The Last Of Us Analysis - Tumblr Posts - Page 2

I’ve seen people ask where they’re going in this shot at the end of episode 8…

…but this actually makes sense.

Considering they didn’t kill all the Silver Lakers in the show, they’re probably weary of raiders. Going to the water’s edge not only means that they don’t have to worry about being ambushed from one side, but it also obscures the sound of their footsteps with the water.

…God, I fucking love this show.

Something that TLOU HBO did that I loved was that they let Ellie be an actual, real fourteen year old girl.

I feel like so many shows just assume that teenage girls are inherently unlikeable, so they portray them as stupid, annoying pests who should never be take seriously. Sometimes if they don’t do that they’ll go in the opposite direction, making their teen girl characters distance themselves from the demographic by being so unbelievably charming, mature, and witty that it becomes impossible for real people, especially real teenage girls, to live up to it. (As great as The Last of Us Game is, it very much does that).

A lot of times that ‘perfect teenage girl’ philosophy also carries over to appearance, with teen girl characters always dressing and looking mature, stylized, and unrealistic.

(Not the main point of the post, but you can absolutely see how these portrayals harmfully affect real teen girls by making them feel like they aren’t worthy of love unless they conform to impossible standards) (is this getting about me? Pfffffft, nooooooo…)

But The Last of Us HBO doesn’t do that. It lets Ellie be a real teen girl with all her faults. It doesn’t portray her as annoying or idealized, it portrays her as a real person who deserves to be taken seriously, and that’s something that will always help the flawed-14-year-old still inside me. She’s awkward and abrasive and charming and funny and brash and sweet and it sees her not as a pest but as a person. Someone who doesn’t always look perfect or fashionable. She’s someone who cries and screams and gets flustered without it being something to make fun of.

Craig Mazin, the main writer for the majority of the show, doesn’t see being a teen girl as something inherently wrong. I think it’s because he has a now-adult daughter who it’s clear he adores. He wrote Ellie with so much respect and care, and it’s clear he loves the character (and is also a fantastic show runner)

Thank you, Craig Mazin

One of the biggest complaints about TLOU HBO was the lack of infected, and while I do understand the reasoning, I can’t help but strongly disagree. There are two main reasons for this…

Reason 1: Fear

I believe that the toned down action not only allows for more deep and incredible character moments, but it also gives every encounter far more weight than it would have with constant enemies (this goes for people, too). Every time an infected appeared, I felt (rightfully) scared for our characters. I think it’s like if you were in a forest filled with wolves versus in a forest with one huge bear. You can constantly encounter wolves, but after enough time they don’t really become that scary. You’re constantly taking down wolves left and right, and sometimes a wolf manages to bite your ally’s neck. But now imagine you’re in a forest with a huge, terrifying bear. You’ll encounter the bear less, but every time you see it someone dies and you barely escape. That seems just as scary to me!

Reason 2: Theme

I feel like the world of TLOU Game is scary, but the world of TLOU show is haunting. Obviously, you’ll have a preference on which one you prefer, but I just love the latter. The world filled with constant enemies and things trying to kill you is intense, it’s exhilarating, but the world feeling lonely and isolating, filled with ghost towns and empty ruins, is such a bleak, heartbreaking picture that I can’t help but adore. Joel is empty after Sarah’s death, and that’s reflected in the world around him. This image of a destroyed, broken down world, is tragic. Seeing these characters make their way through what used to be cities or nurseries, now just empty husks like the survivors, is so hauntingly dark and spectacular from a storytelling standpoint. But seeing these empty husks with a child, with someone excitable and curious is beutiful in a way that’s difficult to describe. By showing the world bleak, rather than intense, the thematic elements of the story and world building are cranked up to 11.

I also understand there’s the matter of audience expectations. If you played the game first, you’d be surprised by the lack of zombies. If you started out thinking of them as you thought of them during the game, the scariness is undercut. The game is chock full of intense action sequences, so if you were expecting constant new obstacles and challenges like in the game, you’d feel like the lack of action was more glaring.

Personally, I think the show would’ve suffered from an over-abundance of actions scenes, and the more ‘Bang!’ tone of the game would’ve hurt the show. I’m not at all saying it’s bad in the game, it’s just the difference in mediums. If you presented the world of TLOU HBO in game form, it wouldn’t be nearly as good. However, if you offer the world of the game in show form, that wouldn’t have worked either. It’s all about knowing what works when, and that’s something I tremendously respect from the teams behind both the game and show. They both knew how to take full advantage of their medium, and squeeze excellence from both.

Something that makes violence in TLOU HBO so effective is that there aren’t “fight scenes”. Obviously there are action sequences, but not in the traditional sense. Violence in TLOU HBO is only used to drive thematic or character elements, which is really unique and thoughtful for a large-scale production like that.

TLOU HBO doesn’t revel in violence. It doesn’t try to be cool or flashy, it shows how devastating violence really is. Most of the time character deaths don’t even count as action sequences, which makes them so much more character-driven and effective.

The few scenes that count as full on action sequences aren’t “fights”, either. When we watch the hospital scene or the Infected in KC, we’re watching massacres.

It gives the violence in the show a brutal finality. It opens a pit in your gut in a way that copious amounts of gore can’t. By not focusing on flashy choreography or impressing the audience, it strips down action to its barest form. It gives it a disturbing level of realism, and really focuses on the characters in the situation.

Ellie’s face in this scene breaks my heart. You can see in her eyes that she knows. She isn’t crying or yelling, but just with this look you can see it so clearly. She’s hurt, she’s betrayed, she wants to cry but she can’t. She’s knows. She doesn’t want to, but she does.

It’s such a feat of acting, the fact that you can look in Ellie’s eyes and see everything she’s thinking. You can tell she knows, even though she denies it. But it’s so… real. It hurts! There’s no exaggerated look back at the camera or snarl, but somehow the look in Ellie’s eyes express even more.

Analyzing the new trailer instead of doing schoolwork because it’s more important than my future.

HBO logo on blurry backgrounds… oooooh, it gets me so hyped.

”David? I knew a David once. He was a weird little queer boy.”

“Seems like we’re talking about different David’s, then…”

Catherine O’Hara is a therapist/Jackson resident confirmed! No sneaky editing here!

They love each other so much😭 Can’t wait to see this guitar lesson❤️❤️

Gah, this scene is gonna break me😭❤️ also holy heck this set design!

I think this person is Ellie, since you can see the fur on the hood of the jacket. The person next to her on the lighter horse is most likely Dina, then.

The porch scene😭 also I’m not sure how anyone can think Bella doesn’t look 19 in this, because the weariness of our little Ellie is absolutely heartbreaking💔

“Don’t mind me, just washing the blood off my knife knife”

I believe this scene is during the infected attack, since they’re wearing the same clothes.

Also, this isn’t Tommy’s eye injury, I don’t think. However, because of Maria’s eggplant jacket we can see that it’s her in this scene:

Maria’s favorite is eggplant purple confirmed??

This is the scene from the promo shots that were released. You can tell because of the setting and Ellie’s outfit.

Abby mourning her dad. So psyched to see Kaitlyn Dever, watch Dopesick if you haven’t!

Craig Mazin: Oh, you wanted more infected did you? Huh? *spits* Fuck you! I’m the boss! Here’s your fucking infected!

Pretty sure the gun is Joel’s… hahahaha I’m gonna die hahahaha

Going back to the first horsey picture, this is probably Dina and Ellie, with Dina on the lighter horse.

First close-up look of the Scars!! Wooooooo!!

Well this is terrifyingly AWESOME

I just love Ellie’s little hair curl here

Tortured Seraphite and Jeffrey Wright looking incredibly scary. Love it.

This is the infected attack on Jackson, probably. Same type of walls and the snowy environment.

🎵Scars burning alive, you know how I fee-ee-eel🎵

It’s September, take your damn Santa hat off, dead-boy. Also, this is the train sequence for sure. At least that’s what I got judging from the red lighting and… the fact they’re in a train…

I think this is Joel, judging from the general physique and facial hair. Also BELLA STOP YOU’RE GONNA KILL ME!!

Joel loves his coffee❤️

I always try never to compare Pedro and Bella’s performances with Ashley and Troy’s.

That isn’t to say I don’t compare performances in general, or that I don’t have character choices that prefer in one version over the other, because I absolutely do. I just think that in this specific instance, the comparison of ‘X did better acting than Y’ is nonsensical and reductive of both parties. Both versions of TLOU have absolutely stellar performances, but they aren’t the same kind of performances!

In gaming, the actors have to be more exaggerated in order to get emotion across, since mocap doesn’t allow for the kind of subtle emotion that video does. You can’t tell what someone’s thinking by the look in their eyes or the way they hold their bodies without it being more exaggerated. But being more exaggerated doesn’t mean being more expressive. Pedro and Bella are both truly fantastic subtle actors, who act more with their eyes than most Hollywood stars do with their whole bodies. That’s just as expressive, it’s just a different kind of expressive. Acting with your eyes and with the subtle ways you hold your body just isn’t possible in video games yet.

If you took Ashley and Troy’s performances in TLOU game and stuck them 1:1 in a live action show, they would seem out of place and over-acted. That’s good! That’s how it’s supposed to be, because mocap and v/o acting are different from live-action, in-front-of-camera acting. Ashley and Troy are also incredible tv actors, but video game acting isn’t tv acting!

My point is that not is comparing these specific sets of actor’s performance useless and unnecessarily antagonistic, it’s also nonsensical. They both gave stellar performances, each pair delivering all-time-great acting specifically tailored for their respective mediums, and that deserves our respect and admiration, not useless manufactured competition.

David and the Infected

David mirrors the infected in The Last of Us HBO. His behaviors, his development, and even his hunting patterns. These parallels are all used by Craig Mazin and Ali Abassi to highlight just how much worse he is.

TWs: SA, Violence/Gore, and Religion

What happens if you don’t resist?

That was a question posed by Craig Mazin, show-runner of The Last of Us, in a discussion about the second episode of season 1. The answer is that the infected are slow, almost gentle in their violation. The same goes for David. In the cage scene we see the same slow, haunting torture that we do in episode two.

Both start out slow and gentle to try and feed off of people, but the more their victims resist the more savage and aggressive they become. When you resist, they fight. They hunt.

But here’s what really put the nail in the coffin. The way they hunt their victims, and the parallels in cinematography is undeniable.

They’re both predators that stalk their physically-weaker pray:

They both try to trap them by holding them down:

(Bella fucking Ramsey, folks) (genuinely one of the best working actors today)

3. The Hive Mentality

Like the Infected, David has a hive-mind too. A group of people doing his bidding, like how Cordyceps takes over people’s minds and connects them to each other. We see how everyone in Silver Lake obeys him, is under his control, just like Cordyceps. We also see how they gravitate towards him and go where he goes like the Infected do for each other.

4. Literally Eating People

I’m not sure this requires further explanation…

But this doesn’t mean they’re the same. Quite the opposite, actually. The creators shatter these parallels to show how much more terrifying David is than the Infected, because he’s human. Everything he does is something terrifyingly human. Lying and manipulating his way to horrifying goals. The fact that he doesn’t do what Infected do, he does what humans do makes everything he does so, so much scarier than the Infected.

The clickers use noise to find their pray while hunting, but David uses noise to yell vile, disgusting things to scare his.

The clickers are animals, they just do what’s instinctual of them, but David chooses every second of the story to be inhuman. He manipulates and lies and acts to hurt others. The infected are creatures, but David’s a monster. Infected only know what’s ahead of them, but David plans ahead. He knows full well what he’s doing, but he does it anyway. He manipulates and scares his hive-mind into submission. He makes the conscious choice to eat people. The infected do what they do to survive, like all animals. David does it because he likes it.

And we all knew by the end of the episode that David wasn’t like the Infected in another way, too. He wasn’t planning on eating Ellie.

It’s terrifying and brilliant, like all of episode 8. They use these parallels to make David so much scarier than the Infected, for so many reasons. It shows how much depth and thought is put into the show, and the way that behind every scene there’s so many layers of meaning and parallels.

TLDR; Craig Mazin and Ali Abassi are geniuses. They created parallels just to flip them to show us how much more terrifying David is than the Infected.