4
Last of Us
Season Two
My gripe (seemingly for Craig based on his public commentary, but could be the decision of the whole team) is how the show sees Ellie as a child, in way over her head, incompetence baked in simply because of her youth and hormone-soaked teenage angst. This wouldn’t be out of place for a kid character living in a civilization, but post-apocalyptic characters are not usually afforded this. Ellie would have died much, much earlier in her life if she did things like drop a tank door loudly enough to summon infected.
The show seems interested in depicting her like one of the characters in the early 90s movie “KIDS”, in which young adolescents severely and tragically mess up their lives and the lives of the people around them by toying with highly consequential things like drugs and violence.
This approach contrasts quite strongly with many people’s experiences with game-Ellie, a loveably vulgar mass-murderer with the skills of a green beret assassin, her converse sneakers very much her superhero suit. She isn’t too young or incompetent for anything EXCEPT how to healthily process her grief. That’s part of why I love her: her emotional wellbeing and empathy is developing much more slowly and in an understandably trauma-stunted way compared to her natural ability to ruthlessly navigate the world she is in.
I question the need to push for more “realism” with Ellie. This is a post-apocalyptic fantasy. A different set of showrunners might have pushed for Ellie to be doing backflips or superhero landings and they would have reason to suggest them. Game Ellie is a terminator.
In order for me to feel super invested in her inner emotional state, I need her wise-cracking John Wick persona to plow through lots of bad guys. That’s the duality that makes the emotional highlights of her game arc so incredibly precious: her feelings are covered in the blood of all the people she outmatched. She needs to be pretty undefeated in order to realize she cannot “beat” her own trauma like she beats everything/everyone else - that is how she finally starts to grow.