Partner and I have been watching The Last of Us because we stan Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.
I was telling my partner not to expect a good character story for The Last of Us Season 2 since the show has been faithfully relaying the plot of the games especially in it's scene composition.
For those who don't know TLOU Part 2 was explicitly written to be Israeli propaganda.
Neil Druckman (grew up as a West Bank Settler as a child, until his family moved to the US) has explicitly gone on the record to say that the story was inspired by the 2000 Ramallah lynching among other experiences in the West Bank. He's a reflexive center left Zionist which means he's an ultra lib loser and he donated $2,500 to both sides after October 7th and the subsequent reprisal. Also he's a huge loser who fell for the beheaded babies propaganda.
He has explicitly gone on the record to say he wanted to essentially do what Kill BIll did for the concept of "when you seek revenge dig 2 graves", where the ending both reifies it but also waters down its inherent tragedy in the eyes of the audience.
“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann told the Post. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”
So essentially the POV is that you're supposed to want to feel the currently very Israeli coded feeling of being so racist, self righteous and hateful that it drives your society to hollow itself out in it's irrational crusade to extinguish the subject of these feelings. But in a, you know, rationalizing, this is fine, this is normal, this is just people and there's nothing you can do and some of it is kinda good actually way.
I'm incredibly curious as to how TLOU Season 2 walks this tight rope with the source material, political climate, and especially since Bella Ramsey has been so outspoken about the genocide.
My partner didn't believe me about the source material, and we started watching S2E4. Within 5 minutes they changed their tune.
Because the cold open is Isaac torturing a Seraphite while reiterating Israeli style talking points about how he doesn't care about who's actually doing the most killing, and that he has some abstract right to kill all of the Seraphites as revenge / preemptive self defense / etc. When the Seraphite tells him that the WLF is eating itself and their troops are joining the Seraphites and never leaving, it leads to him getting irrationally mad and just straight up executing the Seraphite. Outside the door one of WLF guards looks a bit upset for a second before the second one said "Good he got what he deserved".
Grimly realistic stuff. Gonna be interesting how they thread this needle.
I'm gonna be honest, I never understood where the Zionist propaganda was supposed to be located in Part 2
The Seraphites are supposed to be Palestinians? Well that wasn't remotely obvious, they're clearly coded as some kind of amish-like post-apocalyptic cult and the Wolves are clearly presented as the principal aggressors, picking a fight with an island people that suffered just as much under FEDRA as they did
And the Seraphaites come out in the end winning a shocking and theatrical victory against the Wolves
So is the propaganda in the revenge story? If that's true, Elies narrative is too personalized for some geopolitical narrative building
Propaganda doesn't have to be a thinly veiled metaphor rich in polemics like Iron Man. That's actually often the most boring an ineffectual propaganda. Propaganda works best when it creates a heuristic response that muddles emotions and logic.
The propaganda in TLOU Part 2 comes from the ludonarrative dissonance that actually just reinforces the idea that "this is just complex stuff and you shouldn't be 'too moral' about it". For example are we ever really made to feel that Ellie is bad for choosing to avenge Joel?
Ellie's story and the WLF/Seraphite conflict mirror each other in the whole "I don't want to have to do this but I have no choice" -> "I did a thing and I had no choice and now I'm traumatized from my non-choice" -> "more non choices incoming". The reality is that the story consistently creates apologetics to further and further these cycles in the eyes of the player who themselves commit the atrocity. This essentially undercuts the eventual resolution of "you didn't have to do all that".
Comparing this with a game like Spec OPS the Line that forces you to commit atrocity because you're playing "da hero" and then admonishes you for the immorality of it. Martin Walker is shown to be a piece of shit. He's traumatized and abused sure, but that doesn't take focus away from the fact that he's a piece of shit that burns women and children alive with white phosphorous.
spoiler
The emotional resonance and the visceral nature of beating the shit out of Nora with a lead pipe is explored and centered more than the supposed "moral of the story" that you shouldn't travel 200 miles and kill 2 people one of whom was just a victim of circumstance to get information on the next person you're gonna brutalize with a lead pipe. How does the game handle these scenes? We're made to feel bad for Ellie! She's traumatized! These scenes aren't clearly shown for their ultimate immoral implications that create dissonance with the supposed moral of the plot.We see so much "consequence" to validate the "cycle of violence", but we don't really see or play through any significant consequential atonement that bears the same emotional weight as the atrocity itself. It's more of a shrugging apologetic for cycles of violence than an argument against it. On top of that the ludonarrative doesn't give us much choice about it, nor does it give us commentary about that lack of choice unlike Spec Ops.
A good example as to how these stories can be written in a "game style" but not have this dissonance that's both plot based and ludonarrative based is if you stack the emotional and logical judgements of the PC's actions towards the end of the game and heighten the impact. A good example is Mouthwashing where over the course of the game you discover that you're actually a huge piece of shit in context. The things that seemed innocuous at the beginning of the game were actually your PC being a huge piece of shit. Ultimately these actions got a whole bunch of people killed and they were done because the PC is an incompetent ego maniac with a huge chip on their shoulder about their lack of achievement in life.
Yes? She lost everything in her pursuit of revenge. Who walks away from the end of the game and thinks "worth it 😄"
Druckman definitely sucks, of course
There's a ton of mouth breathers on forums arguing that Ellie should have killed Abby. I don't think they're stupid because they "don't see the real message", I think they're stupid because they don't reject the message they actually see. There is a real argument for the existence of the message of "why not just kill Abby" in the construction of the game.
I just can't see that in any reasonable way after someone plays all of it, but I'm also approaching this from a perspective of a marxist/anti-zionist so maybe that's why. I am aware of the horrific responses this game got
The obvious choice to me was turn away at any of the many points Ellie had a chance to instead of ruining the many lives around her (and her own)
They arent coded as Amish. Hell Lev's entire plot is about queer people being "honour killed" and him rejecting his "culture" and choosing to integrate with the liberal Zionist. Lev was also planned to be a child bride to a "prophet" (the whole aisha thing), the seraphites are primitive, brutish, zealots and homophobic who dont have an survival instinct and just throw themselves at the WLF. The WLF was created under FEMA occupation and gained independence due to the aid of terrorism (irgun). The seraphites are literally every Islamophobic stereotype since 9/11, but just because the games tells us that they are "Christian" people overlook it.
That's because it isn't. His comments say it was inspired by, but he's talking about the themes, and yes is certainly a zionist, but neither the game or the show have anything that can even tangentially tied to Palestine. The narrative has you realizing that none of the factions are "good", they're all fucked, and revenge is bad.
Hell, if it were Isreali propaganda, the show wouldn't feature the very scene OP mentions, with Isaac torturing and murdering a Seraphite. Maybe you could argue its propaganda in that the idea that there are no good guys leads to apathy over the genocide, and while that would be quite insidious, its not quite the same as Isreali propaganda. Isreali propaganda is always going to have Isreal as the one true king, god's favorite little girl, etc. This show aint that
This isn't true at all. There are plenty of movies like Beaufort that attempt to thread the needle of "maybe a state of perpetual war and occupation is bad" (because our soldiers get sad and weepy when retreating) without confronting the fact that the logic of Israeli ideology and it's self characterization as a state, requires it to be in a state of perpetual war and occupation. TLOU2 does this same thing where it attempts to separate the consequences from the choices that precipitated the consequences without truly examining them. It makes you feel that the choices are sacrosanct and understandable.
A good example is what you mention in your other comment:
spoiler
In the beginning of Part 2, Ellie's friends attempt to dissuade her from seeking revenge by her friends out of the fear for her personal safety not out of the position that violence begets violence or any sort of moral hazard. Ultimately the moral of the story is the moral hazard. This tension is never actually resolved.Ask yourself, at what point does Ellie regret or feel anything but vindication about her choice to seek revenge for Joel? She doesn't. What ends up happening is that she decides to kill Abby because she thinks it will stop her PTSD, and then she realizes during the fight scene that it won't.
Neither the game nor Ellie actually confront the original sin or the subsequent choices to sin. Neither does the WLF/Seraphite storyline. The same exists in Israeli propaganda, the re-framing and argumentation about a year zero while committing atrocity. The description of the tactic through visual form e.g. the torture scene, is not necessarily communicating a refutation of the tactic. That's you engaging with the work through your morality, not the morality of the work itself. The WLF is framed as the antagonist, and Ellie is framed as the protagonist, but their arcs are the same in terms of how they act and the consequences of their actions.The context is fairly interchangeable. They're simply cast in different lights for the purpose of narrative. Ultimately this means that the stance is "well I guess it's bad but it's just kind-of a wash so you shouldn't be too hard on other people or groups that have this same form and maybe do the same things you did with Ellie where you focus on the good stuff not the bad stuff".
The moral ambiguity in the work matches the moral ambiguity and squishiness of Neil Druckman's liberal Zionism and of all liberal Zionists.
It isn't to stop her PTSD, I didn't get that at all. She couldn't leave Joel unavenged, then she realizes the futility of it in the end, literally saying "just take him".