The Last of Us is not a love story

polygon.com:

Over and over again, Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, the storytellers behind HBO’s The Last of Us — based on the PlayStation game by Naughty Dog that Druckmann co-directed alongside Bruce Straley — assert that their story is about love. Love that is most clearly shown in the connection that Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) forge in a world of discord. They also argue that, in addition to acts of care and altruism — Bill and Frank’s romance in episode 3, or Henry and Sam’s brotherhood in the show’s Kansas City arc — there is a dark side to love worth exploring. Like Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), who leads the Kansas City resistance to fascism in a long-simmering rage over her brother’s death, and, of course, Joel’s ultimate decision to murder a building full of Fireflies to stop the surgery that will kill Ellie in hopes of a cure.

Love, Druckmann and Mazin assert, contains multitudes. Mazin describes it this way in Vulture:

Love is behind the most extreme choices we make and the most extreme behaviors in which we engage. Do you love this person more than those people? Parents say things like this to their children all the time: “I love you more than the world itself.” Do you? For Joel, the answer is “Yes, I do.” That is profound, and the ambiguity of the positivity of love is what we should be taking forward. What Joel has done in the name of love is a selfish act but an understandable one. It is setting a chain of events in motion that will not be undone. If you look at any kind of intractable conflict between people or peoples, at some point you’re gonna find somebody doing something because of love. That love manifests as fear, hatred, xenophobia, racism, religious superiority. These things that start like