The Last of Us Part 2 and Survivor's Guilt (and more).

The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered Art

This is a bit of a shift from what I usually talk about, but both The Last of Us games hold an extremely special spot in my heart. What I find fascinating is how Part 2 explores mental illness and survivors guilt with the main character, Ellie Williams. (Spoilers)

For a brief summary, The Last of Us is set in an apocalyptic future where the world has been overrun with a mutation of the Cordyceps fungus that can affect human life. The first game is set 20 years after the outbreak and follows Joel Miller as he smuggles an immune girl(Ellie Williams) to a doctor across the country to make a vaccine for the fungus. They get into trouble together, and bond, forming a strong father/daughter bond. At the end of the game, when they finally reach the doctor, it's revealed that in order to make the vaccine, Ellie's life would be sacrificed to harvest the cordyceps inside of her body. Joel can't accept that, and goes on a killing spree, slaughtering the group of people, and the doctor who could have made the vaccine. He lies to Ellie, telling her that there were dozens of other immune people, so she wasn't special.

Part 2 is special, as it has two protagonists, but I will only be focusing on Ellie's story. It is set about 4 years after the end of the first game. The other protagonist is Abby Anderson. There is a brief intro and walkthrough of the controls, then Abby and Joel meet, and she brings him back to where she was residing due to a massive hoard of infected. She pulls out a shotgun, shoots his legs and begins to beat him. We learn that Abby is the daughter of the doctor that Joel killed, the one who could have made the vaccine for the infection. She, and a group of her friends, blame Joel for not only killing their friends, but also dooming the entire world.

Ellie walks in right before the killing blow lands, and is forced to watch as the man who's taken care of her since she was 14. She begs them to stop, but Joel's life is taken and Ellie is knocked out.

Throughout the first half of the game, the player is Ellie, tracking down and hunting Abby, killing anybody who gets in her way.

Something to note about Ellie's part is that throughout the game there are flashbacks to after the event at the hospital, and we learn that Ellie found out Joel lied about what happened, and that she would never be able to forgive him. It takes a lot of time, and Joel admitting that he was not willing to give Ellie up because (without verbalizing it) he loves her. She understands how hard it was for him to do that, and that he truly did love her, and she said she would "like to try" to forgive him. This was the night before Joel was brutally murdered in front of Ellie. To get a bit more information about what Joel did and how it effected Ellie in the long term, check out my friend Raegan's post about Joel being an unreliable narrator! Link here!

The start of Ellie's journey is low-action, you find a few empty buildings, and have to search around for gas to power a generator, and a gate code to get into the city with her girlfriend, Dina. Ellie get's ambushed, and almost killed, but is saved by Dina who managed to escape the ambush. This is where Ellie gets her first kill of Abby's group, and where her revenge starts to consume her.

After this first kill, she only focuses on whoever is next on her list. She finds more information about the other group and ends up hunting them down. She gets entirely consumed by revenge and disregards any feeling of her girlfriend (who is pregnant, surprise!) When she finds out Dina is pregnant, she actively gets mad at her because she thought they would have to go back home without finding, and killing, Abby.

Her survivor's guilt combines with revenge to make her into someone the player barely recognizes, but the player feels almost the same as Ellie does—angry at Abby for taking Joel away, since he was the protagonist of the first game. Naughty Dog did a fantastic job making the audience attach themselves to these characters.

Ellie eventually murders her way through Seattle to find Abby, killing quite literally all of Abby's friends (except for like, two of them) by herself. She even (unknowingly) kills a pregnant woman at the place she knew she'd find Abby. (She tortured one of Abby's friends for the information.) While playing this game, you feel for Ellie. You believe what she's doing is right because of your attachment to Joel, but when looking at it from what Ellie was in the first game, she's turned into something completely different. She was 14 in the first game, and 19 in the second game. When you meet her in the first game, she's very hard-headed, but you can tell she's a very caring girl. Seeing her become this monstrous being over the course of three days in unsettling, and the worst part is, even after she does all of this, Abby still lives. Abby(or you, since you play as Abby during this part) ends up finding Ellie's base of operations, kills one of her friends, and shoots another in the face (he lives though), and then the two fight. Abby ends up coming out on top, and then story takes a pause.

We come back to Abby, trying to find a group of her old faction, but she gets ambushed and kidnapped.

After that we go back to Ellie, who actively is struggling with PTSD, reliving the moment of Joel's death and how she can't escape it, and Joel's brother, Tommy, comes out to her and Dina's home and tells them information about Abby's whereabouts. Ellie wrestles with the idea, but she makes her mind, even telling Dina that "I don't eat, I don't sleep. I'm not like you." Ellie sets off to find Abby. Months after their fight in Seattle.

She eventually gets to the area and tracks down Abby. She goes through a group of slavers, and murders her way through them until she finds Abby tied up on a pole at the beach. Abby was once extremely muscular and formidable, and when Ellie finds her, she's scrawny and weak. She cuts Abby down and forces her to fight. She threatens the life of Abby's adoptive younger brother, and they fight.

Ellie ends up winning, but before she forces Abby to drown, she lets go, remembering happy memories of Joel and of who she used to be. She tells her to go and take the boy while she stays on the beach, covered in blood, missing 2 fingers (Abby bit them off), and sobbing violently. I don't know if she gets closure, but she ends up going back to her home with Dina, but everything is gone. Furniture is gone, all of Dina's things. The only thing left is Ellie's art room, and the guitar Joel gave her for her birthday that she can't even play anymore because of the missing fingers.

She's changed, and has to live with the memory of Joel's death and life, and the fact she could not avenge him. I think she may have realized the cycle of revenge that would happen because of the boy Abby saved.

Either way, this game makes me so sad, and it does not get happier throughout the entire playthrough. I feel for the character of Ellie, forced into a world where she is special (immune), but the purpose of her life is gone. She was mad at Joel because he took away the chance for her life to mean something. She feels like her life means nothing anymore since she doesn't have anybody left.

They've all died or left.