Note: This essay contains major spoilers for both the video game and the television adaptation of The Last of Us. Written shortly after the Season 2 finale aired (May 25, 2025), with Season 3 still to come.
In Season 2 of The Last of Us, Ellie finds a guitar in an abandoned theater. She sits with it, alone, already deep into her revenge path. She strums the guitar and sings just one line—
If I were to ever lose you…
And then—nothing. She can’t go on. Or maybe she won’t.
The song is “Future Days” by Pearl Jam—the same one Joel sang to her during a later flashback episode. It’s a glimpse of the early, peaceful days in Jackson, when Joel and Ellie really became a family. When he finishes, Ellie—beaming, says in all sincerity—”Well, that didn’t suck.” It’s a moment of understated tenderness. A promise wrapped in melody. Back then, it was a symbol of healing—of connection. A surrogate father’s vow to offer something beautiful in a brutal world. Joel had restored the guitar, restored music, restored something in himself. A touchstone moment in their relationship.
But now? Now the “if” has become real. Joel is dead—killed by someone seeking justice for a life he took. And Ellie is unraveling. If I were to ever lose you. That single line, left suspended in the air, is no longer a love song. It’s a threat. A justification. An elegy for what was lost and an indictment of what she’s willing to do because of it.
That moment—quiet, restrained, devastating—is the emotional hinge of the season. It’s where The Last of Us shows its hand. This isn’t a story about violence born of hatred. It’s about violence born of love.
Joel’s love for Ellie.
Ellie’s love for Joel.
And Abby’s love for her father.
If I were to ever lose you.
The exact same refrain.
The violence, as relentless as it is, only makes sense because the love feels real first. And once that love is threatened—or taken—the rules break. The world stops making sense. And what we do to survive emotionally, in the name of someone we’ve lost, can be just as destructive as what we do to survive physically.
When the Same Wound Cuts Both Ways
When The Last of Us was announced as a prestige TV show, fans of the game weren’t worried it would be bad—they were worried it wouldn’t be enough. Because the original game wasn’t just a good story in a believable world. It was a singular experience in first-person moral consequence.
The brilliance of the game wasn’t just in its storytelling, but in its structure—you didn’t just observe these characters, you became them. You played as Joel while he killed the Fireflies to save Ellie. You played as Ellie in Part II, not just surviving the infected but killing human enemies—W.L.F. soldiers with names and backstories. And most radically, you played as Abby for half the game, experiencing the narrative from the other side. The game gave you no choice but to inhabit both moral perspectives. It didn’t ask, ‘What would you do if you were them?’ It made you be them. And then it made you sit with it.
So when Joel chose to save Ellie rather than sacrifice her for a cure, you had to live with the weight of that—controller in hand.
That structure, more than anything else, explains the emotional complexity of Season 2. Even before the narrative fully shifts to Abby’s perspective, we see the groundwork for how her arc will mirror Ellie’s.
When Empathy Makes You Complicit
Ellie and Abby are not opposites. They are mirrors. Both lose the person who grounded them. Both feel the loss as a violation of justice. And both try to stitch that justice back together using the sharp needle of revenge. The fact that they are on opposing sides of the same moral argument is the tragedy—not the twist.
Ellie’s journey in Season 2 is marked by grief turned outward. Her love for Joel becomes something both brittle and razor-edged. She doesn’t want to just hurt Abby—she wants to feel something that makes sense. And what she ends up feeling, over and over again, is the high cost of being driven by that pain. She kills. She lies. She alienates the people who still love her. But none of it brings Joel back, or gives her what Abby took.
And Abby? We don’t see her full arc—yet, but what we do see is enough. She’s not a villain. She’s a daughter. And her need for justice isn’t born from ideology—it’s born from loss. That shared root is what makes the contrast with Ellie so painful, and so honest.
What the show does effectively is refuse to make empathy easy. As Brené Brown puts it, empathy is not imagining what you would do in someone else’s place—it’s feeling with them, understanding their experience as they live it. And yet in some ways, the show does make empathy easy. We’re strongly aligned with Joel, who ultimately confesses to Ellie what he’s done—and admits, without hesitation, that he would do it again. Unlike the game, the show makes his love explicit—“Because I love you, in a way you can’t understand.” And we feel that. The rub is this: we empathize with someone who committed an unforgivable act. We feel for people doing heinous things. That’s not a flaw in the show—it’s the point. That symmetry—two acts of love, two acts of loss—drives the season’s emotional logic.
The same mirroring shows up again with Dina and Mel. We spend time with Dina—laughing with her, worrying with her, witnessing how discovering her pregnancy changes everything, not just for her, but for Ellie too. That baby represents hope, vulnerability, a future. So when Ellie later shoots Mel during a chaotic encounter—and only afterward realizes Mel was pregnant—the emotional impact lands like a gut punch. Not just for Ellie, but for us. Because we’ve seen how much Ellie cared about Dina’s pregnancy. And now, through her own actions, she’s caused another pregnancy to end in tragedy.
It’s not a thematic coincidence. It’s a deliberate narrative mirror that forces Ellie—and the audience—to reckon with the human cost on the other side. The maternal instinct plays out in different contexts but with identical emotional weight. The characters aren’t abstractions; they’re people we’ve come to care about. We’re not handed backstory and told to forgive. We’re given an empathetic bridge so we can have a felt understanding. And that’s easier and harder at the same time. But it’s also more real.
When Violence Becomes the Norm
There’s a flashback scene that lingers long after it ends—Joel and Tommy as teenage boys, dreading their father’s return. Joel tells Tommy that when their dad comes home and reaches for the belt, he’ll take the beating instead. But what follows is unexpected. Their father doesn’t explode. He opens up. He confesses to Joel that when he was a boy, his own father beat him so badly his jaw was wired shut for two months. The pain, he says, wasn’t just physical—it was shameful, because everyone knew. And then he says something that defines the quiet tragedy of generational violence: “But I’m doing a little better than my father did. You know when it’s your turn, I hope you do a little better than me.”
This is the blueprint for how violence lives in the world of The Last of Us—not just as trauma, but as legacy. Not just as harm, but as something inherited with love. It’s why the characters don’t talk like killers but act like survivors. Joel and Tommy grow up in a house where love and harm aren’t easily separated. Ellie, Dina, Abby—each a young woman shaped in a world where killing is routine, where infected are hunted and human threats are neutralized without hesitation. When survival demands violence, and violence becomes habitual, empathy erodes. And when that erosion begins in childhood, the brain adapts. What feels “normal” depends entirely on what you grow up with.
And this isn’t just narrative logic—it’s what research bears out. Studies consistently show that the strongest predictor of future violence isn’t exposure to simulated violence—even from something as graphically intense as The Last of Us, whether experienced as a video game or a prestige drama. A 2007 meta-analysis by Christopher J. Ferguson, published in Psychiatric Quarterly, explicitly debunks the claim that violent video games cause real-world violence—a fallacy that continues to circulate in media and politics. The study found no significant causal link between simulated violence and aggression. And yet the myth persists.
What a wide body of psychological research does show is that exposure to real-world, personally experienced violence—not fictional or simulated depictions—is one of the most reliable predictors of future aggression. A personal history of trauma—such as child abuse, domestic violence, gang involvement, or combat experience—leaves deeper psychological imprints and reshapes how the brain anticipates threat, safety, and harm. In short: we don’t become violent because of the stories we consume—we become violent because of the lives we survive.
So when Joel kills to save Ellie, or Ellie kills to avenge Joel, or Abby kills to honor her father—it’s not flippant. It’s not even shocking. It’s what happens when love and violence share the same origin story.
The Last of Us doesn’t trivialize violence. It contextualizes it. And what makes it disturbing is that the show’s depiction of violence—persistent, rationalized, sometimes almost mundane—isn’t hyperbole. It’s psychologically accurate. Trauma doesn’t just make people hardened—it makes them hypervigilant and raw at once. It creates a state of vulnerability, where love becomes desperate, danger feels constant, and violence can begin to seem like the only language left to express either. The world these characters live in didn’t make them monsters. It made them human in the way that trauma often does: capable of both tenderness and destruction, often in the same breath.
When Loyalty Replaces Morality
In The Last of Us, violence is also never random—it’s almost always done for “our people.” That phrase becomes a moral override. Whether it’s the Fireflies, the W.L.F., the people of Jackson, or the Seraphites, every character who kills does so with the belief that they’re protecting their own. What’s chilling isn’t that people do horrible things. It’s that they do them with conviction. With love and loyalty.
Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky describes how our brains are wired for in-group favoritism—how we empathize more easily with those who look like us, talk like us, or share our struggle. It’s not logic. It’s instinct. And The Last of Us shows what happens when that instinct—hardened by scarcity, danger, and loss—becomes our worldview. Once you draw the line between “us” and “them,” morality bends to allegiance.
Ellie doesn’t hesitate to kill W.L.F. soldiers. Abby doesn’t flinch when striking down those from Jackson. Neither sees themselves as cruel. They see themselves as loyal. In a post-collapse world where institutions have failed and every system is tribal, belonging becomes survival—and that makes anyone outside the tribe expendable.
Daniel Kahneman’s work on fast and slow thinking helps explain why. When we perceive threat or loss—especially when someone we love is in danger—we don’t rely on deliberate reasoning. We go with our gut. And our gut says: protect your people, no matter the cost.
That’s why the show resists making villains. It’s easy to judge someone from the outside. It’s harder when you see who they’re fighting for. And in The Last of Us, the most searing example of that isn’t a side character—it’s Joel. Joel isn’t just a flawed hero—he’s Abby’s villain. And the show doesn’t flinch from showing us why. When Abby captures Joel, she doesn’t gloat. She delivers a thesis. She lays out the facts: that her father was an unarmed doctor trying to save the world, and Joel murdered him. She says, “There are some things everyone agrees are just f—ing wrong.” And Joel, to his credit, agrees—just barely. A nod. A silent confession. Not just of guilt, but of recognition. He knows he’s someone else’s monster. And in that moment, the line between us and them collapses.
And if we’re honest, we understand. Because most of us have people we would break the rules for. The show forces us to feel that tension: the deep, human pull of loyalty, even when it leads somewhere unthinkable.
When Love Justifies Everything
The Last of Us doesn’t give answers. It gives us people—messy, grieving, reactive people whose love becomes their justification.
That’s the thread that binds everything in this story. Empathy is strongest when it grows from love. Violence becomes most understandable—not excusable, but emotionally legible—when it’s done in the name of love. And in-group loyalty hardens into moral conviction when love is the thing being protected.
Joel lies and kills to save Ellie because he loves her. Ellie destroys her relationships and her future to avenge Joel because she loved him. Abby’s relentless need not just to kill Joel, but to make him suffer, is directly proportional to her loss—and her loss is directly proportional to her love. This isn’t love as sentiment. It’s love as motive. Love as gravity—the same force that once pulled them toward hope, now pulling them toward ruin.
The show never asks us to condone any of it. It just asks: what would it take to break you? And who would you break the world for if you did?
Season 2 holds up a mirror and dares us to see ourselves—not in the heroes, but in the fault lines. In the places where tenderness turns into rage. Where grief becomes purpose. Where morality gets rewritten in the name of someone we can’t bear to lose.
Love justifies everything. Even when it warps. Even when it hurts. Even when it becomes a threat.
Because in the end, “If I were to ever lose you” is still—and always was—the beginning of a love song.