The Stoner Lesbians Your Preacher Warned You About
There's a sequence early on in The Last of Us Part II that struck a chord with me on a very deep, very personal level. When players take control of Ellie, she's out on a patrol with her girlfriend, Dina. Both find a bunker loaded up with furniture, porno mags, and - most importantly - lots and lots of weed.
The two girls proceed to smash open a Mason jar of joints and blaze up. They dish about life, make deep confessions to each other, and let their touch get clumsy and tender in a way that only two incredibly stoned lesbians can. There's a lot of flirting and playful teasing, and players are given a nice glance at what Ellie and Dina's life is beyond fighting for their lives on the regular.
Now, this sequence resonated with me for a very particular reason. Something I do with my girlfriend on a near-daily basis is get super stoned in the evening and sprawl out on the couch with her. Sometimes we build Gundam models, sometimes we get into heated rounds of Magical Drop III or long sessions of Diablo III, and sometimes we just sit and talk about life in the most roundabout ways possible. And, more often than not, it turns into cute, fun, clumsy makeout sessions.
These moments mean everything to me. Because, from where I stand, they're safety in a very unsafe world.
My Sanctuary
This past month has been a reminder, as a trans woman, that a good portion of the world would rather me not exist. In fact, many people would rather me die than live out my life in peace. It's hard to watch lawmakers try to strip my rights away on a weekly basis. It's devastating to watch trans women be murdered en masse, and for their deaths to go unpunished. This world seems untenable for me, sometimes, and it's hard to ignore every warning sign that gets flashed in front of me for simply existing.
It reminds me, really, of Ellie and Dina. These are two women who live in a world gone haywire, and two women who love each other despite that world trying to tear them apart. Whether it's noxious bigotry, violent militias, or bloodthirsty Clickers, the space that these two queer women inhabit will stop at seemingly nothing to fray the bond between them.
In that sense, The Last of Us Part II can be read as an analogue for living and loving as a queer person in our society. Do I think that's what Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross are trying to do? Definitely not - the game's lazy depiction of homophobia, its noxious treatment of its trans character, and its idea of romance are too painfully mishandled for that. But there is something there, I think, when it comes to exploring Ellie and Dina's relationship in terms of solidarity and sanctuary.
Clickers Are The New Homophobia
"Sanctuary" is, perhaps, the key word here. Sanctuary is what I feel with my girlfriend, after long days of work or on days when the world is particularly cruel. No matter what life throws at me, as either an individual or as a trans girl, I feel safe knowing that she has my back. I don't have to be on guard around her. I don't have to pitch my voice up, apply just the right amount of makeup, dress just feminine enough. She doesn't care. She doesn't think about it. She sees, hears, and loves me for myself, and that's more than it feels most people are willing to do.
Ellie doesn't have to pretend to be anything around Dina, either. She's at her most vulnerable and emotional around her, as well as at her most vivacious and uninhibited. There's no gearing up, there's no being alert, there's no preparing for this person to stab her in the back - figuratively or literally. The world has given her every possible reason to fear every possible person, and yet, she finds a sacrosanct space to inhabit with Dina. Yes, both know that the world isn't safe, and that every day could easily be their last. But that doesn't stop them from holding on to the one good thing they have.
And while it's tempting to say, "imagine how much better their life would be in our world," well... sorry, but that's just not true. Lesbians are raped and murdered for turning down men. Trans people are murdered just for being trans people. Every single day of our lives, as queer people, is lived with the knowledge that it takes one bigot with a gun, a knife, or a gang of likeminded bigots to snuff out our flame prematurely. That's not to mention the political discrimination and the professional stigmas, or the tax that it costs just to live as a trans person.
When Ellie is cornered by militia members or Clickers in Part II, then, I don't just see the enemies on the screen. I see everybody who's harassed me, tried to corner me, or chased me down. I see the routine mistreatment that my girlfriend has received on both a professional and personal level. I see my gay, lesbian, trans comrades who stay in the closet because it's safest for them there. I see the world that killed Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard decades ago. I see the world that murdered Selena Reyes-Hernandez, Dominique Fells, and Nikki Kuhnhausen in the past few months. I see a world that drives young women like Leelah Alcorn to suicide.
I see our world, and not some distance future, some hellish apocalypse.
As queer people, we're not scared of zombies - we're scared of our neighbors, our co-workers, our own fucking families. The whole world is a threat.
"lol go back to your safe space, snowflake"
That's why the space that my girlfriend and I have created means everything to me.
To have a place where I can be my true, unapologetic self, and let somebody see me at my most vulnerable is a precious, precious thing. Having the privilege of relaxing at night and smoking a bowl together, then melting into each other, is something that I'll fight as hard as I can to protect. While it doesn't erase the evil in this world, while it doesn't make me any less scared to live, it does help me to forget - if only for a little while. Even if we're scraping to make ends meet at times, even if that neighbor a few houses town has a Gadsen flag out front, even if the world continues to remind us that it hates us... we can still live. We can still have this.
This is something that The Last of Us Part II, albeit unintentionally, touches on. The game charts Ellie's struggle to balance her love for Dina, her thirst for revenge, and her violent upbringing. She fights to protect the safe space she's created with her girlfriend, while also making choices that ultimately serve only to violate that space. While I, personally, feel that the game botches this fight in several key areas, it's definitely something that you don't see everyday in the AAA space. And you certainly don't see two queer women relaxing on a couch, getting stoned, and making out while spilling intimate secrets to each other.
Regardless of how I feel about the rest of the game (because, boy, I have some opinions,) The Last of Us Part II manages to capture the very essence of what it feels like for two queer people to find solace in each other, when all the rest of the world wants to do is kill them. It's a defiant choice for a marquee gaming title to make - even if it's an accidental one, and even if the hellish, capitalistic circumstances of its development and its lazy narrative padding undercuts that choice.