Partner and I have been watching The Last of Us because we stan Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey.
I was telling my partner not to expect a good character story for The Last of Us Season 2 since the show has been faithfully relaying the plot of the games especially in it’s scene composition.
For those who don't know TLOU Part 2 was explicitly written to be Israeli propaganda.
Neil Druckman (grew up as a West Bank Settler as a child, until his family moved to the US) has explicitly gone on the record to say that the story was inspired by the 2000 Ramallah lynching among other experiences in the West Bank. He’s a reflexive center left Zionist which means he’s an ultra lib loser and he donated $2,500 to both sides after October 7th and the subsequent reprisal. Also he’s a huge loser who fell for the beheaded babies propaganda.
He has explicitly gone on the record to say he wanted to essentially do what Kill BIll did for the concept of “when you seek revenge dig 2 graves”, where the ending both reifies it but also waters down its inherent tragedy in the eyes of the audience.
“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann told the Post. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”
So essentially the POV is that you’re supposed to want to feel the currently very Israeli coded feeling of being so racist, self righteous and hateful that it drives your society to hollow itself out in it’s irrational crusade to extinguish the subject of these feelings. But in a, you know, rationalizing, this is fine, this is normal, this is just people and there’s nothing you can do and some of it is kinda good actually way.
I’m incredibly curious as to how TLOU Season 2 walks this tight rope with the source material, political climate, and especially since Bella Ramsey has been so outspoken about the genocide.
My partner didn't believe me about the source material, and we started watching S2E4. Within 5 minutes they changed their tune.
Because the cold open is Isaac torturing a Seraphite while reiterating Israeli style talking points about how he doesn’t care about who’s actually doing the most killing, and that he has some abstract right to kill all of the Seraphites as revenge / preemptive self defense / etc. When the Seraphite tells him that the WLF is eating itself and their troops are joining the Seraphites and never leaving, it leads to him getting irrationally mad and just straight up executing the Seraphite. Outside the door one of WLF guards looks a bit upset for a second before the second one said “Good he got what he deserved”.
Grimly realistic stuff. Gonna be interesting how they thread this needle.
While knowing the motive behind the series erases any interest I might have in it, honestly I’m fine if they want to promote a narrative of “revenge is okay no matter what” or “pre-emptive self defense.” It won’t work out the way the director, or the west in general, think it does though. The majority of the world has seen who is real offender, the one who has brutally massacred the other from the start and constantly rejected and betrayed peace. The majority of humanity understands on some level what imperialism and colonialism feels like and has been and remains victim to it. Even across the west many are thoroughly disgusted. People know which side actually starves and slaughters babies and the vulnerable, which side actually acts like imperialist barbarians.
Settlers can play these games all they want- and they inevitably will- but it won’t end well for them. And I can’t claim I’d shed a tear when it happens, I’d have compassion and work towards minimizing or preventing harm to (actual) innocents always, sure, but this is what they will have brought on themselves if and when the tables turn.
If they had sense they’d stick to the dehumanization and denial narratives, IMO… though even then the hypocrisy and blood libel is blatant, anything else is simply teaching the rest of the world just how incompatible their mentality is with coexistence and how far humanity at large will have to go to wholly disarm and de-fang the imperialists in turn.