Abstract
This chapter plays through the level “Bill’s Town.” The chapter theorizes the figure of the Child and argues that Joel’s desire is to constrain the Child’s otherness. The chapter also interprets the character Bill, focusing on the ways his homosexuality negatively contrasts to Joel’s straight fatherly masculinity and helps to stabilize Ellie’s heterosexuality.
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Notes
- 1.
James Berger, “Propagation and Procreation: The Zombie and the Child,” in Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, ed. Barbara Gurr (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 153.
- 2.
Berger, 154.
- 3.
Max Dyckhoff, “Ellie: Buddy AI in The Last of Us,” in Game AI Pro2: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals, ed. Steve Rabin (New York: CRC Press, 2015), 431.
- 4.
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
- 5.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 129–130.
- 6.
Michael S. Kimmel, Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), chap. 2.
- 7.
Dyckhoff, “Buddy AI in The Last of Us,” 432.
- 8.
Wells, Meyer, and Monacelli, Art of The Last of Us, 61.
- 9.
Troy Baker, Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, and Erick Pangilinan, “What Are you Scared Of?—Summer Part 2,” interview by Christian Spicer, June 16, 2020, in The Official Last of Us Podcast, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-are-you-scared-of-summer-part-2/id1514792212?i=1000478144498.
- 10.
Bill’s remarks about Tess are perhaps the strongest evidence that her and Joel’s relationship was more than professional. Bill asks why Tess is not with Joel, given that the two are “inseparable.” When Joel evasively says that Tess is “busy”—he doesn’t reveal Tess’s death to Bill—Bill wisecracks that there is “trouble in paradise,” as if Joel and Tess were a married couple.
- 11.
Neil Druckmann, “On Bill: An Interview with Neil Druckmann of Naughty Dog,” interview by Sam Einhorn, Gay Gamer, September 27, 2013, http://gaygamer.net/2013/09/on-bill-an-interview-with-neil-druckmann-of-naughty-dog/. The Gay Gamer website no longer exists, but the link can be accessed via the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine. In this interview, Druckmann claims that he wrote Bill as gay. In other interviews, he attributes Bill’s homosexuality to the decision by voice and motion capture actor W. Earl Brown to portray Bill as gay. But if Naughty Dog had to revise the cutscene in the truck to confirm that Bill is gay, this suggests that he wasn’t originally conceived as such. Druckmann suggests as much in his interview with Creative Screenwriting. This seems to be the more plausible explanation.
- 12.
Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, “The Most Intriguing New LGBT Characters of 2013,” glaad, December 26, 2013, https://www.glaad.org/blog/most-intriguing-new-lgbt-characters-2013.
- 13.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
- 14.
Elise Favis, “A Child in a Dangerous World: Inside the Creation of Ellie,” Washington Post, June 11, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/06/11/ellie-origin-the-last-of-us/.
- 15.
Daniel Sipocz, “Affliction or Affection: The Inclusion of a Same-Sex Relationship in The Last of Us,” in Queerness in Play, eds. Todd Harper, Meghan Blythe Adams, Nicholas Taylor (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 86–87.
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Ramirez, J.J. (2022). Bill’s Town: No Country for Gay Men. In: Rules of the Father in The Last of Us. Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89604-1_5
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