Writing Lost in The Last of Us

I first wrote about The Last of Us for a video back in June 2020, only a few weeks before the release of The Last of Us: Part II. It was roughly 4 pages in length, and connected the events of the game to my personal experience with seasonal depression, a breakup, and isolation amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, the video made it as far as the editing stage before I decided to scrap it. In a rush to get the video out before Part II, I realized I wasn't doing The Last of Us the justice it deserved. Furthermore, the script became intensely personal; so much so that I no longer felt comfortable sharing it on the internet, which is the same reason I won't share any excerpts from it here.

Nevertheless, I would soon make a video on The Last of Us: Part II after fully playing it; an analysis that required me to dissect the first game to a somewhat meaningful degree. Though this quelled my interest in making a standalone video about the first game for some time, something would happen late in 2020 that would reignite interest once again.

I made a short film with my friends!

My best friend Brody and I have long been huge fans of The Last of Us. We've also made short films together practically since high school, and after a year of living our lives almost entirely indoors, we were eager to film something once again during our winter break from college. With no script, what Brody, our friend Ryan, and I ended up filming was a very spur-of-the-moment, impromptu vignette of a character who was lost and alone, thinly guided only by his hate and desire for revenge against a former companion. We were very inspired by the plot of The Last of Us: Part II, but the themes of despair and hopelessness that permeate both games as well. We unfortunately never finished the film-- especially after we were caught for trespassing on private property while filming, which was a total accident for us. That was not a fun afternoon.

Going our separate ways back to college after winter break, I was left to reflect on our short film, and why we gravitated towards telling the story that we did.  Particularly, what aspects of The Last of Us unconsciously manifested in our creative decisions? What have I not yet pinpointed about my experience with The Last of Us, and how did this short film bring that to the surface? That's when several ideas for a new The Last of Us video cropped up in my mind, and slowly evolved into an exploration of perspective, isolation, and escapism over the two years it would take for me to finally write the new video. Ever since then, the script was called Lost in The Last of Us.

Truthfully, my entire concept for this video was born from the inability to pinpoint a central, moral message of The Last of Us. Given how many stories I analyze that do have a controlling moral idea-- the power of hope, the importance of compassion, the value of trust-- The Last of Us was a slight anomaly to me. Yet the game had always resonated on a very deep level. Thus, getting to the root of the game's not-so-obvious themes was my mission.

I outlined this video more heavily than any other video to date, basing each chapter around a different topic.

• Chapter 1 was about the immigration experience. This applied to Neil Druckmann, but also composer Gustavo Santoalalla; although I ended up not raising that in the conversation of the video.
• Chapter 2 was about the subversion of the hero's journey. I tout Joseph Campbell's work in so many of my videos, that the opportunity to critique it instead was exciting to me.
• Chapter 3 was about seasonal depression. This was always my favorite aspect of my original The Last of Us script, and it was one component of that script I was interested in picking back up here.
• Chapter 4 was about humanity's innate hypocrisy. After spending 3 Mass Effect videos glorifying humanity's triumphs, the opportunity to offer a more nuanced, down-to-Earth sentiment about people was also very exciting to me.
• Chapter 5 was about tying all these separate topics together. "A whirlwind of truths" I wrote, believing that the experience of The Last of Us was built on the collision of all the different ideas it evokes. Later on, I would find a message that tied everything together more than the confession that there wasn't, but we'll get to that later.

After my first outline, I made an effort to weave the motif of "lost and found" a little more into the second. Despite how disconnected the topics of each chapter initially were, a recurring motif would lend purpose behind the discussion of each chapter. "Darkness and light," " hope and hopelessness," and "man and monster" would all go hand-in-hand with the language used throughout the script for this (while Chapter 1 establishes to the viewer that all these binaries are synonymous with each other). The second outline was a lot more refined, but I needed to better understand what I was trying to say about the topics in each chapter.

Similar to my Mass Effect 3 video, I wrote a brief exploration of every theme or motif I'd be discussing. "The warp of the hero's journey and its consequences" was a big one, and would be the culmination of the video in many ways. While the rest of the video stayed pretty close to my outline-- which was soon converted and simplified to a digital format I could pull up while writing the script-- Chapter 2 and it's "warp of the hero's journey" wound up deviating pretty heavily from what I had written.

The biggest problem with this chapter was that I wanted to critique Campbell's philosophy behind the hero's journey, but had no compelling reason to believe through my research that Naughty Dog ever had any intention in incorporating, subverting, or critiquing the hero's journey through The Last of Us themselves. It's always important for me to find a purpose through the media I'm discussing for my topics, and I couldn't find a substantive reason for that here.

However, a name and book that did crop up more and more in my research was Robert McKee and Story. I knew about Robert McKee from my time in college, but I had genuinely never explored his work before writing this video. Neil Druckmann cities him often as an inspiration, which made examining The Last of Us far more interesting. Most writers who've studied McKee will incorporate his technical approach to structure, character, and dialogue in their stories, but The Last of Us is one of the few stories I've seen that goes the extra-mile by being all-but completely dedicated to McKee's philosophy behind Story.

The notion that a storyteller should not be didactic, or have any delusions of preaching virtue or morals, but be entirely committed to "telling the truth," applied so strongly to Joel and Ellie. Joel never quite presumes the role of a conventional mentor (an archetype you'd see in the Monomyth), but rather a dealer of truth who prepares Ellie for a horrible and chaotic reality. Ellie, a character desperate to find meaning in all her tragic losses, is enthralled by comic book narratives and the eventual belief that providing humanity's cure, ie "saving the world," will justify all the pain she's endured, akin to the transformative aspect of the Monomyth. All of the sudden, the binary of "Mckee and Campbell" reflected the same language of "lost and found."

McKee's deeper comment about the truth, that "dimension means contradiction," finally inspired the central message I could never find before at the heart of The Last of Us too. Because the truth can be so unbearable-- revealed in Chapter 4 by our confrontation with David and the implications of a world without a hero's journey-- we've never had a greater need for a lie. We all have the capacity to be hypocritical people, and try as we may to do the right thing, or defend when we don't, we're never as noble as we think we are. But if we were always committed to only the truth of our existence, life would be a deeply empty and meaningless experience, thus empowering the necessity of stories as much as truth, light as much as darkness, and being lost as much as being found. Everything bears contradiction. This is the message of my video and the fundamental message of the game.

The intro and Chapter 1 were written in two sittings: one while editing The Legacy of Mass Effect 3, and the other just a week after wrapping up The Legacy of Mass Effect 3. Chapter 2 was written over the span of 3-4 weeks, a period that coincided with Christmas, New Years, and a cross-country road trip with Brody. Poetically, it was almost exactly 2 years since we made that short film on our winter break, and was about the same mileage as Joel and Ellie's journey too, which is why I decided to stress "3,000 miles" at the start of Chapter 5, and included videos recorded from our travels at the sequence that starts the chapter; effectively blurring the line between reality and fiction (for us, anyway)!

Chapter 3, 4, and 5 then were all written in the span of just a few days, after returning from the trip. Most of the script stayed the same in its second draft, although small tweaks were made throughout. Particularly, words that coincided with the binary of "lost and found" were better incorporated throughout the script, while the Intro and Chapter 4/ 5 were made to better mirror each other, echoing expressions like "watch the world burn into chaos," and "a whirlwind of confusion and pain." My favorite change between drafts was a more deliberate attention to POV shifts--

• Chapter 1 is written exclusively in 3rd person. We don't know these characters or this world super well yet.
• Chapter 2 starts in 3rd person, but begins incorporating 2nd person with the line "you are taught how to roleplay as Joel." We're starting to understand the characters better. The quote from Story, "we all carry hope in our hearts," finally transitions us into including 1st person in the script. We've now got a pretty good grip of the characters.
• Chapter 3 begins in including 1st person, but is mostly limited to a singular point of view; this is the first time I use "I" in the script outside of the intro. I know these characters, but I've also become decidedly distant from them. The feelings I'm left with because of that are more personal than ever.
• Chapter 4 includes 1st person, but "we" is the primary address throughout this chapter, while "I" is no longer used. Aligned with these characters, the ideas they experience are more universal than ever, and apply to all of us.
• Chapter 5 incorporates a bit of everything. In the whirlwind of truths, reality and fiction are indiscernible from one another, as is the application of these ideas between us and the characters.

That pretty much sums up the writing of Lost in The Last of Us. While it was already very cathartic to finally find the opportunity to talk about a story I've been dying to talk about for the last few years, outlining and writing this video was often times therapeutic, coinciding with the fall and winter seasons and the routine onset of my seasonal depression. It's rarely been debilitating for me, but writing about seasonal depression, and the attitudes that permeate from it gave me a renewed sense of control. I could access those feelings and direct them towards this script instead. It really helped me through the last few months, and I hope the video means something to others who deal with SAD too.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for a behind the scenes commentary on Lost in The Last of Us, and the exciting Patreon Cut of the video!