"There are a million ways we could’ve died today. And a million ways we could die before tomorrow. But we fight for every second we get to spend with each other. Whether its two minutes… or two days… we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up. My vote? Let’s just wait it out. You know, we can be all poetic and just lose our minds together."
Ellie and Riley cosplay by Me and chocolaten1nja
The cutest pair ever.
With the use of spoiler tags, this review is spoiler free for Left Behind, but not The Last of Us.
@tlougame @Naughty_Dog
Drew this in the summer with the silly idea of Ellie dealing with gruesome situations and Joel always responding with, “Oh Ellie.” :P I didn’t like the drawing but found it just now so I thought I’d finish it.
OH ELLIE.
I can’t draw zombies, you guys,
Oh great, you might think, another male main character given emotional problems by killing a female one who will be “fixed” by interacting with a secondary female character. And, yeah, I was a little worried. But the reality of Joel’s character arc turned out to subvert this in a very real way. Whether you consider The Last of Us to have a happy ending may depend entirely on whether you are or have ever been a parent. Joel’s final actions could be seen as either an incredible act of selfishness, or the only possible choice anyone could have made in his situation. And Ellie is just… I find it difficult to describe how firmly the game establishes that she’s smart, capable, and subordinate to Joel only in twenty-five years of emotional experience and maybe 150 pounds. That is, without explicitly describing the events of the game. There was a point where I really thought The Last of Us was going for the old “play as the secondary character until she gets in trouble and then the main character regains consciousness to rescue her heroically,” but I was proven wrong. I was proven wrong with machetes.
If the folks who were responsible for problematic portrayals of female characters or poor representation of real women in games industry were doing it all purely deliberately, it’d probably be a lot easier to fix. The reality is that a lot of this stuff is far more subtle than that, and the sad fact remains that all of us are capable of having noble or even neutral intentions while still overlooking the subtle ways in which we’re contributing to a stereotype, operating on a false assumption, or missing out on a different but important perspective. Case in point, some of the things the creators of The Last of Us have mentioned lately.