HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us is being praised for improving on its source material, but sadly when it comes to the portrayal of Black people’s pain and suffering, the show doubled down on the video game’s notorious race problem, writes Merryana Salem.
– This article contains spoilers for both The Last of Us video games and series. –
Let’s start with the show’s fifth outing, which adapts Ellie and Joel’s encounter with Sam and his big brother, Henry – both of whom are Black. HBO made a handful of changes to their game counterparts, like fleshing out their backstory to include Melanie Lynsky’s terrifying Kathleen character and her revenge plot against the brothers, as well as making Sam deaf. In the show, as in the game, the episode concludes with a murder-suicide of Henry killing himself after reflexively shooting his infected little brother.
Sadly, Sam and Henry’s fate in the series aligns with the fate of almost every other Black character in The Last of Us franchise. The franchise’s fascination with minority trauma and Black deaths has been heavily critiqued in the 10 years since the original game’s release.
You’d think showrunner and game creator Neil Druckman and co-writer Craig Maznin would have taken some of this long-established critique on board. Unfortunately though, the HBO series contains more Black pain than the original game, all in the name of bolstering the survival of its two white leads.
A Brief History of Killing Off Black Characters
The Last of Us begins with the death of a child: the daughter of protagonist Joel Miller. Sarah Miller is shot by a FEDRA officer as the outbreak begins and it’s his grief and despair over his inability to save Sarah that really shapes who Joel becomes.
In the game, both Joel and his daughter are white. However, the HBO series casts Black actor Nico Parker as Sarah. While it could be argued Sarah is the second death (after the intense demise of the Miller’s neighbour) Sarah’s is the first major death and it lays the foundation for Joel’s story – atop a young Black girl’s dead body.
Intentional or otherwise, Sarah’s death in The Last of Us show becomes a perfect example of the well-documented ‘Black Character Dies First’ trope. The trope’s history is chronicled well in Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman and film critic Mark H. Harris’ 2023 book, The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar – go read it.
According to the duo, the trope has been around since the late ’60s – with 1967’s Spider Baby serving as a likely prototype. From there, the list of films that kill their Black character first has only grown, encompassing films from The Shining to 300, X-Men: First Class, and many, many more.
Black people talking about turning white x men characters black instead of how a black x man characters whose power is to survive is the first to die in x men first class pic.twitter.com/k6Dd34sIYi
— Yokai (@YokaiTheGreat) September 17, 2022
It’s worth noting that even if a Black character does not die first, a Black character is still more likely to die than their white counterparts when it comes to horror. Killing the Black character is still such an established trope it was parodied in films like Scary Movie and Scream 2. But where did it come from?
Whether here in Australia with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, the US’s Black Americans, the treatment of Black African immigrants in the Middle East or South Africa’s apartheid – Black people are brutalised globally. Art, famously, imitates life, or in the case of Black bodies, the robbery of it.
The murder of a Black person has been made a spectacle for the entertainment and benefit of white and non-Black people the world over. It’s a culture in the West that can be traced back to public lynchings, human zoos, and even the very first blockbuster film; 1915’s Birth of A Nation – which depicted the hunting and killing of a Black man who murdered a white woman.
The proliferation of the ‘Black Character Dies First’ trope is rooted in the historical exclusion of Black people from places of equity. Like Hollywood’s history of vilifying and murdering queer folks on-screen as a method to oppress even the image of queer life, dehumanisation of Black on-screen life stems from regulations, laws and a dominant global culture whose racism excluded them from humanity, limiting the inclusion of Black people behind and in front of the camera.
The relationship between Black death and white protagonists also sees Black people killed to further non-Black characters’ plotlines, in a trope filmmaker Ashlee Blackwell identifies as the “Sacrificial Negro”. The Sacrificial Negro, she says, put “themselves in the face of danger and must die in order to help the white character to survive”. Sarah may not willingly have sacrificed herself in Last Of Us, but it’s her absorption of the bullets fired that allows for her non-Black dad to live.
It’s just not possible to divorce HBO’s The Last of Us from this cultural legacy. Sarah’s death at the hands of a faceless agent of law enforcement even echoes the images of the killing of Black people at the hands of police. Her death has always been a senseless tragedy within the story, but casting a Black actor in the role complicates the image of her death beyond a simple tragedy, and racialises her death in a way that can’t be separated from Black bodies being treated as dispensable on-screen.
Sam, Henry, Marlene, and Riley: Black Trauma and The Last of Us
In both the series and games, the path Joel and Ellie take to their survival is strewn with Black bodies. Sam and Henry die in a tragic murder suicide; Firefly leader Marlene is killed in the final chapter of the game; and Ellie’s best friend Riley is killed by the zombie that infects Ellie. All of these people are in this way treated as dispensable to Joel and Elllie’s story.
The game’s sequel, The Last of Us Part II, will likely be adapted for the series’ confirmed second season. The sequel also includes two Black characters, who also die – one by Ellie’s hand, the other tortured and killed off-screen.
While neither game can procure a single surviving Black person, the show can boast one: Tommy Miller’s pregnant wife Maria (Rutina Wesley). However, I’m not inclined to congratulate the show on not killing a pregnant Black woman – I’ve already witnessed three Black children (one of whom is disabled) die violent deaths in service of two non-Black character’s storylines.
(Spoilers for The Last of Us Parts 1 and 2)
I’ve enjoyed TLOU so far. Well directed and incredibly moving at times. But I have one criticism about show and the entire franchise:
Could we get ONE black character from this series that isn’t brutally/tragically killed? Just one? pic.twitter.com/eAcjJyCsrT
— Ultimate Julian Burrell (@Julian_Burrell) February 13, 2023
The Last Of Us is, of course, a story about the end of the world, and death and trauma are to be expected. Many will nod to the non-Black folks who die in The Last of Us as well, including Joel’s partner Tess (Anna Torv) as well as their longtime friends, Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett).
But the problem isn’t how many people die, it’s who gets the privilege of survival. For every non-Black character who dies, you can point to a significant one who lives, namely the beloved protagonists Ellie and Joel. Black characters aren’t afforded the same privilege. Even in a fictional, imagined future, their survival is deemed unimaginable.
The other argument commonly made to justify the slaughter of Black people on-screen is the claim of realism: that media like The Last of Us is actually just being accurate about who will survive and who will not in an apocalypse. This claim would only hold water, though, if the show concerned itself with realism at all.
So, let’s be real: The Last of Us is a science fiction story about a world overrun by viral mushroom zombies that a single child alone is immune to. This is the “realistic” story creator Neil Druckmann chose to tell with The Last of Us. How is a Black person’s survival deemed less realistic than a community of bloated fungi-infested humans hanging out in the sewers?
In a series of interviews including with The Washington Post, Neil Druckmann explained that his inspiration for the games’ material were the “cycles of violence” he witnessed as an Israeli in occupied Palestine. Several times, Druckmann describes the universally vengeful hatred he felt after learning of Palestinian rebels who kill IDF soldiers, claiming that he wanted to kill them all. (In the same interview with the Post, they write: ‘… eventually, [Druckmann] looked back and felt “gross and guilty” for his intense feelings’.)
Suffice to say, someone who so casually admits to such a hatred of non-white people – someone who clearly hasn’t considered Palestinians’ trauma as colonised exiles fighting the occupation of their own country – isn’t a person likely to have compassion for other people of colour.
Druckmann disregards Black trauma and Black bodies in The Last of Us beyond how they bolster the stories of his white protagonists. It’s hardly a stretch to see this as an extension of his “intense hate that is universal” attitude; one that privileges universal hate over a universal right to humanity. It seems that, for Druckmann, people of colour in The Last of Us are canon fodder in the battle for his white character’s survival.
Treating Pain As Black Folks’ Worldly Fate
Before The Last of Us, the biggest zombie TV show was The Walking Dead. The popular series ran for over a decade and concluded its final season last year.
From Twitter to TikTok, comparing The Last of Us and The Walking Dead has reached meme status. One TikToker even acted out the ultimate “apocalypse dad” meeting between The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes and Joel Miller where the two bond over single fatherhood at the end of the world.
The Walking Dead has a far from clean track record in its representation of people of colour, too. But one thing it did have was a diverse presence of Black characters and characters of colour scattered throughout its seasons – including deaf, queer and disabled Black characters. All of whom spend the series thriving, surviving, having families and building community in the apocalypse.
The Last of Us may boast a higher budget and a star-studded cast, but treating Black characters with basic humanity by assuming a future where they’re likely to survive and thrive is not a quality The Last of Us can claim to have over The Walking Dead.
Even aesthetically, The Last of Us finds ways to create an assumed reality in which Black people are unlikely to survive. In its third episode, the rotting corpse of a Black woman and her baby is used to convey a flashback. The camera pans into the corpse and back out to reveal a Black woman hugging her child as the 2003 date flashes on screen.
In The Last of Us, the Black person is dead. They are twice dead in the backstory, dead in the inciting incident, dead twice over on the journey, and rot among the corpses Ellie and Joel step over.
A show’s attempt at inclusion has failed if almost every person of colour dies for the sake of white character development. The bodies of Black people and people of colour are not footnotes, or fodder.
We are not window dressing, nor are our lives kindling for the flames of white storytelling. We deserve better, even and especially at the end of the world.
This is an opinion piece, written by Merryana Salem (they/them), a proud Wonnarua and Lebanese–Australian writer, critic, teacher and podcaster. They are on most social media as @akajustmerry.