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.
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)