Bella Ramsey Says Critics Of The Last Of Us's LGBTQ Storylines Should 'Get Used To It'
"The Last of Us" is the rare video game adaptation that has emerged as both a critical darling and an audience favorite. On review aggregators Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, the HBO series has a 97% rating and an 84 score based on the overall critics' consensus, respectively. And over on the film database IMDb, "The Last of Us" has a 9.2/10 rating from over 194,000 users.
Despite the positive reviews, "The Last of Us" hasn't been completely unaffected (or uninfected) by the culture wars. Up to this point, the series has drawn mainly from the first eponymous game by Naughty Dog, but the 2020 game sequel, "The Last of Us Part II," became the target of immediate review bombing when it was released, in part because of its inclusion of a transgender character voiced by a transgender actor. Some bigots called it "LBGTQ propaganda," among other things.
The TV adaptation of "The Last of Us" also became a target of review bombing for its third episode, which centered on a relationship between two gay men, Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett). However, Bella Ramsey, who co-leads the series as Ellie and identifies as gender fluid in real life, recently told GQ that "critics" of the show's LGBTQ storylines should "get used to it:"
"I'm not particularly anxious about it. I know people will think what they want to think. But they're gonna have to get used to it. If you don't want to watch the show because it has gay storylines, because it has a trans character, that's on you, and you're missing out. It isn't gonna make me afraid. I think that comes from a place of defiance."
Immune to Cordyceps, but not criticism
This section contains spoilers for "The Last of Us" episode 3.
While much of the hate surrounding "The Last of Us Part II" may have been fueled by garden-variety transphobia, it's worth pointing out that the game received some criticism, not for its inclusion of a transgender character, but for its treatment of that character by cisgender writers. A trans writer in Paste said that after playing the game, it seemed like "the only reason trans people are made broadly visible is to make cis voyeurs feel good about themselves."
As someone who's never played any of "The Last of Us" video games, I've had a slightly different reaction to the show thus far. On the whole, I think "The Last of Us" is a great show, but unlike Ellie, who is immune to the Cordyceps infection, I don't think it's immune to all criticism. Hollywood in general isn't as progressive as it might like to believe it is, and I'm still not entirely convinced "The Last of Us" episode 3 skirts the Bury Your Gays trope. At first, Frank feels like this Manic Pixie Dream Guy who's just dropped out of the sky for Bill. And while we do witness this tender love story play out between them, they're still dead and gone after one episode, while the real protagonists, Joel and Ellie, are left to make off with their belongings.
The worst of us
What Bella Ramsey is responding to in her comments is something else entirely. Elsewhere, GQ likened the backlash to "The Last of Us Part II" to the one surrounding "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," which opens up another whole can of worms since a 2018 study suggested that the backlash to that movie was amplified by Russian trolls.
At the end of the day, when a movie or TV show gets review-bombed, we have no way of knowing how many of those reviewers are acting in good faith or have even watched the property in question. Sharing your honest opinion, negative or positive, is one thing, but targeting a piece of entertainment for the people it features reeks of bigotry. And given how quickly ideas can spread online nowadays — rather like the fungal infection in "The Last of Us" — it's possible trolls are leading some into hating something more than they really do.
Ramsey acknowledged that people do have the option of simply not watching "The Last of Us" if they don't like it. That seems like a healthier option than stewing in resentment and behaving like the worst of us online when talking about "The Last of Us."