i’ve seen two articles about how the last of us episode 3 is a conservative power fantasy masked in a queer love story and it just rubs me the wrong way a little because i feel like it ignores the fact that being away from heteronormative society is an actual queer fantasy and trope (like in maurice for example, where the two lovers run away from england to be together.)
i’m trying to be fair to those articles tho and examining my own predisposition to defending this episode – it moved me a lot so i’m a bit protective of me. i also think we can enjoy media while also being critical of it.
both articles seem to really harp on about bill hoarding resources and refusing to help communities around him but seem to ignore that in universe there’s no one really around him to help. joel pretty much states in a scene that they’re so far away from the rest of civilization that the only people who will come their way are the occasional raiders. surrounding communities around them have devolved into fascism and by making themselves known, bill and frank risk the threat of being exposed and potentially executed or forced to lose their home by FEDRA.
the articles talk about how societal isolation is bad (which i agree) without taking into consideration that there isn’t much of a society left in the world anymore. and the fact that bill was already isolated before the pandemic and was only free to be himself and love freely when that society collapsed says something of how damaging that society was.
i think there’s something to be said about how zombie/post apocalyptic media tends to lend itself to more conservative/ individualistic values of “my people over others” but i guess i just don’t understand why this particular episode and this particular couple is the one being nitpicked. that bill and frank somehow owed society a share of their resources when doing so could have exposed them to fascism and hostility.
and on the subject of bill being a doomsday prepper. if anything i feel like that was more of a means to getting him to where he needed to be in the episode – it explains why he was the sole survivor of his town. maybe the episode could have done more to deconstruct his worldview but it was an 80 minute story where the moral was “life can be good in the post-apocalypse if you find someone to love” so idk. /shrug
I remember seeing one of those articles on Twitter, and I clicked on it to read what it had to say and it was behind a paywall. Go figure.
But I think one of the things I actually liked the most about Long Long Time is that Bill really isn’t a nice person… at the beginning. If the apocalypse hadn’t happened and he hadn’t met Frank he’d almost certainly be a nightmare, but he did meet Frank. “You can love a person so much you can make them a better human being and change the entire story” is probably also a power fantasy but I don’t think it’s a conservative one.