The Last of Us...

Double Spoiler Alert!!

Okay, as you can tell by the title I'm going to write about The Last of Us. If you haven't watched the show or played the game and are planning on it you should probably back out now. If you haven't watched the show or played the game and aren't planning on it you might want to back out as well, just because I'm going to be talking about things you haven't seen. 

The second spoiler alert is that I haven't played the game. I'm just watching the show. So I don't know what's coming and I DON'T WANT YOU TO TELL ME. Seriously. Don't tell me things you know because of the game, don't tell me I'm right or I'm wrong in what I'm going to write about based off things you know from the game. Just sit smugly and know you know things I don't. 

So...on to the blog.

First off I want to make super clear that I love this show. I love Joel and Ellie and I think that Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey are both doing an incredible job. After this week's episode I'm ready to hand Bella their Emmy right now. So good. Oh my gosh. Just want to get that out of the way first.

Did you know that when you are watching nature documentaries the film maker can manipulate which animal you are rooting for? It's the one they show you first. So, for instance, if you are watching a family of field mice and their struggle to find food and a good burrow and raise all of their babies you are fully team field mouse. And when they show the hawk coming to try and snatch away poor Mr. Field Mouse you are firmly in the run little mouse get away from that bastard hawk camp. 

BUT...if you start out with the hawk family and see them bonding and building a nest and their adorable little hatchlings. Then when Mrs. Hawk dive bombs the field mice you are like, YEAH! Snatch up that filthy little beast and take home dinner to the babies! You are a fierce and wonderful mommy!

Who we saw first is who is the hero of our story. 

I've always loved that. I love the comics where they would What If? the stories. What if Superman landed in Russia? What if the first person Wonder Woman saw was a German pilot? They were superheroes for the USA because that's who they saw first. 

Like most things your point of view is based on things like that. Your language, your religion, your patriotism, all of those things are more likely to be accidents of birth than choices you made. Some people migrate, or change religion, or even learn new languages, but most don't. And even those that do change still tend to hold some vestige of their past in regard. 

There is a percentage of our population that fully believes that everyone in the world wants to be a citizen of the USA. Thinks people in London are cursing their ancestors for not being part of the colonies. Instead those Londoners are looking at the USA and it boggles their minds that we allow people to go bankrupt or die because they can't afford health care. They are truly confused as to why we just accept that getting shot is a thing that could happen and instead of gun control we teach our kids how to do active shooter drills. They don't want to be us, they are confused as fuck as to why we want to be us. 

But that's because they saw themselves first. And we saw ourselves first. Who we are is an accident of birth as much as it is anything else. 

Who we view as the good guys is all about whose story we see first. 

Joel isn't a good guy. He's just not. He's told us that. His brother has told us that. His brother's wife gave Tommy a pass for "the things he did" saying they were Joel's fault. Which is bullshit, but also a hint that what they did was bad enough she had to justify it. Joel is a smuggler, an opportunist and pretty proficient killer. He's not a good guy. 

But...we saw him first. We saw him with his daughter. We saw what happened in the beginning. How he was one of the first to witness how the government and armed forces were going to turn on citizens almost instantly. He saw him break. And then we saw him many years later, skipping over the rest. And we've watched him warm to Ellie and we've seen him grieve losing Tess. So we cried when he called Ellie baby girl and thought, oh that's so lovely.

I don't have a problem with bad guys in stories. Clearly, some of my favorite characters in the world have been bad guys. They are usually more interesting. And when you get a bad guy who thinks they are the good guy, and who in a different way of viewing it really could be (Killmonger for instance) then I love them. I'm also not nonviolent. I've talked about that before. I'm just not. I like the idea of it, and I respect people who are, but tell them Ellie is the little girl who broke your fucking finger is perfectly wonderful. 

And we all (or at least I'm assuming we) felt pretty okay with Joel killing the guys who told him where to find Ellie. Told him after some encouraging beatings and carvings. But that level of torture is pretty extreme right? I mean, you don't just spontaneously come up with carving someone's knee cap off. And we were all fine because Dave was a pedofile and a cannibal. But Joel didn't know that. He just knew that they had taken Ellie away. Again, he's not a good guy. He's just our bad guy, we saw him first. 

So what I started thinking was, and they would have to trust their audience so much to do it, what if next season we get an episode from the field mouse point of view? We're all team hawk right now. We are fine with Joel slaughtering anyone and everyone who gets in the way of him taking care of Ellie. So what happens if we finally find the Fireflies and we find out that Joel did something to them? Like Tommy joined them for a little bit, but what if the reason Joel never did is because he stole supplies headed for them and people died because of it, or he killed a team of them for some reason? What if to them he's just a BAD guy? Not their bad guy? 

What if Wonder Woman met a German pilot first? 

Because you know that to someone out there in The Last of Us universe thinking of Joel as a hero would turn their stomach. I mean, if they were real and not video game characters. But still...

And what does Ellie then do if she is confronted with someone thinking of Joel as the bad guy instead of the man that came to find her (even though she handled her business thank you very much) and has protected her and helped her and supported her? What does she do if she meets someone who seems like a decent human being, who seems like they are doing their best in a hellish world, but their bad guy nightmare is Joel? 

It's only because I have loved the writing on this show that I can even entertain the thought of them doing such an episode. Because it's been so good. Every step of the way it's been great. I can clearly see where the game play would factor in a lot of the time and that has just added to what I'm watching. Reminding me that they told this story through a game. A game. Amazing. So I wonder, is there some DLC out there where you are playing as the field mouse? Where you are running and hiding from the horrible human who is out there coming to get you? And then the reveal is that the horror was Joel? 

I mean...come on...how good would that be? 

That's how much I'm loving this show. I'm writing future episodes instead of rewriting current ones.