MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Stories featuring children who display levels of agency approaching those of adult characters often utilize tropes connecting them to notions of the monstrous. The character of fourteen-year-old Ellie in the post-apocalyptic video game The Last of Us is no exception: she has something of the monstrous in her in two senses, as she carries both the infection that has destroyed most of human civilization and a natural immunity to it. As the player moves through the story, the focus shifts from Ellie’s potential contribution to medical research to her character, her relationships, and her survival skills, and ultimately back again. It is in this oscillation that The Last of Us subverts tropes of the agentic, monstrous child, for Ellie’s agency and competence are tied directly to her humanity: she is at her strongest when acting as an ordinary girl fighting for survival, and at her weakest, forced to rely on others not only to protect her but to make life-or-death decisions on her behalf, when her supernatural medical condition overwhelms the importance of her character. In this presentation, I examine Ellie as a successful challenge to the enduring subtext of the classic monstrous child trope – that “ordinary”, non-supernatural children are inherently devoid of agency. I propose that the unique characteristics and traditions of the post-apocalyptic genre, and of the video game medium in its contemporary context, combined to give the game’s creators the opportunity to create a piece that challenges traditional depictions of children in fiction, and by extension, traditional understandings of childhood. I close by situating my argument for Ellie’s status as an empowering, agentic child character within an intersectional view that also takes into account the more established analyses which have approached her character as a positive representation of both women and LGBTQIA individuals.