Introduction

Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (2013) and The Last of Us Part II (2020) (henceforth TLoU1 and TLoU2 respectively) both centre father-daughter relationships. TLoU2 particularly deals with the consequences following the deaths of beloved father figures. In its opening sequence, Abby Anderson brutally murders the protagonist of the original game, Joel Miller, who is responsible for the death of Abby’s own father, Jerry. The first part of the game then follows Ellie Williams, Joel’s surrogate daughter, as she seeks revenge for his death; the second part explores Abby’s story, unpacking her motivations and efforts at atonement.

When Naughty Dog released TLoU2, they received critical acclaim for their progressive position on gender. As games studies scholar Amanda C. Cote notes, ‘masculinity defines and structures many aspects of games and game culture’, from character design through to game mechanics, male-targeted marketing campaigns and employment inequalities in the game development industry (2020: 29). Within this context, Ellie and Abby are unusual playable protagonists: Ellie is scrawny, tomboyish, and queer; Abby is physically very strong, a skilled soldier, and has a muscular physique rarely seen on women in video games. Abby’s narrative even features a trans character, Lev. Characters such as these do not usually populate zombie apocalypse, survival horror videogames, let alone have agency within them either as playable characters (PCs) or as protagonists of the narrative. Indeed, the heroines of TLoU2 have been heralded by Susan Peppers-Bates and Mary Bernard as ‘the queer feminist icons we’ve been waiting for’ (2025: 97). The creative director of TLoU1 and TLoU2 and studio head of Naughty Dog, Neil Druckmann, has even claimed that he created Ellie to be ‘one of the coolest non-sexualized female protagonists [in gaming]’ (cited in Ramirez, 2022: 7). But J. Jesse Ramirez is sceptical, remarking that TLoU1, and its sequel, are ‘supposed to be feminist game[s]’ insofar as Naughty Dog ‘self-consciously turn away from hypersexualised Lara Crofts and damsels in distress’ (2022: 7, emphasis added). And yet, he adds, ‘most of TLOU revolves around Joel’ (Ramirez, 2022: 8). Likewise, TLoU2 is driven by a revenge plot that centres around Joel and his death. In fact, speaking about TLoU2, Druckmann himself clearly states, ‘Joel is throughout the whole story. You feel his presence through every beat […] because his actions, his relationship with Ellie, permeate the whole thing’ (2020). At the same time as the game breaks new ground within the world of mainstream gaming, centring marginalised gender and sexual identities, it clings onto the central father figure—Joel—that secured the popularity of the first game.

Through Joel’s paternalistic character arc and violent gameplay style in TLoU1, Naughty Dog comfortably established a ‘pact with hegemonic masculinity’ (Ramirez, 2022: 5). By murdering him, Abby symbolically ruptures this pact. Ramzi Fawaz (2024) has argued that Joel’s removal as a playable character makes room for women PCs like Ellie and Abby. Noting the way the game breaks with gender norms, Fawaz understands TLoU2 as ‘a eulogy to normative masculinity’ (2024). He sympathetically argues that, in disposing of Joel, the game:

honestly [grapples] with the fact that in order to enter a new (protofeminist) video-game world order, players will have to let go of and mourn their attachment to the men who helped shape their literal and virtual power fantasies under patriarchy (Fawaz, 2024).

Yet despite praise for Naughty Dog’s feminist ambitions, the game does not fully relinquish ‘the literal and virtual power fantasies’ initially cultivated in and enacted through Joel in TLoU1. The spectre of the dead father haunts TLoU2. Even as it seems to divest itself of an anchoring patriarchal force (i.e. Joel), it finds ways to hold onto him through Ellie and Abby. Their quests for vengeance structure the game’s ludic, symbolic, and narrative procedures. I understand their fixation—and the game’s broader thematic fixation—on the figure of the lost father as melancholic. I mean this in the Freudian sense of an inward-turning processing of grief that results in the reincorporation of the lost object—which, in this case, is not only Joel, but the spectre of hegemonic masculinity he leaves behind. I argue that the loss of hegemonic masculinity in TLoU2, as symbolised by Joel’s death (and, to an extent, that of Abby’s father), is reincorporated into the game as a kind of melancholic masculinity. Throughout this article, I will use this term to establish a framework for understanding the tension between the game’s progressive challenge to gender norms and its lingering ideological attachment to the trappings and ludic affordances of hegemonic masculinity.

Gender (as a term, representation, lived reality) has increasingly become an ideological minefield, a destructive ‘phantasm’—as Judith Butler compellingly argues—that contains ‘multitudes of modern panics’ (2024: 5). Having been subject to a toxic, misogynistic “review bomb”, TLoU2 is far from immune to the growing volatility around “gender” in public discourses (see Letizi and Norman, 2023; Spallaccia, 2023; and Tomkinson, 2022). Rather, as the rest of this article will show, the game raises important questions around the fragility and tenacity of hegemonic structures of gender—that is, their vulnerability to loss, renegotiation, and reinstantiation. As a model for understanding our attachments to our losses, melancholia is an insightful tool for considering these questions. The game’s setting in a hostile post-apocalyptic environment is also significant, given the relevance of loss to the genre and its tendency to depict the resurgence of conservative ideologies, such as heteropatriarchal gender, in the wake of social ruin (Gurr, 2015: 2).¹ As a popular media form with far-reaching appeal, TLoU2 is ideal for thinking through the construction of hegemonic masculinity not only in gaming, but also in contemporary popular culture. What does TLoU2 reveal about attempts at progressive gender representation in mainstream games? Why is the medium of the mainstream videogame such a charged site for the negotiation of hegemonic structures of gender? What counter-hegemonic possibilities can this format make available for the representation of gender beyond hegemonic masculinity?

This article interrogates these issues through an interdisciplinary reading of TLoU2, weaving together psychoanalysis, cultural studies, gender studies, and game studies. I will, first, outline a method and definition of melancholic masculinity. Partially mirroring the game’s ludic structure, the article will then split into three sections. The first will analyse Ellie’s violent drive for revenge, particularly its gendered codification as masculine. The second and third will explore Abby’s portion of gameplay, focusing on the game’s ambivalent re-articulation of hegemonic masculinity through her character arc and gameplay style before analysing the queer affordances of her partnership with the NPC (non-playable character) Lev. As Stefan Schubert notes, Abby’s story has a ‘parallel development [to Ellie’s], just further advanced—when players control her, it is already a while after she has exacted her revenge on Joel’ (2021: 45). In other words, the pair are on the same linear journeys through, but at different temporal stages of, grief, revenge, and redemption. Accordingly, melancholic masculinity is articulated differently between and across the two characters, thus revealing distinctive perspectives on the knotty intersections of masculinity and violence, grief, and “queer” gender representation in the game.

Reading gender in TLoU2

The construction, and melancholic incorporation, of hegemonic masculinity in TLoU2 has as much to do with its gameplay functionalities as it does with its guiding narrative, told largely through cinematic cutscenes. As many critics have remarked, TLoU2 is notable amongst triple A videogames for its emotionally intelligent narrative and cinematic format. Alongside pushing the formal boundaries of a “game text”, TLoU2 has also been praised for the advancements it makes in computational design and development. Its formal multivalence means it must be read as a filmic and literary text as well as a ludic one. Therefore, this article develops an interdisciplinary analysis of the construction of hegemonic masculinity in TLoU2, combining perspectives from games studies, film theory, literary theory, masculinity studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis.

Hegemonic ‘masculinity is not a fixed entity embedded in the body or personality traits of individuals’, but rather the dominant model of masculinity of a given era or society (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005: 836). It generally establishes itself through the reification of a set of contingent and situated ideals of masculine behaviour, physique, and disposition. In this article, I use hegemonic masculinity to refer to a version of masculinity commonly constructed across a range of videogames; one that is invested in dominance and subjugation, achieved precisely by wielding power (often violently) over others. This is particularly yoked to the ‘mindless violence’ of ‘zombie apocalypse [or] action-adventure shooter’ gaming genres to which TLoU is indebted (Ramirez, 2022: 7). Frequently cited examples include the militarised masculinities of Call of Duty (2003 –), cowboy masculinities of Red Dead Redemption and its sequel (2010; 2018), and gangster-style masculinities of Grand Theft Auto (1998 –). So-called “hardcore” video games often specifically reify hegemonic masculinity through violent gameplay in which physical combat and mastery over weapons are the primary modalities of play. For Cote, modern, Western, notions of hegemonic masculinity cluster around assertions of control: ‘physical strength, athleticism, sexual prowess or power over women, and mastery of technology, including weaponry, vehicles, or even musical instruments’ (2020: 12). Technologies such as guns and cars, in particular, ‘are […] intimately bound up with images of the masculine’ (Tasker, 1993: 139). Shannon Lawlor adds that ludic violence underpins tropes such as these in games, insofar as it ‘essentially functions as a means of demanding and asserting control while also proving oneself capable of physical feats’ (2018: 31).

Videogames, like any other cultural production, are repositories for all manner of social fantasies, including fantasies that support and develop notions of hegemonic masculinity. As Nicholas Taylor and Gerald Voorhees argue, gaming itself can be understood as an ‘extension of hegemony’ (2018: 8). This is precisely insofar as videogames can ‘[enlist] subjects’—i.e., players—‘in patterns of gendered relations that support hegemony’ (Taylor and Voorhees, 2018: 8). How a game reifies a model of hegemonic masculinity is contingent on its ludic form. Writing about the affordances of TLoU1 as a story-driven game, Soraya Murray explains:

As playable representations, games present constructions that users operate to catalyse actions that advance the game narrative. Thus, playable representations are key components through which players engage with the game and its unfolding story (Murray, 2019: 103).

Following Murray, I conceive the TLoU games principally as ‘playable representations’, texts that construct their meaning through a combination of proceduralised gameplay actions and cinematic storytelling (i.e. cutscenes). Naughty Dog, then, first established a playable representation of hegemonic masculinity—one that relies upon violence and domination to sustain itself—through Joel and his identity as a father in TLoU1.

Joel: From hegemonic masculinity to melancholic masculinity

The invention and valorisation of Joel as a videogame character is part of a trend known as the “dadification” of videogaming. Emerging from games journalist Stephen Totilo’s (2010) observation about the ‘daddening’ of videogames, the term has since been developed and used to describe the increase of paternal protagonists in game texts. In TLoU1, Joel is complexly characterised both as the archetypal anti-hero—white, bearded, irascible, and aggressive—and as a loving father. In the prologue of TLoU1, which depicts the outbreak of the deadly fungal “cordyceps” pandemic, Joel’s young daughter Sarah is killed by a soldier. In the following years, he toughens into a cold, single-minded smuggler seemingly capable of unmentionable acts of violence. Murray points out that Joel, embittered and misanthropic, ‘function[s] as a cipher for an American rugged individualism’ (2019: 134). Reinforcing this, in both TLoU1 and TLoU2, he is largely constructed through the mythos of the cowboy: lawless, he solves problems using violence, and has a penchant for flannel shirts, suede jackets and horses. Óliver Pérez-Latorre similarly calls Joel a ‘postapocalyptic cowboy’ (2019), drawing on Barbara Gurr’s argument that, commonly, ‘a cowboy brand of masculinity provides the hope (and shape) of the future’ in post-apocalyptic stories (2015: 31). However, Joel’s misanthropic tendencies are challenged when a revolutionary militia known as the Fireflies tasks him with smuggling Ellie, who is believed to be immune to the cordyceps infection, to a hospital in Utah. Over the course of their journey, he develops a strong paternal relationship with her that gradually softens his hardened, “cowboy-ish” disposition.

Mark Cruea (2018) claims that Joel, as a paternal figure, combines the subject positions of ‘Old Father’ (understood in the Fordist sense of “the provider”) and ‘New Man’ (where modern fathers take on more nurturing roles). In turn, Murray identifies an ‘“aesthetics of ambivalence”’ which, she argues, has ‘emerged as a political response to the exhausted masculine types that have populated mainstream games’ (2018: 90). For her, Joel takes the place of the invincible, militarised game hero and stands in, instead, for an embattled white masculinity, his relationship with Ellie bolstering this by ‘[placing] him in emotional peril relative to his tragic past’ (Murray, 2019: 138). Joel’s particular affective appeal comes precisely from the ambiguous way in which he combines traditional tropes of masculine strength and fortitude with, as Murray signals, a distinctly contemporary version of a fragile, emotionally vulnerable masculinity. Consequently, as Ramirez highlights, for many gamers Joel is a model of ‘positive patriarchy’ and offers them a ‘compelling way of playing fatherly masculinity’ (2022: 2; 3). However, Gerald Voorhees (2016), Lawlor (2018), and Sarah Stang (2018) each note the less-than-perfect gender politics that stem from the shift towards pairings of fathers and daughters in videogames.² In addition to Joel and Ellie in TLoU1, the most frequently cited characters in this instance include Booker DeWitt and Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite (2013) and Lee Everett and Clementine in The Walking Dead (2012). In these games, the daughters are often powerless NPCs and require the protection of the paternal figure, whom players usually control in gameplay. The fathers are typically violent and aggressive. While marking a move away from women characters as love interests, Lawlor and Stang have each argued that the paradigm of “protective-father-vulnerable-daughter” merely rehashes the damsel-in-distress trope.

When Joel learns that making a vaccine against the cordyceps infection will result in Ellie’s death, he massacres the Fireflies to save her, without her knowledge or consent. Stang argues that, in so doing, Joel secures his redemption through Ellie, consolidating a ‘toxic father-daughter relationship in which the daughter-figure is denied any agency over her own fate’ (2018: 164). For Lawlor, the hegemonic status of the father figure in TLoU1 is secured through the use of violence (2018: 31). Likewise, Voorhees argues that the gameplay of TLoU1 is constructed such that players controlling Joel are usually allowed to perform an array of violent actions in fight sequences without needing to protect Ellie (there is only one encounter in the game that results in death if Joel fails to save Ellie from a rampage of infected). He claims that the game, in this way, ludically removes Joel ‘from the obligation to care’ and centres ‘his capacity to do violence’, thus foregrounding a father figure who ‘perpetuate[s] hegemonic, militarized masculinity’ (Voorhees, 2016: 20). For Voorhees, then, Joel is an unambiguous incarnation of, rather than a challenge to, common and problematic tropes of hegemonic masculinity in gaming.

In short, critics like Cruea, Murray, and Ramirez identify an unsettled articulation of hegemonic masculinity in Joel; Voorhees, Lawlor, and Stang register it as more clear-cut. Both of these perspectives are captured in the game’s specific welding of rough yet tender fatherly masculinity to a popular, combat-centred gameplay style, through which Joel secures his more traditional brand of hegemonic masculinity. Although brutally violent in terms of their ludic function, Joel’s actions throughout the game are all, narratively-speaking, in service of protecting Ellie. This allows Naughty Dog to foreground in him an aggressive fatherly masculinity that both challenges and conforms to conventional tropes of masculinity dominant in mainstream videogames.

As the case of Joel in TLoU1 suggests, videogames can both ‘[affirm] gendered identities at the same time as [they mobilise] identifications and desires which undermine the stability of such categories’ (Tasker, 1993: 5). As I argue below, mourning and melancholia are two modalities for this destabilisation. Ellie and Abby inherit Naughty Dog’s ambivalent approach to gender politics in the TLoU franchise, but also become sites upon which the game’s loss of hegemonic masculinity is worked out. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), Freud defines mourning as the only way in which grief can be resolved (Gay, 1995: 584–89). In mourning, the subject undergoes a process of gradual and lasting detachment from the lost object. He characterised melancholia, on the other hand, as a perversion of this healthy form of grieving, whereby the subject remains attached to the lost object. Yet, Butler notes how Freud later revised his definition of melancholia in The Ego and the Id (1923), where he claimed that ‘melancholic identification may be a prerequisite for letting the object go’ (Butler, 1995: 167). Identification, in psychoanalysis, is the process by which the ego constitutes itself. As Butler explains, it follows that a melancholic identification forms when ‘the lost object is incorporated and phantasmatically preserved in and as the ego’ (1995: 166). This means that ‘melancholic identification permits the loss of the object in the external world precisely because it provides a way of [preserving] the object as part of the ego’ (Butler, 1995: 167). The lost object transfers its status from external to internal—the subject internalises their loss so that it might live on within them, becoming part and parcel of their psyche and of how they inhabit and conduct themselves in the world. This reincorporation of the lost object is, I argue, precisely how Joel, both as a character and the brand of hegemonic masculinity he represents, is brought phantasmatically back into TLoU2.

Ellie: violence, revenge, and masculinity

Melancholia finds apposite expression through revenge plots, in which the subject refuses the wrongful loss of a loved one by engaging in a pursuit of the figure who occasioned that loss. As Butler explains, melancholic identification works on the basis of repudiation, whereby ‘the internalisation of loss is part of the mechanism of its refusal’ (1995: 167). The portions of gameplay in TLoU2 in which players control Ellie are guided in this way: she refuses Joel’s loss, forming a melancholic identification with him that manifests itself through her pursuit to avenge his death. Ellie rarely verbalizes her grief for Joel. Instead, her grief is announced through increasingly violent, vengeful action that often imitates the kinds of violence Joel would exhibit in TLoU1. Violence, for her, becomes a conduit for forging a melancholic attachment to, and identification with, her lost father figure.

Shortly after Joel’s murder, Ellie vows to take revenge against Abby. Accompanied by her girlfriend Dina, she travels on horseback from Jackon, Wyoming to Seattle, the base for the paramilitary group of which Abby is a part: the Washington Liberation Front (WLF). The largest section of gameplay in which players control Ellie begins when the pair arrive in the city. The narrative divides into three main chapters (‘Seattle Day One’, ‘Seattle Day Two’, and ‘Seattle Day Three’), which are broken down into a series of encounters. Gameplay comprises a range of actions that revolve around violent combat, environmental exploration, and puzzle-solving. As Ellie and Dina explore downtown Seattle in their hunt for Abby, players controlling Ellie can search for items that allow her to craft a range of weapons (smoke bombs, Molotov cocktails, trap mines, and so on); nuts and bolts for modifying weapons; pills for developing skills such as listening and weapon aim; and trading cards, Ellie’s signature collectible item. These “quieter” moments of scavenging and exploration are balanced out by (often prolonged) violent playable sequences in which Ellie and Dina go up against clusters of infected (the zombie-like monsters one becomes following a cordyceps infection), WLF troops, or a religious fundamentalist cult known as the Seraphites with whom the WLF are at war. Cinematic cutscenes punctuate these sequences at significant junctures, helping to propel the narrative of the game onwards.

There are multiple ways in which a player could navigate the fight sequences in TLoU2 (McKinstry, 2022). Some kills are avoidable. But while players can attempt a non-violent playthrough, there are moments in which violence is narratively and ludically foregrounded as compulsory and inevitable. This forces players into a more self-conscious engagement with the game that Evan Jules Maier-Zucchino calls ‘critical violence’, where ‘[game] mechanisms […] make virtual violence an ethically reflective experience’ (2023: 381). Controlling Ellie, players progressively pick off members of the WLF who were present at Joel’s murder. In these moments, the story will not advance to the next encounter unless players participate in brutal murders. The first instance of this is when Ellie rushes to protect Dina from being killed by Jordan. The second, significantly more harrowing encounter, involves Ellie torturing Abby’s friend, Nora. This encounter, in particular, foregrounds and consolidates Ellie’s (and players’) conscription into a mode of violence that is symbolically tied to Joel and his style of aggressively violent masculinity.

In ‘Seattle Day Two’, Ellie locates Nora at St Mary’s Hospital. The sequence, like many of the significant encounters in the game, unfolds through a series of cutscenes and gameplay. In a cutscene, Ellie confronts Nora, who provokes her by insulting Joel: ‘Do you still hear his screams? […] I hear them every night… Yeah. Yeah, that little bitch got what he deserved’. Nora’s language here strips Joel of his masculinity. Her feminising insult causes Ellie to chase her through the hospital corridors. In this moment, it is as if Ellie is acting out against emasculation itself—and, in order to move the story along, players must act this out. The game forces a “game over” screen if they do not chase her.

Ellie ultimately throws herself and Nora down an elevator chute into the spore-ridden basement of the hospital. The game switches to another cutscene in which Ellie confronts Nora. By this point, infection has already begun to take hold in Nora; Ellie wrenches a crowbar from her grasp and promises either a swift death in return for information on Abby or torture, hissing, ‘I can make it quick. Or I can make it so much worse’. In what follows, the game consolidates a common construction of violence as an assertion of dominance and control through a combination of high and low angle shots, blended with one simple ludic action. The camera angle is poised over Ellie’s shoulder, looking down on Nora’s prone body, suggesting the former’s position as domineering and the latter’s as powerless (Figure 1). Reinforcing this, the camera switches to face up to Ellie when Nora refuses to betray Abby. Players are then forced to engage in an act of torture which affirms her violent dominance over Nora. A small button command appears next to Ellie, which players must press a total of three times to advance the game (Figure 2). Each time they do, Ellie hits Nora with the crowbar.

Figure 1: Ellie gazes down at Nora. Credit: all screenshots taken by the author.

Figure 2: Players are forced to press square and torture Nora.

This moment of violence in the game contrasts starkly with the multiple instances in which players have the option to kill enemies indiscriminately in order to proceed through the game. As Schubert suggests, this actively makes players ‘more complicit in the violence than if the cutscene had progressed without any player input’ (2021: 41). Deprived of any choice, players are urged toward a critical reflection on the role of violence in the game, practicing the kind of ethical engagement Miguel Sicart (2013) has petitioned for in videogames. The ethical quandary of mandatory violence in this scene brings forward the complex way in which players can be drawn into performing certain gendered relations that extend hegemony (Taylor and Voorhees, 2018: 8). When Nora goads Ellie into action specifically through a kind of language that emasculates Joel, the game codifies (computationally and semantically) an implicitly gendered precedent for Ellie’s subsequent pursuit of Nora. Compelled to then torture and kill Nora, players are in a sense not only enlisted, but conscripted, into the game’s tacit directive to avenge not only Joel but also the symbolic loss of hegemonic masculinity he embodied.

Nora’s death is pivotal in the curdling of Ellie’s grief for Joel into unbridled violent revenge. The melancholic nature of that grief emerges partly through the scene’s recollection of similar violent actions by Joel and through the destructive impacts of revenge-motivated violence upon Ellie herself. There are notable parallels, for instance, between Ellie’s killing of Nora and Joel’s of Marlene, the head of the Firefly militia, at the end of TLoU1. Nora’s helpless position recalls that of Marlene just before Joel shoots her: looking up as her murderer towers over her, either defenceless (in Nora’s case) or surrendering (in Marlene’s) (Figure 3). It is also significant that both Marlene and Nora are black women. As TreaAndrea Russworm points out, throughout TLoU1 ‘black characters die in order to teach Ellie and Joel to value their relational bond’ (2017: 113). Her argument rings true of Nora’s death too. Joel kills Marlene, because, in his words, she would ‘just come after [Ellie]’ if he let her live. With Marlene dead, his and Ellie’s relationship is secured and allowed to grow. In TLoU2, that affirmation of their bond is melancholic: Joel may literally be gone, but Ellie’s turn to brutality incorporates and reprises his own tendency toward aggression and self-serving violence. Recalling Stang’s (2018) argument that Joel and Ellie’s relationship is partly defined by a hierarchical model of patriarchal masculinity, both Marlene and Nora’s deaths affirm not only the relational bond between Ellie and Joel, but also the constitutively patriarchal nature of their bond (significantly, Marlene is also the only maternal figure Ellie has known). White hegemonic masculinity, and its spectre, is secured through each game’s mirrored renditions of black subjugation.³

Figure 3: Marlene pleads with Joel to let her go.

Schubert notes how the alignment of the camera with Nora’s perspective during her torture ‘foregrounds the distressing effect’ this has on Ellie (2021: 41). Furthermore, with the camera positioned in this way, each time players press the button, and Ellie swings the crowbar, it looks and feels as if, in hitting Nora, they are inflicting violence upon themselves. The scene of her torture clarifies how an act of harm against another translates into an act of harm against oneself too. When Ellie returns to her and Dina’s hideout in a derelict theatre, she is visibly distressed by her actions. In a cutscene, Ellie undresses to allow Dina to tend to her wounds. The shot foregrounds Ellie’s back, which is covered in bloody cuts and bruises (Figure 4). Of course, prior to Nora’s torture, players had been required to engage in multiple, often physically brutal encounters with infected, WLF troops, and Seraphites. In this cinematic scene, the details of the injuries incurred during these ludic sequences of ‘Seattle Day Two’ are written across Ellie’s body, explicitly bringing hers and the players’ engagement with violence—both as victim and perpetrator—into the narrative of the game. Instead of articulating her feelings about Joel, which have compelled her destructive actions, Ellie’s body gives somatic expression to her internal distress.

Figure 4: Ellie’s battle-worn body.

The encounter in St Mary’s Hospital symbolically resurrects the spectre of Joel and his own violent tendencies. Ellie’s adoption of a mode of violence that bears resemblance to the kind of violence Joel wielded in TLoU1 places her in symbolic proximity to the form of hegemonic masculinity such violence encodes. In torturing Nora, she uses violence to wield power and dominance over another (as she says to Dina in the theatre: ‘I made her talk’). Ellie wielding violence in this way, and players being compelled to do the same, is a key instance in which the game betrays its own melancholic attachment to Joel and his embodiment of hegemonic masculinity. Recalling Murray, Ellie (and players) are conscripted into a ‘playable representation’ of melancholic masculinity (2019: 103). The impact of this is not only represented as destructive to Ellie herself, but also to her relationship with Dina, ultimately limiting the queer possibilities of her story and character arc.

Following the PC-switch from Ellie to Abby at the half-way point of the game, in which the sequence of events that take place in Ellie’s story are played from Abby’s perspective, players resume control over Ellie in a short, nonviolent chapter titled ‘The Farm’. The story picks up several months after the fatal conclusion of the Jackson crew’s time in Seattle, which left Jesse—Ellie’s friend and Dina’s ex—dead and Tommy, Joel’s brother, with a permanent, debilitating injury to the knee. Ellie and Dina are living on the outskirts of Jackson in an old farmhouse, Dina having since given birth to the son she conceived with Jesse. The three of them constitute a small, queer family. This chapter in the game comprises one of Ellie’s nonviolent playable sequences, which allows players to interact with objects and environmental features that build up an emotional backdrop to the story. Players can explore the farmhouse at their leisure: for example, looking around Ellie’s art studio, which is filled with drawings of Dina and the baby JJ, reveals an outward expression of love and attachment, while reading her diary exposes her isolation and mental fragility (it includes accounts of traumatic flashbacks, and disrupted sleep and eating habits). They can also wind up a record player and dance with Dina and JJ while she washes the dishes, the nonviolent action briefly consolidating a sense of queer domestic and familial utopia (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Ellie, Dina, and JJ dancing in the kitchen, a picture of queer familial joy.

However, this semblance of queer harmony is quickly extinguished by the game’s overarching ludic and narrative investment in melancholic masculinity. Tommy visits to urge Ellie to resume her hunt for Abby, and she resolves to travel to Santa Barbara. In an extended cutscene, Dina confronts her, begging her to prove her love and stay. ‘We’ve got a family,’ she urges, ‘[Abby] doesn’t get to be more important than that’. Ellie retorts that she has to ‘finish it’. Her desire for revenge forecloses any reparative possibility her narrative might have contained, such as the formation of a stable, queer family unit. Schubert suggests that, in this scene, Naughty Dog portray Ellie and Dina’s ‘queer relationship in heteronormative, binary terms, with a clear power imbalance’ (2021: 44). Dina, he argues, is the passive, stay-at-home mother, while Ellie is placed in a more ‘active’, masculine position. Underlining this, when Ellie pulls away from Dina and leaves, Dina weeps in the foreground with Ellie dimly visible through the glass of the closed door, back turned and receding into the distance (Figure 6). The scene writes Ellie into the cinematic tradition of rugged, individualistic masculinity associated with the figure of the cowboy. Notably, when she leaves, she wears Joel’s suede jacket, quite literally incorporating and assuming the iconography of the cowboy that Joel himself also embodied.

Figure 6: Ellie abandons Dina and their nascent queer family on the farm.

Players know from a much earlier sequence in the game that Ellie acquired Joel’s jacket after visiting his house after his death. This is another nonviolent chapter in her gameplay. Here, players controlling Ellie can move through Joel’s house and interact with his belongings. The sequence is a touching way of making grief playable. Players can pick up a range of objects that convey the depth of the game’s investment in (ruptured) father-daughter bonds: Joel’s coffee mug in the kitchen; a drawing Ellie made of him; and a framed photograph of him and Sarah, a picture players will recognise from TLoU1 (and though players cannot interact with it, beside this photograph is another of him and Ellie with her horse Shimmer). Sunlight pours gently through the house, aesthetically emphasising, with pathetic fallacy, the ludic “stillness” of this sort of encounter versus the high-octane “motion” of the playable fight sequences that follow in the rain-soaked Seattle chapters. Finally, players can go to Joel’s bedroom, where they find the most significant objects: his jacket and his watch, which is kept in a box with his hunting pistol. Interacting with the jacket allows Ellie and players to perform a sensory act of grief for Joel: as Ellie, players can approach the jacket and press triangle to pull it close and breathe it in (Figure 7). Before or after this moment, they can look at the watch and equip themselves with the pistol, which will be used in subsequent violent encounters. The side-by-side exposition of Joel’s jacket and pistol, both icons of a wild-west adjacent masculinity and a synecdoche of his absence, pointedly constructs masculinity as melancholic. That is, they expose the entanglement of the game’s construction of masculinity with Ellie’s pursuit to avenge Joel’s death. This “quiet” grieving sequence, alongside Ellie’s cowboy-style abandonment of Dina and the farmhouse, both articulate how melancholia structures her gender expression and sexuality—and how it becomes bound up with the game’s ambivalent rendering of gender and especially of masculinity, queerness, and gender non-conformity.

Figure 7: Holding Joel close.

Abby: melancholic “musculinity”

Naughty Dog’s rendering of Abby, from her physical stylisation through to her gameplay style and character development, is similarly haunted by an ambivalence toward non-normative gender expression. From her entry into TLoU’s storyworld to her entire section of gameplay, Naughty Dog frame Abby as a ludic and narrative replacement for Joel. Her gameplay style mimics his and her story arc is based on securing redemption through caring for a younger person—the young Seraphite, Lev. However, as I will later show, any effort to reincorporate Joel into the game by mirroring him in Abby falters in the face of the queer kinship she establishes with Lev.

Players are introduced to Abby in a short playable sequence in the game’s prologue, briefly controlling her before returning to play as Ellie. Abby, along with her WLF crew, have staked out an abandoned ski chalet on the outskirts of Jackson. After an excursion outside, Abby gets caught in a blizzard and must fight her way through hordes of infected. Almost overwhelmed, she is rescued by Joel and Tommy, whom she lures towards the ski resort under the false promise of safety from the storm and the infected. Once there, one of the longest cinematic cutscenes of the game begins and, barring a brief interlude playing as Ellie trying to find Joel, players helplessly watch as Abby murders the anti-hero of TLoU1.

The staging of Abby’s murder of Joel is saturated with imagery that pointedly masculinises her actions. First, she shoots him in the knee to disable him while one of the WLF members knocks Tommy out. Then, she has two of her crew pin Joel up against the floor-to-ceiling window of the resort, before brutally beating him to death with a golf club. It is a grisly, unglamorous way to die. Ramirez suggests the choice not to simply shoot Joel is ‘an ironic affront to [his] weapon skills and hegemonic masculinity’s norm of technological mastery’ (2022: 10). The choice of death by golf club spotlights Abby’s physical strength: while it symbolically strips Joel of hegemonic masculinity’s armour, it endows her with ‘the hegemonic masculine ideals of physical strength and athleticism’ (Ramirez, 2022: 20n12). Over the prolonged course of Joel’s death, the developers draw attention to this. When she first strikes Joel, she is wearing a jacket; once Ellie finds her, she has stripped down to a tight-fitting undershirt (Figure 8; Figure 9). This sartorial shift suggests the extent of Abby’s physical exertion and shows her well-developed musculature, which is occasionally commented upon—not always in a positive light—by other characters throughout the game.

Figure 8: Abby, still clad in a thick ski jacket, prepares her first strike to Joel.

Figure 9: Abby’s stripped-down attire after torturing Joel.

In having Joel killed with a golf club, Naughty Dog also draw Abby into an image-world that has habitually coalesced brutal physical violence and masculine assertions of dominance specifically around the instrument of the golf club. For instance, in Season 3, Episode 5 of The Sopranos (2001), a show that is known for its excessive violence and complex reframing of hegemonic masculinity, Mustang Sally beats Bryan Spatafore into a coma using a golf club (see Harris, 2012; Hibberd, 2011). The golf club is also a commonplace melee weapon in video gaming. It notably appears as a tool of ludic violence in games such as the Grand Theft Auto series and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016), both of which are regarded as games that represent, endorse, and encourage players to act out multiple, often violent, versions of hegemonic masculinity (see Blackburn, 2018; Dashiell and Phelps, 2023; Moody, 2018).Abby’s entry into the symbolic order of TLoU2, then, is facilitated by well-known iconographies of male-centred violence. As she prepares to deliver her fatal blow, the camera, focalising Ellie’s gaze, pans upwards from Joel’s prone and bloodied body on the floor and follows the movement of the golf club as Abby raises it up. The shot frames her silhouette against the snow-white window of the resort, making obvious the phallic image of the golf club clutched in her hands (Figure 10). A splattering of Joel’s blood across the glass in the other window is just visible to the bottom right corner of the frame. These elements of the shot come together to form an overall picture of violent subjugation articulated through a masculinised visual grammar with Abby at its centre.

Figure 10: The phallic imagery of Abby wielding the golf club against Joel.

Film scholar Yvonne Tasker coins the term ‘musculinity’ to articulate the masculinisation of female bodies in popular visual media. She explains that the term indicates ‘the extent to which a physical definition of masculinity in terms of a developed musculature is not limited to the male body within representation’ (Tasker, 1993: 3). For her, it describes the ways in which ‘some of the qualities associated with masculinity’, such as physical strength, can be ‘written over the muscular female body’ (1993: 149).⁴ Specifically, Tasker applies ‘musculinity’ to action heroines from mainstream and low-budget cult action movies from the 1970s to the 1990s, with whom Abby—who is modelled after the professional CrossFit athlete Colleen Fotsch—has more in common than, say, Lara Croft. She explores how characters such as Alien’s (1979) Ripley and Terminator 2’s (1991) Sarah Connor denaturalise the ties between masculinity, maleness, and muscular bodies. However, she also argues that in order for action heroines to ‘function effectively within the threatening, macho world of the action picture’, they needed to be ‘masculinised’ (1993: 149). That is, they would find empowerment by also wielding guns and taking control over cars, computers and other technologies that ‘[symbolise] power and freedom within Hollywood’s world’ (1993: 132). The result is an ambivalent mode of signification in which the muscular female body is symbolically transgressive but risks capitulating to the ideals of hegemonic masculinity.

‘Musculinity’ captures the discordant ways in which the muscular female body enters the realm of visual representation. With her brutally violent, masculine-coded entry into TLoU2, Abby evidences precisely this. In the very moment it divests itself of its figurehead of hegemonic masculinity, TLoU2 transfers this position to Abby. Fawaz has described Abby as ‘the figurative representation of a female masculinity that usurps the archetypal male warrior of so many classic video games’ (2024). Abby certainly does take over a position long held by male video game characters, as does Ellie (albeit on terms imitating Joel’s cowboy masculinity, rather than his physical prowess). This is, however, not necessarily a straightforward feminist victory for gender representation in video gaming. At this early point in the game, before players have a chance to embody it, Abby’s “musculinity” is not yet valorised in the same way Joel’s is in TLoU1: rather, it is repulsive, bound up as it is in players’ perception of her, at this stage, as the villain. The key word in Fawaz’s phrasing is ‘usurp’: Abby (illegitimately) steps into the space Joel leaves behind and, in her initial representation in the game, she is moulded to fit that space, specifically under terms that negatively bind her gender expression up with hegemonic masculinity. Queer theorist Jack Halberstam reminds us that:

[A]s long as masculinity is annexed in our society to power and violence and oppression, we will find some masculine women whose gender expression becomes partly wedded to the worst aspects of a culturally mandated masculinity (Halberstam, 1998: 109).

To remove Joel from, and to introduce Abby to, the storyworld of TLoU, Naughty Dog reproduce exactly this nexus of masculinity, power, violence, and oppression through Abby’s (and, indeed, Ellie’s) gender expression. Rather than lose Joel altogether, then, the game sustains a melancholic attachment to his aggressive, violent iteration of hegemonic masculinity, weaponising Abby’s heavily codified musculature and embedding her in a network of symbols and images tied up with this version of hegemonic masculinity.

Druckmann has often been transparent about the similarity Naughty Dog sought to render between Abby and Joel, particularly in their physical stature and gameplay functionalities. In a documentary on the game’s development, he noted that ‘there [was] something interesting in Abby feeling a lot like Joel’, particularly when the concept art of Abby moved towards giving her a muscular physical build (Grounded II, 2024: 35:42). More recently, he has stated that Abby, in contrast to Ellie, is ‘meant to play more like Joel in that she’s almost like a brute in the way she can physically manhandle certain things’ (Mazin and Druckman, 2025). As he explains in the documentary, the developers designed different animations and movement sets for Abby and Ellie, and different weapon upgrade trees (Grounded II, 2024: 36:40). For instance, where Ellie relies upon the ability to sneak up on and use her knife to take down stronger mutations of infected, such as clickers, Abby is able to use melee weapons and her bare fists to do so. Given her military training and access to military-grade weaponry, Abby’s arsenal is more technically advanced than Ellie’s (where Abby uses flamethrowers and crossbows, Ellie uses homemade Molotov cocktails and a bow and arrow). To borrow Tasker’s words, the kinds of “brutish”, ‘muscular fantasies of empowerment’ players were allowed to perform through Joel in TLoU1 are partially recreated in Abby (1993: 132).

However, Abby is not a straightforward melancholic reincorporation of Joel. She occupies an ambivalent position within the game: on the one hand, she seems to become a symbolic repository for all the game loses with Joel. On the other, her story arc with Lev critically reinvents the paternalistic terms of redemption on which so much of the games’ themes are built. Naughty Dog draw several superficial parallels specifically between the partnership she forms with Lev, and the connection Joel and Ellie develop in TLoU1. The effort here is, somewhat bluntly, to encourage player empathy towards Abby. Just as Ellie serves as a vehicle for Joel’s redemption in the first game, Lev arguably performs a similar function in Abby’s story. That said, her motivations for redemption, and the grounds on which she forges her relationship with Lev, are fundamentally unlike the bond Joel forms with Ellie: rather, they improve upon and queer the paternalistic bond shared between the franchise’s original protagonists. If Joel uses Ellie for his own redemption, denying her agency over her own life (Stang, 2018; Ramirez, 2022), Abby affords Lev the chance to live his life as he chooses. Shortly after saving him and his sister Yara from the Seraphites, Abby learns that they are hunting Lev because he is trans and had shaved his head in an act of rebellion against the cult’s oppressive gender-based roles. By saving him, Abby allows him to the opportunity to live as a boy and remain free from the tyranny of the Seraphites.

Abby and Lev: new possibilities for playing gender

Abby’s relationship with Lev instantiates a new kind of kinship that has the potential to challenge, transcend, and truly mourn the game’s melancholic disposition towards the time-honoured tropes of hegemonic masculinity. Their relationship differs in several significant ways from Joel and Ellie’s. Crucially, from both a ludic and narrative perspective, their relationship is less defined by the hierarchies of gendered familial roles, and more by a sense of solidarity. In this regard, the gameplay arrangements for the two pairs are different. In TLoU1, Joel and Ellie’s relationship is structured around escort mechanics, whereby the PC escorts and protects a defenceless NPC through the gameworld. Cruea notes that the escort mechanics in TLoU1 ‘reinforce’ Joel’s ‘role as protector and eventual father figure’ (2018: 122). Unlike Ellie, Lev is a non-playable ally, and he and Abby balance each other out well. Abby is physically stronger than Lev and is more technically trained in weapon-use. Lev is, nevertheless, a skilled archer who assists Abby in combat. His knowledge of the Seraphites’ network of bridges above Seattle also grants him agency, as he guides Abby between the Aquarium and St Mary’s Hospital and helps her navigate her fear of heights. While much of Abby’s gameplay style does indeed mimic Joel’s, her ludic and narrative role is less as Lev’s protector and more as his equal.

Analysing the game from a narratological perspective, the structure of Abby’s story arc across ‘Seattle Day Two’ (in which the bulk of her shared gameplay with Lev takes place) similarly foregrounds the redemptive quality of her non-hierarchical bond with Lev. The chapter is framed by two of Abby’s dreams. Both take place in the Salt Lake City hospital corridor that leads to the surgery room in which Joel murdered Jerry. (Player-controlled journeys down this exact corridor to the scene of the games’ original trauma are a motif in both Ellie and Abby’s stories.) In the first of Abby’s dreams, an alarm is ringing and flashing red; the corridor is dark and filled with smoke. Armed with a pistol, players controlling Abby can rush to the surgery door and burst through it to find Lev and Yara, hung and gutted. This nightmare compels Abby to find the siblings after her initial rescue effort and bring them to safer shelter. The second dream takes place after Abby has secured medical supplies that save Yara’s life. This time round, the corridor is quiet and calm. The red alarm light has stopped blaring, and Abby is unarmed. When players reach the end of the corridor, they find her father in the surgery room, alone and alive, smiling warmly at her under the beam of a surgical lamp.

When Joel annihilates the majority of the Fireflies in order to “save” Ellie from them, he sets in motion a cycle of violence that results, ultimately, in his own death and Ellie’s descent into melancholic grief, whereby she is still not living according to her own choices, but to those made by Joel. Unlike Joel, Abby’s effort to protect the siblings, and especially Lev, is rooted in an ethics of care that is about more than just herself: it is about redressing wider injustice and particularly gender-based injustice. While the bond between Ellie and Joel represents a meaningful attempt at reimagining fatherhood in gaming, it also consolidates the ‘rule of the father’ that so dominates the TLoU franchise (Ramirez, 2022). Abby and Lev’s relationship, far from simply mimicking Joel and Ellie’s, begins the work of breaking this rule.

Abby and Lev, together, also signal a move beyond the commonplace reliance upon heteropatriarchal ideologies in post-apocalyptic fictions and toward the playful, utopian potential of the genre. Writing about kinship in post-apocalyptic fiction, Gero Bauer suggests that ‘hope emerges […] in the potential for acts of solidarity and for the formation of kinship in the shared experience of loss in the here and now’ (2024: 49). Abby and Lev represent a form of kinship that emerges from parallel experiences of loss: for Abby, the loss of her father, friends, and community; for Lev, the loss of his mother, sister, and community. Through them, the game sows the seeds for what Butler (2004a; 2004b) outlines as the conditions for new community and political agency. Grief brings forward our ‘relational ties’, sometimes by exposing how those ties can be threatened, particularly by violence (Butler, 2004b: 22). In so exposing the ‘constitutive sociality of the self’, Butler argues, grief can also form the ‘basis for thinking a political community of a complex order’ (2004a: 19). In other words, if “melancholic masculinity” describes an ambivalent reincorporation of hegemonic masculinity, then the kind of coalitional role of grief in Abby and Lev’s partnership perhaps signals something beyond this. For Ellie, on whose lonely receding figure the game ends, this kind of solidarity remains an unrealised possibility. Yet, in her final confrontation with Abby on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, Ellie lets both her and Lev go (Figure 11). In this, she keeps alive all the possibilities their partnership contains for fostering a political imaginary of improbable coalitions—in the gaming world and beyond. (Figure 12)

Figure 11: Ellie, armed with her weaponry, approaches an emaciated Abby and unconscious Lev.

Figure 12: Abby escapes with Lev into a foggy, unknown horizon; letting them go, Ellie is left alone.

Conclusion

TLoU2 depicts a fraught negotiation with hegemonic structures of masculinity, which the framework of “melancholic masculinity”, in all its equivocality, captures. Murray eloquently describes the role of hegemony in videogames, writing that ‘mainstream games as software systems tend to prop up the values of dominant culture, by creating fields of possibilities circumscribed by particular value systems and world views’ (2018: 95; see also Spowage, 2026: 4). As a popular mainstream game, TLoU2’s representation of hegemonic masculinity is caught up in precisely this. It is a highly ambivalent text. It embraces queer identities, allowing gamers to play as non-normative women characters and therein making possible kinds of identifications for players that are rarely available in triple A videogames; it also props itself up on the spectres of Joel and paternalistic hegemonic masculinity.

This article, though, has not only been about the game’s vexed articulation of hegemonic masculinity as it is performed through Ellie and Abby; it has been about the instability of these structures themselves and their vulnerability to dispute. Hegemonies project images of themselves as monolithic and innate. In order to smooth over any particular disturbance to this image, a new hegemonic fantasy emerges. Hegemonic structures of masculinity follow such a pattern: their enduring power often lies in the manner in which they consolidate heteropatriarchy as a stabilising force, and that which is queer threatens that stability. Popular cultural texts such as videogames become key sites on which this contestation is—quite literally—played out. This is a vital point of reflection for cultural studies, games studies, and gender studies alike—particularly when it comes to considering how videogames, as a medium of expanding cultural significance, play formative roles in the shaping of emergent discourses about gender and genre.

TLoU2 creates a ‘field of possibility’ for queer gender representation that is limited by the fact that it struggles to imagine violent women on anything but patriarchal terms (Murray, 2018: 93). But Abby’s relationship with Lev represents an important step away from the hierarchical, paternalistic model of hegemonic masculinity that the game grapples with—and toward a way of conceptualising novel PC and NPC pairings, and game narratives, that might provide antidotes to the toxicities of hegemonic masculinity. More broadly, their relationship gestures to the queer, utopic possibilities latent in post-apocalyptic cultural texts, which tend to depict survivors rushing to reestablish patriarchal orders and other gender-oppressive structures. Inaugurating a ‘new (protofeminist) video-game world order’ in TLoU2 would never have been as straightforward as simply killing off Joel (Fawaz, 2024). If we are to begin to imagine triple A videogames that truly aim to let go of players’ and the industry’s ‘attachment to [male characters] who helped shape […] literal and virtual power fantasies under patriarchy’ (Fawaz, 2024), then kinships like that between Abby and Lev would be a meaningful place to start.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kate Spowage, first, for indulging my long monologues about The Last of Us and for embarking on this Special Collection with me—I couldn’t ask for a better editorial partner in crime. Thanks also to Carl White for casting an assiduous eye over an early draft and particular thanks to Rachel Johnson for being my continuous interlocutor and final reader. Lastly, sincere thanks to the OLHJ editorial team for steering the ship and to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their attentive readings of my article, which have improved it immeasurably.

Competing Interests

I am co-editing the Special Collection in which this essay appears: ‘Gaming and the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Essays on The Last of Us (2013–)’. I have had no editorial involvement with my own essay, which has undergone the standard procedure of double-blind peer review and has been overseen by my co-editor, Kate Spowage.