not sure quite how i feel about the article exactly mostly bc it’s been like three years and i never really cared about the game in the first place but at the least i think it’s a line of criticism i’m sympathetic to and it also like quotes druckmann on some stuff he’s said about the subject, i’d be interested in what other people make of it. i think “idf propaganda” is probably a mischaracterization of the game somewhat but its politics are at the very least rather fraught
i think the like totally bullshit and really alarming transphobic/reactionary/gamergatey response to abby in particular kind of buried some legit criticism about the actual trans character in the game lev and how they handled his story, i remember being sympathetic to the way this article laid out its criticism w/ regards to that but i’d also be interested in what other people make of it, again i never really cared about the game in the first place and don’t quite know what i make of the article as a whole necessarily or like literally everything said within it but i think “cisgender voyeurism” is very apt and kind of sums up how i felt about it watching the one streamer i follow play it at the time The Cisgender Voyeurism of The Last of Us Part II - Paste Magazine
I think tlou2 def embodies the fascist politics of israeli settler propaganda but it is slightly ambivalent about it. Not enough to humanize the palestinian analogs tho
without getting into the politics I just feel like this sums up why I dislike the game, despite so much of it being very good. I hate criticizing shit like this with the word “ugly” because I don’t think that’s an inherently bad aesthetic choice in most senses of the word – but I can’t think of a better word to describe this kind of attitude when it comes to creativity.
it reminds me of why I dislike so much of lars von triers stuff, because it often feels like it just wants to hurt you for consuming it. and there’s no purpose beyond that. I just don’t understand why. the real world is already so ugly and violent and hurtful. that’s no reason to avoid those feelings in your work, but if that’s like, your defining creative purpose? I do not like it. I just think it’s bad. not for me at least. I guess I can respect why other people are into it but few things make me feel more alienated from people that I otherwise closely relate to. it’s weird. makes me sad.
(this should probably be split into another thread. I should probably learn how to do that someday lol – but the last time I tried I made a huge mess of things!)
yeah it just feels like the culture war stuff (i.e. having queer characters) which always invites the predictable reaction of frothing gamer hordes distract from the obvious reactionary/conservative message of this sort of sentiment. it’s Death Wish type shit wrapped in “compassionate storytelling” lens. this is what i find disingenuous about so much prestige game shit. there are so many people out there making conservative art that’s wrapped in enough cultural signifiers to predictably invite the frothing gamer hordes who are easily triggered and mobilized. and this frothing mass helps disappear basically any other critique that can be had of the sentiment at the heart of this stuff. the inevitable stupidity of gamers feels almost intentionally wielded as a veil to ensure any deeper critique invariably gets lost in the shuffle.
i feel like the genre of games that are all about queer poc witches in pastel colors being landlords/small business tyrants of cat cafes or whatever extends out from this. the brutality/lack of compassion at the heart of this is hidden behind a huge veil of “progressive” signifiers.
I like this essay about the cut to black that occurs whenever any of the black characters in TLOU are killed during the story, how it centers their deaths as motivating forces in the stories of Joel and Ellie. And what is basically confessed to when the death of Joel in the second doesn’t have a cut like this. Just another angle to think of these games as playing out some really negative and regressive… ideas? idk ideology
I definitely think there are artistic depictions of nihilism that are valuable. Blood Meridian or the No Country For Old Men adaptation are good examples. It’s just, there’s no way Neil Druckmann has, as an artist, been exposed to enough legitimate pain in his life to authentically portray this bleak horror, nor is he enough of an empathetic genius to fake it. He was much better suited to the Whedonian antics of Uncharted, and could just barely stretch himself to make TLOU an interesting character study based on the pulpy “how far would you go for the ones you love?” premise, but that game’s artistic, critical, and commercial success made him overconfident and put him out of his zone.
I think some of those people just also have like, 0% awareness of even the possibility of questioning or trying to go beyond those kinds of economic structures/power relations/etc…it seems hard for people to really imagine how to view things “intersectionally” or what have you…I feel like a lot of people these days who want to make things that lean on their political aspects have a tendency to of specialize in one or two “axes of critique” and then seem to have almost no angle on any others, or just a blank acceptance of the status quo. I do feel though too like, yeah, without a strong underlying compassion for “people in general” or something it’s very easy to subconsciously write people off whom your politics would otherwise imply you should have consideration for if you thought it through, which yeah probably does lead directly to what you’re talking about.
Is it ever really nihilism though…? I don’t know if I can think of any work of art I’ve encountered that really seemed to me to capture a total rejection of all life or meaning or understanding. That just makes me think of the bleakest, most flattened-out depression…in some ways that’s a boring emotion because of its total flatness, which is almost like, an essential part of what makes it so hard to experience. It seems almost impossible to actually capture in art, because in some ways it’s a totally “nothing” feeling, like being completely resistant to stimulus or experiencing all stimulus as a uniform, generic unpleasantness. Art like…makes you feel something, something distinctive, it almost can’t help it, unless you’re that depressed. Maybe this is getting off-topic though…I haven’t actually experienced any of the media you’re bringing up or TLOU or any of it so it’s possible I totally misunderstand. I just think these are interesting questions.
yeah I feel like it’s something considerably cheaper than nihilism. arguably lars von trier gets there, but I doubt tlou2 would even try to own that label.
Well I mean, I don’t want to get into a terminological debate about the meaning of nihilism, and of course even nihilists get up in the morning and take a dump and feel that old pain in their knee and eat breakfast, no one denies at least the temporary subjective experience of consciousness.
All I mean to say is that there is a whole strain of art that says, in essence,
Horror movies, the ones I like the most anyway, often have a nihilistic theme. Like what’s the “moral” of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre? As an aesthetic object it’s brutal and outrageous and disgusting and funny (although not excessively gory), but like, what it has to say about the human experience is basically… boy, there’s people out there who are just pure fuckin evil, eh. Seems to be just a permanent feature of human existence. Boy that sucks doesn’t it.
My point is that TLOU2 could, in theory, be something like this and therefore worthwhile. But Druckmann ain’t got the chops. TLOU1 was NOT like this, although it definitely gestured vaguely in its direction, and I thought it was pretty successful, and just about at the limit of Druckmann’s abilities.
I mean I guess what it comes down to for me is that nihilism is good when it’s funny and excruciating when it’s “serious”. horror often does a wonderful job straddling both which is why it’s such a good genre. it’s probably why it’s never taken seriously critically but that shit’s dumb as hell if you ask me.
this really just gets me thinking like… is the last of us even a horror game? like nominally it wears the genre but it rarely seems interested in being actually scary. the zombies aren’t even a maguffin, they’re just kinda there.
i know last of us 2 does the thing i said i liked earlier this thread, where the hard morality of killing people is communicated by overhearing their friends being like “nooo brad she killed you!!” when they find brads body. but uhh that’s maybe more than i want
