last night The last of us final on HBO Max ushered in the inevitable, the thing many of us have feared for a decade: major releases, the same ones who refer to video games as if they were all still like pac manthey are weighing their controversial ending.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but massive spoilers follow for both the first game ending and the HBO season finale. Read on at your own risk.
In case you managed to avoid both waves of The last of us ending the discussionHere’s a brief recap of both the game and the series: After vowing to safely deliver Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a young woman immune to the infection that has ravaged the world, to a revolutionary group determined to develop a cure, Joel (Pedro Pascal) learns that they will have to kill the young woman in the development process. But instead of letting a girl die for the good of the human race, Joel goes on a murderous rampage at the hospital where she is being held, murdering every last person and rescuing the sedated girl, at the expense of the rest of humanity. .
The last of us the final speech generalizes
When the game came out in 2013, this ending sparked a fairly direct debate about what you would sacrifice for your loved ones, and several more debates that were much more nuanced about problematic tropes, gore for gore, and whether or not this game was. “The greatest story ever told in video games.” Naturally, those of us who have been involved in the industry have somehow grown weary of The last of us speech, not only because it seems to tread and retread the same ground ad infinitum, but because of the anger that too often accompanies such conversation.
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But now, everyone is talking about this damn ending, about my video game ignorant parents who once worried that I would yell into my microphone when playing. halo 3to the person at my gym who knows what I do for a living, and even prestigious legacy news publications like The New York Times. That newspaper has picked up the torch of discourse, albeit 10 years after gamers around the world first turned it on. And though he’s covered The last of us in some capacity before, either is filtering the first game through a feminist frequency lens either discussing the infamous DLC (both the work of a journalist, Chris Suellentrop), the journalistic monolith has never ventured into the murky waters of discussion The last of us‘ ending.
Well, thanks to the ending of the hit HBO series, it has. But, like all legacy publications determined to handle video games with a surprising lack of nuance, it’s clear that even after all these years, the standards don’t know how to talk about video games. Maybe it’s easy to feel that way because the piece is titled “The last of us Finale: First-Person Shooter” or because the opening paragraph features the reviewer waxing poetic about how he had never played the game before but did, for the first time in his career, see a walkthrough for the game before writing. Or because it refers to The last of us like a “shootout”.
join the Times and the ranks of gaming publications and podcasts and YouTube channels that have talked about The last of us‘ ending up they were blue in the face are the hollywood reporter (“heartbreaking”, “provocative”, brings up the car problem), entertainment weekly (“cataclysmic”, interview with Druckmann), and the washington postgutted game vertical Rocket launcher (Gene Park, a gaming journalist, asks, “Did Joel do the right thing?”).
What the popularity of the HBO series means is more talk about an ending that has been talked about ad nauseam in many gaming circles, and more talk about whether or not video games can be successfully adapted into TV shows and movies. It means, as Carl “CJ” Johnson so eloquently says Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas“Ah shit, here we go again.”
