Paternal Emotion in The Last of Us

I honestly had a hard time when I started trying to write this, 'cause it's such a 

deeply fundamental issue. But dangit, it's worth trying. 

The truth is that it's hard to talk about The Last of Us because it strikes so deeply at the experiences of being a parent figure that all of us experience in some way. Even if we're not parents ourselves, all of us have a little sibling or a friend or a figure that we mentor and have tender feelings towards, and TLoU is essentially a parenting simulator where you have to face the worst perils possible for your kid again and again and again.

The real truth is that we're getting a slice of parental experience here ... but that doesn't mean we're getting a slice of parental reality. In real life, responsible parents worry about their kids all the time, but there's more to parenting than just protecting them. Hard as it is to admit, TLoU does a disservice to parenting by minimizing its reality and narrowing it down to a tiny aspect.

I'm gonna be honest here, when I went down the emotional rabbit hole of what someone like Joel must feel like when faced with the ending, it simply is an impossible choice. It goes against every instinct of parenting to allow that ending to happen. The fact that Josef Stalin is considered to have actually done this is an example of how cold he was. To allow one of your kids to die to meet a greater purpose is seen as one of the most merciless things a person can do, and it doesn't matter if it was for a greater purpose.

This is why leaders' families get protected during moments of crisis! It doesn't matter what the math says, if you're faced with an action that may involve getting your kids killed, you're never gonna be able to make that choice.

So, looking at it as a caregiver, it's impossible to choose. But there's a way out of this. Don't look at your kids just as things in need of help. Look at them like people.

It's hard to reconcile, because SO much of your lives and effort have been put into this baby. But the truth is you gotta let your kid be a person. Parenthood is helping a person become lucid enough to make choices on their own, and some decisions are so big a kid deserves to have a say. Think of the parents you know who don't let their kids grow up. There's some serious issues there. But we can do that too, if we don't let our kids develop. It's the scariest thing ever, but it has to happen.

All this is to say - Joel totally messed up when he did what he did, but it's not unexpected that he would do it. BUT it was still the wrong choice in the grand scheme of things.

What Joel did here was the equivalent of moving countries, or taking your kid out of school, or deciding where your kid goes to college. It's a decision they should AT LEAST get a say in. But she never did. And that's the central problem in TLoU's narrative. But I believe there's a solution. I just don't have room for it here. But I will write about it in my next article, where I explain how TLoU could have told an emotionally gripping story AND still given us an ending with meaning. Stay tuned.