There are different types of sadness. Some rend. Some hollow us out slowly over time. Some we’re able to visit less as time passes. Some are shared as truths for others to help bear the load. Some are lies that only free us up by passing the burden on. Our post-apocalypse stories tend to center around hopefulness or hopelessness. In Western stories, we’ve long tended to investigate individualism surviving cruelty. “The Last of Us” throws hope out the window – not as hopelessness, but as a concern that isn’t its primary focus.
The world’s been taken over by a fungal plague. The fungi cordyceps is known for infecting insects and seizing their motor functions. In “The Last of Us”, it’s adapted to a warmer climate and therefore can infect warm-blooded hosts. It makes the shift from insects to mammals.
Ellie is a child born with immunity, the only one known. It’s up to Joel, an old, traumatized mercenary, to protect her as they travel across the country in search of a science lab that can harness Ellie’s immunity into a vaccine.
When I say hope isn’t the primary focus of “The Last of Us”, I don’t mean that hopelessness is. Hope is there in Ellie’s immunity, and defines the breakaway third episode ‘Long, Long Time’. Hopelessness is present in the circumstances of so many they pass…but both are set aside. Both are so, so far to see from anywhere in the story. No one here has time for hope or hopelessness. Both cost too much energy. Neither is “The Last of Us” an examination of survival. Survival is there, but it’s not dwelt on. Sacrifices are sudden and practical. “The Last of Us” isn’t even about individualism. In fact, it repeatedly rejects it in favor of collectivism enabling survival and rebuilding. “The Last of Us” isn’t about cruelty either. It’s visited, but again – it’s not the focus as it is in so many post-apocalypse stories. It isn’t even about how dire things are; that’s just the landscape. The series is unlike the post-apocalypses we’ve seen in the past because it’s not here to rubberneck. There’s no spectacle that thrives. Ethics and cruelty are each in turn visited and witnessed, but they don’t change the fact Ellie and Joel need to move on.
“The Last of Us” throws out many of the typical things our post-apocalypse stories are built to cover. Instead, it focuses simply on perseverance. Its focus isn’t a key moment, the goal being chased, or even the journey. All these things are present, but above all else, the story here is just about putting one foot in front of the other because it’s what needs to be done.
Fear, injury, hate, love, need, comfort, vengeance…Ellie and Joel pass each of these by because they’re just waypoints. They avoid confrontation and even when they’re drawn in, their end goal is to just keep on walking west. “The Last of Us” involves stellar action and horror, and it has that “Watership Down” quality of happening upon settlements both terrifying and wonderful. But like that novel, you do what you need to do to keep on walking. You can’t fix everything if you’re already trying to fix the thing in front of you. Sometimes you’re just a witness, as awful as that is.
“The Last of Us” is one of the worlds in which it would be most tempting to just give up. Sometimes hope fades. That’s why we’ve got other emotions and abilities. Hope isn’t magical; it can’t exist on its own. Sometimes we need anger. Sometimes we need perseverance. Sometimes we need those things that bridge the gap when hope is a long way from returning. That’s why “The Last of Us” feels so real. It isn’t two-dimensional about the presence or lack of hope. You don’t stop and lament the absence of hope; you use the other things you’re built from to do what you would do if you had it anyway. If hope shows up, great, what a relief. If it doesn’t, you’re still putting one foot in front of the other, doing the work to get closer to something more than survival. Hope can be a product of circumstance, timing, narrative. There are times when we’re not lucky enough for that circumstance, but if we don’t keep on stepping toward it, how will those who follow know which way to continue? So you put one foot in front of the other because: it’s what needs to be done.
And then the rug is pulled from under us. What happens when hope returns in a swell too large to handle? What happens when we’re safe, when that perseverance can take a break, but hope runs uninformed, free of the context of perseverance, of kindness and anger, of all those other things that give hope shape and purpose?
Hope is a wonderful thing, and it is protective and often just. It is not the only thing. It has to exist alongside all the other pieces that make us. Hope has to be more than personal; it has to be informed. After so many sadnesses along the way, so many sacrifices, what happens when we shear all those other pieces away because we haven’t had hope for so long that we forget what it connects to?
Many of the types of sadness above, I know how to endure. Without spoilers, the sadness that “The Last of Us” considers last is so deeply unexpected and complex, I’m not sure we’re built to have defenses against it.
What I Said Last Year
My choice for Saddest Series last year was “Cyberpunk: Edgerunners”. You saw it coming like a freight train. It sundered hope. It tore you down. It was a vision of meaningless sacrifice, of a world that paints letting others down, of letting their lives and memories be erased and overwritten, as an inevitability, a systemic design. It was devastating art.
It was designed as a standalone, one season series. Thank whoever had the sense to stay true to that. It allows “Edgerunners” to tell its story clear of any need to drop cliffhangers or leave doors open. The story it has to tell, the point it has to make…it needed to have the freedom to conclude.
It is the saddest, most emptying series I’ve ever seen. There’s importance in that. I hold it so close to my heart. The first notes of Rosa Walton’s “I Really Want to Stay At Your House” are still enough to get me tearing up. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wouldn’t want to shield myself and lose the part of myself that can feel that way.
Calling something sad might feel like it would dissuade you from seeing it, but whether it’s “Edgerunners”, “The Last of Us”, or something else, stories that make us feel this way give us safe places to practice parts of ourselves we would only feel otherwise under trauma. You can’t understand a part of yourself during trauma. We need other opportunities, through story, to feel these things, these sadnesses and losses, free of personal trauma and anxiety. Stories give us that. As sad as they can be, they also give us beauty and meaning through lenses we would otherwise avoid. Everyone tolerates sadness in storytelling differently, but please don’t be afraid of it. Be willing to test it. It can help us sit with pieces of ourselves we would otherwise pretend don’t exist.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 