The Last of Us Courts Controversy in Latest Trailer

The Last of Us was great. People loved it and clamored for a second installment, to which the studio happily obliged with an announcement in October of 2016 via one short trailer of Ellie singing. Awesome. Since then, there has been absolute radio silence on the sequel, probably due to the announcement trailer being about the only thing complete in the game at the time of the announcement. (The saltiest among us might blame the Cher-style farewell parade of Uncharted material, but I’d rather not be buried alive by Uncharted fans.)

After a year of waiting, Christmas came early and fans were gifted a new trailer full of new characters in The Last of Us Part 2. Just kidding about the saltiest among us earlier. Twitter comments on the trailer are saltier than fries, with aggravations ranging from ‘how dare you include new characters in a sequel’ to ‘I cannot believe this trailer for a particularly violent video game contains violence’. Playstation responded to the latter criticism better than I can, so I’ll just pop their response in here.

The Last of Us obviously is a game made by adults to be played by adults. I should never prejudge this but it will probably be rated ’18’, I think it’s fair to say.

Outside of the controversy, breaking down the trailer is quick and easy, so we can go ahead and jump into that here. There are three characters that survive the trailer. Two are from a group that seems like it may be a religious cult, on account of referring to the infected as demons. They appear to be locking horns with either the leader of the group or a second cult, with the leader stealing away young women for purification rituals and atonements that invariably involve physical torture. The third character is an unknown woman bearing a striking resemblance to Ellie, who is saved by the religious duo just in time for infected to show up. Somewhere in between, the three work together to kill the three homicidal cultists and escape before more can arrive. As a note, the purification in questions seems to be aimed at eliminating a pregnancy in the third woman, who also happens to be super ripped.

Fans across the internet have come to the conclusion that the third female character is Ellie’s mom, though there are other possibilities and no confirmation. We likely won’t know anything else about the mystery woman for several months while Naughty Dog works on the game, but fans can have fun in the meantime in online forums discussing how these characters may fit into the world we know from The Last of Us.