The Last of Us 2 - Symbolism of Eyes
I would like to talk about something that really stuck with me after playing The Last of Us 2, and which really made me think a lot. This is gonna be a loong post lol. Not sure anybody will read this.
We know that the motto of the Fireflys is “When you’re lost in the darkness, look for the light.” Quite obviously, the ongoing problem addressed in The Last of Us 2 is that our characters “have stopped looking for the light.” The game revolves around blind hate, revenge and retaliation. And loss as the origin of those.
Ellie’s journal entries are as dark as can be. Most of them are dedicated to Joel of course. You’ll probably have noticed that she never draws his eyes. All she does is practice drawing eyes a lot. What’s more, she keeps talking about feeling blind herself, she says she’s lost the light.
For me, it’s like she doesn’t see any hope, no joy, no future in which she can find true happiness ever again. She’s *had* this hope. She wanted to forgive Joel for what he did, start anew. They’ve wasted a lot of time because Ellie understandably couldn’t forgive him so easily for what he’s done. At the end of the game, we get to see the last conversation that happened between them, the night before Joel dies. In this conversation, Ellie tells him that she “would like to try” to forgive him. And that’s probably the moment they reconnected after years of distance, tension and resentment. Ellie speaks of this last conversation in one of her early journal entries:
I was thinking about the meaning of Ellie not being able to draw his eyes. One that came to my mind is that whenever she tries to imagine them, all she can see is his disfigured face right before he dies.
Ellie looked him in the eyes and begged for him to get up. It was the last time they really looked each other in the eyes, had this connection, maybe saw all the things they went through together flash before them right before it was taken away from them. We find out that she has PTSD or something very similar to it when she lives on the farm with Dina. She can’t get the images out of her head:
Despite them having other people in their lives after settling in Jackson, they complemented and gave each other what they needed the most.
Despite Ellie saying it, we know that they they could never be done with each other, because too much connects them. That’s what the first game was all about, after all.
Ellie had hurt Joel over and over again. He’s not a hero, but we love him, because we love Ellie, and because we can understand why he did what he did. And Ellie does too. Her pain and hurt is just as understandable. She met him with almost cruel resentment and rejection all the time, got angry at him for small things, even when he meant well (like after she kissed Dina).
It’s this fight they had that she remembers right before deciding to finish what she’s started, to find Abby and kill her. When she couldn’t sleep on that farm, she got up, went to her room, closed the window, knocked over the guitar and thought of that night.
And I don’t think this is all about revenge. I think Ellie feels deeply guilty for having been to him that way, because she understands how much she means to him, and because she understands how deeply hurt and broken he is himself. She never wanted things to be like this between them, and she just wanted to forgive him in the end - she loves him and understands his pain better than anybody else.
But she never got to get things right. This chance was taken away from them, her forgiveness came “too late”. I think Ellie is so deeply broken herself, and I feel like she hates herself. Hates that she was the one who didn’t turn when Riley did. That her life only would have mattered if they killed her to make a cure. All these years, she was mean and cruel toward him. Now he’s dead, and part of her wants to make it up to him.
By wanting to kill Abby, she doesn’t only want to avenge Joel, she wants to redeem herself.
Notice how she can’t draw Joel’s and Abby’s eyes, but she can draw JJ’s and Jesse’s eyes?
I think that that she can’t draw their eyes has a good reason. With Joel, it’s not only that she can’t get the images out of her head. I also don’t think it’s because she can’t remember what he looked like - I think she can. All too well.
I think it’s because if she imagined his eyes before her, it’s like Joel would reflect everything she does and did. His eyes would “stare” at her, as she wrote in one journal entry, but then she replaced it with “smile”. She associates him with warmth and love, but what she does is losing herself. And he’d never want that. She does things that deeply traumatize her more and more. She tortures people, kills a pregnant woman. Looking him in the eyes would mean reflecting on her actions and on herself. Putting loved ones at risk and prioritizing revenge while neglecting her family and other relationships. Looking him in the eyes would mean for her to acknowledge that Joel would never condone that. He’s gone and nothing she does can change it. And he’d want her to be safe and stay true to herself and her values. Not be blinded by hate and grief.
Abby’s eyes represent something similar. Ellie knows that Joel crossed a lot of people. She knows he killed hundreds of people, especially Fireflys, including Marlene (although we don’t know if she knows that). She knows that he did a lot of bad shit in the past. Abby and her friends spared Ellie and Tommy, and that indicates that they aren’t universally bad people. Even when Dina asks Ellie what she thinks why they spared them, Ellie doesn’t want to talk about it and says that it doesn’t matter. But it does.
And she’s avoiding and denying this gray area. She’s dividing the world into good and bad now, disregarding everything in between. Even in the end, when she sees that Abby is just a normal human being like Ellie is, taking care of Lev, she feels obliged to kill her.
Jesse and JJ don’t represent her blind hate. They represent the love and people in her life that still make her happy and care about her. The life she could have, if she were able to “leave it all behind”. She doesn’t associate them with pain and loss.
Only when she finally has the choice to kill Abby, she remembers the last conversation she had with Joel - and it was about forgiveness. But it was not only about deciding to forgive him. It was about understanding that the world isn’t as simple as good and bad, black or white. People are more than that, just like Joel was neither a hero, nor a villain. Just like Abby is neither a hero nor a villain.
Of course, by deciding to break the cycle of revenge, which is the most obvious topic in the game, she spares Lev of going through the same pain Ellie and Abby did. But I think something deep inside her forgives Abby for what she’s done. I think Ellie understands that Abby isn’t just a bad person, just like Joel wasn’t. By stopping there, Ellie undergoes the growth not to be like Abby and kill the one who’s responsible for her loss, just like Abby grew and decided not to kill Dina despite the fact that Ellie killed Mel.
And she finally lets her mask slip. When she decides to let Abby live, she finally accepts that Joel is dead and “reconciles” with him. She decides not to turn into something she’s not and let her grief and hate get the better of her. Ellie understands what she’s done, the mistake she’s made. How she’s lost herself and how she wronged Dina.
And that’s when she can finally draw his eyes.
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