This article was submitted to Amerikaner.org by Obadiah Hakeswill. If you would like to submit your own content, please email amerikanercontributions@proton.me.
This is just going to be a little post on something that’s been rattling around in my head for the past few weeks. Basically, it’ll be on the Last of Us games and the new TV show that has come out. It will focus on why I think the right is wrong about the new TV show.
So, I assume most people know about the 2013 video game The Last of Us. Here’s a quick overview. It’s a zombie survival game where you play as a man who has lost a daughter and is trying to protect his surrogate daughter and survive a world that is run over by fungus zombies.
You play a gruff and indifferent man, Joel, who doesn’t want to get attached to a surrogate daughter, a girl named Ellie, because he has already lost a child and is afraid of being hurt again.
But Joel can’t help but give in to his natural instincts to protect Ellie and he sees her as the child that he has lost. We and Joel both want to protect Ellie and that’s why at the end of the game he can’t sacrifice her for a chance that there will be a cure.
Simple stuff. Man wants to protect his daughter and we the gamer feel good about it when he saves her. It’s traditional and promotes strong family bonds. I would say that this is a conservative message that appealed to a lot of people.
However, the DLC came out later and Ellie shares a kiss with a young girl. Some people at the time thought Ellie could be bi or just experimenting or something. The second game overrules that. It’s natural that they’d want the daughter they saved to go on to have a family of her own. Especially since it’s a post-apocalyptic game and the human race needs to reproduce to build our numbers back up again.
The main game never hinted at Ellie being a lesbian or whatever. And this might anger people but the default is heterosexual so that’s what should be assumed of people. I think Ellie being a lesbian does change things. I think most people would want to save Ellie and such even if they stated she was a lesbian in the base game but I think they would prefer to save a child who could go on to have their own family. No one would want to watch a little girl get killed. I’ll bring up “the family” shown in the second game later.
So, what does that mean? That little inclusion in the DLC? I would say that the DLC acts as a Trojan horse for leftwing politics in a game with a core conservative message. It also leads into the sequel game and the show where the Trojan horse isn’t necessary and it is very explicit in what it sees as family.
I have not played the second game and won’t give Naughty Dog my money for it. But I have seen enough of the game online and reviews to at least state this. In the second game, Ellie is in a lesbian relationship with a Jewish woman who was impregnated by a Asian man and they raise this baby as their own.
How wonderful. How progressive. Ellie gets to adopt a multi-racial baby and we’re supposed to view this as the new nuclear family. A man pumped some sperm in a woman and Ellie gets to adopt a baby she has no connection to. Not racially or genetically. She played no part in bringing this child into the world. This is the better nuclear family. The very concept of family that the gamer sought to protect in the first game has been annihilated and twisted beyond recognition. I know that Joel and Ellie aren’t related but could you actually pretend to view this as your surrogate grandchild? I think not.
Now, you could say that these characters aren’t political messages. They’re simply people. I don’t believe that. I think this was a very deliberate choice by the studio and Neil Druckmann. I view this as a billboard for what the media is trying to push and what their values and ideas about family are.
I don’t know much else about the second game. I know about Abbey and some of the other dumb things but I just wanted to highlight how they’ve taken that father-daughter bond that hooked people in with the first game and how it has been subverted.
Now, I know there’s a new show based on the game. I won’t be watching it because I don’t like giving bad media my attention or money but I have seen people come out to criticize the show. They call the show woke and this and that. They cry and rage about how the first game was so good and now its message is being destroyed.
That’s the joke.
The family message. The base instinct of a man trying to protect his child was supposed to be subverted in the first game with the DLC. It was always meant to be this way. I think they pulled back on their message in the first’s base game to have male gamers emotionally sink into Ellie to soften the blow of what was to come. You’re already invested in their relationship and want to save Ellie…so I mean what’s the big deal if she’s gay? It’s a Trojan horse of leftist subversion.
Those that attack the new show and hold up the original game as great and that it has a conservative and traditional message don’t understand what they’re actually fighting for. The family message was already destroyed in the first game. They’re trying to save a game with imbedded leftist ideology. I think it’s very effective and harming that you will have gamers that hold up the first game as something that shares their values when it’s actually destroying them. “Conservatives” will hail the first game as their game when it is anything but and in fact further pushes aside what is actually conservative or traditional.
That’s it.
You can find more from Mr. Hakeswill on his SubStack, https://obadiahhakeswill.substack.com
The real problem is the game is too fucking good despite how awful the faggot element is. Great, one could argue. And to be great despite the message means the fundamental play is beyond good. It is transformational. Especially the second one. It takes you on just the type of adventure through scenery that both feeds our romanticization of a civilizational collapse and nourishes our deep, oppressed desire for meaning. You live out a QUEST. And because it is so well executed you, at least I, choose to overlook the obvious propaganda because there is nothing better to do with yourself when there is snow up to your waist outside covering a sheet of ice, or your mall is overrun with Somalis, and even the artsy entertainment district that you could grab a drink and go thrift shopping at merely 5 years ago is teeming with niggers shooting off random guns from stolen vehicles and George Floyd murals everywhere. And even if you did go to any of those places a burger is now $20. Oh, and let’s not forget all the bartenders are trans. Maybe that’s just Minneapolis. But because of it I both loved and loathed these games. They were comforting in dark times where I needed to put my attention somewhere other than reality and LIVE a little. Perhaps the overplayed pre-release drama about Abby being trans turning out to be nonsense assuaged the initial anger I approached 2 with? OP isn’t wrong, it’s just we live in dark times and I spent my youth traipsing through abandoned factories, meandering down old railroads, and contemplating the ruins of ancient drag strips, drive in theatres, and pouring over what seemed like archaic Hot Rod magazines, Playboys, Thrashers, and dubs of dubs of dubs of Misfits cassettes no one had ever seen a cover for. Even then the Before Times called to me. While playing TLOU this world we are suffering in today is over. It’s finished. In fact that’s hardly a nigger left. And despite the mass destruction it still seems better compared to what we have right now. If only the Chinese or Russians didn’t have so much to gain from the emasculation of the American male it would be nice for some studio to move there and produce games of similar quality with a normal message, or no message whatsoever. But instead we get Neil Druckman, the jew.
I could not agree more. I liked the first game when I played it. It still had an impact on me, because I know I was totally in line with the choice Joel made. Once the rest came out, I realized it was all a ruse. Druckmann even said that: (paraphrased) “Love is a strong force, but too much of it can make someone do a bad thing, like get revenge, or do what Joel did.” Once he said that, anyone that paid attention knew that he was basically stating Joel made the “bad” choice, in his mind. Then the rest of the trash. The second game and show are exactly what these people meant the whole time.