How ‘The Last of Us 2’ fails its women protagonists

This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us, The Last of Us Part II, and Left Behind.

With two daughters starring as the lead protagonists, you’d think The Last of Us Part II would be a game about daughters. But it isn’t. Instead, it only purports to be about Ellie and Abby, all while reducing both women’s lives to revolving entirely around their fathers. 

Far from revolutionary, Last of Us II reads more like a veiled retread of the dad game — an old trend from 2013 that often stripped its daughter characters of their agency and personhood. 

You have not created fully fleshed out human beings. You’ve created projections of the paternal gaze.

At the time several aging game designers (often experiencing new fatherhood) started trying to tell more mature stories, leading to a slew of titles about dads and their daughters that released to near-unanimous praise. But unlike BioShock Infinite, Walking Dead Season 1, or Dishonored, the original Last of Us was different, subverting expectations by actually giving its daughter some autonomy. Ellie wasn’t just a non-playable mechanic used to make her father’s decisions more narratively interesting. She was a playable character in her own right, with her own interiority, abilities, worldview, and convictions independent of her father figure.

It’s a devastating blow, then, to see what’s become of a series once known for its groundbreaking and singularly humanizing treatment of the daughter character. Because while Last of Us II gives us twice as long to actually play as Ellie, she’s less than half the person she was in the original.

The fact is, if the motivations of not one but both your women protagonists hinge almost exclusively on a psychotically single-minded obsession with their dead dads, then you have not created fully fleshed out human beings. You’ve created projections of the paternal gaze, capable only of reflecting women and girls through the limited perspectives of the men who raise them. 

Saddest of all, the Last of Us II dashes any remaining hope that the daughter game — a counter-trend to the dad game — can ever reach its full potential in AAA games.

The rise and fall of the daughter game

Thanks to the success of the dad game, each daughter got her own full release or DLC, inadvertently leading to an unprecedented number of mainstream games starring young girl protagonists.

The daughter game trend carried with it a promise of better representation. By relinquishing those young women characters from the confines of the dad game, they could tell their own stories, reclaim their autonomy, and perhaps even explore daughterhood with as much depth as dad games afforded fatherhood.

Then those daughter games actually came out, each falling abysmally short of any one of those lofty dreams.

SEE ALSO: ‘The Last of Us Part II’ is a powerful yet deeply flawed artistic triumph

As it turns out, the predominantly male creators behind dad games were far less adept at immersing players in the daughter’s perspective. BioShock Infinite’s laughably bad Buried at Sea DLC only turned Elizabeth into a playable tool for Booker’s narrative this time around. Clem’s Walking Dead Season 2 had its moments, but mostly signaled the decline of the series as a whole. Dishonored 2 fared better, but only if you chose to play as Emily, since the option to play as her dad still remained.

Once again though, Left Behind (Ellie’s 2014 DLC) was an outlier, a masterpiece all on its own with narrative and mechanical innovations that immersed players in authentic experiences of girlhood play and love. Yet somehow after six long years of anticipation, Ellie’s first proper full release feels less like the daughter game’s peak and more like its funeral. 

Because despite its cover art and marketing, Last of Us II isn’t even really Ellie’s game — and I don’t mean because she splits half of it with Abby. Despite even its commendable representation of characters who aren’t the usual straight cis white men of AAA blockbuster games, Last of Us II doesn’t let any one of them out from under the dad game’s looming shadow. 

Neither Ellie nor Abby can be the center of their own game because, even after literally bludgeoning him to death a few hours in, Last of Us II still finds a way to somehow make everything about Joel.

Always daddy’s little girl

Now, I’m not here to minimize any child’s grief over a lost parent (especially one violently killed before their eyes). But I am here to point out the demeaning shallowness of women characters whose whole existence — reasons for living, for viciously murdering, for risking the lives of every loved one still breathing around them — always comes back to their dead dads.

In Ellie’s case, it’s an even more dubious motivation when the dad in question isn’t even a good person. Because it should go without saying, but since some folks (including the creators) seem to have forgotten: The first game’s ending makes it pretty clear that Joel is not a good man, or arguably even a good dad. Sure, he kept Ellie alive. But Joel’s final act at the end of Last of Us not only robs Ellie of her agency but co-opts her in the downfall of all mankind. Worse still, he only “saves” Ellie (against her wishes) to selfishly spare himself the grief of losing her.

I mean, is our bar for stellar fatherhood really that low?

For Last of Us II, apparently, it is. The game idolizes Joel in death, while never bothering to fully unpack his failures as a father or the deep trauma his betrayal inflicted upon his daughter.

At most there are two flashback scenes addressing it, but both are only concerned with how Ellie finding out impacts her relationship with Joel. No time is spent on Ellie processing her own guilt, anger, and pain over being made the unwitting, involuntary cause of humanity’s end. Aside from the flashbacks, there’s only one other line of dialogue that even hints at her harboring such feelings, when she tells Abby to kill her instead of the others at the theater.

“Joel did what he did to save me. There’s no cure because of me. I’m the one you want,” she says. It’s one of our only fleeting glimpses into the unimaginable pain Joel caused Ellie, overshadowed by the game’s near-exclusive focus on her pain over losing him.

If you squint hard enough to read between the lines of her journal (otherwise filled with pages and pages of missing dear ol’ dad) you might find a few more hints at potentially conflicted feelings toward Joel. While listing what she knows about his killers, for example, Ellie questions whether to tell Dina and Jesse that they killed Joel for wiping out the Fireflies. 

“No they can’t know,” she writes, “They won’t understand. Do I understand?”

But understand what, exactly? The game never gives any insight whatsoever into the fundamental question of what Ellie does or does not understand about Joel’s decision.

Throughout the game characters like Dina and Jesse do repeatedly try to ask what Ellie’s thinking or why she’s on this rampage. But she clearly inherited Joel’s refusal to open up. Unlike Joel in Last of Us, though, this game doesn’t give Ellie a single chance to let down her guard. She doesn’t even take the opportunity to unpack her feelings about being immune with Dina, the love of her life and only other human left alive who knows about this pretty monumental secret. 

All of it is endemic of just how little Last of Us II cares to explore Ellie’s interiority — unless it’s related to Joel, of course.

Last of Us II does such a poor job of grounding us in Ellie’s inner world that some of her most essential character development and emotional processing (like why she can’t stay on the farm with Dina and JJ, for instance) happens only inside an optional-to-read journal. I mean imagine if essential parts of Joel’s emotional arc in Last of Us took place in his diary entries?

All of it is endemic of just how little Last of Us II cares to explore Ellie’s interiority — unless it’s related to Joel, of course. Everything else is, at best, left to vague subtext. But no amount of subtext is louder than the text, which overtly and repeatedly positions Joel as Ellie’s sole concern.

Instead of any character growth, the closest the game gets to communicating Ellie’s emotional journey is various shots of her blood-soaked face after committing another hard-earned murder for Joel, repeated PTSD flashbacks to Joel’s death that cause her to make inexplicable decisions like leave the farm or let Abby go, and a bunch of other flashback sequences that are only about (you guessed it) Joel. 

Presumably an attempt to help the player understand and empathize with Ellie’s rampage, the flashbacks are instead one of the most insulting reductions of her humanity. But the final one is the most egregious and gross of all.

“I was supposed to die in that hospital. My life would’ve fucking mattered. But you took that from me,” she says in her last conversation with Joel, at last confronting him for what he did to her.

Astoundingly, Joel doesn’t respond with an apology but rather a resolute, “And I’d do it all again!” Despite showing zero remorse or understanding that what he did was wrong, the game then forces Ellie to accept this as enough. Without Joel earning a single ounce of it, Ellie promises to forgive him one day anyway.

None of the other flashbacks sequences are about Ellie as a character in her own right, either. If anything, those scenes only betray the game’s inability to commit to killing Joel off at all, making the story bend over backward to keep him at its center rather than take that time to understand who Ellie is without him. The flashbacks even rob you of being fully immersed in Ellie’s grief because you, as the player, know Joel’s going to show up every couple hours throughout her portions of the game.

Ellie’s blind love for Joel is even stranger when you consider that he isn’t even her actual father. He was a smuggler hired to deliver her as a package, who only begrudgingly began taking on a fatherly role late into their journey together. In the grand scheme of things, she met this guy five years ago, the majority of which she spent feeling understandably estranged and conflicted about him. Ellie’s years in Jackson were otherwise preoccupied with developing other, healthier interpersonal relationships with people like Tommy, Cat, Dina, and Jesse.

Yet Ellie’s more than willing to throw Tommy, Jesse, and Dina’s lives away — as well as toss their beautiful life on the farm with JJ — for the sake of Joel’s literal corpse. The game can’t let Ellie be Dina’s partner or JJ’s mom because she must first, foremost, and only be Joel’s daughter, even after he’s gone.

She must first, foremost, and only be Joel’s daughter, even after he’s gone.

But Ellie lived a full 14 years of life before Joel came along. And before Last of Us II, the franchise portrayed her as being much more than just Joel’s daughter. She was also Riley’s best friend and crush. She was her mother’s daughter, too.

At least in the first game Marlene mentions Ana, Ellie’s mom who died shortly after childbirth. In a letter, we even learn that Marlene promised Ana she’d keep Ellie safe, taking on something of a surrogate mother role for years before asking Joel to temporarily take over.

But in case you, like The Last of Us II, also forgot: Joel then went on to unceremoniously murder Marlene in cold blood while holding Ellie’s unconscious body in his arms at the end of the first game. Marlene tries to stop him from kidnapping Ellie by forcing him to see that sacrificing herself for a vaccine is “what she’d want. And you know it.” Joel doesn’t deny it, but instead shoots Marlene in the face, because “You’d just come after her.”

What a savior, amiright?

Despite Ellie having a much deeper history with Marlene, though, she never once asks what happened to her in Last of Us II. Joel is never made to reckon with the fact that he implicated Ellie in not only Marlene’s slaughter, but the slaughter of the entire ideology she stood for when he wipes out the Fireflies too. 

The monster daddy made you

That’s another nuance in Ellie’s character from the original game completely absent from its sequel. One of the most interesting tensions between Joel and Ellie in Last of Us was how, unlike Joel, Ellie actually believed in the Fireflies’ hope for a better world.

“After all we’ve been through. Everything that I’ve done. It can’t be for nothing,” she told him before they reached the hospital, expressing a willingness to sacrifice anything in order to justify all the senseless violence they’d committed and endured together.

But Last of Us II makes it abundantly clear that the entire first game was all for nothing. Everything Ellie stood for, fought for — how she even convinced Joel little by little to see the goodness in humanity despite its cruelty — was for nothing. The Ellie of Last of Us II Is devoid of those foundational beliefs, with no indication of how she became such a one-dimensional, unfeeling, unapologetic monster.

And I get it: the implicit message (beaten over your head again and again) is that Ellie is the monster Joel made her. But again, that’s an unbelievably reductive depiction of her character — and how people work in general. Daughters aren’t just products of their fathers’ worst qualities. To reiterate, Ellie had 14 years before and four years after her journey with Joel, filled with many other impactful relationships with other people who should be given a bit more credit for influencing the young woman she grows up to become.

Last of Us II is a game that apparently thinks daughters only have dads. 

But Last of Us II is a game that apparently thinks daughters only have dads. 

Abby’s mom is mentioned maybe once in passing. But other than that, we can safely assume that these two women protagonists were born through the male version of immaculate conception, springing forth fully formed and dressed for battle from their fathers’ skulls (or, more accurately, their creators’) like the Greek myth of Zeus creating Athena. If there were women involved in the birth or growth of these human beings, their contributions apparently do not warrant even a moment’s exploration in the game’s 25-hour runtime.

Instead, Last of Us II spends most of those 25 hours inhaling its own farts for being smart enough to blow your mind with the evocative lesson that The Doctor You Killed As Joel Also Had A Daughter 🙁 

It’s as if no other human relationships matter as much as the love between a father and a daughter, whether it be romantic love, maternal love, or even the sibling-like dynamic that blossoms between Abby and Lev. 

I’ve focused on Ellie’s story so far because the game does the worst by her. Thankfully, Abby’s story is often infinitely more nuanced, compelling, innovative, and well-rounded. But her narrative still also overwhelmingly drowns in the paternal gaze. The parts of it that don’t aren’t given enough time to develop because the dad stuff just keeps sucking up all the oxygen.

At first, Abby’s life is just as nauseatingly defined by her relationship to two patriarchs, consumed by her obsession with revenge-killing Ellie’s dad for killing her own. It’s only after that’s over that Abby is finally allowed to invest herself in other relationships. And unsurprisingly, her arc with Lev is when Last of Us II is at its finest. 

The tension between Abby (a WLF) and Lev (a Seraphite) even harkens back to the electricity of Joel and Ellie’s dynamic from the first game, as two people with contradictory worldviews and backgrounds learn to care for one another. For a few miraculous hours, The Last of Us II lets their relationship expand our understanding of the game’s world and ethos, by grounding it in human experiences and motivations beyond just father figures.

You can almost start to see the beginnings of a worthy sequel to the Last of Us when Abby’s story shifts away from revenge, and toward reviving the Fireflies, sharing their dream of a better future with Lev. Granted, even that is inspired by Abby’s father, but I’ll take what I can get.

Devastatingly, though, that theme is cut short by Joel’s Avenging Angel. Ellie wrestles the narrative reins back and practically threatens Abby and Lev at knifepoint for daring to even think about telling a story that’s not about dads.

The sins of being your father’s daughter

While Last of Us II doesn’t make time to grapple with the magnitude of Ellie’s trauma, it does find time to make excuses for why we should absolve Joel of the sins that caused it. 

It’s implied (through Joel’s words only, mind you) that there’s no guarantee the vaccine would have worked (as if that makes what he did OK). During the game’s intro while talking to Tommy, Joel brushes off the last vestiges of hope for humanity’s future as a silly belief in “that whole cure business.” The people around him, like Tommy and Ellie herself, unquestioningly validate this rationalization for why Joel “saving” Ellie at the cost of a potential cure is ultimately justified.

Worse still, the game then proceeds to make Ellie — the 14-year-old girl Joel burdened against her will with the end of humanity — atone for his sins. Barely asked to deal with any consequence for his own actions, Joel gets to die knowing Ellie wanted to forgive him. And as the rest of Ellie’s journey makes clear, death is by far the better fate than actually having to live with his decisions — like Ellie is forced to.

If I’m being generous, I might be able to see the game saddling Ellie with Joel’s sins as an attempt to speak to the realities of growing up with an abusive parent like Joel. Tragically, the children of abuse can often inadvertently perpetuate the cycle by inflicting it on other people. It’s not always the case (and offensive to suggest otherwise), but certainly could’ve been an interesting theme to explore.  

But instead, much of the game suggests Ellie was doing the opposite of repeating abusive patterns or the violent lessons taught by her father. Instead her years in Jackson were spent recovering from her traumatic experiences with Joel by becoming part of a thriving community, participating in snowball fights, and having stoned sex with Dina in an underground weed greenhouse.

Despite Joel, despite everything he put her through, Ellie actually appears to have had the strength to become a remarkably well-adjusted young woman all on her own.

It makes me think of an unintended implication of a ham-fisted reference to a book which creative director Neil Druckmann has mentioned as an inspiration. At one point Abby is reading the novel City Of Thieves, written by Game of Thrones showrunner David Benioff. What’s notable to me isn’t necessarily the contents of that book, but rather the similarities in how Benioff and Druckmann made the same major mistake while concluding their beloved franchises: They failed to believably depict the interiority of their women heroes’ sudden turn toward villainy. 

Like Daenerys, Ellie inexplicably pivots from being someone willing to lay down her life for humanity into a psychotic tyrant who indiscriminately kills with little need for justification. The shame is that, if the creators behind these women protagonists had bothered grounding the audience in their emotional journeys during that descent, they could have been powerful stories about the fall of human beings with even the best of intentions. 

Instead in both cases we get an unsubstantiated character reversal that comes out of nowhere because, well, that’s what the plot needs her to do. And because daddy issues, I guess.

Video games that dehumanize women characters to underscore the cruelty of their worlds is nothing new, brave, or progressive.

The counterargument in favor of Last of Us II is that we’re not supposed to feel morally aligned with Ellie’s rampage, just like we didn’t with Joel’s at the end of the first game. First of all, I don’t know why a franchise would need to teach us that same lesson twice, in a story twice as long. But also, if Ellie’s unjustifiable acts are only there to intentionally drive a wedge between the player and the character they’re supposed to be identifying with, then that’s bullshit too.

Because while some of us felt pretty gross during Joel’s Firefly massacre, that was just one scene. It’s hard to sustain that disconnect over a dozen hours of Ellie’s unendingly gruesome homicidal rampage. On paper, forcing players to commit acts they don’t want to sounds interesting. In practice, it results in a game where the main protagonist is perpetually kept at arm’s length — and that arm is holding a knife to your fucking throat telling you to shut up and take it. 

The consequence of centering Ellie’s entire story around a vengeance- for-Joel plot is that Joel got a whole game prior to that last scene for players to empathize with his lived experiences. Meanwhile Ellie gets a game where the player is ultimately asked to condemn her, look down on her from a moral high horse, and — as pointed out by my colleague Adam Rosenberg — even defeat her in a boss battle (!!!). To be frank, video games that dehumanize their women characters to underscore the cruelty of their worlds is nothing new, brave, or progressive either. It just feels awful, and like several steps backward.

But again, in theory, I’m intrigued by the prospect of a game making players empathize with an unlikable woman protagonist, especially since unlikable fictional women tend to be judged more harshly than their male counterparts. Countless other games make players identify with irredeemable, murderous dirtbag men. But while The Last of Us II actually does succeed in doing that for Abby, it comes at the cost of doing it for Ellie. Ellie is given no relatable motivations to help us understand her homicidal obsession — nothing other than “daddy murdered, big mad.” And that just doesn’t cut it.

At the end of the day, Last of Us II makes the fatal error of assuming I’m willing (if not eager) to mourn a white man who put his own selfish needs above scores of other human lives. Maybe back in 2013, that’s the best we could expect from AAA shooting game narratives. But as it stands in 2020, I can’t really stomach a game that insists I make nice with a guy who, by murdering a Black woman who was leading the fight to save humanity, effectively genocided the entire human race. 

Honestly, I don’t know why this game would ask me — or Ellie — to forgive him for that.

Born from the legacy of the dad game, Last of Us II inherited all of the trend’s biggest flaws when it comes to representing daughters. Yet, as one of the most sapphic AAA blockbuster games to ever exist, it’s also confusingly an undeniable step for women and LGBTQ characters. It’s exactly in the moments between Ellie and Dina, or Abby and Lev, that we get glimpses into what Last of Us II had the potential to be — if it wasn’t so dead set on being a dad game. 

Glimpses aren’t enough anymore, though.

Despite appearances, The Last of Us II never succeeds in truly killing the father. Instead, it feels like the final nail in the coffin for the daughter game as a path forward, a natural evolution for mainstream games to tell stories grounded in the lived experiences of people too often marginalized by the AAA landscape.

Like Last of Us II’s protagonists, it feels like the creators forgot to look to the light. By only rehashing its past with Joel, the game can’t begin to imagine what a brighter future looks like for everyone else.