Our Editor-in-Chief and my boss, Stacey Henley, just published an article about how we should sto🥀p comparౠing HBO’s The Last of Us to the game. Sorry, Stacey🧜, but I’m here to do just that, but in a more nuanced way than your typical Twitter thread, I promise.

With the premiere of ’ second season has come a fresh wave of criticism. As Stacey has written, much of this is stupid – complaints that the adaptation is changing too much from the game, cheering at one-to-one copies of cutscenes, and of course, whining that the cast looks too different from the characters as they’re rendered in t💖he game.

But there is one change that’s buggi🐼ng me, and it’s a lot subtler than Pedro Pascal’s Joel shoving homophobe Seth to the ground instead of just pushing him away. As I watched the first episode of The Last of Us’ second season, I couldn’t help but notice that Ellie and Dina seem more childlike than they did in the games.

Spoilers for The Last o♛f Us Part 2 and the first episode of the second season of HBO’s The Last of Us.

HBO’s Ellie And Dina Are Immature

Ellie and Dina dancer in The Last of Us

This could perhaps be partially chalked up to the fact that actors Bella Ramsey and Isabela Merced are quite diminutive. All of The Last of Us’ thr🧔ee main women characters are, actually. Google says that Ramsey is 1.56m, Merced is 1.55m, and Kaitlyn Dever, who plays Abby, is 1.57m tall. I’m not saying that short women can’t look mature, but it certainly doesn’t help.

Ramsey and Merced play up the𒊎 youthfulness of their characters, but in a way that feels almost bratty. Ramsey’s Ellie seems angrier, more like a rebellious teen than a reasonably angry young adult. In the show, Dina asks Ellie to join her and Joel to watch a movie, and Ellie quickly changes the subject, clearly not keen on gettin🅷g into their spat.

But in the game, it’s Ellie who brings up the movie while she and Dina patrol together, saying that she has plans to watch it with him that evening. In other parts of the show, such as when Joel talks to the therapist Gail about Ellie, their relationsh🎃ip is framed as that of a father figure struggling with an irrationally angry, rebellious teenager, making Ramsey’s Ellie feel more immature.

Ellie and Abby in The Last of Us
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Ellie screams into the mountains about her immunity despite Tommy’꧋s pleas for her to be quiet. She seems incapable of self-control, pinning her sparring partner in a painful position even after he taps out. She seems to reject Jackson’s principles of community, instead of simply feeling like she doesn’t have a place there.

This is further perpetuated within Ellie and Dina’s dynamic. Where in the game they’re capable young women who patrol on their own – no need for supervision, they can follow orders – the show has them as part of a group, hanging behind and gossiping, mocking Jesse’s authority when he gives them instructions, and gleefully breaking off from the group against protocol d🗹espite explicitly being asked not to do so. It’s teenager stuff.

A later scene where they describe their findings to a council has them🦩 slouching in chairs like misbehaving children in the principal’💦s office.

What Do Less Mature Characters Bring To The Story?

Ellie and Dina sit together in The Last of Us Season 2.

I’m sure there is a reason for this, but it’s hard to say what that reason is with just an episode of the second season to dissect. It’s hard to reconcile these portrayals of the young women with the character🌄s we know from the game, who are mature enough to decide to start a life together on their own. HBO’s characters feel precociou♎s, incapable of taking anything seriously.

I don’t think it’s necessarily an inherently bad choice. The show, while sometimes recreating scenes shot-for-shot from the game, has taken quite a few liberties with the game’s canon, as it should – after all, it’s an adaptation, not a live-action recreation. And making these characters more 𓄧immatur😼e at the outset of the season could make their arcs hit harder. We could see themes of innocence lost and violence forcing children to grow up too fast.

This is something we saw in the games, but the show seems to be putting more of an emphasis on it. Joel goes out of his way to rearrange Ellie’s duties, putting her out of harm’s way in an attempt to ✨keep her as safe as possible. Jesse gets her sparring partner to pull his punches, because Joel would be upset with him if she got knocked out while training. When Dina and Ellie speak to the council, Tommy scolds them for going into the grocery store, something he says would have been different if it was him and Joel. He can’t explain why when pressed, implying that Dina and Ellie are different because they are young women who need to be protected.

This is an additional layer to the story, but just as I’m hesitant to say that it’s a bad thing, I’m not willing to say just yet that it’s going to work. It’s just a layer, yes, but it might be a transformative one, one that refracts and dilutes the ultimate moral of The Last of Us’ story. A selfish,💟 bloodthirsty, rebellious Ellie 💙is going to colour the pursuit of revenge differently, and through this, tell a different story. What remains to be seen is if that story will be better or worse for its changes.

The Last Of Us Cover
The Last of Us
First Episode Air Date
🀅 January 15, 2023 𝓡
Cast
Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey ♚
Where to watch
HBO Max
Video Game(s)
The Last of Us (2013), 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2 (2020)