There’s been a brouhaha over the last year or so about women and gaming. On the one extreme, we’ve got the mouthbreathers spewing the usual sexist crap. On the other extreme, we have Anita Sarkeesian and her highly disingenuous “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” which criticizes the tropes, but doesn’t offer any substantive evaluation beyond, “This is bad, mmm’kay.”More recently, with the release of The Last of Us, we have Chris Suellentrop over at The New York Times bemoaning how the game just follows the conventions and declares, “This is another video game by men, for men and about men.” Naughty Dog, naturally, took umbrage at this assertion, particularly in light of the story that they actually told their PR firm to get more women into the testing groups when it seems there was a dearth of them earlier.
Having played through the game, I have to wonder what game Suellentrop played, because the credits at the end of the game most certainly contained a large number of women’s names in there. And I have to wonder why Suellentrop and Sarkeesian seem to think it’s so bad being a man. (I disagree vehemently with John Scalzi’s assertion that being a white male means you go through life on “easy mode,” since I’m pretty sure that inside and outside of the U.S., there’s places where being a white guy is more of a detriment than a benefit, if not a net zero. A rant for another time.)
I feel the need to make a strong distinction between “male” and “man,” and I will say that The Last of Us should be “for men and about men” in the best possible way. It’s not about the male macho power fantasy. It’s not some chest thumping screed about the inherent awesomeness of a penis. Amid the explosions, the gunfire, and the creepy-as-all-hell clicking of the infected, it’s the small things that stand out. It’s the quiet moments and unspoken messages that are the real power behind the game.
I’m not married and I have no kids. And yet, The Last of Us' prologue ended with me crying a little bit, chest pinched in pain. Sarkeesian would likely dismiss the prologue as just another example of the “woman in the fridge” trope, and she’d be dead wrong.
Look at the setup: yes, you’re playing as Joel’s daughter Sarah, but the first cutscene establishes clearly that of her two parents, it’s Joel that has been taking care of her. You don’t hear anything about Joel’s wife until later in the game, and it follows the not-unfamiliar pattern of two kids who probably had a shotgun wedding. Seriously, read a “Dear Abby” column in your local paper and you’ll hear a variation on the theme at least twice a week. If the main character in the game had been Joleen, there could have been a just as equally trite (and no less offensive) use of the “Daddy went out for cigarettes and never came back” trope. For whatever reason, Joel’s the only parent Sarah has, and they love each other. They’re not rich, just barely getting by, but they both know there’s one person in the world that loves them unconditionally. When Sarah starts wandering the house and sees Joel shooting one of the neighbors that’s become infected, it’s clear that Joel is not just some dumb redneck with a gun and a hankering to shoot folks. He has been outside and he is reacting to a threat against his family, which at that moment consists exclusively of his daughter. His recently awakened, completely unarmed, and not unreasonably freaked out daughter. ‘Cause let’s face it, most of us do not tuck our kids in with a bedtime story and a loaded pistol in anticipation that infected maniacs are going to burst into the room with homicidal intent.
Going through the game, it becomes pretty obvious in very short order that there are plenty of opportunities for women to not just be empowered, but be in power, or as much power as one can grab without being part of the network of police city-states that post-Cordyceps America has become. Joel’s partner Tess, for example, does not appear in any way, shape, or form to be anything other than Joel’s boss. Colleagues, maybe even friends of a sort, but the primary engine of their relationship is business. In the real world, if your boss comes in looking like they were in a fight, you ask what happened. If it looks like they just got jumped a few minutes ago, you make up an ice pack. This is basic courtesy and simple human decency. Joel’s not upset because “his woman” got beat up. He’s upset because his boss got robbed and their supply stock is gone.
As the game progresses, we meet two other very strongly written women characters outside of Ellie. The most important of the two is arguably Marlene, the head of the Boston Fireflies cell who puts the entire adventure into motion. Marlene isn’t frivolous or an airhead, but she is capable of making mistakes, and her great flaw seems to be her inability to pick her battles carefully. Being the head of an insurgent cell isn’t exactly like running a business or raising a family. A bad day as a resistance fighter means too many people died for too little gain. She needs fighters, and fighters need equipment, and she knows how hard it can be to obtain both. Yet, she manages to get a lot of her fighters killed picking the wrong fights with the Feds. Complicating the matter is looking out for Ellie, which she botches, causing Ellie to become infected with the spores. Forget not watching your kids around the pool. Becoming an infected lunatic is the major fear everybody in the game world lives with every day. And at the end, Marlene fails because she chose the wrong fight again. What exactly did she think would happen if she tossed Joel out without even giving him a chance to talk to Ellie? That he was just going to meekly roll over and accept what she was going to do? She might be great at logistics, but Marlene demonstrably sucks at tactics. She got her own team pretty much wiped out making the same trip Joel and Ellie did. There’s a giant swath of fricasseed clickers and gunned down cannibals which should have suggested either getting Joel on board or just shooting him without ever bringing him into the hospital. Marlene dies pretty much as we’ve seen her live: her actions blow back on her spectacularly. Not because she’s a woman, but because she sucks at her job.
It’s the character arc of Ellie that is, for me, one of the most satisfying elements of the game, and apparently one of the more insulting for the game’s detractors. Yes, Joel spends the lion’s share of the game under our control. Yes, even Joel initially thinks of her as a particularly troublesome package rather than as a human being. But there’s never any indication that she’s helpless or useless. Even from the first moment we see her, she’s armed and ready to shank the first person who looks at her funny. She has never known a world that wasn’t under threat from the spores. She has never been outside the walls of the Boston Quarantine Zone. Take all of that away and you’re left with a typical 14 year old: young and stupid, but in the process of growing up and growing wise. There’s no great affinity between Joel and Ellie at the start. He’s just the guy leading her to the Fireflies, she’s just the cargo, and there is nothing more than a straight up business transaction involved. But as they are forced to go farther out and leave Boston altogether, the relationship changes in an organic and highly logical fashion. In a stand-up fight, basic math says a 14 year old who stands five foot nothing and weighs a buck ten with her backpack full isn’t going to enjoy a lot of advantages against an opponent who’s older, taller, and heavier than her. But that same short lightweight kid makes a hell of a backstabber and ambusher, and there were more than a few fights in the game where Ellie just bounced around and stabbed dudes in the face, at least in the early stages. Joel can’t reach some spots on his own, Ellie can’t swim at all, and the two of them cannot make any forward progress without working together. As time goes on, Joel takes on a mentor role to Ellie, mainly because he needs her help as much as she needs his experience. A guy who survives two decades in the fungal hellscape is probably somebody you want to learn as much as you can from if you want to try and beat his record.
The relationship changes again at the end of the “Fall” section of the game, and I think it was either the worst visual pun one could conceive of or the folks at Naughty Dog really didn’t notice the gag. Joel flying off a balcony and getting impaled back to front with a chunk of rebar was quite possibly the most visceral and stomach churning moment in the game after the prologue, and in some respects, it feels worse. I sat slackjawed through the rest of that cutscene and had to pause the game for a few minutes to get myself back into the right frame of mind to continue. The same refrain kept rolling through my mind: “They are so fucked.”
Joel’s been doing the heavy lifting for the entire game up to that point. He’s been teaching Ellie as often as he can and she’s been a quick study, but impalement isn’t like a knife wound or a pellet of buckshot digging into you. Tetanus, sepsis, gangrene, organ failure, and that’s all assuming he doesn’t just bleed out right there on the ground. If there was ever a situation short of Joel himself becoming infected with Cordyceps that would spell certain doom for the adventure, this was it right here. But the “Winter” section starts up and we’re playing as Ellie, and it looks like she’s been paying attention. She’s off hunting deer at the start of the chapter, and I found it very easy to identify with her situation. If there’s one thing that is annoying as hell even when it’s absolutely important, it’s trying to track a deer through the woods without spooking it. I understood and felt her frustration at the stalk, because I’ve been there myself, and it’s equal opportunity. More importantly, I got the feeling that things were going to be all right. Even if Joel had died, which I wasn’t certain of at the start of that section, there was the certainty that Joel had done a good job teaching Ellie how to survive.
It’s the second half of the “Winter” section that I think got Suellentrop bent out of shape, where you’re switching between Joel (alive but still kinda beat up) and Ellie (a little beat up but still alive). From a story perspective, if that section had stayed just centered on Ellie, I would have felt kind of cheated if Joel had suddenly shown up out of nowhere, a blatant “knight in shining armor” trope that even I would have found insulting to me as a player. I’m not so sure about how I would have felt if Joel hadn’t come to, basically sleeping through the entire section, but something tells me it wouldn’t have been as effective. A major theme in the game is partnership, the ability of two people to work together closely to effect a mutually desired outcome. The “Winter” section took a chance on exploring that theme in a different way. The first half of the entire game was about working in close proximity. This section tested the idea of how partners can work independently and still support each other. As a test section, and probably one of the most challenging sections in the game, it worked really well. Beyond that point, I don’t know if it would have served the story to keep them separated.
It’s the finale that probably offers a bone of contention equal to the “Winter” sequence. Joel’s operating solo again and on a mission to get Ellie out of the hospital before she’s killed on the operating table in the name of science.
Sarkeesian would doubtlessly classify this as a manifestation of the “helpless princess” trope, and she would be right in one sense, but wrong in another. For starters, let’s look at why Ellie is helpless in this scenario. She’s under general anaesthetic, so right there, she’s not going to be doing a whole hell of a lot. The woman who raised her between the time Ellie’s mother died and that fateful day in Boston apparently agonized over the decision, but didn’t think it was important to ask Ellie what she wanted or if she was willing to make that sacrifice.
Oh, and that same woman apparently didn’t think it was important enough to let Joel have an opportunity to at least say goodbye, and was willing to have him shot if he tried to press the point. Yet it’s somehow a bad thing that we want to save Ellie? This is our companion, our comrade, our buddy, laid out on the altar, about to be sacrificed in the hopes of a cure being developed. If Marlene had been just a little bit smarter about it, or even lied convincingly about Ellie’s willingness to undergo the procedure, things would have turned out differently. But, as I pointed out before, Marlene picked a fight with the wrong guy for the last time. If you believe your friend’s in immediate and mortal peril, who wouldn’t try to save them? After everything Joel and Ellie went through together, it would have been idiotic to think either one of them wouldn’t come to the other’s aid if they were in danger. We saw that much in the “Winter” sequence. There’s no reason to think that would stop happening just because the snow melted.
Earlier, I said that this game should be “for men and about men” in the best way possible. For all of the terrible things Joel had done before he met Ellie, he demonstrated more than a few virtues. Tenacity and resolve in the face of danger. The willingness to teach the next generation on how to get by in the world. The refusal to surrender to despair. The belief that one does not abandon their friends when they’re in trouble.
Some might argue that for all of that, Joel betrays his friendship with Ellie by not telling her the truth about Marlene and the hospital. I would counter that there are times when being honest and telling the whole truth does nothing but hurt the people we care about. How do you tell somebody that their foster mother basically led them like a lamb to the slaughter? How do you explain the degree of betrayal they experienced and didn’t even know it? My impression is that Ellie knew that Joel was lying to her and chose to accept the lie. Two people who’ve been working that closely under repeated life threatening conditions come to know each other very well. Picking up on each other’s verbal and non-verbal cues is an important survival skill which has the added benefit of letting people know when they’re lying or telling the truth. And Ellie’s acceptance of the lie is an unspoken acknowledgement that she has at least some idea of the truth. How much, we don’t know, but enough that she can move on with her life. And she can move on with her life because she is still alive.
I found nothing inherently sexist in The Last of Us. As a game, it was excellently done. As a story, it gave us rich and complex characters of both genders. I do not doubt that there are still areas that games and gamers need to work on in terms of gender equality. But this is not one of those games. And in our quest for mutual respect, we do ourselves a disservice to automatically reject positive virtues and behaviors of characters who are men as sexist. To denigrate, dismiss, and devalue those elements simply because they are performed by men is just as sexist and no less reprehensible than it is for women.
- Axel Cushing
