What Could Be Worse Than Death? Untangling Entangled Existence in The Last of Us (2013)
First author: LeeYear: 2024
Abstract
Recent moves in the environmental humanities and posthumanism have called for expanded considerations of non-anthropocentric conceptions of life and what it means to cohabitate with non-human others. Given its postapocalyptic setting and story, which pivots on a fungal virus that transforms human hosts into fungal/human hybrids, Naughty Dog’s 2013 action-adventure videogame The Last of Us is a text which explicitly explores notions of human/non-human relations narratively, thematically, and aesthetically. Recently, the game has been taken up as offering an image of the possibilities of entangled existence, what Anna Tsing describes as “the possibilities of coexistence within environmental disturbance.” Such a reading holds that The Last of Us offers a positive vision of what non-anthropocentric life could or should look like but is at odds with the game itself. Contrary to this view, this article suggests that The Last of Us argues in favour of an anthropocentric understanding of life and the world, fundamentally reinforcing a worldview in which human beings are uniquely privileged, primarily due to our capacity for self-consciousness, which the game posits as the key difference between the human and the nonhuman other. This article also suggests that a desire to frame the game as a positive vision of posthuman existence is misplaced, and given the popularity of the game both commercially and critically, that it is instead paramount to untangle what the game itself has to say about entangled existence. Ultimately this paper argues that The Last of Us may actually offer a cynical or reactionary view of human/nonhuman relations, an assertion which will be developed and supported through close analysis and discussion of the game and the central role played narratively, thematically, and aesthetically by the figure of the infected, anthropomorphic hosts which carry the fungal virus of the game’s story. While these figures are typically read as no different than standard zombies, the specificity and nuance born out of their status as fungal/human hybrids holds the key to unlocking what The Last of Us ultimately suggests about non-anthropocentric life: that it is perhaps the only thing worse than death.Details
Language: EnglishCountry of affiliation: Canada
Published in: The Neutral: Graduate Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
Publication type: Journal article
Source: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/theneutral/article/view/37022#:~:text=While%20these%20figures%20are%20typically,only%20thing%20worse%20than%20death.
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