The Last of Us has a bleakness problem that goes beyond ‘apocalypse fatigue’

polygon.com:

There is an absurdity to complaining that an apocalypse story is too bleak.

“We are the walking dead” — Robert Kirkman’s distillation of the zombie genre down to its most fundamental elements — was published in 2005’s The Walking Dead #24, and Andrew Lincoln brought a version of those words to the audience of The Walking Dead TV show’s fifth season a decade later. The comic’s TV success sparked a wave of fascination with the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, not merely the outbreak. At this point, we know very well what a zombie story is really about.

But if The Last of Us’ fifth episode demonstrates anything, it’s that it’s not the zombies and the violence and the death that bend this particular apocalypse to nihilism. It’s the insistence that cruelty and selfishness are widespread — through revolutionaries, authority figures, and everyone in between — and that there’s nothing anyone can do about it, so you may as well grab a gun and defend yourself and your own. It’s not that we’re the walking dead. It’s that they are.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for The Last of Us episode 5, “Endure and Survive.”]

There’s something I don’t like about it that I can’t quite put my finger on… Oh, right! It’s that I don’t like to be told — especially by corporate-produced media — that deep down, everyone’s a monster, so there’s no point in getting rid of the monsters in charge.

Maybe it’s the way “Endure and Survive” opens with revolutionaries torturing their oppressors to death and mutilating their bodies, as the citizens of Kansas City’s quarantine zone celebrate the overthrow of their city’s FEDRA outpost. Maybe it’s the scene where Henry — who is fleeing the revolutionaries after FEDRA extorted him into betraying them