Yeah I think I have to agree, that’s a bit of an unfair dismissal.
It might be fair to say what is shown in The Last of Us about the world is vague, and leaves the audience with more questions than answers, and perhaps not all of those questions are interesting and perhaps not all of those answers would be satisfying. But I don’t think any of the organizations’ qualities as depicted in the game are just superficial and not to be taken too seriously. I think instead it’s all actually quite thoughtful and thoroughly thought out, and there’s a lot that can be inferred about the world that is not explicitly communicated, in a way that is maybe even more interesting than if it was being, like, prattled off as Lore in an authorial, prescriptive tone.
If anything, that’s one thing I thought wasn’t as sophisticated in Part II, with the whole factional warfare happening in Seattle felt a little less grounded fiction and a little more The Warriors or Mad Max corny excess. Something about them having, like, Proper Noun Names and goofy little aesthetic theming and a little themed home base, a dumb little logo for each of them, especially their dumb graffiti and protest art, kinda comes off as a bit of hacky writing and execution (maybe it’s Druckmann’s uberliberal soft Zionist brainworm taking a nibble off there and forcing him to poorly understand the nature of protracted conflict between people and feel some weird urge to aestheticize animus between groups of people in a juvenile way, like we wouldn’t be able to tell them apart without the signposts). Like, an underground organization having a cool and evocative name like Fireflies makes sense, a descendent of a disaster response governmental agency that basically slipped from quarantine restriction into full fascist martial law needs a dumb acronym, even the gang at the end of Part 2 comes off as having more verisimilitude by just not being explicitly named out loud (to my recollection) and having more diegetically convincing little uniforms (I mean, they’re just supposed to be the LAPD, right?). Something just doesn’t come off as honest with the two factions in Seattle.
Anyway, if it was just set dressing, I think it would either not infer much beyond itself, or maybe infer things a little too presctiptively, if that makes sense. Like, again, the gang at the end of Part II, what they do and how the members you see speak and act, and what they wear, you can infer information from that without being told it, and it threaded that balance between evocative and grounded.
Also just to be clear I am the OG TLoU2 lover on this forum and I have always thought it was an exceptionally good game. I just did kinda have to suspend my contempt a bit for that relatively easy to ignore aspect of its fictional setting. I think if you were to get rid of the two factions having a Proper Noun Name, cut down on the corny aestheticization of factionalism that Neil couldn’t resist using, so no dumb graffiti with a consistent visual language, no dumb logos, or just make all of that subtler, it’d all be more believable. So maybe it’s the dumb stuff about the Seraphites and the WLF that I would be more able to identify as set dressing, distracting visual information for something that would be better told through narrative or just left more subtly stated.
), and i can see it becoming the game i recommend to almost anyone without question in the future. including….to you 