The Last of Us debuted in 2013 and didn’t take long to become one of the most popular video games of the 21st century. A decade later, the HBO series adaptation was quickly hailed as the peak of video game adaptations and a brilliant television series in its own right, yielding eight Primetime Emmy wins for its first season.
Like anything that dominates pop culture, the series—about surviving a post-apocalyptic America taken over by a viral infection—has attracted scrutiny and strong opinions, particularly for its alleged parallels to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Season 2 of The Last of Us approaches, we take a look at what the game’s co-creator and writer Neil Druckmann has said, what people have read into the game’s subtext, and how the discussion fits into the broader conversations about Israel and Gaza and the West Bank in pop culture.
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What Druckmann has said about the games’ inspiration
Though Druckmann has said that specific moments in the games have been influenced by conflicts in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, he has never said that the games are based on the conflict. Druckmann himself grew up in Israel but left in 1989 when he was 11.
The conclusion to 2013’s The Last of Us, in which Joel refuses to sacrifice Ellie (whose body would have been used to try to stop the virus), is inspired by Israeli history. On the official PlayStation podcast for the game, Druckmann referenced the 2011 exchange of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for 1,027 prisoners. Druckmann said of the choice Joel makes, “If it was to save a strange kid, maybe Joel would have made a very different decision. But when it was his tribe, his daughter, there was no question about what he was going to do.”
Ellie takes a dark, furious turn in the game’s sequel, The Last of Us Part II. The impetus for Ellie’s trajectory in Part II came from Druckmann seeing footage as a teenager of Israeli soldiers being lynched in the West Bank. He couldn’t shake the fact that there were cheers after such violence. “It was the cheering that was really chilling to me,” Druckmann told the Washington Post in 2020. “In my mind, I thought ‘Oh, man, if I could just push a button and kill all these people that committed this horrible act, I would make them feel the same pain that they inflicted on these people.’”
Once that anger subsided, Druckmann said he felt disgusted over his own fury. But that made him think about how humanity processes hatred. “I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?”
In a 2023 interview with Haaretz, Druckmann was keen to note that being inspired by something and basing a game on something are two different things. “It was inspired by, not based on,” Druckmann said of The Last of Us Part II and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “That’s a really important nuance, because my inspiration is like my feeling towards a cycle of violence that I’ve experienced as a child growing up in Israel, growing up in the West Bank specifically, coming to the United States and observing it then from the outside, vs. being in it.”
“This game deals a lot with tribalism,” Druckmann continued. “Sometimes tribalism on a very large scale, between two groups that are fighting for land—and again, that has obvious similarities to stuff that happens in the West Bank—but sometimes it’s tribalism within its own group…a sense of a group that feels righteous. And when you’re righteous, it’s very easy to diminish another group and say, ‘They are less than me, and I’m correct and they’re wrong, and therefore that gives me permission to inflict violence upon them.”
How does The Last of Us Part II reflect this?
In a 2020 Vice article, journalist Emmanuel Maiberg wrote that the game “marginalizes Palestinian experience in a manner that perpetuates a horrific status quo.” Maiberg writes, among other things, that the in-game Seattle is “defined by a series of checkpoints, security walls, and barriers,” pointing out the striking similarities with the barriers built around the West Bank.
Major Spoilers for The Last of Us Part II video game (and possibly future seasons of the TV series) ahead! Skip to the next section to avoid plot details.
The question of righteousness fuels much of Part II, set four years after the events of the first game. Abby, the daughter of the surgeon Joel killed to save Ellie’s life, is on a quest for revenge, and has finally found Joel. Abby does something unthinkable to players of the game: she brutally kills Joel with a golf club as Ellie watches. Ellie, who was already conflicted over her relationship with Joel (“My life could have meant something” she says to him in an earlier scene) is completely shattered over this unexpected loss. She, too, dedicates her life to vengeance: She will find Abby, and she will kill her. And nobody will stand in her way.
Ellie gets word that Abby is in Seattle, and she sets off to find her. Once there, she discovers a conflict between the WLF (a.k.a. Wolves) and the Seraphites (a.k.a. Scars), two rival factions battling for control of Seattle. It’s here that comparisons to violence in the Middle East are hard to ignore. The Scars traverse Seattle through “sky tunnels,” similar to the tunnel network formed by Hamas underneath Gaza. They are shown as intolerant of minorities, which could be a reference to the state of various groups’ rights under Hamas (per Amnesty International, for example, consensual same-sex sexual conduct is banned in Gaza). This is particularly evident in the storyline of Lev, a trans character who tries to escape the Scars. At one point, Ellie finds “Martyr Gate,” the location where the Scars’ leader died, suggesting that martyrdom is key to Scars culture.
While someone familiar with the conflict might be likely to clock these parallels, it’s worth noting that many gamers could play the game without making a single connection. The fight between the Wolves and the Scars is also secondary to the main quest following Ellie and Abby.
In a twist, players eventually play as Abby for a considerable portion of the game’s 30-odd-hour story. They begin to understand her own challenges and drive to avenge her father’s death. Part II goes to great lengths to empathize with the enemy, so much so that we completely doubt whether Abby is really any different than Ellie. We see Abby caring for Yara and Lev (both running from the Seraphites). She’s loyal, caring, and kind. Both Abby and Ellie experience an unforgiving, post-apocalyptic world,overcome by grief and anger. The only thing they believe they can do is fight and continue the cycles of violence that have plagued their entire existence.
Ultimately, Ellie and Abby’s fight on a California shore is incredibly violent. It’s an explosion of rage by two people with different experiences, clashing in a fight for survival. Eventually, Ellie gains the upper hand, and has the opportunity to do what she set out to do, drowning Abby in the water. But before she kills Abby, she stops herself, deciding to spare her life.
Throughout Part II, Ellie is driven by hatred and an unquenchable thirst for revenge. We see her do things we never could have imagined her doing in the first game, things she doesn’t seem to believe she could do either. Her relationship with her girlfriend Dina falls apart because Ellie is unable to let go of her desire to take out Abby.
Yet when she has the chance, she lets go. She chooses to forgive, forsaking her drive for vengeance, giving both herself and Abby a chance at a different kind of life, and something entirely more humane. It’s a striking break from the cycle of violence. Abby and Ellie go their separate ways, and there’s a sense of hope amid the doom that Part II creates. If The Last of Us Part II speaks to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at all, it seems to suggest there can be a brighter future ahead, and humanity and empathy may be the key to long-lasting peace. Maybe the cycle of violence can finally give way to a different approach to coexistence.
Broader conversations about the conflict in pop culture
As the Israel-Hamas War has continued since Hamas’s Oct. 7th, 2023 attack (long after The Last of Us games were completed), conversations around Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank have intersected with pop culture, including around The Last of Us.
The production of Scream VII has been under a microscope since actor Melissa Barrera was fired after sharing social media posts criticizing Israel, including one saying it is committing “genocide and ethnic cleansing.” Spyglass, the film’s production company, claimed her words were antisemitic, launching a social media firestorm. Though those events took place in November 2023, recent comments from Jenna Ortega, revealing she left the film because of Barrera’s firing, have reignited the conversation.
No Other Land, a documentary made by Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers about destruction in the West Bank, stirred up discussion when it was nominated and then won an Oscar, despite not having proper U.S. distribution. The film was recently in the news again after co-director Hamdan Ballal, was attacked and later detained by Israeli forces in the West Bank. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences apologized after receiving an open letter that criticized the Academy’s response to the attack, which failed to mention Ballal by name.
When Disney’s Snow White live-action remake flopped in recent weeks, many placed the blame on star Rachel Zegler, despite near unanimous acclaim for her performance by film critics. The primary reason, alleged in a Variety piece, is because Zegler tweeted “Free Palestine,” straining the film’s publicity efforts. Gal Gadot, who also stars in the film, has repeatedly offered support for Israel on social media, leading many to view the co-stars as being in opposition despite red-carpet appearances together. Disney also scaled back the movie’s premiere, seemingly due to this and other controversies surrounding the film.
The Last of Us Season 2 arrives during this heightened state of online discourse, as well as ongoing violence in Gaza and the West Bank. The extent to which these conversations saturate discussions of the new season remains to be seen, as HBO prepares to drop the first of seven episodes on Sunday night.