommy aptly called “a second chance,” echoing one prominent western historian’s description of frontier America as “the land of mankind’s second chance.”5 Yet all of these meanings are but historical ghosts, haunting the shadowy edges of the game’s intelligibility, where they are rather easy to overlook or banish if one doesn’t already believe in ghosts. And they are powerfully inoculated by a somewhat atypical western hero who shares the frontiersman’s strength, tolerance for pain, violence, ingenuity, and reticence, but whose masculinity is also faulted in “Tommy’s Dam” for suppressing fatherly feelings.

Ranch House The player can find Ellie in an upstairs bedroom of a ranch house. Entering the room triggers a cutscene in which Ellie is reading a girl’s diary. “Is this really all they had to worry about?” she asks Joel philosophically. “Boys. Movies. Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt? It’s bizarre.” Ellie’s musings not only underscore her estranging perspective on the old world but also echo the western’s sensibilities about the real. Boys, movies, and clothes are bizarre because they are frivolous concerns in comparison with surviving on the post-apocalyptic frontier. That they are also stereotypically feminine concerns throws into relief the masculinity of the western’s fascination with the realness and seriousness of struggle. Relationships, entertainment, and fashion are feminine and irrelevant; survival is masculine and of the highest consequence. What Tompkins says about shopping 4  Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019), 8. 5  Grandin, 3.

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also applies to the things Ellie finds bizarre: “Shopping, in this context, not only implies nonmale activity, it embodies everything that readers of Westerns are trying to get away from: triviality, secondariness, meaningless activity. That the qualities devalued here are associated with women is essential to the way Westerns operate as far as gender is concerned.”6 By voicing the western’s take on the hollowness of feminine life, Ellie aligns with the western’s values and codes herself as masculine. In the winter season, she will enact these codes more completely as a playable character. The ensuing argument between Joel and Ellie is perhaps the single most important step toward establishing their father-daughter bond. But it happens backwards, as it were. Ellie says she knows that Joel was trying to pass her off to Tommy, and when Joel tries to rationalize his decision, claiming that Ellie will be safer with Tommy, Ellie does what no other character has done so far: she names Joel’s vulnerability explicitly. “I’m not her, you know,” Ellie says, simultaneously putting her finger directly in Joel’s wound and negating the very symbolic substitution, Ellie for Sarah, that is at the heart of Joel’s (and the player’s) emotional development. In other words, the game’s worst kept secret—that Joel will become Ellie’s new father—moves from the background to the foreground by way of negation. Joel, disillusioned, seems to put the final nail in the coffin: “You’re right. You’re not my daughter. And I sure as hell ain’t your dad. And we are going our separate ways.” Openly negating the game’s central relationship is a savvy technique for ingratiating the player and getting them to believe in this very relationship. Compare it to what the developers do earlier in the level to a repetitive gameplay mechanic, the pallet ferry. At several points in the game, the player must locate a pallet, push it across a body of water, wait for Ellie to jump on, and ferry her across the water. The mechanic is narratively motivated—Ellie can’t swim—but it quickly becomes predictable and dull. This time, however, Ellie reacts differently: “I know. Step on the fucking palette.” It’s the same annoyance that I’ve been feeling, and because Ellie says it, I am less annoyed. I feel heard and understood. I feel smart. Instead of feeling like I’m being forced to do something—instead of feeling unfree in my free play—I feel like the developers and I are sharing a joke. Later, when Joel acknowledges what The Last of Us is about, he effectively says to the player: “I know. The fucking father-daughter relationship.” And because he scorns the relationship, I don’t have to. Joel knows that a real 6

 Tompkins, West of Everything, 14.

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man—the sort of man whom I’m prosthetically inhabiting in gameplay— has no truck with clichéd love stories. He and I know what the game is trying to do to our emotions; we cannot be forced. But now that we both know, and know that we know, I feel more inclined to believe. Violence seals the deal. No sooner does Joel announce that he and Ellie are splitting up than bandits invade the house. There is no direct narrative resolution to the negation of the father-daughter relationship. Instead, there is combat, which is after all the player’s fundamental gameplay expression of care. The player cannot ask Ellie how she’s feeling, help her cope with her fears, motivate her, feed her, clothe her—in a word, parent her. There are also no mechanics for working through Joel’s emotions. If his character doesn’t change in cutscenes, combat is all that remains as an expression of his bond with Ellie. At the moment when Joel needs to walk back his negation and reaffirm the father-daughter relationship, he has nothing to say. The subsequent cutscene shows him riding silently back to Jackson with Ellie and Tommy. To be sure, it would be out of character for the post-apocalyptic cowboy to suddenly become eloquent and expound on his change of heart. In Druckmann’s view, Joel was touched by a particular sentiment that Ellie expressed during their argument, but he needed time to let it sink in.7 “Everyone I have cared for has either died or left me,” she explained. “Everyone … fucking except for you. So don’t tell me that I would be safer with someone else, because the truth is I’d just be more scared.” When the three riders return to Jackson and Joel surprisingly tells Ellie to ride with him, he does so because he realizes how much Ellie trusts him and would be scared without him. He loves her too much to let that happen, and he has accepted this love. In Baker’s words, Joel is now “all in.”8 It’s a relatively sudden and enigmatic change of heart, but perhaps the player can believe it precisely because they’ve already been granted permission not to. After Joel finds out the location of the firefly lab from Tommy, he gives his only explicit answer to why he changed his mind: “Your wife scares me.” Although Joel might have reason to be afraid—Maria threatened Joel that she would hold him responsible if Tommy died while taking Ellie to the Fireflies—the line is clearly not meant to be taken seriously. It’s a cover, a non-reason that allows Joel to conceal, or perhaps remain 7 8

 Druckmann, Baker, Johnson, and Neonakis, “You Have No Idea What Loss Is.”  Druckmann, Baker, Johnson, and Neonakis, “You Have No Idea What Loss Is.”

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ignorant about, his true motivations. Yet the remark is suggestive of how fatherhood in The Last of Us must keep motherhood at bay. Maria might not really scare Joel, but Marlene will.

The University Joel and Ellie arrive at the fictional University of Eastern Colorado. The fall oranges, the setting sun, the gentle breeze, and Santaolalla’s “The Hour,” whose motif is a clock-like chime, all establish a tranquil mood, a calm sense of closure. After all, isn’t this the journey’s end? The Firefly lab is supposed to be here. And Joel and Ellie’s relationship seems to have reached maturity. Their conversation during the player’s exploration of the campus shows them bonding like never before. Ellie shares her dream of becoming an astronaut, and Joel responds that he wanted to be a singer. Joel even opens up about Sarah and reveals that he was young when she was born and that he was only briefly married to her mother. It is the most intimate information he’s shared with Ellie yet (though he stops short of telling her why they got divorced). Having never seen a university before, Ellie is perplexed by the thought of adults going to school. Joel explains that students would “study, party, and find themselves. Figure out what they wanted to do with their lives.” The idea of figuring out what to do with one’s life resonates with Ellie. She can’t attend university, but the anti-anti-world has already been her school and has already taught Ellie her purpose: to provide a vaccine. This goal is deferred when the duo discover that the Fireflies have abandoned the lab and relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah. When a group of men attack the university and one catches Joel off-guard, Joel falls from the second floor and lands with a steel bar protruding from his stomach. It is the pivotal event that structures the second half of The Last of Us. After Ellie pulls Joel to his feet, the player must guide the severely wounded Joel out of the university. The power and weapons that the player has been accumulating up to this point—including the flamethrower that can be found at the beginning of “The University”—are now gone. Joel hobbles along and falls over repeatedly. When more enemies attack, the player can only watch as Ellie uses her gun to eliminate them. The roles have been reversed. Ellie is now the protector; the child is father of the man.

PART III

Winter

CHAPTER 8

Lakeside Resort: Reversal

Playing as Ellie Gamers who played The Last of Us upon its release might have wondered at the start of the winter season if Naughty Dog had done the unthinkable and killed the father whom the game had been rebuilding so carefully. The last time we saw Joel, he had fallen off his horse just outside the university. His eyes were closed as Ellie pleaded with him to get up. In the next gameplay sequence, the player is hunting in snowy mountains as Ellie. Joel is nowhere to be seen. Ellie’s playability is a surprise that Naughty Dog worked hard to keep secret. In numerous prerelease interviews, Druckmann and Straley lied whenever they were asked if Ellie would be playable.1 The box cover art of the Playstation 3 release shows Joel and Ellie, but Joel is in the lead. In fact, playing as Ellie and reversing her and Joel’s roles were the germ cells from which The Last of Us grew. Druckmann has stated that “from the very first pitch, that was the reason to make this game: […] this shift in perspective.” Crucially, Druckmann explained the reversal as an upending of core gaming’s gender conventions: “You have kind of these more stereotypical characters […] the protector and the protectee, and then you’re going to flip it on its head, and then the ‘damsel in distress’ has to become 1

 Druckmann and Straley, “Definitive Interview (Part One).”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_8

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the protector.”2 Druckmann’s comments admit that, up to this point at least, the game’s gender roles have been “kind of” stereotypical. Druckmann then gives us reason to believe that “Lakeside Resort” will overturn the tropes. By reversing the game’s most important character roles and privileging Ellie’s perspective, this level could potentially transform the meaning structure of The Last of Us, and perhaps even undo the rules of the father. Gameplay begins with Ellie stalking a deer. There is no HUD, and Ellie has only a single usable weapon, the bow. Mechanically, playing as Ellie feels mostly like playing as Joel. One immediate difference, of course, is that she doesn’t look like him. Neither does she look like many of the female playable and non-playable characters in AAA games. Dressed warmly in jeans, hoody, and overcoat, Ellie shows very little skin and largely conceals her figure from the player. While Phillips has made a persuasive case against the adequacy of the film studies concept of the male gaze for interpreting the multisensory feedback loops of videogaming,3 Druckmann understood Ellie’s break from gender stereotypes in precisely this way. In his 2013 keynote for the International Game Developers Association, Druckmann wondered aloud about his daughter’s role models in videogames while he projected images of the half-dressed videogame characters Cortana (Halo), Quiet (Metal Gear), and Ayane (Dead or Alive). “I don’t like what I see,” Druckmann concluded.4 Ellie is the product of Druckmann and Naughty Dog’s anti-male gaze. She signposts an emergent era of gender representation in videogames, a post-“Lara phenomenon” in which normative feminine beauty and sexiness may lose their hold as prerequisites for strong women and girls to appear in games.5 It is no longer enough for sexualized characters like Lara Croft to show up and “take up space within a particularly masculinized landscape.”6 For Druckmann, they must also break free of the voyeuristic  Baker, Druckmann, Johnson, and Neonakis, “You Have No Idea.”  Phillips, Gamer Trouble, chap. 3. 4  Druckmann, “IGDA Toronto.” 5  Jeroen Jansz and Raynel G. Martis’s concept of the “Lara phenomenon” refers to the influence of Lara Croft on subsequent representations of female videogame characters as “tough,” “competent,” and “in a dominant position.” See Jeroen Jansz and Raynel G. Martis, “The Lara Phenomenon: Powerful Female Characters in Video Games,” Sex Roles 56 (2007): 142. 6  Helen W. Kennedy, “Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis,” Game Studies 2, no. 2 (2007), http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/kennedy/. 2 3

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objectification that has conditioned their entry into this landscape. Only then can female characters stop being things to look at and fully become characters to play as. Another distinguishing feature is Ellie’s backpack, which is not only a visual but also a narrative object that helps to build Ellie’s character. The backpack contains several new artifacts: the joke books from which Ellie read to Joel in “Pittsburgh”; the switchblade that will later function in combat like Joel’s shiv, with the exception that it never breaks; the toy robot that Ellie gave to Sam shortly before his death; a Walkman; the photograph of Joel and Sarah that Tommy tried to give to Joel; a Firefly pendant that once belonged to Riley Abel (“I miss you,” Ellie says as the player inspects it); and a letter from Ellie’s mother, Anna. The last two items are especially suggestive for understanding Ellie’s motivations as distinct from Joel’s. While Joel’s journey culminates in a restoration of caring fatherhood, Druckmann has usually described Ellie’s character arc as a coming-of-age story.7 The photograph implies that Ellie reaches adulthood and maturity by internalizing her ability to help Joel make peace with the loss of Sarah—she will eventually give the photograph to him, and this time he will accept it—but the other two artifacts point to relationships with female characters that are independent of Joel. Ellie will mention Riley by name for the first and only time in the final cutscene of The Last of Us. Ellie will tell Joel that Riley was her best friend, and that Riley’s death is a major reason that she wants to help create a vaccine. Since Ellie is implicitly coded as heterosexual—and because this aspect of her backstory was apparently not written yet—she will not tell Joel that she and Riley kissed. Her devotion is that of a straight friend, not a queer partner. Written shortly after Ellie’s birth, Anna’s letter explains the origin of Ellie and Marlene’s relationship—the terminally ill Anna asked Marlene to take care of Ellie—and documents Anna’s advice to “find your purpose and fight for it.” The letter ends with the exhortation to “make me proud, Ellie!” Ellie responds: “I’m trying to make you proud.” Yet unlike Riley, Anna never figures in Ellie’s account of her motives beyond this one moment. There are no rules of the mother in The Last of Us.

7

 Druckmann and Straley, “Definitive Interview (Part One).”

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Joel-Lite After striking the deer twice with arrows, the player can follow a blood trail to the ruins of a barn. Approaching the deer’s carcass initiates a cutscene in which two men, David and James, emerge from behind a tree. Immediately threatening to shoot them between the eyes, Ellie reacts as aggressively and distrustfully as Joel would. In fact, although she may have a distinct character arc, Ellie has already learned Joel’s survivalism and will rival his brutality by the season’s end. But David seems peaceful, and he gains enough of Ellie’s trust to stop her from killing him. David’s masculinity differs significantly from Joel’s: he lacks Joel’s strong, menacing build, and he speaks more often and more softly than Joel. Ellie agrees to trade the deer for antibiotics, but insists that James retrieve them from his community while she holds David hostage. After the two move indoors to escape the cold, a clicker attacks. David shoots it, revealing that he had another gun in addition to the rifle Ellie confiscated from him. “Sorry,” he tells Ellie in response to her surprise. If this man with sad eyes could have tried to kill Ellie and steal her deer, but instead protects her and apologizes for his concealed weapon, perhaps he can be trusted after all? Gameplay requires a temporary pact with David. More infected attack, and the player must work together with David to defeat them. The player must assist David when an infected grabs him; David, in turn, can save Ellie from a clicker bite. This and ensuing gameplay sequences introduce the player to the main similarities and differences between Ellie and Joel as equipment for play. Having obtained a rifle from David, Ellie can now toggle through a weapons menu that is identical to Joel’s. The player can already see that Ellie will be able to use a few of Joel’s guns and all of his bombs. Ellie also possesses Joel’s ability to listen and detect enemy movements through walls. When the player moves Ellie through the gamespace and collects resources, they use the same buttons and watch for the same circle overlay to identify actionable items and surfaces. The primary change is in melee combat. While Joel is a bruiser during fisticuffs, Ellie can only weakly slash at enemies with her switchblade. Attacking alerted enemies head-on quickly leads to game over. To maximize survival chances, the player must either practice stealth attacks more consistently or evade enemies altogether. If there is a reversal in “Lakeside Resort,” the player can only vaguely perceive it at the level of action affordances. There is no equivalent to, say,

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Princess Toadstool’s ability in Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988) to float across the screen—a gameplay mechanic that both distinguishes the female-­ coded playable character from the male-coded playable characters and provides the player with a unique relationship to the gamespace. To be sure, playing as Ellie changes my experience of character and narrative. I imagine that her existential goals are different from Joel’s. She looks and sounds different. These properties are what keep Ellie from being a straightforward Ms. Male, a merely reskinned version of a male character.8 But Ellie was freed from the male gaze only to be returned to his rules. For her differences from Joel are tacked onto a bundle of generic conventions, algorithmic functions, and prosthetic habits that I have already inculcated for several hours while playing as Joel. Ellie is Joel-lite: her immediate objectives and relationships to the gamespace are basically the same as his, but she is somewhat weaker because of her smaller gun arsenal and ineffective hand-to-hand combat abilities. James Malazita’s argument about Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea (2013–2014) is true of The Last of Us as well: “designers shape playable women characters … as weakened men.”9 The profit imperative reinforces such design shortcuts by pressuring developers to reuse existing code instead of devoting additional time, labor, and resources to creating a different kind of playability—and thus a different kind of game—for each new character. Amanda Phillips observes that “developers that are considered progressive in the industry fail to apply a deep approach to meaningful inclusion, instead swapping surface signifiers in order to reap a maximum appearance of diversity (which theoretically comes with increased market share) at the lowest cost.”10 Thus, “reversal” means not that The Last of Us becomes a radically different game when Ellie is playable, but rather that its generic conventions and core mechanics, which are based on a violent male character, are made available to a female character. Even though Ellie is weaker than Joel, the player can turn her, too, into an effective killer among the ruins of neoliberalism. 8   Feminist Frequency, “Ms. Male Character—Tropes vs Women in Video Games,” YouTube, November 18, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYqYLfm1rWA. 9  James Malazita, “The Material Undermining of Magical Feminism in BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea,” in Feminism in Play, eds. Kishonna L. Gray, Gerald Voorhees, and Emma Vossen (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 38. 10  Phillips, Gamer Trouble, 152.

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Bad Joel After the player has fought off all the infected alongside David, the latter reveals in a cutscene that a “crazy man” travelling with a young girl murdered some members of his community who were scavenging for food. Realizing that the crazy man is none other than Joel, Ellie trains her rifle on David again. But David doesn’t hold her responsible. “It’s not your fault,” he says with fatherly understanding. “You’re just a kid.” David orders James, who has returned in the meantime, to give Ellie the antibiotics and let her leave. David’s parting offer to Ellie—“I can protect you”—announces his role in the game: David is the false protector, the bad Joel, the pseudo-father. David’s apparent largesse is a ploy. Not knowing David’s men are tracking her, Ellie travels to a house. Now the player learns that Joel is alive after all. Shivering feverishly on a mattress in the basement, Joel is the reason that Ellie was hunting for food and insisted on trading with David for antibiotics. Ellie gives Joel a shot of the medicine and, like a parent tucking in a sick child, soothes him, pulls a blanket over him, lies down beside him, and places a reassuring hand on his chest. It is a tender moment in which care-giving is not only reversed but transformed. Ellie’s caregiving is precisely the sort of feminized labor, focused on the provision of food, health, and comfort, that Joel doesn’t practice. As if to occlude this difference, Ellie discovers David’s men in the morning and switches to Joel’s protective caregiving style by drawing the men away from the duo’s hiding place. Ellie’s horse is shot during her escape, and the player must guide her on foot past more of David’s men and through the eponymous lakeside resort. Just when the player thinks they’ve made it through the area and are headed back to Joel, David reappears and strangles Ellie until she blacks out. She awakens in a cell. On the other side of the bars, Jason is dismembering a human corpse. David’s community practices cannibalism. In her analysis of US colonial discourses about Haiti, the home of zombie folklore, Chera Kee identifies the “ideological work” of the zombie’s cannibalism as the “separat[ion] [of] the world into its civilized and barbaric categories.”11 Thus, one reason that cannibalism is so prominent in 11  Chera Kee, “‘They Are Not Men … They are Dead Bodies!’: From Cannibal to Zombie and Back Again,” in Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, eds. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 22.

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zombie apocalypses is that cannibalism is another expression of post-­ apocalyptic speculation’s colonial-anthropological unconscious and its metagame of de-progress. But it should also strike us as odd that a game about brutal survival demonizes cannibalism. After all, cannibalism is another way to endure and survive. It obeys the same neoliberal logic of scarcity, necessity, and selfish violence that The Last of Us constantly asks the player to perform—as Joel and as Ellie. David makes the comparison explicit when he offers Ellie a plate of food. Ellie eats after David assures her that it’s only the deer, but she still calls him a “fucking animal” for his cannibalism. David counters: “You kill to survive … and so do we. We have to take care of our own. By any means necessary.” David’s community may be bigger than Joel and Ellie, but his distinction between care for “our own” and violence for everyone else describes their worldview as well. Yet it seems clear that Naughty Dog wanted us to see only a weak and fleeting similarity. Cannibalism is a means by which to inoculate neoliberal selfishness, which, in contrast to the rival’s brutality, appears to be the lesser evil. Joel, Ellie, and David’s community are all survivors, but because the latter are also cannibals, they are worse; they represent an “extreme” survivalism (analogous to the Fireflies’ “extreme” politics) in contrast to which Joel and Ellie’s survivalism becomes normalized and permissible. To solidify the contrast, David must synthesize extreme survivalism with perverted fatherly masculinity. This is why he follows up the comparison he drew between his group and Joel and Ellie with a sexual advance. As he attempts to convince Ellie that he is trying to protect her from the other members of the group who want to kill and eat her, David touches her hand through the jail bars. “You’re special,” he says. Later, one of the cannibals will refer to Ellie as “David’s newest pet.” Johnson said she acted the scene as if the gesture was sexual.12 Nolan North, the voice and motion capture actor who played David, interpreted the character as wanting to repopulate his community with Ellie because the group had so few women.13 In other words, David also believes in the Child’s futurity, but he corrupts it by trying to make it an outlet for his sexual desire. The 12  Retro Replay, “The Last of Us | The Definitive Playthrough—Part 12 (Troy Baker, Nolan North, Ashley Johnson),” YouTube, February 4, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7AaaGoWfOhY. 13  Nolan North, “An Uncharted Twist (The Last of Us Spoilers),” interview by Greg Miller, YouTube, June 21, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiVmKnrjBMQ.

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sexuality that Naughty Dog so carefully removed from Joel and Ellie’s relationship is transferred to David as the cannibal pedophile, the false father who wants to possess and consume the Child. If Ellie’s design embodies Naughty Dog’s anti-male gaze, the male gaze returns within the game through David, the man who looks at Ellie as a sexual object. Even though Joel is also using Ellie to restore himself, his fatherly relationship with Ellie is normalized by comparison to David. Gerald Voorhees observes that “Ellie is the object of David’s erotic desire, but the game positions the player in disgust of this desire by making David a very difficult point of identification (for instance, David and his men are cannibals and his inhumanity is repeatedly communicated through both images and dialog).” In contrast, Joel’s relationship with Ellie is “rooted more in a logic of paternal care than of sexual possession.”14 Joel replaces the male gaze with the gaze of a caring father. The father’s gaze sanctions protective violence that needs to brush up against a “barbarous,” sexualized fatherly masculinity in order to purge itself and offload these meanings onto its doppelganger. Recognizing the false father, Ellie takes David’s hand and breaks his finger. She responds to his outraged remark that she’s a “stupid little girl” with her typical foul-mouthed bravado: “Tell them that Ellie is the little girl that broke your fucking finger.” Before leaving, David tells Ellie that he will be back in the morning to chop her up.

The Return of the Father Given the importance of role reversal in Druckmann’s account of the game’s purpose, it is surprising that Ellie’s playability is so brief. A shot of Ellie in the cell cuts to a shot of Joel waking with a start. Whereas his previous awakenings in the game were presumably caused by bad dreams of the past, Joel is now concerned about the present. “Ellie?” he calls out weakly as he rises, wincing from the pain of his still unhealed wound. He picks up his backpack, and a moment later, the camera is again in the familiar place over his right shoulder. We’re playing as Joel again, although his injury makes him slightly slower than before. The level in which The Last of Us could have changed is, at most, a partial reversal that is only half committed to Ellie as a playable character. We play as Joel as he runs into David’s men and tortures them to find out  Voorhees, “Daddy Issues.”

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Ellie’s location. We then switch back to Ellie and navigate the cannibal camp in a snowstorm after she escapes from David. This section of gameplay culminates in a boss fight against David in the resort’s restaurant, which catches fire. Since Ellie is a relatively weak fighter and has no weapons, the player must again prioritize stealth and strategy to sneak attack David with the switchblade. The third successful strike initiates a cutscene in which Ellie jumps on David’s back, only for David to knock her unconscious before he slumps onto the floor. Once more, we switch back to Joel and navigate him through the cannibal camp. The final switch occurs when Joel reaches the burning restaurant. We move back inside the restaurant as Ellie, whom we can only bring to a slow crawl as she struggles to retrieve David’s machete and finish him off. When David recovers from his wounds and attacks Ellie again, the threat of sexual violence becomes more pronounced. “You have no idea what I’m capable of,” he hisses as he sits on top of her and chokes her. Pressing triangle causes Ellie to make a final reach for the machete, a phallic weapon that Ellie turns on the sexual predator. Retrieving it initiates a cutscene in which Ellie not only slashes at David and forces him off of her, but proceeds to get on top of him and hack at his face and chest repeatedly, blindly. She is unhinged. The ordeal with David has forced the Child to become a ferocious killer, completely engulfed in the anti-anti-­ world’s hatred. But as David himself said, it’s not her fault. Ellie’s just a kid. David may not have raped Ellie, but we can see how much he has damaged her childhood by forcing her to become so violent that it overcomes her completely. The restaurant boss fight is a crucible in which the innocence that caused Ellie to delight over fireflies and corny jokes is finally burned up. The back and forth between Joel and Ellie is a technique not only for creating dramatic tension but also for subverting the core gamer’s expectation that Joel will rescue Ellie from David. By the time Joel arrives, Ellie has already saved herself. All he can do is free her from her blind rage by reassuring her that the trial is over. “Joel saves her emotionally and not physically,” Druckmann commented.15 The game may not be over yet, but this is the moment when Joel’s character arc is just about complete. In his 15  Troy Baker, Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, Gustavo Santaolalla, and Almudena Soria, “‘It Can’t Be for Nothing.’—Winter and Spring,” interview by Christian Spicer, June 30, 2020, in The Official Last of Us Podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/itcant-be-for-nothing-winter-and-spring/id1514792212?i=1000480302772.

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first unrestrained expression of affection for Ellie, he takes her in his arms and calls her “baby girl,” his term of endearment for Sarah. “It’s okay … it’s okay … it’s okay now,” Joel repeats as Ellie buries her head into his chest. The caring father is back. The music that played during Sarah’s death scene plays again, but now it signals a new daughter’s birth. In what sense is there a reversal in “Lakeside Resort”? The character in the background moves to the foreground; the girl who started off under Joel’s authoritarian control becomes playable and develops narrative motivations independent of him. Joel, the protector, needs Ellie’s protection and care, which she provides without becoming a voyeuristic object. As evidenced by Ellie’s fan communities, playing as Ellie was appealing to many gamers across genders. The popular cosplayer Mica Burton, for example, has praised the level for “smashing stereotypes” and allowing Ellie to be a “badass.”16 Perhaps fans were assisted in their identification with Ellie by the gameplay similarity between her and Joel. Voorhees argues that this similarity facilitates an adaptive identification process: “There is no gulf between the capacities of the father and the daughter and so passage from identification with one to the other is fluid.” Even the earlier levels in which Ellie is not playable set up later identification with her: “Running around in Joel’s body while also experiencing the emotions—the terror, excitement, and awe—that Ellie feels, facilitates the play of identification and difference.” While he is also critical of Joel’s fatherhood, Voorhees praises the “consubstantiality” of Joel and Ellie’s relationship and the “openness, permeability, and fluidity” of fatherhood in The Last of Us, which he contrasts to the “coherent” and “fixed” father of BioShock Infinite.17 One could add that this openness, which allows Ellie to perform many of Joel’s actions, denaturalizes and destabilizes hegemonic masculinity by separating it from a male-coded body. But instead of Voorhees’s fluidity, I see the primacy of the rules of the father and a hegemonic masculinity that is strengthened by becoming flexible enough to allow Ellie to participate in it. I find it difficult to interpret the father-daughter relationship as “consubstantial” when Joel is the 16  Mica Burton, “Sad Town USA,” interview with Christian Spicer, July 1, 2020, in The Official Last of Us Podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/artifact-1-sad-townusa/id1514792212?i=1000480899140. 17  Voorhees, “Daddy Issues.”

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central playable character for the vast majority of the game; when Ellie makes only a cameo appearance as a playable character, and even splits her level with Joel; when she mimics Joel’s heterosexuality; when she practices his survivalism against “barbarian” cannibals; when her action affordances are modeled on his; and when her key moment of maturation is her elimination of a rival father. Including other genders in hegemonic masculinity isn’t a recipe for destabilization but rather for normalization, expansion, and the further eclipse of alternative ways of being.

PART IV

Spring

CHAPTER 9

Bus Depot, Firefly Lab, Jackson: What a Dad’s Gotta Do

Ellie’s Diverging Path When Joel and Ellie arrive in Salt Lake City, Joel is again the playable character. It’s spring, a lush green season of “hope and rebirth.”1 Joel is in high spirits. He enjoys the spring breeze and reminisces about playing guitar on his porch before the apocalypse. He then connects the past to the future, promising to teach Ellie how to play guitar after they’ve completed their journey. Gone is the jaded man whom we met back in the Boston Quarantine Zone. Even when the player discovers the corpses of a family, including children, in a motor home on the highway, their deaths don’t haunt Joel like the child’s grave in “Tommy’s Dam” did. This Joel can imagine a future as Ellie’s father, risks and all. Later in the level, Ellie gives Joel the photograph of him and Sarah. He breathes in deeply and reflectively as he looks at the photograph in his hand. “Well, no matter how hard you try,” he concludes, “you can’t escape your past.” This is the pain from which Joel has been fleeing for twenty years; the cynical smuggler was the result of its denial. Thanks to Ellie, he can finally begin to mourn Sarah and potentially heal. For when wives and mothers can no longer carry the ideological burden of fixing men without emasculating them, children must shoulder the responsibility. 1

 Wells, Meyer, and Monacelli, Art of The Last of Us, 114.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_9

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Now that Joel has completed his return to caring fatherhood, it becomes clear that Ellie’s story is unfinished. Baker has noted that at this point the game is no longer about “how Joel has changed, but now how Ellie has changed.”2 She is distracted when Joel offers to teach her how to play guitar, and she can only muster an unenthused “sure” when she finally does respond. We get some insight into what’s bothering Ellie when she sees a faded advertisement for an airline on the side of a vine-covered bus on the highway. In an optional dialogue, Ellie tells Joel about a recent nightmare: she’s on a plane that is about to crash; people are screaming; there is no pilot in the cockpit. “I try to use the controls,” she explains, “but I obviously have no clue how to fly a plane. And right before we crash, I wake up.” The dream suggests that while Joel feels free, Ellie feels trapped; he sees happiness in private life, she sees her responsibility to help humanity avoid doom. The inarticulate Joel gains no insight from Ellie’s dream. “Dreams are weird” is his underwhelming response.

The Giraffe, or, the Utopian Enclave No enemies oppose the player as Joel and Ellie make their way through the city’s abandoned Quarantine Zone and toward the Firefly hospital. It’s time to rest and recover from the intensities of the previous level. The combat-free sections also help to foreground the new tension in Joel and Ellie’s relationship. When the duo enters the eponymous bus depot, the player can spot a ladder on a ledge and press triangle to initiate the familiar boost mechanic, but this time Ellie doesn’t come. She’s sitting on a bench, lost in her thoughts. She heeds Joel’s second call, but then suddenly runs off after dropping the ladder. In one of the game’s most memorable sequences, the player follows an excited Ellie through several corridors. Santaolalla’s shimmering “Vanishing Grace” lets us know that there is no danger. The chase ends in a second-story room with a missing outer wall. What is waiting there is surprising: a giraffe is reaching into the room and eating the ivy that is hanging from the wall and ceiling (Fig. 9.1). The soft, melodic music, the contrast between the darkness of the room and the light from outside, the creature’s calm movements, and the mountains and skyscrapers in the 2  Baker, Druckmann, Johnson, Santaolalla, and Soria, “‘It Can’t Be for Nothing.’—Winter and Spring.”

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Fig. 9.1  The Giraffe. The player can interact without violence. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author)

background create a tableau of wonder and peace. This is the pinnacle of the theme of nature’s triumph in The Last of Us. Perhaps the encounter would have been equally impressive in a cutscene, but the fact that it offers a little interactivity makes it more impressive. Upon entering the room, the player can see the circle overlay on the creature’s neck. Walking up to the giraffe turns the circle into a triangle and enables Joel to touch it. The procedure not only makes the interaction with the giraffe more vivid; it also momentarily transforms the game’s survivalist ways of seeing. The circle/triangle no longer facilitates instrumentalist scavenging in a world of scarcity, but instead allows the player to do something unique: touch another living being without violence. It’s a fitting gesture for the reinstated caring father. Joel gets Ellie to touch the giraffe as well, allowing her to connect with triumphant nature and giving her back some of the Child’s wonder that she lost in winter. Appropriately, the subtitle of Santaolalla’s track is “Childhood.” The giraffe walks off to join others, sending Joel and Ellie to the rooftop to watch the herd. An optional dialogue allows Joel to stand beside Ellie and appreciate the view of the giraffes against the backdrop of the

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skyline. The giraffes are in a green clearing that is mostly walled off from the rest of the city. Like the woods before Bill’s town, the area is a utopian enclave, a peaceful space apart. Watching the herd is a unique gameplay moment in which the player is immobilized and can only control the camera while the gamespace is in an “ambient” state. The game’s algorithms are running, the giraffes are strolling, the wind is blowing, Ellie is moving her head, but normal gameplay is suspended as the gamespace becomes an aesthetic object to behold and admire.3 Narratively, something more is happening. Joel sighs as he takes in the scene. Once the player decides that they’ve seen enough and moves Joel to the nearby staircase, a cutscene shows him pausing before the door. He and Ellie now openly discuss the tension between them, which the giraffes both interrupted and clarified. Joel tells Ellie that they could simply go back to Tommy’s community and “be done with this whole damn thing.” Seeing nature’s beauty in an ambient state seems to have convinced the already apolitical Joel that completing the journey is unnecessary. There is enough hope for him and Ellie in the anti-anti-world as it is. But Ellie turns down Joel’s offer: “After all we’ve been through. Everything that I’ve done. It can’t be for nothing.” The fundamental division between Joel and Ellie is that Joel can justify the violence he’s committed if it culminates in being Ellie’s father in Jackson. The life he envisions with her is much like the giraffe’s utopian enclave: separate, isolated, walled off from history, frozen in time. But that’s not enough for Ellie. Her desires are still in motion—and bigger. As the passengers in her plane nightmare imply, Ellie feels responsibility for society at large. She has learned and practiced Joel’s neoliberal survivalism, but she cannot condone it like he can. Precisely because she’s acted as selfishly and brutally as Joel—“everything that I’ve done”—Ellie must transcend selfishness and brutality and find meaning in the vaccine. Only this service to society can make up for her actions and pose an alternative to the “nothing” that Joel’s solution offers. The reversal that “Lakeside Resort” promised has finally arrived, albeit without involving Ellie as a playable character. To come of age, Ellie must repudiate the anti-sociality for which Joel stands. She must not find peace among the ruins of neoliberalism but try to build something new. The Child must break the rules of the father.

3

 On the ambient act, see Galloway, Gaming, 10–11.

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Father’s Second Chance Joel and Ellie finally meet the Fireflies, though not as expected. After the player makes it through an underground area swarming with bloaters, clickers, and runners, Joel and Ellie enter a tunnel filled with rushing water. While crossing the water on the tops of vehicles, Joel falls inside a bus. Showing daring, and continuing her caregiving from the previous level, Ellie comes to Joel’s aid by helping him pry open the bus door. A QTE appears to free Joel, only for Ellie to be thrown from the bus as it sinks deep into the water. When the player finally swims free of the bus, they can see Ellie’s body floating lifelessly. The ensuing cutscene shows Joel frantically trying to resuscitate Ellie. Two armed Fireflies approach, and when Joel doesn’t obey their commands to put his hands up, they knock him out. Joel comes to inside the Firefly hospital. It’s the last of several cutscenes in which Joel wakes up. They track the phases of Joel’s fatherhood in The Last of Us: when he awakens in Boston, he’s a broken, cynical ex-father; when he awakens in “Lakeside Resort,” he’s a caring father again; now he awakens as a hybrid, the caring father who uses violence to protect his child. The violence is motivated by Marlene’s revelation. She greets Joel and assures him that Ellie is “alright,” but she refuses to let Joel see her and gives a suggestive look to the armed Firefly in the room. Marlene explains that the virus has mutated in Ellie, and once doctors remove it— along with Ellie’s brain—they can use it to produce a vaccine. Marlene repeats the word vaccine because she has decided that it’s more important than Ellie. She stresses to the bellicose Joel, whom the other Firefly has knocked to the ground, that the decision has not come easy. Sensing that Joel’s refusal to let Ellie die is paternal, Marlene defends her position by claiming that, because she’s even more of a parent to Ellie, the decision to trade her life for the vaccine is more painful for her: “whatever it is you think you’re going through right now, it is nothing compared to what I have been through. I knew her since she was born. I promised her mother I would look after her.” Artifacts that the player can find in the hospital confirm Marlene’s inner turmoil. In a journal entry and two voice recordings, Marlene documents her regret about giving Ellie to Joel and Tess, her struggle to lead the beleaguered Fireflies westward from Boston, her joy upon learning that Ellie is still alive, and her anguish over the head surgeon’s conclusion that Ellie must die in the operation to remove the virus. Since Marlene was tasked with caring for

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Ellie by her mother—her last voice recording is addressed to Anna—she claims to possess a maternal authority that allows her to understand Ellie’s value. She is not sacrificing Ellie because she doesn’t love her enough; she loves Ellie even more than Joel does, has taken care of her for longer, and is allowing the doctors to kill her only because of the vaccine’s incomparable benefits to society. “This isn’t about me, or even her,” Marlene tells Joel. Like the Fishes in Children of Men, the Fireflies are more faithful to an abstract cause than to an individual Child’s life.4 In her message to Anna, Marlene describes the vaccine as “a chance to save us, all of us.” Despite Marlene’s genuine love for Ellie, she can’t compete with “all.” Ironically, Marlene says in the same message to Anna that she doesn’t want to kill Joel because he is the “one man in this facility that might understand the weight of this choice.” He doesn’t. Joel calls Marlene’s reasoning “bullshit” because he’s doesn’t care about “all.” He cares only for one. Voorhees points out that Joel’s and Marlene’s competing perspectives invert the gender coding of heroism. While Marlene performs the role of the noble male hero who suppresses his emotional attachments and forfeits his happiness for the sake of the greater good, Joel is a feminized subject who is “too weak, too sentimental, too defined by his relationship with Ellie to be the hero.” Voorhees believes that Joel’s feminization makes him “more human” and interprets The Last of Us as a “therapeutic game” that models how to let go of the myth of heroic masculinity.5 This is a plausible reading, especially because it adds an important dimension to the debate among fans and critics about whether Joel’s ruining of the only chance for a vaccine makes him the game’s villain. While this debate tends toward philosophical abstraction, Voorhees proposes that judgments about Joel’s alleged villainy are gendered and may reflect the player’s inability to mourn the passing of heroic masculinity.6 4  The liberal political imagination tends to define such commitments as “fanatical.” See my “Children of Men, or, Europe: The Finite Task,” Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power 8 (2021), https://coilsoftheserpent.org/2021/02/ children-of-men-or-europe/. 5  Gerald Voorhees, “Mourning Sex: Letting Go and Liking Girls in The Last of Us,” First Person Scholar, September 3, 2014, http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/mourning-sex/. 6  Danielle Riendeau’s reaction to the level shows that women can also find the subversion of heroic masculinity frustrating: “It made me mad as a player. Because I’m so conditioned to make the ‘heroic’ choices in games—the ‘save the little sister, save the village, Jesus-orHitler’ binary choice that we always make fun of as gamers. I was expecting to have that

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However, I think Voorhees’s interpretation overstates Joel’s weakness and the degree to which his relationship to Ellie contradicts his hegemonic masculinity. Joel’s reaction to Marlene’s news is to take Ellie from the hospital. He may be more sentimental than Marlene, but he’s also learned a lesson from Sarah’s death: only proactive violence can save the father-­ daughter bond. After Marlene instructs the other Firefly to escort Joel out of the hospital and kill him if he resists, Joel murders the Firefly and reequips his backpack and weapons. Although the player can sneak past the Fireflies who are guarding the operating room, it’s much more satisfying—and more in keeping with Joel’s narrative character—to kill them. The Fireflies are heavily armed, but so is Joel. Indeed, since the player can now add an assault rifle to Joel’s already substantial arsenal, it’s fair to say that Joel is more effectively homicidal than ever. And once the player reaches the operating room, Joel must kill the surgeon who stands between him and Ellie. A brutal kill animation awaits the player who chooses to use a melee attack—Joel drives the surgeon’s scalpel into his neck—but any weapon will do. The developers wanted so badly to ensure the kill that they unintentionally created humorous opportunities for trifling gamers who can make the surgeon instantly drop dead with a mere pistol shot to the foot. If the player trifles by refusing to attack the surgeon, a cutscene will ensue after about 30 seconds and show the Fireflies bursting into the room and peppering Joel with bullets. Joel’s love for Ellie may be “weak” when compared to, say, Superman’s capacity for self-sacrifice, but he resembles a standard action hero when he protects this love with an assault rifle, flamethrower, and bombs. The Last of Us isn’t about a binary opposition between heroic masculinity and feminized fathering. It starts by valorizing Joel’s caring fatherly masculinity, tragically takes that masculinity away from him, and then gives him (and the player) a second chance to use violence to preserve it. The game’s circularity becomes crystal clear when the final playable sequence in the hospital repeats the end of the Prologue: the player guides Joel out of the hospital while he carries the unconscious Ellie and calls her once more by Sarah’s name, baby girl (Fig. 9.2). The music that played during Sarah’s death plays again. Enemies are in pursuit, and even though they are human Fireflies, they are basically interchangeable with the choice, and the fact that I didn’t actually shocked me.” Danielle Riendeau and Chris Plante, “Let’s Talk About: The Ending of The Last of Us,” Polygon, July 24, 2013, https://www. polygon.com/2013/7/24/4548992/the-ending-of-the-last-of-us.

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Fig. 9.2  Joel Saves Baby Girl. Joel takes Ellie from the Firefly hospital. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author)

infected and the soldier in the Prologue. The escape sequence, which Naughty Dog revised to make playable, suggests that Joel’s “feminine” fatherly masculinity calls not for condemnation but for the player’s performative protection.7 In Baker’s words, Marlene has “awoken the beast and activated every part” of Joel,8 which I take to mean the caring, fatherly, and violent parts that the player is invited to combine. To be sure, players do not have to share my evaluation of Joel. As I have already stated in the Prologue, my playthrough is shaped by my affective connection with Joel. Parents are probably more likely to agree with Joel’s defense of caring fatherhood than players who don’t have children or other young people in their families over whom they feel protective. For example, Johnson has no children, but she has said that she would behave just like Joel to save her nieces and nephews.9 Other players want the 7  The original ending was a longer cutscene. Playstation, “The Last of Us ‘Alternate Ending,’” YouTube, September 26, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=z8XN7eoZr0Y. 8  Baker, Druckmann, Johnson, Santaolalla, and Soria, “‘It Can’t Be for Nothing.’—Winter and Spring.” 9  Baker, Druckmann, Johnson, Santaolalla, and Soria, “‘It Can’t Be for Nothing.’—Winter and Spring.” One limitation of this book is its lack of large-scale empirical analysis of player opinion. My view is admittedly speculative and draws on anecdotal evidence from fan discus-

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ability to decide how Joel reacts to Marlene and are frustrated that the game forces them to participate in Joel’s choice. Voorhees may be right that this frustration reflects objections to Joel’s feminized attachment to Ellie. But The Last of Us hasn’t given players significant choices up to this point, and it would be incoherent to introduce player choice now. The anti-anti-world is a place of necessity, where you “gotta do what you gotta do,” even if it’s amoral. This necessity is mirrored in gameplay that lets the player perform the actions of a not-I, a character who takes the player along for the ride. The ride has a distinct narrative and gameplay architecture that privileges some interpretations over others. Whereas Voorhees sees a contradiction between masculine heroism and Joel’s parental care, I see a hybrid synthesis of the hero’s use of force and caring fatherly masculinity that gives Joel a chance to redeem his first failure and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. This defense of caring fatherhood is what the game has been building up to since Joel’s failure in the Prologue. Every player won’t fully agree with Joel’s actions, but the game wants all of us to identify with the father enough to feel at least ambivalent about aiding him.

Black Death Since fatherly masculinity is relational and intersectional, an interpretation of Joel’s actions in the hospital is incomplete without an account of how Joel’s white fatherhood contrasts with Marlene’s Black femininity. Once the player escapes from the hospital, a cutscene shows Joel taking the elevator into the parking garage. Marlene is waiting for him. Joel shoots her once, puts Ellie in a car, then returns to finish off Marlene while she pleads for mercy (Fig. 9.3). Joel justifies the ruthless act by saying that Marlene will only come after him and Ellie if he lets her live, but it also makes sense within the game’s implicit gender and racial logic. The gender reversal that Voorhees identifies works the other way around. Because Marlene transgresses the self-sacrificial duty that hegemonic masculinity assigns to mothers, because she fails to act like a “real” woman by placing a Child above her political aspirations, Joel must be a mother for her. Killing Marlene simply acknowledges that Joel has replaced her. Marlene thus sions in online forums, Druckmann’s remarks, and Mark Cruea’s small study of blogger responses in “(Re)reading Fatherhood: Applying Reader Response Theory to Joel’s Father Role in The Last of Us,” in Masculinities in Play, 93–108.

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Fig. 9.3  Joel Murders Marlene. Ellie’s surrogate mother begs for her life before Joel shoots her in the head. The Last of Us (2013), Sony/Naughty Dog. (Screenshot by author)

enables Joel to have his gender cake and eat it too: by saving Ellie from her, Joel can be a daddy and a killer, a “feminine,” loving father and a man whose capacity for the most toxic aggression is available when needed to defend against a false mother’s quixotic politics. That this failure of motherhood belongs to the only prominent Black woman in the game is difficult to overlook because of how it establishes a parallel between Joel and the angry white man’s sense of abandonment in his public life, his bitterness toward unloving mothers and wives, and his sense of being surrounded by nonwhite others who have made him a stranger in his own land. While Murray agrees with Voorhees that The Last of Us is about loss, her emphasis on the game’s coding of loss as imperiled whiteness helps us see that the negation of Marlene’s Black motherhood aids the rebirth of a white father. To be sure, Druckmann didn’t put three Black characters (Henry, Sam, Marlene) in his game with the sadistic intent of killing all of them. When asked in 2013 what he regretted most about The Last of Us, Druckmann said it was the deaths of the Black characters. Yet he went on to justify their

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deaths by claiming that they were necessary to maintain artistic integrity. Druckmann learned from Robert Mckee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (1999) that the “responsibility of the writer” is not “to be moral or anything like that,” but rather “to be honest.”10 This honesty required Henry’s, Sam’s, and Marlene’s deaths: “Because the evolution of the story is so organic, sometimes certain characters’ fates were envisioned in one way, but then when we reached that point, it didn’t feel honest. The story needed something else.” What I find odd about Druckmann’s account is how it compares to his advocacy for gender diversity in videogames. When inclusion in videogames was about strong (white) female characters, Druckmann portrayed himself as an active ally of feminists who pushed back against toxic game testers and marketers who wanted to remove Ellie from The Last of Us’s box cover art. In these narratives, Druckmann emphasized his agency and freely admitted to having a political “agenda” in addition to his purely artistic concerns. But when the subject was the game’s Black characters, Druckmann became passive and made the story the agent: “we just reached that part in the story, and the story needed them to die. […] [A]t the end of the day, I have to be a slave to the story.”11 In other words, when diversity was about whether Black characters would continue to be sacrificed to further the development of white characters, Druckmann lost his political agenda and obeyed his amoral commitment to honesty. The double standard is clear: active intervention in core gaming’s depictions of white women and girls; “slavery” to stories that just so happen to reproduce sacrificial Blackness. It would be cavalier to call The Last of Us racist. Nevertheless, the game echoes racialized common sense about who should live and who may die, who can have a future and who cannot, who is an end and who is a means, whose perspective is central and whose is peripheral, who is strong and who is weak, who is justified and who is to blame. This common sense is supercharged by cultural forms that pit individual heroes against “barbaric” hordes and resonate with the racialized, gendered, and antisocial grievances of the late neoliberal moment. To “obey the story” is to increase the likelihood of obeying these sedimented and contextual meanings.

 Druckmann, Creative Screenwriting interview.  Druckmann, Creative Screenwriting interview.

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Jackson, or, the Lie Joel drives away from the hospital. When Ellie wakes up and woozily asks what happened, Joel lies to her for the first time. He tells her that there are more immune people from whom the Fireflies have tried and failed to develop a vaccine. They’ve given up. Resting on the back seat, Ellie takes the news silently before turning on her side, her back toward Joel. The player cannot tell if she believes him, or if she noticed how Joel stammered before saying that the Fireflies have stopped developing a vaccine. The game’s final level begins with a cutscene in which the car has stalled on the outskirts of Tommy’s community. It’s unclear how much time has passed since the duo left Salt Lake City. As Joel fusses with the engine, Ellie sits in the car and contemplatively touches the old bite on her arm. The Last of Us has one final reversal in store for us: after Joel announces that they will have to walk the rest of the way to Jackson, Ellie becomes playable again. Gameplay is short and simple, requiring the player only to move Ellie through the enemy-free woods as Joel remarks that he thinks Ellie and Sarah would have been good friends. But while Ellie’s playability gives the player almost no significant action, it’s still important for setting up the game’s final cutscene. In the original version of the level, the player continued playing as Joel. According to level designer Peter Field, the player was likely to feel “horrible” and defensive about Joel’s actions in the hospital. Making Ellie the playable character was intended to forestall the player’s defensiveness and invite the player to move closer to Ellie’s perspective.12 Lingering behind Joel, Ellie asks him to stop and begins to fidget nervously. What she is about to say has probably been weighing on her since Salt Lake City. She pauses, hesitates, sighs, then begins to describe the circumstances in which she was bitten and first learned of her immunity. Her “best friend” was bitten, too. They decided to be “poetic” and turn together, but Ellie survived. “Her name was Riley, and she was the first to die,” Ellie explains before linking Riley’s deaths to others. “And then it was Tess. And then Sam.” Thinking that Ellie is expressing survivor’s guilt, Joel tries to assure her that the deaths are not her fault and offers his 12  Matthew Reynolds, “How One Simple Change Transformed the Tone of The Last of Us’s Ending,” Digital Spy, November 7, 2014, https://www.digitalspy.com/videogames/ ps4/a583526/how-one-simple-change-transformed-the-tone-of-the-last-of-uss-ending/.

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own life philosophy as a guideline. “I struggled for a long time with surviving,” he councils. He touches and looks down at his broken watch, then concludes: “No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for.” This is a succinct statement of Joel’s truth in The Last of Us. He lost a daughter, so he took a daughter; society damaged him, so he returned the favor. Because he was too passive in the opening stages of the apocalypse and naively believed that the state owed him protection, he had to learn to be actively violent and forsake society. For Joel, violence isn’t a temporary means that requires making amends with society later—the means are built into the ends; “fighting” is the very form in which a caring father can find a sliver of salvation in private familial life (untrustworthy mothers notwithstanding). That Joel thinks this bit of salvation is possible in Jackson is fitting. Joel has eliminated the figurehead behind the “damn cause” that drove a wedge between him and Tommy. With Marlene gone and the possibility of a political alternative crushed, Joel’s caring fatherly masculinity has nowhere else to go than to Tommy’s post-political frontier community. If we recall the large American flag hanging in the hydroelectric plant, we might even imagine that the apocalypse has wiped away society so that America can start again from settler families, and perhaps stay truer this time to its frontier values. But as Ellie has already made clear, Joel’s truth is not hers. She may be enough for him, but he isn’t enough for her. The vaccine was Ellie’s way to reconnect with society and make meaning out of her friends’ deaths and her own antisocial violence. She cuts Joel off and confronts him with his first lie. “Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true,” she demands. Joel pauses, but then says with a convincingly straight face and even tone, “I swear.” The camera dwells on Ellie as her large, liquid eyes search Joel’s face. Santaolalla’s ronroco plays, a rapid tremolo rising and building dramatic tension. Finally, Ellie nods and says, “OK.” Cut to black. The credits roll. Game over.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion: Good Riddance, Joel!

The ending of The Last of Us is the game’s defining moment, the point at which its meanings converge and crystalize. But what makes the ending so debatable is that these meanings are deliberately ambiguous, the crystals clouded. It would appear that the free choice that The Last of Us takes from the player in gameplay finally returns in the form of interpretive freedom. Why did Joel lie to Ellie? Was he right? What does Ellie’s “OK” mean? Does she believe him, or does she know that Joel is lying? Would she have decided to sacrifice herself for the vaccine if she were given the choice? What will she do next? Our answers to these questions shape our overall interpretation of the game. In this concluding chapter, I want to present a reading of the ending that ties together the strands of the critical metagame that this book has developed. It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. In The Last of Us, it takes a child to raise a neoliberal father. Many players and critics praise the ending’s ambiguity. Instead of delivering a perfunctory happy ending, The Last of Us gives us uncertainty; instead of gift wrapping meaning for us, the game invites us to reflect, discuss, and produce meaning ourselves. Amy M.  Green states that the “act of debating […] underscores the value of the game as a fictive

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_10

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exploration of human morality.”1 This view aligns with Druckmann’s intention, which was to push players beyond core gaming’s moral binaries and present Joel as neither good nor bad but rather as “a complex person who’s made good and bad decisions” that are “open to interpretation.”2 Naughty Dog’s refusal of neat closure is also a technique for bolstering its claims to have created a new kind of AAA game without sacrificing commercial success. Straley’s aspiration was for The Last of Us to be as refined and profitable as a high-grossing art house film like No Country for Old Men (2007), which he and Druckmann have often cited as the greatest inspiration for the game’s minimalistic approach. Roger Ebert called No Country for Old Men “a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate.”3 This succinctly describes what The Last of Us aspires to be. “We’re starting to look at [players] as an audience in the way that good filmmakers do,” Straley explained, “using subtlety and subtext in their filmmaking.” Conveniently, subtlety is also lucrative: “We’re all grown up now. I’ve seen enough good stories in books and film. Now I want to see them in video games. When they come, that subtlety really sells.” For Straley, the ending’s ambiguity was a strategy for reaching a generation of mature gamers who are eager to pay for a sophisticated gaming experience that allows videogames to compete with the best films and novels. And we should not forget that ambiguous endings are more useful than closed endings for expanding a cultural commodity’s shelf life.4 The open ending all but guaranteed The Last of Us Part II. 1  Amy M. Green, “The Reconstruction of Morality and the Evolution of Naturalism in The Last of Us,” Games and Culture 11, nos. 7/8 (2016): 17. 2  Druckmann and Straley, “Definitive Interview (Part Two).” The ambiguous ending seems to have been a difficult sell. In the original ending, Ellie simply believed Joel’s lie. The duo were later shown starting over in a small community in San Francisco, suggesting to the player that “they are going to live the rest of their lives in this town. The camera pulls back and maybe everything is going to be alright for these two.” When Druckmann and Straley rewrote the ending, focus testers called it “unclear, anticlimactic, unsatisfying.” Druckmann claims that many members of the development team also preferred the original ending and only slowly came around to the revisions. David Scammell, “Naughty Dog Discusses The Last of Us’ Original Story, Ending and Alternate Villain,” Videogamer, August 7, 2013, https://www.videogamer.com/news/ naughty-dog-discusses-the-last-of-us-original-story-ending-and-alternate-villain/. 3  Roger Ebert, “No Country for Dead Men,” Roger Ebert.com, November 8, 2007, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/no-country-for-old-men-2007. 4  See Stephen Joyce, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse (New York: Palgrave, 2018).

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While Straley has spoken frankly about The Last of Us as a cultural commodity, Druckmann’s interpretation of the ending again centers honesty. In his view, Joel’s choice to damn the world to save Ellie isn’t moral, or even rational, but it does honestly reflect how parents feel about their children. Druckmann’s experience of parenting is the core of his interpretation: “That’s the honest part; that choice has become the center of the story for me. You understand, as a parent, it’s illogical. It’s irrational. But you’d sacrifice everything to save your child. The first time you hold your kid, you know that.”5 Joel thus stands in for Druckmann, Ellie for the writer’s daughter (who was born during the game’s production). Druckmann has said that his first major “ah ha” moment when creating Joel was his realization that Joel’s character arc is the unfolding of his total, irrational love for Ellie and his desire to protect her life at all costs. Not only is Joel willing to trade all of humanity for his new daughter; his lie shows that in the end, he will even put his relationship with Ellie in jeopardy to stop her from potentially returning to the hospital and harming herself. This is the end of Joel’s growth, the apex of his fatherhood: a commitment to Ellie so limitless that it has nothing left to do but potentially eat its own tail.6 In contrast, Druckmann has described Ellie’s character arc as a maturation that starts with her dependence on parental figures and fear of being alone (as she told Sam) and transforms into self-confidence and independence. For Druckmann, Ellie’s “OK” indicates her realization that Joel is lying and that she can become her own person only by leaving him: “It’s Ellie for the first time waking up and realizing that she can’t rely on him anymore. […] She knows that she has to leave him; she has to make her own decisions and her own mistakes.” Although Ellie came to trust Joel because he was the only person who hadn’t left her, as she confessed at the ranch house, she now recognizes that she must give up the father’s security “to become truly independent.” This independence is what Druckmann has said he wants for his own daughter.7 Thus, for Druckmann, The Last of Us is about two competing perspectives, equally valid, equally honest: a father’s incalculable love for his daughter; a daughter’s right to autonomy. Druckmann’s interpretation of the ending is a compelling metagame that recommends how to use The Last of Us to reflect on parental love. I’m  Druckmann, Creative Screenwriting interview.  Druckmann, “IGDA Toronto.” 7  Druckmann, “IGDA Toronto.” 5 6

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one of the many fathers whom Druckmann had in mind when he reported that “anybody who’s a dad gets it.”8 I did get it. During my first playthrough, I believed that I wouldn’t have let the Fireflies kill Ellie, or my own daughter, even if it meant robbing humanity of a vaccine. That’s why I enthusiastically killed the Fireflies guarding the operating room. But I didn’t want to kill the relatively defenseless surgeon, and I assumed that pressing the button for a melee attack would allow me to knock him down without taking his life. The kill animation that followed was surprising and disturbing, especially since the nearby nurse reacted by calling Joel a “fucking animal,” the exact words Ellie had used to describe David. Joel’s vicious murder of Marlene compounded my uneasiness, not only because of its implicit racialization but also because her death felt wrong within the context of the game’s fictional relationships. In cutscenes and gameplay, Joel had killed infected, smugglers, FEDRA soldiers, hunters, bandits, cannibals, and Fireflies. According to one count, Joel’s kills amount to a whopping 406, Marlene being the last.9 Although I obviously wouldn’t condone such a slaughter in the world beyond the screen, the player-subject I had developed in/of the game could rationalize the killing because it was necessary to survive and protect Ellie. Of course, it was also more than necessary; necessity gave me license to enjoy, and protection of caring fatherhood gave enjoyment a higher purpose. Marlene’s death morally alarmed me as a subject outside the game because I connected the image of a white man shooting a prone, begging Black woman to the images and realities of Black death that pervade American social life. As a player-subject in/of the game, I knew that Ellie, the character who motivated so much of my action, would hate Joel for killing her friend and mother figure. I had a “positive negative experience,” a valuable moment of reflection triggered by an unpleasant feeling: complicity.10 In the few seconds before Joel answered Ellie, various possible responses flashed through my mind, some of them specific to Joel’s relationship with Ellie, others reaching beyond the game to my relationships with my own daughters. Murdering the surgeon and Marlene felt wrong, but it also felt  Druckmann, Creative Screenwriting interview.  Video Game Kill Counts, “The Last of Us Remastered (2014) Old Kill Count—All Joel’s Kills,” YouTube, June 6, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4K6SrEfCFA. 10  See Kristine Jørgensen, “The Positive Discomfort of Spec Ops: The Line,” Game Studies 16, no. 2 (2016), http://gamestudies.org/1602/articles/jorgensenkristine. 8 9

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right that Joel stopped the Fireflies from killing Ellie. When Joel lied the second time, the lie was his because I didn’t have the ability to choose his response. Yet since I had connected with him, helped him, prosthetically been him, I felt that it was partially my lie, too. I was still buckled in and going along for the ride. Ellie’s “OK” deepened my guilt because, to my ear, it sounded like acceptance. Not only had Joel lied to Ellie, she had believed him. The lie’s success magnified its wrongness. And yet it still felt justified. It was what any father would do. After replaying The Last of Us multiple times, reflecting on my play, and thinking about the game within broader cultural and historical contexts, I no longer want to play Druckmann’s metagame. His interpretation starts to unravel once we examine the proposition that The Last of Us is a philosophically ambivalent game. Whereas Druckmann has framed the ending as an ethical dilemma that pits two equally legitimate perspectives against each other, his reading must pull the final cutscene out of the game in order to raise it to the level of abstract philosophizing about parental love. The Last of Us isn’t a philosophical treatise; it’s a videogame, a “possibility space” bounded by specific rules of play, procedural ideologies, and styles of habituation.11 Druckmann’s interpretation forgets that the player has spent many more hours performing as Joel than as Ellie before reaching the cutscene; that the game has consistently privileged Joel’s perspective in gameplay and narrative; that Ellie’s gameplay mechanics are a shadow of Joel’s; that the player knows Joel’s history and motivations more intimately and completely than Ellie’s; that the player has met Sarah but not Riley or Anna; and that, generally, The Last of Us pays more attention to the father than to the Child. The Last of Us is a game by a father, about a father, for fathers (and anyone else willing to try on this identity).12 Given the general focus on Joel, it should come as no surprise that the final cutscene itself represents Joel’s and Ellie’s perspectives unequally. Since the player guided Joel through the hospital level, they know exactly what Joel did and that his oath to Ellie is deceitful. Joel’s statement about finding something to fight for is a short, oblique, but still significant account of his actions. What the cutscene offers as a contrast to Joel is not an articulated counter-perspective but an ambiguous “OK.” We can evaluate the father’s actions and our complicity with them, but we cannot  On games as possibility spaces, see Bogost, Persuasive Games, chap. 1.  This is a variation on Chris Suellentrop’s claim that “this is another video game by men, for men and about men.” Suellentrop, “In the Same Boat, but Not Equals.” 11 12

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similarly evaluate Ellie’s response to these actions because we don’t really know what her response is. Whereas the game gives Joel a crystal-clear position (“I swear”) and invites the player to ask whether Joel is right, wrong, or somewhere in between, Ellie’s actions don’t solicit the same sort of judgment because her situation is defined by what she could not choose—provide the vaccine or live—and by what she does not say. An ambiguous ending might be generally superior to a saccharine one, but in this particular game, it helps to preserve Joel’s status as subject and Ellie’s status as object. By privileging Joel, the ending of The Last of Us favors a neoliberal understanding of fatherly love that masquerades as a parent’s simple, obviously true (“honest”) devotion to their Child. Joel could have expressed his love for Ellie by stopping the Fireflies from killing her without her consent and then asking her what she wants. The game’s concrete ethical problem is not only that the Fireflies determine that the vaccine will cost Ellie’s life—I will return to this point later—but also that the Fireflies never ask Ellie if she is willing to pay this price. By taking Ellie from the hospital, killing the Fireflies, and lying to Ellie, Joel simply repeats Marlene’s violation of Ellie’s right to determine her life’s meaning. This is why I’m unpersuaded by Druckmann’s argument that Joel’s actions demonstrate the absoluteness of a father’s love for a child. Druckmann has stated that Joel’s lie means “he’s willing to put his relationship with Ellie on the line in order to save her.”13 But Joel is saving himself. I cannot help but remember how Joel obliquely blamed Sarah’s death for harming him: “don’t do this to me.” Joel’s greatest love is not for Ellie or the social bonds to which she has devoted herself, but for the preservation of his own fatherly masculinity. If Joel were truly committed to Ellie, he wouldn’t risk his relationship with her to protect his lie but would instead allow her to make a choice that might define her life’s meaning in opposition to his own needs. In other words, what Joel should put on the line is his gendered self-­ understanding as guardian of Ellie’s life. A truly caring parent would recognize Ellie’s life as hers and Ellie as the only person who can properly assess its value in relation to the vaccine. Imagine that Ellie had the option of deciding that something else is more important to her than living and  Baker, Druckmann, Johnson, Santaolalla, and Soria, “‘It Can’t Be for Nothing.’— Winter and Spring.” 13

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being Joel’s daughter. In that scenario, Joel could honor Ellie’s freedom to choose and the ideal for which she gives her life more than he values his duty to keep her alive and safe. His fatherhood would thus be expressed not in paternal authority over life and death but in solidarity with Ellie’s hope, even if he doesn’t fully agree with it. However, this isn’t the man whom we’ve been playing. Joel cannot father in solidarity with Ellie’s hope because he doesn’t believe in the society for which Ellie could decide to martyr herself. Betrayed by government and abandoned by nurturing women, this tough, taciturn, and broken father withdraws from society, renounces politics on all sides, and violently pursues his self-interest. Of course Joel ends the game by affirming the necessity of fighting for something—fighting is central to how The Last of Us constructs what it means to be a man and father among the ruins of neoliberalism. Meeting Ellie gives Joel a chance to recover his caring, pre-apocalyptic fatherly masculinity, but he can do so only by combining care with protective combat that pantomimes white frontier violence against vaguely racialized others and distinguishes itself from queerness and duplicitous mother figures. For the majority of The Last of Us, Joel links fatherly masculinity with action, control, and safety while relegating femininity to passive dependency (but not so much that the player feels burdened by it). Even when the game attempts to invert its own gendering of protection in “Lakeside Resort,” it only allows Ellie to participate in hegemonic masculinity to kill a rival father. Joel’s final lie simply solidifies these preexisting relations. If Joel were to give Ellie the opportunity to be more than his protected daughter, this act would overturn the rules of the father that govern the entire game. The Last of Us is essentially about the virtues of necessity. Although the player might develop qualms about Joel’s killing at the hospital, a bad conscience can just as easily bolster the player’s rationalization that violence is simply what a dad’s gotta do. In BioShock (2007), the villain Andrew Ryan offers the following maxim: “A man chooses. A slave obeys.” The ideological work of The Last of Us is to reverse Ryan’s idea: a real man and father does not choose; he obeys his absolute, irrational duty to protect his daughter. In an irredeemably damaged anti-anti-world, family life (without mothers) deserves the utmost commitment because it alone can offer fathers a modicum of hope. This sounds plausible to the degree that privatized fathers in particular, and parents more generally, have

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abandoned society, taken on sole responsibility for producing the good life for their children, and accepted their isolation as fate. In other words, the game’s view of fatherhood, naturalized as what every honest dad already knows, makes sense only if we forget philosopher Sara Ruddick’s point about the fundamentally social and political basis of care: “the best that any parents can do is to create protective communities. […] It is banal but perhaps still necessary to remind ourselves that children are safest when the circumstances of their lives are safe […]. This safety cannot be ensured by any combinations of parents but only by collective and deliberate policies to which parents can contribute.”14 Ruddick’s “banal” insight is the opposite of The Last of Us’s common sense. If The Last of Us appears to be a story about parental love, it’s because the game is remarkably adept at fusing parental love to the antisocial individualism, fatalistic necessity, and collapsed expectations of the late neoliberal era. Even if the player rejects Joel and connects more with Ellie, her limited possibilities also show how Druckmann’s metagame is a moral cul-de-sac. Joel denies Ellie the freedom to choose, but the terms of the choice are problematic anyway: Ellie’s life or the vaccine, the individual or society. To be sure, if Joel were to tell Ellie the truth and she were to go back to the hospital and die for the vaccine, this would be a free choice that repudiates Joel’s anti-sociality. If we read Ellie’s lesbianism backwards from The Last of Us: Left Behind and The Last of Us Part II into the original game, we could also interpret Ellie’s hypothetical decision to die as a rejection of the straight Child’s reproductive futurity. Yet why should death be the only way to be free, social, and queer? The Last of Us paints Ellie into a corner where her options are to be duped by Joel, know that Joel has lied but still have no opportunity to fulfill her desire to provide a vaccine, or sacrifice herself. What remains undreamt in this possibility space is a future in which Ellie is neither surrogate daughter, victim, nor martyr. I can only echo videogame journalist Heather Alexandra: let queer characters live and be happy!15 But that would be another game. The game we have is, at best, an incomplete lesson in the costs of neoliberal fatherhood. I want to return to one aspect of my original reaction to the ending, namely, my impression 14  Sara Ruddick, “The Idea of Fatherhood,” in Feminism and Families, ed. Hilde Lindemann Nelson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 211. 15  Heather Alexandra, “Let Queer Characters Be Happy,” Kotaku, June 26, 2018, https:// kotaku.com/let-queer-characters-be-happy-1827147707.

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that Ellie believed Joel’s lie. I find this interpretation more critically rewarding than Druckmann’s suggestion that Ellie knows that Joel is lying because it turns the ending of The Last of Us into a potential moment of dialectical reversal: the father wins, but it’s a loss. Joel saves Ellie, but he measures Ellie’s life in terms of its value to his fatherly identity—the ultimate fridging. By taking her from the Firefly hospital and then duping her, Joel steals Ellie’s ability to find her purpose so that he can continue to be a father, protector, political bothesidesist, and crypto-frontiersman who finds a little salvation in his Child. Ellie remains an object, but the player is invited to see how the father-subject instrumentalizes Ellie. In my metagame, The Last of Us ends by revealing that children are the refuse of neoliberal fatherhood. This way of playing The Last of Us recommends an alternative use of the game that enables players to examine not love as such, but the truncated, damaged love that feels honest when many believe that physical protection is men’s most important form of care, when expectations for good government are at their nadir, when society no longer serves as a domain in which to acknowledge and redress inequalities, when white masculinity feels besieged, when privatized family life seems to be the only haven in a heartless world, and when children shoulder the burden of making men great again. At most, the metagame that constitutes Rules of the Father can gesture toward Druckmann’s affirmation of Ellie’s desire for autonomy negatively, that is, by denying her autonomy and soliciting the player’s conscious complicity in this negation. Played in opposition to its design architectures, The Last of Us can immerse the player in the logic of neoliberal fatherhood, show its costs, and sketch the beginning of a critique that must eventually encompass the game itself. Ultimately, The Last of Us cannot carry out this critique on its own terms. I agree with Voorhees that the game can model how to let go of certain elements of hegemonic masculinity, but this modeling remains negative and requires a different metagame, an intervention in preferred meanings. The greatest strength of The Last of Us is simultaneously its greatest weakness: it plants the seed of a critique of hegemonic masculinity that it cannot bring to fruition. Since they cannot solve the antagonisms of their industrial, social, political, and historical context, perhaps the most we are permitted to expect from cultural commodities is that they fail well. Playing a videogame will never topple the late neoliberal order and its gender, sexual, racial, and colonial regimes. Neither will social inequalities

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beyond the screens magically vanish because people are more diverse and equal inside them, even if some players do justifiably find recognition and solace in representation. Ending inequality requires collective political transformations of economic and state power, rooted in shared sociality— the very things that The Last of Us renounces and the gaming industry as a whole seeks to carefully manage. For all the lip service to interactivity and diverse fan communities, the media conglomerates who dominate the videogaming market will never willfully make their intellectual property, profits, and monopoly control more interactive or communal. Their embedded interests are the most powerful algorithms limiting the conditions of play. Yet the games that we have now can still be useful cultural tools. They can show us the motion of contradictions in the ways cultures construct and reconstruct hegemony under market imperatives, combine rules and stories to constrain and solicit consent, celebrate and blame, naturalize and disguise, (mis)remember the past and dream futures. The critical study of videogames is essential to understanding how and why we impose imaginary limits on our minds and bodies and pretend to be free, and to asking if and when the powerful, strange, and often exhilarating unfreedom of play might transform a bad reality. The study of such a contradictory cultural commodity cannot but arrive at its own self-contradictions. The anti-form of play always contains the imprint of the reality it negates. Thus, only an emancipated society can create emancipatory games, and only a free society can know how to play with unfreedom. And yet some games already contain flashes of a better future. One such lightning strike occurred in The Last of Us Part II, a game that, by killing the father and explosively reshuffling the contradictions of the late neoliberal moment, retroactively revealed the first game’s conservatism. This is the kernel of truth in Joel’s death: there are better ways to play with gender than to inhabit fathers like him. We don’t need any more Joels. I say this as a father who has struggled to let Joel go; it is a critical judgment and a statement of political aspiration. Games can do more than liberate femininity from the male gaze while only inoculating and hybridizing neoliberal masculinity. Different genders have different relations to power, and thus require distinct political projects, but the emancipation of all genders is one. No genders are free, and thus available for genuine play, unless all are. Feminine subjects cannot flourish as long as protective masculinity appears to be the timeless

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essence of fatherhood, for it consumes women and girls as scapegoats, martyrs, and saviors, then spits them out as waste. Neither can fathers flourish as long as they blame women for neoliberalism’s culture of insecurity, or dream of salvation through the violent defense of daughters who cannot choose to be more than daughters. The airborne transmission of the Cordyceps virus remind us that we are social beings whose fate is as shared as the air we breathe. Joel’s response to the virus is to retreat into individualism and the family, thus radically restricting his social being. His “us” is defined by his masculinity and limits others to roles that sustain it. We should say good riddance to Joel because videogames deserve a more capacious “us.”

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Index1

NUMBERS, AND SYMBOLS Åse, Cecilia, 49 A Abby, 2, 5 After London: or Wild England (1885), 44 Agamben, Giorgio, 17 Anderson, Benedict, 26 Angel Knives, 65 Anna, 51, 97, 114 Anti-anti-world, 17 B Bailey, Laura, 1 Baker, Troy, 21n19, 87, 91, 110 Barthes, Roland, 12 Berger, James, 61, 79 Bill, 62, 65

BioShock (2007), 129 BioShock Infinite, 104 BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea (2013–2014), 99 Blackness, 51, 71, 80–82, 117 Bogost, Ian, 3n6 Boluk, Stephanie, 4 Boston Quarantine Zone, 38 Bothsidesism, 40, 75, 77, 86 Brown, Wendy, 8 Burton, Mica, 104 C Canavan, Gerry, 27, 58 Cannibalism, 100 Casual era, 7 Childhood, 61–65, 78, 103, 130 Children of Men (2006), 77, 114 Choice, 46, 123 Clickers, 56

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. J. Ramirez, Rules of the Father in The Last of Us, Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1

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INDEX

Combat, 46, 56, 98 Control, 50, 56 Cooper, Melinda, 7, 22 Cordyceps, 45, 133 Cote, Amanda C., 7 Critical playthrough, 4 Cultural commodity, 1, 5, 11, 13, 125 D Daddification, 64 David, 98 Dishonored (2012), 47 Druckmann, Neil, 1, 9, 18, 21, 27, 31, 42, 47, 53, 66, 68, 74, 81, 91, 95, 103, 118, 119, 125 honesty, 119, 125 E Edelman, Lee, 69 Ending, 123 Escort missions, 49, 79 Estrangement, 63 F Far right, 8, 75 Fatalism, 29, 130 Fireflies/firefly, 40, 48, 72, 86, 113 Flow, 42, 43 Frome, Jonathan, 33 Frontier, 88 G GamerGate, 7, 9, 13 Giraffe, 110 Gone Home (2013), 9 Goopy goblin gamer brain (GGGB), 43

Government, 28 Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA), 38, 72 Grandin, Greg, 88 H Hall, Stuart, 33 Hayes, Hana, 19 Henry, 80 Heroism, 114 Horror, 25 Hunters, 71–73 I Ico (2001), 10 Identification, 32, 104, 117 Inoculation, 12, 69, 101 Interactivity, 48 J Johnson, Ashley, 78, 101 Journey (2012), 9 K Kimmel, Michael S., 64 Klavan, Andrew, 2 L Lara Croft, 2, 96 The Last of Us: American Dreams (2013), 51 The Last of Us: Left Behind, 3 The Last of Us Part II (2020), 1, 2, 9, 132 Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), 43 Lemieux, Patrick, 4 Life Is Strange, 34

 INDEX 

Love, 50, 125, 130 Ludic contract, 16, 27 M Magic circle, 5 Male gaze, 96 Maria, 85, 91 Marlene, 48, 50, 86, 113, 117 Marx, Karl, 11, 28 Masculinity caring, 12, 21, 24, 28, 49, 69, 71, 79, 91, 100, 129 fatherly, 2, 28, 67, 69, 78, 101, 117, 128 gay, 67–70 hegemonic, 5, 22, 64, 69, 87, 104, 115, 131 hybrid, 13, 21, 113, 116 militarized, 39 neoliberal, 11 McCarthy, Cormac, 61 Mckee, Robert, 119 Metagames, 4, 13, 47, 75, 125, 127, 131 standard, 4 Metal Gear, 41 Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004), 47 Minkoff, Jacob, 21 Mitchell, Liam, 3n6 Moral simplification, 17 Motherhood, 20, 51, 92, 97, 114, 117 Murray, Soraya, 12, 42 Music, 18, 59, 62, 87, 92, 110 Myers, David, 16 N NakeyJakey, 42 Nature, 15, 44–45, 85, 111 Neoliberalism, 7, 42, 56, 64, 65, 128 insecurity culture, 21, 23

Newman, James, 41 Night of the Living Dead (1968), 10 No Country for Old Men (2007), 124 North, Nolan, 101 P Pallets, 90 Papers, Please (2013), 9 Phillips, Amanda, 11, 96, 99 Post-apocalypse, 16 Propp, Vladimir, 55 Protection, 21, 24, 49, 132 Pugh, Alison, 23 R Riley, 97, 120 The Road (2006), 61, 64 Ruddick, Sara, 130 Russworm, TreaAndrea M., 81 S Salt Lake City, 109 Sam, 80 Santaolalla, Gustavo, 18, 19, 21, 59, 87, 92 See also Music Sarah, 19–20, 28, 30, 90, 92, 109 death, 28, 29 playing as, 25–26 Sarkeesian, Anita, 6, 7, 9 Scott, Brandon, 80 Settler colonialism, 57–58, 73, 76, 88 Shaw, Adrienne, 14, 32 Sicart, Miguel, 13n39 Sin City (1991–2001), 10 Social justice, 2, 5 Sontag, Susan, 17

147

148 

INDEX

Spoiler, 1 Stang, Sarah, 48 State of exception, 17 Stealth, 46, 56, 98 Straley, Bruce, 10, 47, 49, 53, 124 Super Mario Bros. 2, 99 Supplements, 57 T Taylor, Nicholas, 3 Tess, 10, 37, 53–55 death, 60 Tommy, 25, 26, 28, 85 Tompkins, Jane, 88 Tribalism, 74–78 Trifling, 47, 115 Tropes vs Women in Video Games, 6 fridging, 30, 60, 131 Ms. Male, 99 Tutorial, 40–44 28 Days Later (2002), 28

U Utopian enclave, 62, 110–112 V Voorhees, Gerald, 3, 102, 104, 114 W The Walking Dead (2003–2019), 61, 79 Wells, H.G., 16 Western, 87 Whiteness, 8, 12, 73, 117, 118 angry white man, 23, 118 Workbenches, 57 Wyoming, 85 Z Zombies, 27, 45, 61, 100 ethics, 26–27