About Beauty, Storytelling and The Issue of The Last of Us Part II

"With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with beauty” William Morris

A dear friend of mine once gave me as a small present a bookmark, which contained these words by William Morris. They stuck with me ever since. But not just as a downright sentiment of a young idealist seeking to change the world for better. Eventually, they came to represent a sort of perpetual quest to see beauty where others won’t look for it.

Of course, this was a very loose interpretation of Morris’s quote. We are used to seeing beauty as a value. With time, though, beauty began to embody not only that for me — it set to represent an attitude rather than an abstract quality sometimes observable in a physical object. Beauty became a way to interact with the world. And I could transform the life around me for better by simply choosing to look for beauty in every aspect of it.

Commonly beauty is considered to represent an ideal. As an embodiment of something physically attractive, clear, harmonious, and at the very core of it — good. Ancient Greek sculptures are often mentioned to illustrate this point of view. Pythian Apollo has long been considered one of the greatest examples of this unspoiled beauty.

Roman copy of Pythian Apollo — considered to be one of the masterpieces of Classical Antiquity.

Yet beauty canons in Ancient Greece weren’t something carved in stone (pun intended!).

Pythian Apollo represented the ideal of Classical Greece. The beauty of the time was integral to goodness and deeply interlinked with Plato’s philosophical teachings. The opposite of beauty, if any, was the lack of it rather than ugliness or evil. The tranquility of Apollo, and this might be something not so easily comprehensible to a modern mind, didn’t come from a balance between good and evil or the victory of good over evil but from the absence of evil as such. But the ideals were changing with time.

Laocoon and His Sons — statue from the period of Hellenistic Greece, rediscovered in the Renaissance

Another iconic example of Greek art is the statue of Laocoon and His Sons. This work dates back to the Hellenistic Greece — a time more dynamic and a period of instability and change. It’s not that the struggle between beauty and ugliness was already fully conceptualized by then, but the interest in otherness and emotions was undeniably present. When we look at Laocoon, we see strength, both physical and mental, but also vulnerability and pain. There’s this element of darkness that has been let in to manifest itself in the stone. Pythian Apollo was as if of light alone. Laocoon, on the other hand, has shades to him.

Now, when I think about beauty and antiquity, Ovid’s Medusa comes to mind first. A beautiful girl, desired by many, hurt, raped and transformed into an evil monster able to kill if you only laid an eye on her.

Keira Knightley in a still from Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina” — invoking the image of Medusa

It is a very dark and dangerous mixture of so many emotions and drives. Medusa is also hardly a manifestation of classical physically attractive and harmonious beauty. Yet there is something deeply tempting and raw in this character, something revealing a deeper essence of things — a quality distinctly attributable to beauty.

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Ellie in the promotional material to the upcoming “The Last of Us Part II”

Gaming may not be the first place one would go to when looking for beauty. Although this is questionable.

The Last of Us was one of the first games I played on PlayStation. I’m hardly a gamer, but The Last of Us inspired me to dive deeper into the world of videogames as I realized it had far more to offer than I initially thought.

A lot in the story of The Last of Us feels relevant to this concept of beauty I held in my head — the menacing combination of both darkness and light that are in a constant struggle with one another. Beauty is this fragile balance in which light manifests itself amid pitch-black darkness. And sometimes the light is so bleak that you need to look hard to see even a glimpse of it. I guess this is where my interpretation of William Morris’s quote comes in — to transform the world with beauty we need to be able to look for it even where it is less likely to be found.

With The Last of Us, I spent several hot summer days and nights killing zombies and fighting for the lives of the characters I grew to love. Sometimes I found myself in the darkness of my room, close to midnight, yelling excitedly after brutally smashing someone’s head with a brick in a desperate attempt to fight for my life. In the back of my mind, I knew it was just a game and that if I die, I would start again. But it felt so real. And I found such pleasure in smashing those heads, blood all over the screen, some of them human like me. It was both ecstatic and scary as hell. It revealed darkness in me I never knew about. When at the end of the game I, as a character, had to make some difficult choices, I never doubted what I did, I never regretted doing what was hardly the right thing. I didn’t care about that and I killed everyone on my path with the same pleasure I smashed those heads earlier. It was terrifying, but also true. And I wasn’t afraid to face it. There was beauty in this raw anger and the urge to protect the only thing I cared about in the world.

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Now, from what I read and heard in the context of the controversy about The Last of Us Part II, the reasons for my love for the first game might be fundamentally different from the majority of gamers. Yes, I loved the characters and the story, but more than that I loved what I learned about myself by playing it. This may be the reason why I am more willing to accept… let’s say more daring ways to go explore what could be next for the characters.

I have thought about writing all my life and although I never got far with it myself, creating stories and analyzing how stories are created is still a central element of my life. I had this idea (and still have) that if I ever wrote a book, it would be a dark story without real happy-ending. But it would be beautiful. Exactly the type of messy and dark beauty that I talked about before. To be able to create a story that seemingly ends with darkness, but has light hidden in the very core of it — that’s my biggest challenge. Something I consider to be the greatest challenge any artist can ever face. I was very excited when George R.R. Martin talked about his ending to A Song of Ice and Fire being a bitter-sweet one. I hope he manages to finish his story one day just to get a taste of what he meant by that.

Now, there’s a risk with writing in this manner. Will the reader be willing to go to dark places and most importantly stay in dark places? Or will he/she just choose to look away and take another book instead? Will the light be even visible or believable to the reader once he’ll be introduced to it? The ending of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment seemed to me the most beautiful and touching thing, but when discussed with others it became obvious that only some considered it believable and emotionally satisfactory. Most felt, though, that Raskolnikov’s discovery of God was contrived at best.

If the leaks about The Last of Us Part II are true, and there has been hardly any reason to doubt it, then the story envisioned for us by the creators is grim and unpleasant. But if anything, I consider this a good thing. I’m not afraid of the pain, I’m not afraid of the darkness. Hell, I’m even welcoming it! Stories that offer escapism are necessary and beautiful in their own right. But The Last of Us was never about that.

In recent weeks, I heard and read a lot of negativity about the upcoming The Last of Us Part II. But none of the things I encountered addressed why the particular story would be bad. Outside of maybe saying that it would be too hard to experience in these challenging times. But it is hardly a valid point considering that the first game wasn’t light either. There’s critique about political implications, about the way the company dealt with people discussing the leaks on Youtube and other platforms, but nothing about the story itself.

Ellie in the promotional material to the upcoming “The Last of Us Part II”

Revenge is a dark pit that will suck you in and give you nothing back. I’m worried about how terrifying playing this game may turn out to be, but if it will succeed in recreating the sickening feeling of emptiness that revenge would leave you with, I’m willing to embrace this darkness. Because it has the potential to be truly groundbreaking. Not on the industry level, but on a personal level for anyone who would go through with it — by making you hate the feeling of hate itself.

The bottom line is — there is nothing wrong with the underlying idea behind this upcoming game. If anything — it is a truly brave thing to attempt! Of course, execution will be the key. And even the greatest ideas can be destroyed by it. But assuming that something will be bad just because you don’t like the places it is about to take you — well, it is hardly fair.

Going back to where I started — beauty is first and foremost an attitude. And I intend to venture into this upcoming story open-minded. I may face a huge disappointment there. But I would rather do that than robbing myself of the potential to see something truly remarkable.