Playing as/against Violent Women: Imagining Gender in the Postapocalyptic Landscape of /The Last of Us Part II/

Abstract

This article examines how femaleness and femininity are constructed in the 2020 video game The Last of Us Part II (TLoU2), analyzing how it imagines gender narratively, visually, and ludically. The game is set in a postapocalyptic future in which the majority of the population has turned into zombie-like creatures, while the surviving parts of humanity have formed new societies and groups that fight against each other. Players control two characters, Ellie, who was already featured in the first TLoU, and Abby, who is initially set up as the antagonist of the story and whom Ellie determines to kill in an act of revenge. TLoU2 is thus one of very few mainstream video games that champion (especially active, dominant, and, indeed, violent) female characters as protagonists. In order to examine the depiction of gender in the game, I approach TLoU2 through an affective framework that analyzes the nexus of violence, femininity, and empathy. I argue that TLoU2 constructs violence as liberating and emancipating for its female protagonists in a postapocalyptic world that itself was created and is regulated by violence. Simultaneously, the game insists on the importance of balancing potentially justified violence with empathy for the position and perspective of others. It establishes this point both diegetically in the story of its two protagonists and extradiegetically in how players are forced to act aggressively against characters they have grown to empathize with, a 'ludo-affective' dissonance that consciously and productively discomforts the act of playing.