The Last of Us and Characters Who Live

I was resistant to watching the The Last of Us. Who wants fictional end times when we've got a home-grown version right here? But the pressure got to me. (Later, the terror did too. I wish the science weren't quite so plausible in terms of that cordyceps.)

[First episode spoilers ahead, but I won't go further.]

Like most apocalyptic television, the series is not just about zombies, but about relationships and, in this case, extreme loss. Joel's daughter Sarah is killed the first night of the outbreak and he carries the grief and trauma of that through the rest of season.

Oh wait, a biracial girl is sacrificed to the gods of a man's character complexity? I think I've seen this one before.

Over and over in TV and movies, we see women, and most especially women of color, brutally killed—as a plot device or to make us empathize with some other character. It may draw a tear, but it also denies these women and girls the full and rich storylines of the male characters they leave behind.

I don't think The Last of Us avoids the problematic nature of that trope. However, it does some work to make sure that Sarah is not only Joel's trauma.

In episode one, we don't know that the show will be about Joel. The camera follows Sarah in her quiet life, taking a bus into the city to get a watch fixed for her dad's birthday. We know that she's doing this for Joel, but he's mostly off-screen, and we get to focus on her as she becomes aware of small clues that something might be starting to go wrong in the bigger world.

When the zombies first appear, Joel isn't there at all, but away rescuing his brother, and Sarah has to fight off her zombie neighbor all by herself—which she does. Then her father and uncle come speeding back, and it's the sort of end-times scene that I imagine most viewers signed up for--chasing and whacking and bodies blown to bits.

And at the very end of that first episode, Sarah dies. Episode two begins twenty years later with Joel as the main character, and Sarah is really gone.

I'm interested in the approach for a few reasons. 1. It's unusual. 2. It centers and creates space for the authority and agency of a character who might be treated as mere object or sacrifice in a different story. 3. It lets the viewer connect with Sarah before we lose her. This means we feel her loss instead of only knowing about it cerebrally.

And the three work together. Because I didn't expect the very first episode to center a character about to die (maybe I'm naive!), I let myself connect with her. When she argued with her dad about how to celebrate his birthday, I thought their relationship would be an important theme of the show. Her solitude as she navigated the city let me feel her vulnerability. And her quest to fix the watch in time for the birthday gave the story some immediate (though relatively low-key) stakes. She made choices, took risks, exposed herself as a human being with specific and complex desires. I invested in this character.

And then she died.

I won't say that what a viewer feels upon the death of a character is anything close to what we feel at the death of a loved one in real life—it's not. But it's still much more powerful than if we are merely told that a character like Joel has lost someone. That loss is only his; this one is ours too. The devastation we feel is a tiny shadow of its real-world parallel, but it's only because we first get to know Sarah that we can feel it at all.

The shift from knowing to feeling is so often what I crave from storytelling. It's what makes a story into an experience for me (whether I'm reading or watching), instead of just an abstraction.

This is surprisingly easy to forget when we write fiction! We'll mention old trauma as a quick way to deepen our characters. And this can certainly work. But think about what can happen when we invite the reader to experience it too.

In our previous life (as the Minneapolis Storytelling Workshop), we wrote about re-centering a few times. Consider a quick look at those old prompts (Recentering, Recentering But Better) as enrichment to this one.

Try this:

What loss has shaped your character? It doesn't have to be a death. It might be a dream or ambition they've given up on or a dog that ran away. It might be a shiny ring that rolled down a sewer grate. Or maybe it's more abstract--like the approval of a strict parent or a friendship that fell apart. Whatever the loss, think about how you can allow the reader to experience this thing--in its full brilliance--before you snatch it away. Whether you complete this prompt as a quick memory, a flashback, or a completely new start to the story--write it out. See what happens.

For Your Consideration:

This is a prompt that won't work for every story. There's not always time or space or wordcount to explore a character's past in a way that centers someone else. But completing the exercise can teach you about your character, even if the scene itself never makes it in. What is the difference, to you as a writer, between knowing about your character's loss abstractly, and the way you feel after having fully experienced the thing because you've written about it more deeply? 

From Erin Kate:

I like thinking about the way that these past losses can live in or on characters’ bodies. Scars and stretch marks and Mom-heart tattoos, sure, but also: the absent gesture of a character living alone pulling down two coffee mugs in the morning. In Julian Barnes’s History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, he uses the half chapter to define love. He does this by rooting into his own experience: reaching for his wife in the middle of the night, every night, to press his mouth to her neck. For years, when she had long hair, she would reach up to brush it out of the way so that he could reach her skin. After she cuts her hair into a pixie cut, he still reaches for her in the middle of the night—and still she reaches up to brush her long hair out of the way. Love lives not only in the mind but in the body, Barnes is saying. As you engage with your characters, just think of all the ways the body’s unconscious movements can hold loss and desire.

And One More Thing From Allison:

Check out this review of Erin Kate’s Quantum Girl Theory. It’s not just about the book, but about queer spaces, doorways, and family. Maybe we can get Erin Kate to write more about these idea for a future IMPROMPT2 newsletter. (I’m going to bug her about it.)

"Queer Safe Space in Erin Kate Ryan’s Quantum Girl Theory" by Susan Pagani

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Leave a comment to argue with our ideas or tell us how they might intersect with your own writing and observations. We also like conspiracy theories. (OK, one of us does.)