Long, Long Time..

When I started watching The Last of Us, I was not aware it was a reincarnation of a very popular video game. I am not a gaymer and have never felt the inclination to play video games, TBH, video games seem to me slightly pointless role-play that requires me to buy expensive equipment and have tons of free time to get to the 'next level'. They also make me slightly nauseous. It may be because I'm nearsighted and the constant shifting of focus fucks me up. The farthest I've gone is to play one game or two Super Mario and maybe that zombie game where the zombies eat sunflowers or something. 

In any case, I had no idea The Last of Us was a video game and that people were VERY invested in it. To me, it's just another post-apocalyptic series involving a very believable threat (the fungus IS real) and a hot lead. I was sold. Little did I know that I was in for a treat. Both in the sense that the story is pretty cool and that I was going to cry during episode three.

It all started pretty commonplace: leads go on a quest and find tons of dangerous stuff on their way there. We all know that. What I was not expecting was that a flashback (the series leaves tons of Easter Eggs spread throughout the episodes, ready for the fanboys to pick and run with them) to one of the characters of the video game: Bill (a prepper, quasi-Q loner who does not trust anybody) is living his best prepper life with his guns and his traps and trips to raid the local Orange Retailer when one of his booby traps get a catch he was not expecting: Frank.

Frank. Frank is the man who shows Bill that even though he's not afraid of the apocalypse, he's afraid of intimacy. Because what he craves is intimacy with another man. The kind of intimacy that makes you cook for that man and have sex with him and try and protect him from anything nefarious.  Yep, Bill is a gay prepper. And just what Frank needs. 

The series branches away from the protagonists' story and launches into one of the most fabulous and satisfactory love stories I have seen in a one-hour-and-something serial. It's a story that was not in the video game. The homophobic fanboys -comes with the territory- were up in arms and went to IMDB to bomb the series they had been giving rave reviews. The fucking fragility of the incels knows no limits.

But I digress. This post is about Bill and Frank's decades-spanning love story (played with gusto and savoir-faire by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlet -YUM!) and how it enriched and made meaningful an episode that could have had just some of the run-for-your-life shenanigans we usually get with these shows and fleshed out characters and situations that are significant in the timeline of the series. It also demonstrates how a well-written, well-acted, well-placed same sex story can tug at your strings and make you even more invested in a series.

If you are not watching The Last of Us, I'd recommend it. It's HBO so if you know anybody with a password, make thee with some popcorn, a selection of cheeses and some wine and invite them over. It'll be worth your time. The one surprise I gave myself is that I actually was Frank. I would need a character like Bill to survive the apocalypse, because I'm a disaster with the things that would make me a good prepper and survive monsters and horrible people in case a cataclysmic event erases the human race from the face of the earth. I realized I would have to either be eaten or infected by the monsters or pair up with a man who symbolizes everything I despise: conspiracy theories, guns, and overall paranoia against the government. 

Every end-of-the-world series or book or movie is almost always an ode to chaos in many aspects and to the cataclysmic fall of any kind of government and social constructs. All that's left is the basest of instincts and the idea that you'll have to kill or get killed.p in order to survive. The cottagecore story of Bill and Frank is just a gayed-up ode to traditional masculinity: Joel finds a letter from Bill that says that he saved Frank to protect him. That's the role of men like Bill and Joel. That's their job. It's a very conservative coda. Bill fences off his whole neighborhood to protect Frank (that's the suburban right-wing dream right there). I, good liberal that I am, swallowed the pill whole because it was a fantastic gay love story, but it made me aware that in case I want to survive the apocalypse (that the Doomsday Clock tells us is too close for comfort) I may need to pair up with a gay doomsday prepper gun nut to survive.

Those zombies better be terrifying.

XOXO

P.S. you'd think the homophobes would be savvier: Ellie, the protagonist, is gender non-conforming and when she grows up goes on to have a relationship with another woman and on top of that, there are other queer storylines in the games... so yeah.