Note: Spoilers for The Last of Us (Part I and II) ahead.
I didn’t write a book about The Last of Us because I was trying to be clever. Rather, I wrote it because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Because after playing both games repeatedly, I kept asking questions that no amount of ruminating could answer.
Questions like: Why does a story about a fungal apocalypse feel more honest than the real-world news? Why does Joel’s lie feel more complicated than most sermons I’ve ever heard? Why does Ellie’s grief feel more real than the grief we witness certain widows perform in front of the cameras?
The answer, I think, is that The Last of Us is simply a story about the world we’re already living in, though it is set in a fictional apocalypse (but are these really that different?).
So, before my book Saints, Sinners, and Clickers drops on April 28, here are ten things this brutal, beautiful franchise—and apocalyptic storytelling more broadly—can teach us about the moment we’re living through.
1. The Infected Were Never the Real Threat
The thing about the infected is they’re predictable. Joel’s “friend” Bill says it plainly: ‘as bad as those things are, at least they’re predictable. It’s the normal people that scare me.’ And he’s right. In The Last of Us, the runners and bloaters are terrifying, sure, but it’s FEDRA’s soldiers who shoot children at checkpoints. It’s David’s little commune that practices cannibalism under a thin, Calvinistic coat of scripture. It’s the Fireflies who strap a fourteen-year-old to a table without asking her permission.
The thing we should fear most in our world isn’t some external monster—not the immigrant, not the radical, not the Other with a capital O. It’s what we, the so-called “normal” people, are willing to do when fear gets enough leverage on us. The apocalypse, in fiction and in life, reveals that we are the monsters we fear. We are the ones we were warned about.
2. Authoritarians Start Out as Liberation Movements
The Fireflies began as freedom fighters. Freedom, liberation, and the restoration of the constitutional republic all sounded great on paper. Their motto was poetic: ‘When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light’ It’s terribly difficult to argue with that.
Then they gained access to power and immediately started doing things that looked suspiciously like the people they were fighting against.
Likewise, the Washington Liberation Front overthrew FEDRA in Seattle and then built something that, in the words of the game itself, looked an awful lot like the system they’d just destroyed. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
This isn’t cynicism for cynicism’s sake. But it is mimetic theory 101 (something Saints, Sinners, and Clickers explores on multiple occasions, borrowing from the work of René Girard). We become what we fight, imitating our enemies the entire time, building new cages from the rubble of old ones and calling it liberation.
This should give every revolutionary movement serious pause. The revolution that believes it is exempt from this pattern is the most dangerous revolution of all.
3. Survival Without Something to Survive For Is Just a Slow Death
Joel Miller survived for twenty years after his daughter Sarah died. He ate, breathed, traded, fought, and killed his way through a collapsed civilization. And by any metric, he was succeeding at survival.
He was also, in every way that mattered, completely dead inside.
The Last of Us is insistent on the fact that staying alive is the lowest bar, not the highest calling. Ellie reads ‘Endure and survive’ from her Savage Starlight comic, half as a joke and half as a desperate prayer. But the story keeps pushing us toward the harder question: endure and survive for what?
We live in an era obsessed with productivity, optimization, and the hustle. It is a cultural moment that treats mere continuation as the goal. Get through the week. Make it to the weekend. Survive the quarter. But people don’t flourish on survival alone. We need meaning. We need something or someone to fight for, or we become exactly the type of soulless machine Joel becomes.
The antidote to despair is never comfort. It’s purpose. And purpose, unlike comfort, requires risking something.
4. Trauma Doesn’t Excuse Us, But It Does Explain Us
One of the reasons The Last of Us hits so hard is that it refuses to let anyone off the hook while simultaneously refusing to let anyone be simply, conveniently evil. Joel is a liar and a murderer. He is also a devastated father. Abby is a war criminal. She is also a grieving daughter who watched her father get executed in front of her. Ellie burns everything she loves to the ground. She is also a teenager who was robbed of agency, meaning, and the chance to grieve honestly.
These things are all simultaneously true.
We live in a culture that too often swings between two equally useless poles: either trauma explains and therefore excuses everything, or it explains nothing and everyone should just get over it. The Last of Us rejects both. Trauma is real. It shapes us in ways we can’t always control. But it doesn’t determine us absolutely. The space between ‘this happened to me’ and ‘this is what I do next’ is where all the moral weight lives.
Joel’s lie to Ellie at the end of Part I is born of trauma, but it’s still a lie. Both of those things are true. Holding them together without binarily collapsing into either pure condemnation or pure excuse is the hard work of actually understanding what it means to be human.
5. The “Good Guy With a Gun” Myth Is Dead
Joel Miller is our case study in the death of the Manichean hero. He doesn’t exist in The Last of Us, and if we’re being honest, he didn’t really exist anywhere else either. We just preferred the illusion.
In the Salt Lake City hospital, Joel doesn’t save Ellie because it’s the morally correct answer to the trolley problem (is there one?). He saves her because he cannot survive another loss. He’s not heroic. He’s desperate. And in that desperation, he slaughters an entire floor of medical professionals, including a surgeon who was, at least in the way the story sets things up, trying to save the world.
We understand Joel. Most of us, if we’re honest, would have done the same thing to save our “baby girl.” And that is the most unsettling truth in the entire franchise.
What The Last of Us understands (and what our culture badly needs to reckon with) is that the person most convinced of their own righteousness is often the most dangerous person in the room. Joel doesn’t think of himself as a villain. Neither do the Fireflies. Neither does FEDRA. Hell, neither does David. Everyone in this story believes they’re protecting something sacred.
6. Community Is Both the Best and Worst Thing About Us
Jackson, Wyoming, in The Last of Us universe, is the closest thing to utopia the apocalypse offers. Children laugh and crops grow. And there are actual holiday dances and movie nights. It’s warm and communal and almost achingly normal.
It also has a wall, tons of guns and ammo, a bigot named Seth, and rules that can get you exiled or worse.
The thing about community is we can’t live without it, and we inevitably corrupt it. We bring our prejudices, our power dynamics, our need for scapegoats, and our tribal instincts to every collective we build. The Seraphites started as a community organized around simplicity and egalitarianism, and then ended up gutting people as a religious ritual.
The WLF started as a liberation movement and became an authoritarian military state. FEDRA was supposed to protect people and devolved into a fascistic police apparatus.
This doesn’t mean community is hopeless. But it does mean it requires unceasing vigilance, humility, and the willingness to name the rot when it appears, especially when the rot is looking back at us through in a mirror. The communities that survive with any integrity intact are the ones willing to confront their own shadows. The ones that aren’t end up building new prisons from the rubble of the old ones.
7. Vengeance Is a Wave That Destroys Everything on Its Way to Shore
Ellie’s arc in Part II is one of the most grueling things I have ever experienced in any medium. You watch her lose Jesse, lose Dina (effectively), lose JJ, lose two fingers, lose her ability to play the guitar Joel taught her, all in service of a vengeance that, if we’re being ruthlessly honest, she knew going in wouldn’t actually heal her.
And yet. Off she goes.
This is the most honest depiction of the revenge fantasy I’ve ever encountered, precisely because it refuses to be a fantasy. It shows us, beat by brutal beat, what vengeance actually costs. Not just in bodies—though there are plenty of those—but in the pieces of yourself you burn along the way.
Abby gets her revenge on Joel at the beginning of Part II. She finishes the job. She “wins.” And then she stands there in the aftermath, surrounded by the bodies of almost everyone she loved, still haunted by nightmares and still disturbingly empty.
The cycle only breaks when someone decides not to complete it. Not because they’ve necessarily found peace, or achieved closure, or arrived at some neat narrative resolution, but because they’re exhausted enough to glimpse what mercy might feel like.
We are a civilization in love with the revenge narrative. We have built entire political movements on it. We should all be paying very close attention to what The Last of Us has to say about where that road actually leads.
8. The Truth Is Complicated
Joel’s lie to Ellie at the end of Part I is simultaneously one of the most loving and most destructive things one person does to another in the entire franchise. He lies to protect her. He lies because he cannot lose her. He lies because, on some level, he doesn’t think she can bear the weight of the truth.
And here’s the genuinely uncomfortable thing: he might be right.
But it doesn’’’t matter. Because the lie robs Ellie of her agency. It steals her ability to decide for herself what her life should mean, what her immunity should mean, what the Fireflies’ plan should mean. It turns her into a character in a story someone else is writing, a story she didn’t choose and wasn’t told about.
This is what we do to each other all the time, in families and in politics and in religion. We tell ourselves we’re protecting people from hard truths. We’re cushioning the unbearable. We’re being “merciful.” And sometimes we are. But often, we’re protecting ourselves from the discomfort of being honest. We’re controlling the narrative. We’re deciding what other people get to know about their own lives.
Joel pays for this with his life. The people around him pay for it with their peace. The story suggests there’s almost no version of this that ends well. Not because honesty is always kind, but because deception, no matter how loving its origins, tends to compound interest at a rate that eventually bankrupts everyone involved.
9. Nature Doesn’t Care About Our Feelings
One of the quietest and most radical things about The Last of Us is what happens to the world after humanity loses its grip on it. In all reality, it gets better.
Giraffes wander through the ruins of skyscrapers. Ivy swallows highways. Deer reclaim the suburbs. The planet doesn’t mourn the loss of our infrastructure and never pauses to eulogize our civilization. It just exhales and gets back to doing what it was doing before we arrived and decided we owned everything.
This is uncomfortable information for a species that has staked its entire self-image on being the protagonists of Earth’s story. The Last of Us gently, insistently, and sometimes brutally suggests that we might be more like a particularly aggressive invasive species in need of substantial pruning.
In my book, I call this a ‘rewilded eschatology’—an end-of-the-world story that doesn’t end with judgment, but with recalibration. The Cordyceps outbreak is fictional, but the ecological truth it’s built on is very real. We have been living so far outside of balance with the natural world that any movement back toward homeostasis is going to feel, from our side of things, like catastrophe.
10. Mercy Is Harder Than Violence
At the end of Part II, Ellie has Abby pinned beneath the waves in the shallows off Santa Barbara. She is drowning her. Finally. Abby is too weak to fight back. Ellie’s fingers—most of them, anyway—are wrapped around her enemy’s throat.
And then she stops, not because she suddenly achieves inner peace or because she’s become a saint or received divine revelation or completed a tidy redemption arc. She stops because she remembers Joel playing guitar on his front porch. A single image. An improbable and eucatastrophic grace.
She lets Abby go.
Tolkien called it eucatastrophe and described it as the sudden turn that pierces the darkness without denying it, the moment of grace that arrives not because it was earned or deserved but because someone, against all odds and all reasonable expectations, chose differently.
We live in a moment that glorifies toughness and mistakes cruelty for strength. A moment that sees mercy as naivety and calls vengeance ‘justice.’ The Last of Us looks at all of that and says, very quietly but very firmly: you’re wrong. You’ve always been wrong. And the way through is to put down the knife.
Saints, Sinners, and Clickers: Love and Loss in The Last of Us, is available April 28, 2026 from Quoir.
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