The Paradox of the Second Person

Nathan Wainstein reexamines Naughty Dog’s 2020 game “The Last of Us Part II.”

By Nathan WainsteinMay 4, 2025

• SF

Editor’s note: This essay contains spoilers for the video games The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II.

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WE HAVE TO BEGIN with the scene. A surprise shotgun blast at point-blank range. Our hero’s leg dangling from a portion of his knee. His brains dripping from the head of a golf club. Everything that transpires in Naughty Dog’s postapocalyptic zombie epic The Last of Us Part II (2020) follows from the shocking murder of the first game’s protagonist in the sequel’s opening hours. But Joel Miller’s execution at the hands of paramilitary trooper Abby and her crew is not just the crux of the game’s plot—it’s also a crux of its critical legacy, at once a traumatic event for legions of fans whose aggrieved response to watching their ego-ideal beaten to death by a muscular woman continues to poison conversation about the series, and a vivid example of the so-called “misery porn” with which many of the game’s genuinely thoughtful critics would indict it. To echo Part II’s own thesis, both sides are wrong—but only the latter deserves our attention.

Let’s first set the record straight: this extraordinary scene represents the pinnacle of Naughty Dog’s storytelling. While on a routine patrol near their home base of Jackson, Wyoming, Joel and his brother Tommy are led by pure chance into the company of the very crew that’s hunting him. (“Y’all act like you’ve heard of us or something,” Joel murmurs upon revealing his name to a room of dumbstruck would-be killers—the most chilling line in the series.) The gruesome scene that follows boasts the rare beauty of an uncompromising narrative choice. It’s not merely that Joel’s death seems narratively justified following the conclusion of The Last of Us (2013), in which he murders an entire lab of doctors, including Abby’s father, who were planning to sacrifice his immune surrogate daughter Ellie to develop a cure for a global zombie plague. The game also does something far rarer in giving Joel, a serial torturer and murderer, a taste of his own medicine. Simply put, even in the bleakest postapocalyptic entertainment, the Handsome Male Antihero almost never dies like this: exactly as he lived. The scene’s brutal violence is merely a function of this symmetry, which shocks us in the way that only true inevitability in stories can.

But the misery porn complaint was never just about gore. More interestingly, it’s sometimes framed as a critique about motivation. Such critics object less to the game’s violence itself than to the fact that they can’t fathom the characterological choices that lead to it. Yet motivations in games like The Last of Us are a paradoxical thing. In an essay on HBO’s 2023 adaptation of the first game, Andrea Long Chu notes the fundamental “helplessness” of players who are granted the power to control an avatar while nevertheless being funneled into rigid narrative beats. There is a basic—and for her, aesthetically fruitful—tension between the interactivity of gameplay and the fact that, as Joel, you have to slaughter those doctors no matter your preference.

This is an astute observation, but the metaphysical contradiction of video game “role-playing” also goes deeper. Games like The Last of Us do not merely accentuate our incapacity, common to almost all other narrative forms, to make choices for the characters at pivotal moments in the plot. They also put us in the deeply strange position of acting as those characters with only a limited understanding of their choices in general. We control their bodies without ever really knowing what they’re thinking. Psychological opacity, not identification, is thus the true affordance of video game narratives, and despite whatever tricks games may use to alleviate this disjunction—to simulate novelistic or filmic interiority by having the protagonist talk to themselves, write journal entries, or dream (all techniques that Part II employs)—the weirdness remains. To “be” a video game character is to experience a state of absolute psychological dissonance.

The most interesting thing about Part II is how it both ignores and exploits this basic fact. It’s often said by the game’s more celebratory critics that it uses the unique nature of video game interactivity to explore empathy in a bold new way. What starts as a revenge story, where you play as Ellie seeking payback for Joel’s death, unexpectedly adopts Abby’s perspective halfway through, forcing us to replay the same time frame as Ellie’s nemesis in a bid to make us sympathize with her. The game’s creative director and co-writer Neil Druckmann has even stated that this is the point of the dual-protagonist structure: we’re supposed to “hate [Abby] immensely” for what she does to Joel, but to eventually arrive at a place where we’re “rooting for both characters.”

But other narrative forms are just as good, if not better, at showing two sides to a conflict. Part II uses the game medium to do something far stranger. Here, the shifting perspectives serve only to underscore how little the game tells us about these two women’s inner lives. Although we control Abby for roughly 10 hours, her feelings about Joel’s murder—the very thing we’re supposed to “forgive”—remain mostly unknown. Likewise, although we play as Ellie for an even longer stretch, the precise reasoning behind her quest for vengeance is ambiguous until the very end. Indeed, the game’s two biggest plot twists both concern belated revelations about the state of Ellie’s relationship with Joel prior to his death, thus laying bare how much we didn’t know while carrying out violent acts in his name and undercutting the ideal player’s hate for Abby with a more complex knot of emotions.

Part II is defined everywhere by this interplay between sophisticated forms of character identification—narrative, filmic, ludic—and a fundamental opacity. Consider again the opening murder: at the climactic moment, Ellie, tracking Joel through a snowstorm, happens upon the abandoned ski lodge where he’s being tortured. In her attempt to save him, she is pinned to the floor and watches helplessly as Abby delivers the killing blow to his head. This cutscene contains alternating floor-level shots that loosely approximate the visual perspectives of Ellie and Joel. Yet this symmetry is a purely formal flourish. Though momentarily justified on mimetic grounds, as Ellie looks at Joel and he gazes back at her, the alternating pattern continues even after Joel has died, thus emphasizing the way in which a formal structure of character identification can exceed or even contradict its literal possibility. Indeed, in the most artfully composed shot of this sequence, we gaze at Ellie across the floor from a position inches behind Joel’s head, where we can see in the blurred foreground both the fatal wound in his skull and the bits of his brain clinging to Abby’s golf club. In a way typical of Part II, this composition uses grisly violence to highlight the doubleness of “perspective” itself, a term that names both an abstract category and an embodied effect of seeing and thinking—a matter of gray matter.

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Perspective in Part II is frequently a ruse, something that conceals just as much as it reveals. An early action sequence offers an especially vivid illustration. Sneaking past armed patrols in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Seattle—where you, as Ellie, have traveled in search of Abby—you try to escape the area in a stolen car. In a hectic sequence viewed entirely from the passenger’s seat, you blast away at approaching soldiers, kill the driver of another car that’s trying to ram you, trigger a fiery crash that summons a horde of zombies to your position, and plunge down an embankment into a river. As a playable imitation of action-movie spectacle, it’s thrilling. Yet the very faithfulness to Ellie’s visual perspective that makes the scene so intense also masks the fact that this set piece literally goes nowhere: amid all the sound and fury, this “chase” covers a distance of about three blocks. The sequence thus echoes a moment in Naughty Dog’s treasure-hunting adventure Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (2016) when, during a pleasant drive through Madagascar, your jeep suddenly plunges off a cliff while attached by winch to a tree, forcing you to mash the throttle to drive vertically up the cliff for a few yards before continuing on your merry way. Another instance of gratuitous action devoid of plot significance, the Hillcrest sequence likewise literalizes its superfluity by having the player virtually drive in place, but with none of Uncharted 4’s gleeful transparency. Here, rather, the tight adherence to Ellie’s POV slyly obscures the extent to which the game is just spinning its wheels.

In this case, of course, such perspectival sleight of hand is harmless. But there is at least one moment when Part II’s play with visual perspective raises more troubling questions. A few hours after the car chase, Ellie manages to corner Nora, a member of Abby’s crew, in a hospital corridor. In a cutscene, Ellie demands information on Abby’s whereabouts, and when Nora refuses, the camera assumes a frontal, head-and-shoulders view of Ellie—shot from below to mimic Nora’s perspective—while a button icon appears on the screen prompting you to strike Nora with a metal pipe. After the player hits her twice, the scene cuts, and we subsequently learn from a visibly disturbed Ellie that Nora gave up the information before dying.

This showy sequence functions, first of all, as a series of evasions. Most obviously, it’s an evasion of torture, a trope the series employs frequently but whose full depiction it almost always elides. But it’s also an evasion of physical violence itself. At first, the framing of Nora’s beating may recall a similar sequence in Santa Monica Studio’s God of War III (2010)—whose grind-house take on the Gigantomachia of Greek myth makes it one of the few big-budget action games with a realized aesthetic—wherein the player, as the angry god Kratos, beats Poseidon to death while experiencing the carnage through the latter’s POV.

But these two sequences really function quite differently. In God of War III, the flashy camerawork is pure exploitation, serving to enhance the immediacy of Poseidon’s suffering by depicting it through his eyes—at least until, in a grisly coup de grâce, Kratos gouges them out. And indeed, lest the point be missed, the sequence also includes several quick cuts to an external view so that we can admire the facial damage we’re inflicting. In Last of Us Part II, by contrast, the POV framing belies an essential detachedness. Not only do Nora’s injuries remain “tastefully” off-screen, but even the violent blows to the head and face that we experience in first person do not really register subjectively—there’s no camera shake or visual occlusion, for instance—thus asserting a sharp separation between Nora’s actual experience and the visual position of the camera even as the shot folds them together.

This separation reveals the true meaning of the sequence. Over and above its discretion—which could just as easily be read as guilty evasiveness—the POV framing serves neither to make us identify with Ellie’s victim nor to emphasize our heroine’s brutality. Instead, the camera simply adopts Nora’s visual position as a convenient proxy through which to fulfill its true goal: to render Ellie alien, wholly external, in the very moment that we commit appalling acts of violence “as” her. The point of the shot is not that we are Nora, but rather that we are not Ellie even as we control her.

This paradox is encapsulated physically in the grimace that plays across Ellie’s face while the button prompt appears. At first glance, her expression—an ambiguous blend of pain, fear, desperation, and wrath—appears to signify an internal conflict that might aid our identification with her: Ellie doesn’t want to torture Nora, just as we may feel horror at making her take this step. But further reflection reveals this expression to be essentially unreadable. What, in the end, assures us that Ellie feels conflicted? Other emotions seem equally plausible, such as pure rage or grief at Joel’s death, or even plain confusion. Nora, after all, has just raised the question that constitutes Part II’s greatest point of suspense: how much does Ellie, who was unconscious during Joel’s killing spree, understand about what really happened at the end of the first game? (Or as Nora puts it more obliquely, “How many people are dead because of him?”)

A first-time player, who has every reason to assume that Ellie has no idea what Nora is talking about, might thus read her expression as a sudden doubt regarding Joel’s sanitized version of events. Meanwhile, the player who has finished the game, and thus knows that Ellie already knows everything, might read it as any number of things—for instance, as a feeling of absolute moral desolation. The point is that we can’t tell: Ellie’s grimace is a sign not of “inner conflict” but of ultimate psychological opacity. In foregrounding this opacity at the very moment that we initiate her most drastic action yet, this sequence represents Part II in its purest form.

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That Ellie already knows what happened in that Salt Lake City hospital is, of course, the game’s most brilliant twist. The first game famously ends with Joel lying to Ellie about why her operation was called off. This lie is an obvious narrative time bomb, and one initially expects the plot of Part II to hinge on Ellie’s belated realization of Joel’s deception. The structure of the vengeance quest seems to reinforce this, since Ellie’s murderous rampage through Seattle at first seems reasonable only if we assume that she believes Joel to be an innocent victim. But in a flashback that occurs almost immediately after Nora’s death, we learn the truth: Ellie had discovered what happened years ago and was estranged from Joel ever since.

The disorienting placement of this flashback is an effective choice. If Nora’s torture scene seemed to be posing a familiar moral question about the means and ends of revenge (a question that some critics have mistakenly taken at face value), this flashback retroactively reveals morality to be completely beside the point. Ellie’s quest is in no way about justice, even in the most warped sense, since she knows full well that Joel is dead because he murdered a team of innocent doctors and likely doomed the human race. Rather, her killing spree stems from a wholly personal pain and rage for which rational justification is irrelevant. Indeed, the irrationality of this response is what makes it suggestive. Ellie’s rage is a function not of Joel’s presumed innocence but of his guilt: by continuing to love him in spite of herself, she effectively affirms and repeats his renunciation of the rest of humanity, a bargain that makes it all the more devastating when he is taken away forever.

What needs to be stressed, though, is not the power of this narrative choice in itself, but rather the psychological obscurity that enables it to function as a twist. In stark contrast to most other revenge stories, Part II purposely clouds the motivations for vengeance itself. It takes one of the most immediately legible characterological motivations in all of fiction—you killed my family and now you’ll pay—and then reveals almost halfway through that Ellie may have been thinking something different this whole time. Even before we adopt Abby’s perspective, the game thus exploits the basic unknowability of video game avatars for narrative effect.

In truth, when Part II stumbles, it does so not by making Ellie commit violent acts but by pulling back on that violence at the last minute. The game ends with a final showdown in which Ellie, controlled once again by the player, pins Abby under the waves on a beach. In a cutscene, Ellie brings Abby to the brink of drowning, only to abruptly let her go when an image of Joel from their last conversation flashes silently across the screen (and thus, presumably, her mind). This moment employs the same formal logic that defines Part II’s treatment of perspective throughout. In the very act of deploying a filmic technique of identification—a disconnected image that seems to give us immediate access to Ellie’s mind—it lays bare her fundamental otherness by using that image as pretext for a decision whose motivation remains opaque. Why does Ellie, who has already given up everything in pursuit of revenge, now change her mind?

As with the Nora sequence, the game quickly gives some retroactive context. A concluding flashback reveals that, in Ellie’s last conversation with Joel, she took the first step toward trying to forgive him. The effect of this final revelation, however, couldn’t be more different. Whereas the flashback following the Nora sequence replaces moral hand-wringing with emotional ambiguity, this one does the opposite, annulling Ellie’s knotted death drive with a moralizing deus ex machina. And whereas the previous flashback uses perspectival artifice (it makes little sense, after all, that this particular memory would occur to Ellie in the hours after Nora’s murder) to deepen character, here character is precisely what gets overwritten by the game’s baroque play with POV.

Form leads Part II astray the moment it becomes rationalized. The issue is not that the memory of Joel occurring to Ellie mid-combat is unrealistic—most of Part II’s perspectival jumps defy rationalization—but rather that the game now atypically treats it as real by using it to spur an otherwise inexplicable decision. Ellie, we’re supposed to assume, lets Abby go because she suddenly remembers the possibility of forgiveness. But this conscription of perspectival play to diegetic ends causes the game to forget its most interesting lesson for the sake of a shallower one. Artistically, mercy kills—both because it seems nonsensical in this moment, and because its presentation tries so hard to make us identify with Ellie despite everything that has come before. Motivation finally becomes a problem, but chiefly for the game itself. No longer content to rest in the dissonance between perspectival form and content that makes its revenge tale exceptional, here Part II commits a final lapse in trying to pawn off that dissonance as harmony.