While the second season of The Last of Us took home the Game Award for Best Adaptation, the live-action show is definitely still a sore subject for fans of the game with how it’s handling Naughty Dog’s infected drama. Although much of the backlash toward the show has become noise, lumping genuine criticism with homophobia, original Ellie voice actor Ashley Johnson thinks the discourse around the show isn’t dissimilar to that around the games.
Speaking with the Direct, Johnson charitably characterized the backlash as one steeped in evident passion for the games. A passion that will more often than not find friction whenever one’s idea for the series runs counter to what the creators have planned to bring it to life. With The Last of Us‘ whole deal, for better or worse, being a huge subversion of fans’ expectations, from the original game’s ending to the front half of the second game, which doubled down on the feeling of dumping cold water on fans and asking them to sit with that feeling, the show’s adaptation running into a similar phenomenon is basically poetry, rhyming, and Johnson can understand the frustration from both sides.
“Sometimes that passion feels really great, and sometimes it feels not great. But you know, I understand it. I understand loving something so much, and wanting it to be what you want it to be,” she said. “We don’t operate to either make people happy on social media or avoid making them upset. We just do what we think is right, and we hope that people come along for the ride and enjoy it.”
While Johnson doesn’t get too into the weeds about what caused the fan backlash to The Last of Us season two—and honestly, who can blame her (that’s a huge can of worms)—she ends her take by bandying both sides of the aisle, creators and fans, by highlighting just how hard it is to balance passion and expectations.
“It can be hard sometimes, when you are making these things, and on your side of things, you’re passionate about it, and excited about it, and hopefully that those two things can meet. Sometimes they do not. And that’s hard, because I mean, anytime you’re working on anything, you want people to like it, and you want people to love it as much as you. But I love The Last of Us in every form, and I am so happy that I get to be a part of that telling of that story.”
Johnson isn’t the only Ellie actor to voice their sentiments on fan backlash over season two. Bella Ramsey basically said what most people were thinking while speaking on The Awardist podcast in response to the loud yet vocal minority viewers who took umbrage with Ellie’s relationship with Dina.
“There’s nothing I can do about it anyway. The show is out. There’s nothing that can be changed or altered. So I’m like, there’s not really any point in reading or looking at anything,” Ramsey said. “People are, of course, entitled to their opinions. But it doesn’t affect the show; it doesn’t affect how the show continues or anything in any way. They’re very separate things to me. So no, I just don’t really engage.”
At io9, we were pretty critical of the second season for not seeming to trust its audience unless it was laying every possible thought from their noggins, leaving nuance and “show, don’t tell” by the wayside. In essence, the show felt like it was practically massaging viewers’ jaws to help them chew on what every character is feeling in any given moment, without letting its cast do their thing.
As far as what the future holds for HBO’s adaptation of Naughty Dog’s frequently re-released infected-killing Dad simulator, we’ve got season three in the wings, though it won’t see game co-creator Neil Druckmann involved. Druckmann will instead be focusing on the development of Naughty Dog’s upcoming anime-inspired space game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. The season will instead be solo-helmed by showrunner Craig Mazin—a man who definitely has had questionable interpretations of character amplitudes from the past season. He’s also someone who’s already got his hands in another video game pie in HBO’s upcoming Baldur’s Gate 3 show—a show that the writers at Larian Studios aren’t going to be involved with (cue nervous sweating).
Regardless, the third season is going to be less centered on Bella Ramsay’s Ellie and instead take more of a focus on Kaitlyn Dever’s Abby, so prayer circles for her to continue to avoid the weird “fans” and the online harassment and death threats lambasted at her video game acting counterpart, Laura Bailey. What that season will have in store is semi-up in the air, in terms of where it’ll end for folks who’ve played the game, because the whole shebang will end with a fourth season. Hopefully, by then, we’ll all be completely normal about it.
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