In the universe of The Last of Us, love isn’t so much a multifaceted emotion, but a catalyst for things that are already there. This is what makes it hard to accept Mazin’s efforts to assign love as the root cause of oppositional notions like “fear, hatred, xenophobia, racism,” or “religious superiority.” It’s poorly supported by the text of the show. Or she could see him as a deluded man to indulge for lack of options. Or she could simply trust him in a world where she isn’t able to trust anyone else, happy to reflect what Joel sees in her back at him. Ellie could also conceivably love Joel back. Ellie is not the object of Joel’s affection she is a vessel for his grief - he even calls her “baby girl,” his pet name for his long-deceased daughter. It could also be something else entirely, a selfish need for the thing that he lives for in the post-apocalypse to be the daughter that was taken from him. The thing Joel feels for Ellie could be love. Joel’s foundational trauma in The Last of Us is the loss of his daughter, Sarah her absence reduces him to the grim shell of a man that we see in the first half of the show, and treating Ellie as Sarah’s substitute is the reason he becomes a warmer presence in the latter half of the season. They work through their collective trauma, poorly in most cases, yet sometimes - in Bill and Frank’s case, or most successfully, with the community in Jackson - they are able to grasp a simulacrum of what they lost, even as they mourn it. What the characters in The Last of Us do instead is grieve. They write poetry and sing and scream and sob. They commit to caring for animals they may have hated at first or children they never considered having. People uproot their lives and move across the world for love. But when either Mazin or Druckmann expound on this, they name other emotional drivers that are notably not love, which, while too broad to universally define, can generally be understood as a deep affection that is often disruptive, even irrational. This is the upside of talking about an abstract yet universal idea like “love” - it’s something that can look different for everyone, which means that everyone can read a story like The Last of Us a little bit differently, making it all the richer. This assertion tends to go unchallenged it’s why the pair keep repeating it. These things that start like little seeds grow into massive things that we can’t comprehend how to get out of. That love manifests as fear, hatred, xenophobia, racism, religious superiority. If you look at any kind of intractable conflict between people or peoples, at some point you’re gonna find somebody doing something because of love. It is setting a chain of events in motion that will not be undone. What Joel has done in the name of love is a selfish act but an understandable one. Do you love this person more than those people? Parents say things like this to their children all the time: “I love you more than the world itself.” Do you? For Joel, the answer is “Yes, I do.” That is profound, and the ambiguity of the positivity of love is what we should be taking forward. Love is behind the most extreme choices we make and the most extreme behaviors in which we engage. Love, Druckmann and Mazin assert, contains multitudes. Like Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), who leads the Kansas City resistance to fascism in a long-simmering rage over her brother’s death, and, of course, Joel’s ultimate decision to murder a building full of Fireflies to stop the surgery that will kill Ellie in hopes of a cure. They also argue that, in addition to acts of care and altruism - Bill and Frank’s romance in episode 3, or Henry and Sam’s brotherhood in the show’s Kansas City arc - there is a dark side to love that’s worth exploring. Love that is most clearly shown in the connection that Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) forge in a world of discord. Over and over again, Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, the storytellers behind HBO’s The Last of Us - based on the PlayStation game by Naughty Dog that Druckmann co-directed alongside Bruce Straley - assert that their story is about love.
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