The trendy post-apocalyptic trope The Last Of Us just couldn’t resist
Was the big twist in the penultimate episode a cliché, or just the latest expression of a pop culture moment?
TV Features Us
Editor’s note: The following discussion contains spoilers for the eighth episode of The Last Of Us, “When We Are In Need.”
In an article for Vogue last December, author Chelsea G. Summers identified cannibalism in fiction as the defining cultural trend of 2022. The evidence is hard to dispute. We got Bones And All in theaters, and Yellowjackets, Fresh, and Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story on television. There were books like Woman, Eating and Summers’ own A Certain Hunger. The popular video game Elden Ring featured a cannibal village, and there were even cooking games like Cannibal Cuisine and Ravenous Devils that involved the preparation of human meat. All of those titles came out just last year. So if you have mixed feelings about the latest episode of The Last Of Us going the cannibal route (as the game previously did), it might help to look at it as a narrative tool that reflects on (and perhaps even relies on) the zeitgeist.
For a series that has spent most of its season deliberately avoiding the tropes of the zombie genre (and make no mistake, this is a zombie show), The Last Of Us took a rather expected turn with the introduction of David (Scott Shepherd), the most evil villain we’ve met so far, and his clan of (mostly) unwitting cannibals. It’s nothing new for post-apocalyptic stories in any medium to use cannibalism as a plot point; they’re essentially an offshoot of the disaster survival genre. The Walking Dead, which always seems to hang over The Last Of Us like a long shadow, had its Terminus arc back in 2014. When those episodes aired, many fans accurately predicted where the storyline was going. The juxtaposition of mindless man-eating zombies and survivors who choose the same path with clear heads is rich territory to explore. It’s no wonder it comes up so often in these kinds of shows.
There’s a whole category for this over on the TV Tropes website: “I’m a humanitarian” (as in, if vegetarians eat vegetables, then humanitarians must … you know). You’ll find dozens of titles listed there, from The X-Files to Brooklyn Nine-Nine to The Simpsons to Hannibal. But none of those—with the possible exception of Hannibal, a show way ahead of its time—really speaks to the current wave of cannibals invading our media landscape and the reasons for that. What is it about modern times that makes us want to lift up the rock of civilized society and examine the squirming savages beneath?
If only there were some sort of massive global event we could point to that made us all pause and consider what might happen if the guardrails that keep our communities in order were to fail. Oh, right. The pandemic might be the most obvious paradigm shift, but we’ve also seen upheavals in social justice, democracy, women’s rights, international diplomacy, the economy, and so many other systems we once took for granted as reliably stable. Watching them being dismantled and feeling powerless to stop it takes a toll on our psyche. To the rational brain, it might sound ridiculous to draw a line from these events to cannibalism, but cultural trends like this often touch something deeper within us beyond logic (and some right-wing extremists have already gone there by circulating illogical conspiracy theories suggesting their political opponents have engaged in it).
The news cycle often forces us to ask the question: What horrors are we as a species truly capable of when ethics, truth, empathy, and basic human decency are devalued? Taking that line of speculation all the way to its limit, we ultimately arrive at cannibalism, the last and most forbidden taboo. When we see characters in fiction cross that line—whether it’s a desperate attempt to survive or to satisfy an unnatural craving—it’s a sign to the audience that they’re past the point of no return. We can believe this character is capable of committing any atrocity because they’ve already thought the unthinkable, and acted on it (with or without their sanity intact).
When we learn that David in The Last Of Us has been feeding his people human meat and lying to them about it, that tells us all we need to know about the extent of his depravity. For all the reasons we’ve talked about, it’s likely that most of the audience correctly jumped to the right conclusion about the real origin of that “venison” right away. Once we suspect David is a cannibal, he becomes that much more of a threat to Ellie. Then he makes his creepy advance on her and we know we’re dealing with a truly irredeemable monster. It worked well in the game, and still does here. Sure, it’s a more predictable twist than we’re used to in this series, but the writers are counting on the audience to make that connection. With cannibals suddenly cropping up everywhere in pop culture, that’s an even safer bet now than when the game first came out in 2013.
It’s starting to look like cannibalism as a defining trend isn’t going to be limited to a single year. As long as we’re still dealing with trauma and disruption in public life, it will have symbolic appeal to artists, creators, and audiences alike. As much as it’s tempting to call out The Last Of Us for being the latest work to jump on the cannibal bandwagon, it’s a subject matter that remains unfortunately relevant in 2023.
165 Comments
Cannibalism is trendy?I’m finally cool! Wait until I tell lunch.
Now is finally the time for my long pig business to shine!
Just don’t late for dinner, or your friends will give you the cold shoulder!
better than having cold feets for the wedding banquet
Oh, I would never go to a banquet that wasn’t serving feet. I’m lack toes intolerant.
I could serve up an offal riposte, but my heart isn’t in it, and I just don’t have the guts for it.
Having an old friend for dinner?
Cannibalism, bleaching your eyebrows (see Madonna at The Grammys), cargo pants, and, worst than cannibalism, Crocs.
my last meal really made me work for itno hand outs!
This entire article is framing this as if TLoU didn’t do this story back in 2013. Huge swaths of this episode (and the series) are straight form the game, and aside from seeing the men and women of the community, this is maybe the closest the show has hewn to the game.
Exactly. It’s not hopping on some trend. It’s telling a story that it told a decade before the current “trend” even started.
Oh, the seemingly nice people who eat people is a very, very old trope that was a tired cliche well before 2013. Think of the famous 1950 short story “To Serve Man” in which the friendly aliens just want to serve mankind (as their main course!). This was made into an even more famous Twilight Zone episode of the same name in 1962, and was parodied in the first appearance of Kang and Kodos in “The Simpsons” in 1990.
I disagree that post-apocalyptic cannibals weren’t a trope 10 years ago, but they may have become even more trendy since then.
To be clear, I never said they weren’t a trope. Just that TLOU isn’t jumping on a trend, since they’re just retelling a story they already told before the current trend.
yeah I feel like you just defeated this entire article with that statement.
Was just gonna say the exact same thing. Did the writer not realise its based on a game from 10 years before?
I’m guessing since the article specifically mentioned that this happened in the game 10 years ago, the author probably knew this happened in the game 10 years ago.
She even mentions that it was something in the game but didn’t bother to research that the game came out in 2013. Imagine writing an entire article for nothing?
it’s mentioned in the article that the game did this before, but then it proceeds to step on that acknowledgment like this is something new to this story.
If only there were some part of the article that mentioned that, maybe even in the first paragraph.So if you have mixed feelings about the latest episode of The Last Of Us going the cannibal route (as the game previously did)
Manotaur’s question seems rhetorical as the author’s inclusion of that parenthetical seems to obviate the reason for the article’s existence. (Sorry for not opting for “raison d’etre” there. It seemed a bit much after typing “obviate.”)And even if it was a lapse, it seems forgivable, as the author’s Betteridge’s Law thesis question lends the article some unnecessary confusion: While it’s fine to write a modest little think-piece about the uptick in depictions of cannibalism in film and television, it’s disingenuous to bait the hook with a “Is TLoU jumping on the bandwagon?” question, especially when you concede in the very first paragraph that it isn’t, that the story predates the trend. (What, is the show supposed to diverge from its perfectly good source simply because some other (mostly crappy) things exist?) The article would have gained a lot by subtracting that.In short, if the writer seems a bit confused, who can blame the reader for feeling the same way?
You do realize that there just might be a small group (read: majority) of people who haven’t played the game that might be watching this show on it’s own merit?Not everyone has been playing this game in their mom’s basement since 2013.
The medium of the original story is inconsequential. This article is the equivalent of saying “Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front jumps in on trendy new anti-war themes.” Something can’t be hopping on a new trend if it existed before said trend occurred.
It isn’t hopping on a new trend, necessarily, but sometimes things are adapted (or readapted) because the subject matter has come back into vogue. Not that I’m really defending this article. It isn’t saying much, really. But the premise that “This came out when it did because the subject matter is currently hot” isn’t invalid just because it’s adapting preexisting material.
I get your point, so I’m not trying to be snarky here, but it’s not as if a desire to get in on this cannibalism fad was a major motivating force behind adapting the game to TV, considering as it was for just one episode and considering that this adaptation has been in the works for at least five years (i.e., before the rise of the cannibalism trend).That’s an incredibly obvious point, I know, but the point I’m getting to is that I doubt there was some kind of writers-room situation when they got around to this particular episode and actually consciously decided to keep the cannibalism angle in order to ride a trend. It was a significant arc in the game, so it’s naturally going to remain intact for the show. (i.e., if there wasn’t some kind of cannibalism trend, it’s not like they would have even paused to consider not including it in the show.)
I don’t disagree, and you’re probably right that the presence of that subplot was utterly irrelevant to the decision to adapt the show. I’m just saying that “This is in this show because it’s trendy right now,”while probably an incorrect argument, isn’t a bullshit argument just because the material is preexisting.
Ooooh so edgy, “your moms basement”, amazing stuff.
well, I’m still playing Ratchet and Clank in my mom’s basement . . .
Yeah I wasn’t familiar with the game but cannibalism isn’t a “trendy trope” that the show decided to jump on. If anything it’s very expected that there would be groups of people doing this. Just like it took me about 60 seconds to realize, without any previous knowledge of the game, that David is a sociopath using religion to control his group, and that when James (or whoever it was) brought the bowl of “meat” to be added to the stew, it was from a human being.
Yeah, and? That still doesn’t change the fact the cannibalism in the show was inspired by the cannibalism in the game, not by a pandemic that started 7 years later.
you’ve only been playing with yourself in your mom’s basement
Yes. And clearly, whoever got paid to write this dumb-as-rocks article is part of that majority. Fortunately too, there was absolutely no incentive for them to, y’know, do some research on their hot take, because no one running the undead corpse of the AV Club gives a shit about anything they publish anymore. It’s the even hotter zombie trope of 2023: zombie web sites just going through the motions of their former lives, and zombie commenters defending the stupidity out of sheer cussed habit.
A thing can exist even when some people weren’t aware it existed. Macbeth wasn’t a story from 2021 just because that was the first time some people were exposed to it via Joel Coen’s adaptation.
Just completing the headline to “The trendy post-apocalyptic trope The Last Of Us just couldn’t resist because it’s pulled directly from the game it’s based on” would’ve save writing 1000 words on this.
Is this really a trope in the genre? I can’t think of any big Zombie Apocalypse property in the 21st century that featured survival cannibalism. Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, World War Z, I am Legend, etc.
It was a major plot line on TWD like 20 seasons ago.
Well admittedly TWD is one I’ve never gotten around to seeing
you have too much taste and no time to waste on TWD.
TWD aka the worst zombie story in history.
World War Z (the book, not the movie) featured reluctant cannibalism.
The Hunters (cannibals who hunt people to survive) first appeared in TWD issue #61 in 2009.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily a trope in zombie fiction specifically (that’s not my area of popular culture studies), but it is a pretty common trope in the larger genre of dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives. But I would say it’s more commonly seen in the types of post-apocalyptic narratives where a disaster creates scarcity, like a nuclear bomb or a natural disaster wiping out plant life. Zombie stories are often more about defending resources (keeping the zombies out) than about scavenging to survive. But if anyone else things otherwise or has a better take on this, I’m all ears. Like I said, it’s not my area.
It absolutely made sense in The Road where there was no possibility of growing things. I think it makes sense in this specific episode of the Last of Us because maybe they ran out of food. But generally, it doesn’t make sense that people 20 years after a collapse wouldn’t have figured out how to grow enough food for a couple dozen people including enough to store for the winter augmented by hunting.
Unless I missed it, David wasn’t killing people to eat, he was using the meat of people who passed away to feed his starving people. Given the choice in a Yellowjackets or Alive type situation, I’d definitely eat someone rather than die.
The idea that they’re hunting people is implied in the code that David and James use to talk about their food supply. James talks about having a week of food left and David asks what they have, and James haltingly says, “Venison, elk, rabbit.” Then he says, “Josiah and Martin think they spotted some deer the other night…couple of miles east.” And David pauses and says something like, “It was dark…people see what they want to see.”There’s a lot wrapped up in that conversation once you realize that they’re eating people. There’s the whole venison, elk, rabbit code. And there’s the suggestion that men from the group are going out looking for “deer,” which given the code implies that they are hunting for people. David’s suggestion that people see what they want also applies to the people in the camp, who seem to be taking a wary “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to what they’re fed at night.So while I don’t think it’s ever explicitly confirmed, I think the definite suggestion is that they’re hunting people and not just eating the community members who die.
That’s exactly why the hunters immediately attacked Joel and Ellie at “Eastern Colorado University.” That wasn’t defensive, they were looking for victims to kill and eat. So it’s possible that the whole “we’ll bury your father in the spring” bit (and what that implies) was just a diversion, in that the plan is likely to eat outsiders, not members of the community, and maybe he would in fact be buried in the spring. Those bodies hanging in the restaurant were probably “deer” culled from outside the community.BTW, what’s with “Eastern Colorado university?” Eastern Colorado is part of the great plains and very flat; the community near the university is clearly in the more mountainous region in the west (of Denver) or southwest. That also makes more sense from the perspective that Ellie and Joel travelled from Wyoming (west of Colorado) to get there. It makes no sense that they travelled through the entire western part of the state, i.e., through all the mountains, in mid-winter to get there. So why not call it “Western Colorado University?”
I’m guessing they couldn’t use Western Colorado University since it’s a real university, whereas the University of Eastern Colorado fair game. That’s no excuse for locating Eastern Colorado in Boulder, though, I agree.
Good point. I would have gone for Western Colorado M & T or some other fake name if they were scared of using a real name. Kinda reminds me of a movie called “Frozen” (no, not that one), where people get stuck on a chairlift overnight, supposedly at a Massachusetts ski area, and are set upon by wolves. The movie was filmed out west (in Utah), as was obvious from the very large (non-New England) mountains, and there are obviously not roving wolf packs in Massachusetts, so why not set the movie out west (say, Montana) to match the location and story, rather than force it into a location where none of it made sense?
Wyoming is north of Colorado. If traveling in midwinter, they would probably have taken I-25 south through the plains. I assume Eastern Colorado University is a stand-in for University of Northern Colorado or Colorado State, in Greeley and Ft. Collins respectively. Both look roughly like what we see in the show.
Oops, I noticed that I got my geography sorta wrong. Jackson, Wyoming is northwest of Colorado, not west. The point remains, however, that travelling to Colorado from Jackson puts them smack-dab in the mountains, and not anywhere near Eastern Colorado.
Sometimes college names don’t make sense, geographically. Texas State University used to be called Southwest Texas State, in San Marcos, TX, which is about a half-hour south of Austin. Which is a region nobody ever called “southwest Texas.”
“BTW, what’s with “Eastern Colorado university?”’
I dunno, maybe the same thing that makes Ohio part of the “midwest”?
What makes me suspicious also is that at the university the raiders (who we now know are part of David’s group) attack Joel and Ellie unprovoked. Had they succeeded certainly J+E would’ve ended up on the menu and they’d tell the group “Oh we got some more uhm… venison and rabbit. :)”
ok, but we know there actually were deer around, as Ellie shot one. And we can presume there are more deer around that remote area than stray people. So they probably are mainly hunting deer and no need for a code word “deer”. The cannibalism is more likely to be living off the bodies of people in the camp and raiders who wind up dead.
I think they’re eating “all of the above.” It’s a lot easier to hunt deer than human badasses who have survived 20 years into the apocalypse, as David’s crew unfortunately found out. Deer don’t hatchet your head in. If they find deer the people in the town eat real venison. If they come up empty on deer but stumble across humans who don’t appear to be connected to any nearby larger group, the town gets “venison” stew.
“It’s a lot easier to hunt deer than human badasses who have survived 20 years into the apocalypse”
Yes, because as we’ve seen all survivors are badass.
Yes, but when he tells James to go fetch the medicine he also says “that wasn’t code.” Implying they do talk code.
“ok, but we know there actually were deer around, as Ellie shot one.’
What’s it like to be this thick?
I feel like this is reading a whole lot into it. Ellie finds a deer and a rabbit just wandering around one morning, and I’m sure there are elk too, so they probably do eat venison, elk, and rabbit. Since there obviously are deer, that can be spotted and hunted and eaten, it seems a little counterproductive to make “deer” code for “human outsider.” Like if Josiah knows the code but Martin doesn’t, does that mean that Josiah and Martin spotting deer means humans or deer? And if Josiah actually sees some deer, how’s he supposed to get that message passed along so they won’t hear “Josiah spotted a lot of deer” and think there are a bunch of dudes out there?I feel like the “this isn’t a code” line has people confused, thinking that there must be a code, when it was really just there for that particular situation to make clear that it wasn’t a BS trick to get the upper hand, that he wanted him to go get the medicine and not come back with backup and guns.
I agree that is implied by the episode but I find it extremely implausible. Humans are much worse at surviving in inhospitable conditions than animals who are native to the environment are. Ofc I would die in about twenty minutes in the wildnerness so maybe I don’t know. But logic suggests it would be easier to find some deer (or fish… why can’t they fish in that giant lake?) or rabbits surviving in the snow than to find some humans surviving in the snow.
Yea, it’s funny the resort is by this huge lake, and it’s like, “why don’t they just… fish?”
“But logic suggests”
Ah yes, the logic of what would “really” happen in an apocalypse, right?
*sigh*
This was one of several reasons why I thought this was easily the weakest episode of the series so far.The primary one was the evolution of David, who goes from Curiously Creepy Dude With Flock at the beginning of the episode to Completely Boring Trope by the end of it; I’m having a hard time coming up with any other TV show character who starts a single episode appearance vastly more interesting than they end it, but this one certainly does.But afterwards, I realized the hunters really bothered me too. Why? Partially because they were used to set up something that was really not compelling to watch – Joel had far too much plot armor to not recover just in time, and the penicillin/adrenaline/+30 health bar shot was an even more tedious resolution of a lousy plot line – but that this episode didn’t take advantage of what they imply.That’s because what jumped out at me was the contrast between the two hunting parties with guns that David leads – and the hunting party that ambushes Ellie and Joel to set up the last two episodes, who quite notably don’t have guns but only sticks and knives. That in turn means they’re out there to either kill humans (or monkeys, I suppose), but are somehow not supposed to go after game, which given the setup of this episode makes little sense.If everybody in the flock is in on the cannibalism because they prefer it, that’d have made a far more compelling arc than what we saw; even better would have been spending time on the flock’s reaction to a terrible secret being revealed openly. But even without that, there was a missed opportunity with Ellie when a better narrative would have had her figure out she’s with a bunch of cannibals by realizing the previous hunting group were armed with sticks, what it implied, and confronting David about it. The ear could have then been used as final confirmation after he almost certainly would have gaslit her, and that potential sequence would have (again) been a lot more interesting to watch than what we got.Anyway, the whole episode was sloppy like that, and it ties in to what we’ve talked about before with why I was worried about what a lot of the little things that required suspension of disbelief that shouldn’t have been required in previous episodes. We’ll see how it progresses going forward.
In the game David and some members of his group are all-in on eating people. When Joel is searching for Ellie he stumbles up on a walk-in freezer with human bodies hanging from the ceiling (like we saw in the episode). He finds a note that lists all of the “meat” David’s group has found within the past few weeks/months, and you realize that this is all human meat they have found and catalogued, telling you that this has been going on for awhile.
seems like they eat people because they dig it though
I went vegetarian in 2016 (still going!) and it was largely triggered by The Walking Dead doing a cannibal storyline. Cannibalism in fiction absolutely drove me off eating meat period.
Then I had a dream where a cow was chewing on my bicep and I was like “ahhh omg what’s happening” and the cow looked at me and said “I’m getting all of your flavour out of it”. After that I was done with meat.
LMAO. You were triggered? People really need to stop using that word.
Wrong context, man. He said that something “triggered” a change in behavior, as in “this caused me to pull the trigger on a lifestyle change.”
you’re triggered by the word triggered jfc
Good god, you’re fucking stupid.
Triggered means more than one thing, you fucking moron.
I live in the city, so cows don’t pop up in my dreams often, but that is a very vivid one to remember! I would have ate a burger immediately after. As revenge. Juicy revenge with onions.
No joke, I’ve eaten stinging nettles out of revenge.
Cool story. Lots of people don’t based their life decisions of dreams, but good for you.
lol okay wait I can’t keep it straight anymore. Does the A.V. Club think this is or isn’t a zombie show? I swear there was an article agreeing with Druckmann that it isn’t (it is dammit) and now they’re saying it is? loooool
You’re aware the site has multiple authors, and they sometimes have different opinions?
“The AVClub” is not one person, moron.
.
“When we see characters in fiction cross that line—whether it’s a desperate attempt to survive or to satisfy an unnatural craving—it’s a sign to the audience that they’re past the point of no return”Depends. In the movie Alive, which was based on a true story, the survivors lived above the treeline on the side of an Andes mountain for more than two months by eating the remains of the people who died in and after the crash. But they didn’t murder them, and the Pope later absolved them of any sin associated with it. At the other end of the spectrum is The Road, with a captive scene so harrowing it’s hard to believe McCarthy was able to top it later in the book. You know the ones I’m talking about. But that also falls squarely in line with the book’s overall “what would you go?” theme about holding on to human morality for no practical reason.ETA: Might as well add the Alive plane crash scene, which was pretty impressive effects in the early 90s.
I do wish the episode had had about 15 or so more minutes to spend with David’s community. They’re obviously in desperate straits when David runs into Ellie, but there was an interesting bit on the companion podcast about how they’re also just unlucky – this place probably looked like paradise in the spring when they arrived, but now the local animals and wild food has run out and the harsh winter has set in.
It’s just the last of multiple disasters that David has led them into, something that only gets said as a one-off line from David about how every time they settled down somewhere, raiders drove them off. I don’t think David is shown as being as good at keeping it secret as he thinks, judging by the lady cooking the stew.
They definitely could have packed on another 10-15 minutes pretty easily to flesh out the community and make David’s turn from “hey I can help” to “I’m an evil creep” a little less abrupt. It was still a great episode, but it’s a little wild to me that they took one of the most memorable sequences from the game and adapted it into less than an hour of running time.
There needed to be a bit more desperation and delusion there with David, a sense that the community was finally starting to turn on him after he’s led them once again into disaster, and he’s responding to it with appeasement (going out of their way to try and kill Joel) and distraction (becoming obsessed with Ellie – both for gross pedophile reasons and because he’s convinced himself that she’s somehow the “answer” to his problems).
Agreed, I thought this was the weakest episode just because I required video game players to fill in a lot of the details (that a blizzard was occurring in the game during Ellie’s fight made the episode make more sense to me).I also think the place being on fire while attempting to sexually assault Ellie was a lazy cartoonish choice. The fact he wanted a child bride is inherently violent, and gives the audience more to consider about how some morals are naturally good, whether or not society has crumbled.
I think it should have been David that (accidentally) starts the fire. Burning down his own metaphorical house (and community he controls) from his desire to possess and control Ellie.
I thought the scene really jumped the shark when the guy said he liked when they fight. It was cartoonishly evil and not in character with his belief in his own moral highground. I am not an expert on sxual predators but I am a woman, and I do not believe, for a second, that he would admit, to himself, that he was committing assault. He was a classic groomer who would expect a more pliable victim.
I’d want an extra 10-15 minutes because I always do, but I always want that extra time with Joel and Ellie. We spend so much time NOT with them. It’s wild.
#FreeArmieHammer
I actually think the resurgence of the zombie genre is more of a general 21st century phenomenon, sparked by the way in which 9/11 seemed to herald a century of decline and rot. Later events like the global financial crisis, Trump’s election and the pandemic only further exposed the truth that there are no real guardrails maintaining civilization and a lot of the security we always took for granted was always an illusion. We may have overreacted to 9/11 itself, but things have just kept getting progressively worse ever since, and we still have the horrors of climate change, a declining birth rate, the hollowing out of the workforce, AI and automation, and so on to look forward to.There were hardly any zombie movies in the 90s. Then in 2002 we got 28 Days Later, followed by the Walking Dead comics in 2003, and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead in 2004. The original Dawn famously uses the mall setting as a metaphor for capitalism’s false promises, a consumerist society consuming itself. Even by 2004, the mall was dying. Now plenty of them are boarded up, left to rot and be reclaimed by nature just like every structure in The Last of Us.The more society collapses around us, the more we’ll be drawn to stories that literalize our decline.
Doesn’t change the fact that zombie are and will continue to be, totally played out and boring AF.
I like zombies 🙁
As you are entitled to 🙂
Eh, something had to take the place of vampires, post-Anne Rice.
I think we need a new undead villain.Ghouls? Reverents? Something else??
Seeing as we’re an excitable and dumb country, I’d go with generic “Frankenstein’s monsters.” Which, natch, would be called Frankensteins.
….maybe mad scientists everywhere, and various city-states around the globe are building their own Frankenstein monsters?? There are good ones and bad ones and it starts small in the first movie and escalates from there!The script writes itself! DM me Ugh. ! Let’s get crackin’ and get our money from Hollywood!!
Sasquatches
Hmmm…I like doing away with the undead theme. Go on….
Mummies. And lots of em! Tom Cruise’s Dark Cinematic Universe was trying to get us there.
edgy!
Like zombies in a post-apocalypse society barely holding on!
There’s also a lot of scholarship that pegs upticks in zombie narratives in books and films to social anxieties over race and immigration. Take, for example, George Romero’s zombie horror movies. In Dawn of the Dead, at one point the battle between police and zombies moves to a public housing complex. One of the police officers remarks on the unfairness of giving blacks and Hispanics free housing in “nice hotels,” and the officers start firing indiscriminately on both the zombies and the Black residents of the complex. In Night of the Living Dead, only Ben Huss, a Black man, survives the farmhouse. When he emerges, the militia mistake him for zombie and kill him, remarking that he is “just one more for the pile” of bodies. So basically in the 60s, zombie films reflect racial struggles that accompany the Civil Rights Movement, and in the 2000s, they reflect anxieties over immigration and terrorism/homeland security. In both, there is a central theme of dehumanization that runs throughout zombie narratives that closely reflects contemporary attitudes toward racialized others. Zombies lose their language and their reasoning. They move as an uncontrollable swam, destroying people indiscriminately and savagely. It is a dehumanizing process, and when we dehumanize someone, it becomes much easier to enact violence upon them. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how zombie lore in the early 21st century reflects the prevailing political rhetoric about post-9/11 anxieties regarding immigration, national/homeland security, and the possibility of a society being overrun by outsiders (or worse, that the “outsiders” are already “inside” and lying in wait). The Walking Dead comic series starts in 2003, with the TV series following a few years later. The films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later come out in 2003 and 2007, respectively. That’s about as much as I can expound on this off the top of my head—I do a lot of research in genre fiction, but zombie lore isn’t one of my particular specialties. It’s sort of adjacent to the work I do with dystopias, so I know a little bit, but others do this sort of analysis far more often and in greater depth than I do.
There is a correlation between Republican presidencies and zombie media. http://www.mrscienceshow.com/2009/05/correlation-of-week-zombies-vampires.html
Total hyperbole but who knows, the way things are going I could see conservatives saying it’s okay to hunt and eat liberals at some point. There may be some q-anon types saying it already.
This show is trash
you sound triggered, by something.
Yeah…by bad fuckin’ writing and absolutely nothing new to offer from either a genre tv standpoint or a reason-to-exist standpoint. Presitge TV for simps.
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! I don’t like something so it must be trash because waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
sounds like it occupies a lot of space in your brain. is that incel shit or what do you call that?
then don’t watch you ugly little gremlin
Watch your hole!
In the game you don’t have the scenes of David and his group when Ellie isn’t around, so you don’t find out about the cannibalism until Ellie finds out, when she’s in the cage. Even if you’ve never played the game, watching these pre-cage scenes it’s pretty clear what’s going on with the “meat”.
This is a good point, because it’s more of a shock
What a pointless article, Cindy! Like you and everyone else said, the game came out over 10 years ago. Not exactly a 2023 trend that the show is following. Find something worthwhile to say for the love of god. But at least you got some clicks and comments on your drivel.
Articles being pointless will never stop the AV Club. It’s like they have no editor to challenge ideas – someone comes up with an idea and even if the fundemental concept is flawed, just pushes forward.
Absolutely. It just sucks because I remember the days when this site had real writers and some great reviews and articles, not just clickbait and recaps. I don’t know why I still check the site, but I’m just another loser screaming into the void.
way to contribute to what you hate numbshit
wow you did the same thing!i guess that makes me a numbshit and you a dumbshit.
nah i’m just here to make this place worse
Mission accomplished
bless you
that sounds like a worthwhile use of life.
i’m happy for the first time since the accident
that shoeboxdivinity is one sensitive little bitch
Cliche but also realistic. The US is already hurtling towards a fascist theocracy based on Christianity so I expect it would do the same in the power void left after an apocalypse.
Loving the show. If civilization was destroyed by a fungus that decimated the human population, I’m thinking maybe longpig would be the least plentiful foodstuff compared to rampant farm crops with no-one to harvest them and unchecked animal populations. But hey.
Its not s new trope at all though…I mean Dddn’t The Walking Dead do literally do the same ‘ Cannibal Community in a world of Zombies’ years ago?Its a well written piece but there’s more stretching and reaching here than Dhalsim from Street Fighter II at a hot yoga class.
The Hunters (cannibals who hunt people to survive) first appeared in TWD issue #61 in 2009.
So. Fucking. What?
“Its a well written piece”
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I wouldn’t call cannibal cults trendy. They’re foundational to the entire post-apocalyptic sci-fi genre.
Even A Boy And His Dog invokes it, and that’s almost 50 years old.
54 years old if you go back as far as the novel. One could argue The Time Machine by H.G. Wells from 1895 is the Ur example.
This writer is too clever by half—bordering on cute. Ok, cannibilism isn’t a bandwagon topic, and Last of Us isn’t the “latest” (I can feel your pseudo-intellectual eye rolls); you wrote yourself but didn’t bother to understand what your cute fingers were typing: the game came out 2013, which means the story was written before it was game developed and debugged which could take anywhere from 1 – 5 years. So this “bandwagon” plot device wasn’t conceived because Walking Dead exploded, it was written into the story more than a decade ago—so you’re eye rolls and superiority complex based on spotting something you think is cliche is severely misplaced. Hey Cindy, psst I hate to break it to you, but cannibilism comes up in end of world scenarios because it logically comes up in end of world scenarios—EVERY genre that involves dystopia, cataclysm, or apocalypse explores this taboo because it is part of the human condition. (Hell even ancient stories have it). And it never gets old. you know why? You guessed it: Because humans when faced with hunger and despair can very realistically turn to this horrifying condition. We will always be exploring it in literature and art until our world really does end. So stop ok, come up with something else to make yourself sound hip, current and “smart”. As it is your whiffed on this one.
hEy CiNdY – cindy doesn’t give a fuck loser
Say what you want about cannibalism but eating the rich still sounds like a decent plan. But as they say: “good people make good food”“Some people just have great taste”“Taste depends on the people”
The great part of this episode was how it turned up the heat on David one degree at a time. He’s a preacher, he’s a sinister preacher, he’s a preacher/cult leader who smacks his people around; they’re hunting because they’re hungry, they might eat people because they’re hungry which might be okay depending on circumstances, it seems like they are actively hunting people which is worse…oh now he’s feeding a girl her father while he watches and gets off on it; now he’s saving Ellie, it’s because she could be helpful, no it’s because he’s a religious zealot who wants more sheep, no it’s because he’s a cult leader who wants more slaves, nope it’s a CanNIBaLIstIC PAeDo SEX ORGY!!!!!!!!!The episode was like the frog in warming water, and the guy’s performance was perfect. I just wish the writers had taken one single second to explain why the town didn’t come to the burning building (unless I missed it).But I agree with Cartagia: it wasn’t making him a cannibal that was new, that was in the game and so doesn’t mean anything…apparently in the game he wasn’t clearly a paedo? It’s almost a shame to do all that and so quickly because they could have gone a “dark joel” route with him where he actually believed in his flock, calling, etc., and did the same things…he could have argued that he butchers people Kashrut!
It’s not really trendy to show people in harsh winter conditions eating their dead for food. That is what happens in survival situations. Hunting people for food… yes. That is extremely implausible, even within the context of the zombie apocalypses. Because it is so implausible (how could the humans they hunt survive without food? How could humans survive in conditions that kill native wildlife?), it also comes across as cartoonishly evil. I like some things about this show but it really is trying to have its cannibalism and eat it too. It wants to be prestige and serious… without doing the work to translate the actual story and story structure to the medium of television. The mission format is really clear and the plot structure of introduce sympathetic character + zombie bite is already played.
The story was written in 2013. Do some basic research.
I haven’t seen The Last of Us, but in The Road, cannibalism is shown as commonplace, because there’s very little else left to eat. That would be true in a lot of parts of the world after a ‘zombie apocalypse’ and true in most of it after the environmental collapse shown in The Road.
I love the Last of Us because there are so few “zombies”. You could cut out all the zombies and still have an awesome series. Humans can create their own apocalypse without any monsters. People are the monsters.
cannibalism is back in fashion this season; sharpen your designer bone saw people
Why are you framing this like the show hopped on some bandwagon—the story was written more than 10 years ago. The game came out in 2013, (which you referenced but didn’t actually think about) and games take years to develop, so the story device you’re criticizing isn’t a response to some zeitgeist, it was written more than a decade ago (probably before you became hip and trendy writing for this website). And hello cannibilism isn’t some cliche story device—it’s a logical, real, (albeit horrifying), choice that people would have to face if they were hungry and desperate aka the end of society.
Isn’t cannibalism in post-apocalyptic scenarios less a trope and more of a predictable result?
The erosion of social values in the face of survival is a pretty central theme for a story like this, though, right? Of course cannibalism popped up; all infrastructure has collapsed and the only survivors are random people with zero safety net. It’s the Donner Party, with zombies.That said, my big complaint is that I’m tired of sexual violence always becoming the main currency of trauma for women in these stories. The Last of Us has been pretty soft-handed on this point, but Ellie facing “a fate worse than death” was something I didn’t want to see.Sure, the same argument could apply: “that’s probably what would happen if society collapsed,” but after years of ‘serious, mature HBO drama’ hammering the point, I don’t need the reminder.
As recently discussed by Gyles Brandreth on a delightful segment from QI.
Bithead1000 was great as David in the new Last of Us episode.
I don’t know anything about the game, but the cannibalism angle was predictable, but that somewhat shocking episode ending was not.
This is a profoundly stupid thing to say but I didn’t connect The Last of Us to the Covid pandemic at all. Seems totally different.The last of Us is strange because it seems to be such a retread of yesteryear with barely any subtext.So the cult leader killed everyone?
So I think The Walking Dead did this better. I really liked the Terminus arc, and I wonder if The Last of Us could have given David and his flock more episodes, like they did with Kathleen and KC (which I’d argue, needed it less).
Ellie proved that there was meat to be hunted. I think they just realized it was a lot less work to capture and eat people.
I think the series handled this really well. It was horrific without showing the cannibalism too much. I worry how the Fallout series might handle this if there’s an episode featuring a cannibal faction.
The Walking Dead, which always seems to hang over The Last Of Us like a long shadow, had its Terminus arc back in 2014The Last of us came out in 2013…