Level Story | Mini-Mag 2 | The Last of Us: Left Behind

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SUBSCRIBE LEVEL STORY MAGAZINE MISSION STATEMENT www.patreon.com/levelstory CREDITS Writer, Editor, & Designer | Danielle Carpenter Writer | Jacqueline Merritt Writer | Naomi “Bez” Norbez Cover Photography | Benjamin Szabo Photography | cottonbro Photography | Darius Krause Photography | NeONBRAND Photography | El Mehdi Rezkellah Photography | Sergio Souza Photography | Sean Whang

Storytelling in video games is getting better and better with age. What began as simple forms of combat, exploration, and journey missions, has evolved into something much more sophisticated than once allowed. No longer are we content to only be concerned with gameplay mechanics. Although gameplay is really important, the gaming community also cares about other attributes such as style, design, musical score, and of course story. As time has passed, video games have steadily begun to provide well crafted stories to accompany their gameplay. But unlike mediums such as the novel or film, video games are not well respected and therefore are not considered to be an art form. They began as a series of objectives for the player to immerse themselves in. It was only as the technology developed that creators began to challenge the mediums original intent. Video games are still tainted with the taboo of mediocrity that many find to be silly and for the immature. This is an outdated notion. Video games, new and old, are important. Stories are important. All stories regardless of the medium are worthy of study. My goal is to examine the stories that exist in classic and modern day video games. Through careful exploration I will analyze these stories just as one would analyze a novel. Is the story well crafted? What themes are at play? How do our characters grow? And ultimately, what attributes of the video game directly contribute to the game’s core narrative? This is Level Story Magazine.

FEATURES 5 // Story Overview

WORKS CITED

6 // Ellie Coming of Age

Naughty Dog. The Last of Us: Left Behind. Sony Interactive Entertainment. PS3/PS4. 2014.

8 // How Queerness Informs Ellie’s Character

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10 // Desperate Love, Desperate Measures

anna anthropy. Queers in Love at the End of the World. PC/itch.io. 2016.

The ideas presented by the writers in this magazine belong to them individually and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of everyone who contributed. © Level Story Magazine, 2020

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Creator Letter

A Small, Beautiful Game When working on this mini-mag for The Last of Us: Left Behind, I couldn’t help but feel like there was more I should be saying about this game. I knew this was a mini-mag and therefore going to be a smaller issue by default, but when all I could churn out was one article, I wondered if I could do more. It felt like this game deserved more from me.

So this is the section where I will proceed to gush about my love for this game, and hope I don’t sound like a rambling mess in the process. I think most people who were tuned in to games criticism at the time of Left Behind’s release will know how impactful it was to video game narratives and representation in the gaming industry. The Last of Us had already blown people away and this was an extra helping that made it all the more rich.

This game could have been many things: a forced prequel cash grab, an attempt at representation that falls flat, or simply an unnecessary inclusion to the main story. But thankfully it is none of these things. Left Behind

is a beautiful story about friendship, queer love, and what it means to be human. I know that last one sounds pretty generic but I mean that with complete sincerity. After all, this is a universe where an infection turns a person into a being that is subhuman and monstrous. The characters are constantly having to reconcile with their humanity.

I talked about this a bit in the Firewatch issue but it bears repeating: video games are loud. So often they rely on high intense situations but rarely do they take the time to focus on the quiet moments, the moments that are small, average, and beautiful. Though Left Behind is far from a quiet game (Ellie spends a good chunk of time fighting off enemies in the winter timeline with Joel), it seems to value the moments that are outside of heavy combat.

Ellie and Riley do a good deal of walking from destination to destination, reading jokes from a joke book, trying on Halloween masks and quoting The Wizard of Oz, and just talking. I appreciate the attention to these small moments, these moments of quiet interaction that reveal layers of these characters slowly and delicately.

My favorite scene of the game is the scene everyone knows - when Ellie and Riley kiss. It isn’t just the kiss itself that I love, but the build up toward it. I love watching the girls dance together, the camera zoomed out as they danced in a desolate mall. I love Ellie’s plea for Riley to stay, and the clear love these girls have for one another. But most of all I love how wholesome the scene is in a game series that doesn’t allow for these moments very often. It is extremely effective. Though it is short, it is some of the highest quality storytelling in the industry and I encourage everyone to play it.

Danielle Carpenter Creator & Publisher

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DECEMBER 2020 | LEVEL STORY

STORY SUMMARY Left Behind interweaves two stories together: the night Ellie was bitten and Ellie’s time immediately after Joel is impaled in The Last of Us. After Joel is impaled at the University, Ellie desperately tries to get him to safety and keep him alive. She takes refuge at a shopping mall, leaving Joel so she can find him some medical supplies.

She comes across a pharmacy but there are no supplies left behind. Fortunately there is a medical helicopter that crashed into the mall and Ellie makes her way toward it. The only way up is through a locked door and the power is out. She is forced to make her way through a flooded garage to get the power back on. After fighting off the infected lurking in the garage, Ellie manages to get the power on and climb up to where the copter crashed. Inside are medical supplies, just as she needed. Ellie makes her way back to Joel when she sees some more men from the University followed them and are trying to get to Joel. She fights them off, along with some more infected.

Throughout all of this, the game flashes back to three weeks before The Last of Us begins proper. Ellie is living at a military boarding school. In the middle of the night, her best friend Riley pays her a surprise visit. The two have not spoken in a while and Riley reveals that she has been recruited by the Fireflies. Riley and Ellie sneak out to an abandoned shopping mall. As they walk around, they proceed to goof off. After getting sidetracked from their normal route, they make their way through a Halloween store where they try on masks and Ellie reads a magic eight ball. They then find some bricks and try to see who can break the most windows on some abandoned cars on the floor below. Through all this, Ellie tries to learn why Riley hadn’t spoken to her in a while. She wants to know why Riley brought her to the mall.

Riley shows Ellie that they can turn the power on in the mall. They ride a carousel briefly before it dies and take pictures in a photo booth. They then find an arcade and Riley helps Ellie imagine she is playing as the classic fighter, Angel Knives. After evading the question for long enough, Riley finally explains that she has been reassigned to a new group in a different city. Although Ellie is upset by this news, the girls try to make peace and have a water gun fight. Riley then puts on some music and the girls dance. Ellie stops and pleads with Riley not to go. After a moment, Riley pulls off her Firefly pendant and Ellie kisses her. They are then ambushed by some infected and try to run away. They almost evade them by climbing some scaffolding, but eventually they each have a bite mark.

Ellie lashes out, smashing objects at the cruel reality that they are infected. Riley shares some words of wisdom and comfort, telling Ellie that they have to fight and cherish the last moments they have with one another.

As Ellie prepares to leave with Joel in the winter, Riley’s words play in back her mind, reminding her to fight and continue on even when it is hard.

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Written by Danielle Carpenter

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DECEMBER 2020 | LEVEL STORY

When it comes to the character of Ellie, Left Behind offers a unique perspective on the coming of age narrative. It is a core theme of the game and offers a lens for the player to better understand Ellie’s character.

Left Behind is a small game that packs a big punch.

Through the interweaving stories of the day Ellie was bitten and the day Joel was brutally injured at the University, we get to see how Ellie becomes the character we know and love from the base game, The Last of Us. A lot of this has to do with Left Behind being a subtle coming of age story that depicts Ellie’s gradual radicalization after being an apathetic onlooker for most of her life.

The coming of age story depicts a child making the transition into adulthood. Examples of this type of story include To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Malcolm in the Middle, and Stand By Me...just to name a few. Coming of age stories do not aim to literally represent the moment a child becomes an adult because this is a long transitional period of one’s life. Rather, coming of age represents moments in time when a child’s view of the world is changed, and it transforms their viewpoint because of this. Left Behind explores coming of age by contrasting two different timelines: Ellie before she was bitten and Ellie afterwards, traveling with Joel.

When we meet Ellie in Left Behind, she is living at a military boarding school. Although it is the character we know and love, she is different. In her interactions with Riley, Ellie is revealed to be more naive and unsure of herself than in the base game. Although she is breaking the rules by sneaking out, she is clearly uncomfortable with doing so and is consistently weary of authority despite her mockery of it at later points in the game. Ellie is not content with the world but doesn’t stand up to the powers that be. Sure she gets into trouble, but it never goes beyond a slap on the wrist (or in this case, the confiscation of water guns).

Left Behind is concerned with illustrating Ellie and Riley’s innocence in a world where childhood hardly exists as we understand it. The girls spend their time in the mall playing games, riding the carousel, trying on Halloween masks, and taking pictures in a photo booth. They shoot each other with water guns and then point guns at infected.

This is contrasted with Ellie’s other storyline which also takes place in a mall but under very different circumstances. Ellie is no longer on a care-free adventure with her friend but on a quest for survival at all costs.

Coming of age in this world feels a lot different than we normally understand it. In the earlier example, Stand By Me, main character Gordie grapples with coming of age when he and his friends find a dead body in the woods. But in The Last of Us and Left Behind, death and mutilated bodies are commonplace. Children are not shielded from violence but prepared to face it. They attend military academies and are recruited into the rebel militia known as the Fireflies.

Early in the story, it is revealed that Riley has become a Firefly. Ellie presses her, wondering why she joined up with the group in the first place. As they make their way through the mall, Riley avoids Ellie’s questions. Instead, she jokes around with her by scaring her with a vampire mask or pulling out a joke book.

As the game continues, she later reveals that she has to leave the city of Boston because she has been assigned to another group in a different city. This revelation completely alters their friendship. Not only is Riley becoming a militant Firefly, but committing to it and taking decisive action. On top of this, Riley leaving means that she will be leaving Ellie in a world where every person Ellie has loved has left her in some capacity. Grappling with this feels too difficult and so the girls decide to make up for a while by playing with water guns.

Then we arrive at the iconic scene of the game. Riley turns on Etta James’ I Got You Babe and the girls dance atop a glass display case. The camera zooms out as they dance amidst the overgrown, disheveled mall. It is a beautiful and effective shot, one of my favorites in the game. Ellie stops dancing and whispers to Riley, “Don’t go.” Riley proceeds to rip off her Firefly pendant and the girls kiss, just before being ambushed by infected.

We all know how this ends. The girls run but are unable to make their way to safety. They are bitten and this can only end in tragedy. As they sit in the morning sunlight, Riley goes

over their options. At her suggestion that they fight, Ellie asks, “fight for what?” Riley then gives a moving speech and reflects that they can fight for the moments they get to spend with one another. Her speech overlays a scene of Ellie in the present day, with Joel hitched on a sled, about to brave the winter winds. Though it happens off screen, we know the true ending to this story. Riley dies and Ellie learns she is immune. She will never get those moments with Riley back.

Her death marks a distinct turning point for Ellie.

This is the moment that changes Ellie forever, the coming of age moment. It isn’t just that she was bitten and survived. At the ending moments of this game, Ellie has no concept of the idea that she could walk away from this unscathed. She expected to die along with her best friend and love interest. This is brought up at the end of The Last of Us. Since that day, Ellie has been waiting for her turn to die and it never happens. People are constantly dying beside her. She had made it all that way to the Firefly hospital, only to leave with nothing but empty words from Joel.

It isn’t merely the fact that Ellie was bitten that she sees the world differently, though that is certainly a part of it. Ellie changes because she now has a reason to fight. At the start of the game, Ellie is skeptical of Riley’s involvement with the Fireflies and wonders why she would get involved at all. By the end, Ellie loses her. The infection takes her.

Riley’s final on screen words encourage Ellie to fight.

Her death is the crux of Ellie’s entire worldview from this point forward. It isn’t enough that she survived. She survived without Riley. This is a moment that shows Ellie the cruelty of this world. She has to continue fighting, for Riley’s sake. And if she can, she wants to be used to find a cure so that people can survive next time.

When Joel is injured, Ellie does all that she can to keep him alive. Just as with Riley, Ellie explores an abandoned mall except now she is alone. There is no warm glow from the carousel but only white snow and bitter cold. She is fighting to keep Joel alive in a way she could not keep Riley alive.

It can be assumed that these memories haunt her everyday and at the same time keep her going.

Left Behind is a beautiful coming of age story that takes Ellie from a silent bystander to an active fighter. It is a subtle tale of radicalization and one that captures the nuances of what it means to grow up in a pandemic that has destroyed the world.

DANIELLE CARPENTER

is an avid reader and writer. She graduated from West Chester University with a BA in English Lit., and is the creator of Level Story Magazine. https://dcarpenter.carrd.co/

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QUEERNESS

HOW INFORMS ELLIE’S CHARACTER

Written by Jacqueline Merritt

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DECEMBER 2020 | LEVEL STORY

In The Last of Us: Left Behind, we learn that Ellie, the driving force behind the main game’s story, is in love with another girl, Riley, and see them both share a kiss together. This moment is unfortunately, gated behind a $10 piece of DLC, and undercut by its separation from the main game’s story, but even within that context, it is a powerful moment of representation and characterization that adds clarity to Ellie’s character throughout the whole of the game.

When we first meet Ellie in the game proper, we immediately learn that she’s feisty, aggressive, and fiercely protective of the people she cares about. She attacks Joel, a man twice her size, on sight the first time they meet, because she thinks he poses a threat to Marlene, one of the few people she cares about. She also attempts to be self-sufficient and reliant whenever possible, going out of her way to stand up for herself in the face of huge threats, and refusing to blindly listen to authority, only trusting the guidance of those she knows have her best interests in mind.

With these characteristics alone, it’s easy to see why queer women might latch onto Ellie, as she embodies the kind of rebellious spirit a lot of us take up in our youth. They are, however, all surface details to her character; details that are not exclusive to queerfolk by any stretch, and don’t reach down to the psychological core of her character that defines her: her distrust and alienation from the rest of the world.

Because Ellie is immune to the cordyceps virus, she’s automatically set apart from other people in the world. Anyone who finds out she’s been bitten is immediately distrustful of her, and she has to hide that core aspect of herself and “pass” as normal in order to survive. Thanks to the story of Left Behind though, we learn that this pattern of behavior was normal for Ellie long before she was bitten, and see as her alienation from others affects her relationship with Riley.

Ellie describes Riley as her “best friend” at the end of the game proper, and from that description, we might expect them to be thick as thieves, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Ellie’s relationship with Riley is complex, messy, and filled with ambiguity; she’s upset with her when Riley drops in to visit at the start of the DLC, and as the story goes on, we learn that the two of them parted on unpleasant terms, with Riley saying many hurtful things to Ellie that she later apologizes for. Throughout the story of Left Behind, we see the two of them work on communicating with each other, and slowly figure out how to express how much they both mean to one another, culminating in their aforementioned kiss, before they’re beset upon by infected, and bitten during their escape.

Ellie’s struggle to be honest in her relationship

with Riley stems from clear trust issues. Riley herself seems to have left Ellie many times before, despite caring for her, and Ellie has a difficult time resolving Riley’s absence with her feelings. We see this kind of behavior from Ellie plenty in the main game too; Ellie’s entire relationship with Joel is founded on her desperate desire for the people who care about her to stay, and their biggest moment of conflict comes when Joel attempts to pass her off to his brother Tommy, and leave her behind with a complete stranger.

It’s here where the queer experience can begin to clearly inform Ellie’s character, as the alienation many of us experience from the wider world around us can cause us to develop the same type of trust issues as Ellie. Just like her, we’re forced to navigate a world where we have to hide a part of our existence for our own safety, and because of this, many of us tend to gravitate towards people who dole out affection and their presence in our lives as a reward. We can’t trust the affection given freely to us, since it can turn sour on a moment’s notice. But affection that comes as a struggle, and comes unreliably? Well that we learn to trust easily, because that inconsistency makes it feel more real and worthwhile, despite how unhealthy a relationship like this can be.

Ellie’s character arcs in Left Behind and the game proper then, are rebuttals to these unhealthy relationship dynamics, and key to the game’s themes. Left Behind, of course, explores Ellie learning to communicate with Riley and express her feelings honestly, but it also shows Ellie learning the value of resistance and maintaining a fighting spirit from Riley, a lesson made more meaningful due to Riley being a Black girl. Thanks to Riley, Ellie refuses to take the easy way out, and spends every single moment with her first love that she can.

Similarly, in the main game, Ellie does everything she can to make her immunity count, regardless of if it alienates her from others. She fights to get to the Fireflies, guarding and protecting her immunity, in order to make her difference mean something, and in doing so, proves that she treasures this metaphorical queerness the same way revolutionary queers like me treasure our queerness. Ellie’s battle against the world to use her otherness for its benefit is highly reminiscent of queer struggles, and is one of many reasons her queerness is essential to her character.

JACQUELINE MERRITT

is a trans woman and experienced video editor who (in)frequently makes video essays on YouTube. You can find her on Twitter @JacquelineFilm and find her video essays at youtube.com/c/JacquelineMerritt

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IF YOU LIKE LEFT BEHIND, THEN YOU WILL LIKE...

Desperate Love, Desperate Measures Written by Naomi “Bez” Norbez

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DECEMBER 2020 | LEVEL STORY

When we have each other we have everything.

Love is desperate. Queer love is even more so. In an oppressed world, by design queer love is a clinging thing, a type of love that must hold tightly against the many obstacles it faces (ranging from microaggressions to death, depending on where you are in the world).

Anna Anthropy perfectly captures this desperation in the Twine Queers in Love at the End of the World. In this short game, you are a queer person with your lover. The world is going to end in ten real-time seconds. Do what you will with that time.

There are many ways to spend your last moments with your lover. You can hug her, tell her you love her, fuck her, breathe with her, among many, many other options. I don’t think any player has seen the full extent of what this game has to offer - there are only ten seconds, after all, and you can only do so much.

But that’s the magic of it: you can only do so much.

You don’t have much time to spend, and less time to waste. How do you let the one you love know how you feel - how much do you convey your appreciation before “[e]verything is wiped away”?1 By design the game is desperate. Say what you can, do what you will before it’s too late. Before your final moments, how do you show love?

Do you show it with a hand up your lover’s skirt?

One quick fuck before you go? A passionate kiss? Just saying, “I love you” over and over? All these little actions are in the game, and because it’s the end, they are given meaning beyond their immediate meaning. They are a final expression, the last goodbye, a passionate rebellion

of inaction as the world comes to a close. In that sense, the game is almost punk.

The best and saddest part of the game is that you can’t stop the end. There is no secret ending where, if you click the right things, you find the undo button and save the world. There is no alternate version of the game where these characters turn out alright. It is the end.

And you can be in denial about that fact, or you can embrace it and do what you can to celebrate the life you have left.

There’s also no knowing what exactly is ending the world. It could be nuclear war or climate change; it could be illness or mass shootings. Or it could be figurative language, and perhaps only the world of these two characters is ending, and the rest of Earth is safe. We have no way of knowing. The moment between these lovers is the only thing that matters.

The only thing that matters is our desperate, queer love.

And when we have each other, we have everything.

NAOMI “BEZ” NORBEZ

is a interactive fiction developer and writer. You can find his work at https://norbez.itch.io/, and talk to them on Twitter @NaomiNorbez.

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DECEMBER 2020 | LEVEL STORY