I absolutely love The Last of Us. I've played both games, and of course the TV show brings the whole story to a new level. I really liked the game Fallout 4, and the TV adaptation of that universe was pretty solid. Both work on variations of a total breakdown of society as we know it. The Fallout universe is a little less interesting, because it deals in a post-nuclear scenario, meaning that a lot of stuff gets totally wiped out. Oddly, both games spend time in Boston.
The Last of Us is more about people and their relationships, despite the infected zombies. And as I said, the remnants of a thriving society are still around, if largely reclaimed by nature. Since the games mostly take place decades after the outbreak, presumably all of the young people are born into the weirdness, which is to say that they necessarily have some level of survival capability. But what if it was you, at the beginning of the end?
My first instinct is to say that I'd be toast. This is rooted in the joke that I make when someone talks about liking to run, and I ask what's chasing them. That might be true, I may not last very long. However, I think about how my mind seems to change in the worst of circumstances. If I have an obligation, say to my wife and child, I know that I pivot and become more matter-of-fact about things. For example, when Diana's car got totaled (the first time), I dutifully got Simon out of bed, went to get her and did whatever was necessary to keep him chilled out and wait for the FHP (which never ended up coming because of a fatal accident down the road). I go into this mode any time there's a serious travel disruption, too. That one is weird because I'm a nervous traveler under normal circumstances. Heck, as terrible as the whole Finn situation was, I largely kept it together for the benefit of Simon for most of the time. I sometimes adapt because I have no choice.
But those are time-boxed bad situations. They don't last indefinitely. An apocalyptic scenario never ends. That's where I think it can get you. At what point do you get too tired to keep fighting? Sure, humans probably still have that animal part of our brain, but it's like raising an animal in captivity. If you let it go after being hand fed by humans, it's not going to know what to do out in the wild. We've all been hand fed.
Cheerful subject, right?
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