I think one pertinent element of my analysis of The Last of Us series is that I don't think the "zombie" themes do what they're asserted to do in other fiction about zombies. Furthermore, I don't think the series *is* "about" the Infected.
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I think the function of the cordyceps infection, narratively, across both hands but especially the first (it seems to become increasingly irrelevant in the second except as background) is to set up the idea of human diminishment and extinction and justify the title
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The games have never made combat against Infected "fun". You don't feel guilty for killing them, but they're legitimately scary, they're not acting as a power fantasy of "what if I could kill everyone." Their human characteristics are obscured by the fungus too
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I think you could have told The Last of Us with a pandemic that was just killing people, but that "hey I found this video of an ant dying from zombie fungus, what if that could happen to humans" was a game pitch that was accepted and they went from there
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The point is simply to be post apocalyptic and to have the idea that rebuilding is hampered by an ongoing pandemic - again, a theme I can't see as non-resonant today. And honestly the idea that that makes it somehow implicitly right wing is just bad. It's a bad idea.
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As I've mentioned, it actually allows some of the implicit racism of other types of survival stories like Westerns to be filtered out, because the "frontier" is our world that we have now, or had at a specific moment in 2013, ripped out of time forever
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I guess my point is maybe somewhat personal too in that I actually fcking hate zombies, as a genre, and yet The Last of Us 2 and 1 are my number one and two games of all time, so there's some cognitive dissonance
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I don't hate zombies for ideological reasons though and I think a lot of those critiques are better applied to specific works. I just specifically find the idea of a mindless opponent that doesn't use tactics to be extremely boring for any sort of action-adventure
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Replying to @BootlegGirl
I have come to not like the presence of the Infected in P1. They exist solely for gameplay sequences and do very little to enhance the narrative. In P2 I was on board with them, because it always dwelled with me that most Infected you kill could* have been saved if not for Joel.
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Replying to @MJAHarrison @BootlegGirl
I think the way the Cordyceps infection is painted as this truly agonizing body horror makes the whole thing a *bit* more evocative than if the story were just about a superflu that kills you normally Like it gives resonance to stuff like Tess' decision to die rather than change
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It's not *just* a theme of survival and resisting death, it's a theme of resisting *change* The Cordyceps/Homo sapiens hybrid is the new dominant species of Earth, it's replacing us, not just killing us off Which I think the Rat King in TLoU 2 is a pretty successful riff on
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The whole "We are the Walking Dead" theme thing where it directly raises the question of whether survival means anything if you don't hold onto your humanity in the process of surviving -- is Joel actually meaningfully different from a Stalker or Clicker at this point
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I think it's an interesting artistic choice that in the scene in 2 where Ellie kills Nora, it starts with Nora gasping and choking on spores and then realizing who Ellie is because she can breathe them And Ellie is breathing harder and harder before she lands the killing blow
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