a blog
Ellie
(The Last of Us)
The Last of Us is a zombie apocalypse video game, and even those completely uninterested in zombie apocalypse video games have admitted that the story behind The Last of Us is incredibly touching and well-done. Following two characters, Joel and Ellie, the game is a story of survival that received recognition from gamers everywhere.
One minor character in the game, an angry man named Bill that helps Joel and Ellie during a portion of the story, was revealed to be gay in the original game.
But once the DLC Left Behind was released players found out that Ellie is a lesbian.
In Left Behind Ellie is reunited with her friend Riley, and the two share one last adventure together through an abandoned mall.
The past and present overlap through the DLC as players switch back and forth between two different malls—one where Ellie is desperately scavenging for supplies to help save an injured Joel (showing players that the DLC takes place during The Last of Us, covering events that were left out of the game) and another where she and her friend are, unknowingly, enjoying their final moments together.
While Ellie succeeds in saving Joel in the present, she loses her friend Riley in the past. After both are bitten by zombies the two wait to die together. However, only Riley dies and turns into a zombie while Ellie survives, meaning that she is immune to whatever virus causes people to become zombies, and this fact is what ultimately leads to the events in The Last of Us.
All things considered, Naughty Dog made a very smart, strategic choice by not revealing Ellie’s sexuality until the DLC.
Yes, sexuality is important and should be represented, but Naughty Dog managed to avoid making Ellie’s sexuality the most important thing people noticed about her character by not mentioning it.
By doing that they established Ellie as this cool, strong young girl that managed to win over players everywhere and then later told us that she was a lesbian.