So Beautiful

So beautiful😭❤️

Read this series if you haven’t—it’s seriously some of my favorite tlou fic content EVER! It’s absolutely brilliant and heartwarming and occasionally the saddest thing ever!

@bumblepony commissioned this incredible art of Bookshop!Ellie and Bookshop!Joel for me. I can’t believe how fucking lucky I am to call her my friend 🥰😍😘

David and the Infected

David mirrors the infected in The Last of Us HBO. His behaviors, his development, and even his hunting patterns. These parallels are all used by Craig Mazin and Ali Abassi to highlight just how much worse he is.

TWs: SA, Violence/Gore, and Religion

What happens if you don’t resist?

That was a question posed by Craig Mazin, show-runner of The Last of Us, in a discussion about the second episode of season 1. The answer is that the infected are slow, almost gentle in their violation. The same goes for David. In the cage scene we see the same slow, haunting torture that we do in episode two.

Both start out slow and gentle to try and feed off of people, but the more their victims resist the more savage and aggressive they become. When you resist, they fight. They hunt.

But here’s what really put the nail in the coffin. The way they hunt their victims, and the parallels in cinematography is undeniable.

They’re both predators that stalk their physically-weaker pray:

They both try to trap them by holding them down:

(Bella fucking Ramsey, folks) (genuinely one of the best working actors today)

3. The Hive Mentality

Like the Infected, David has a hive-mind too. A group of people doing his bidding, like how Cordyceps takes over people’s minds and connects them to each other. We see how everyone in Silver Lake obeys him, is under his control, just like Cordyceps. We also see how they gravitate towards him and go where he goes like the Infected do for each other.

4. Literally Eating People

I’m not sure this requires further explanation…

But this doesn’t mean they’re the same. Quite the opposite, actually. The creators shatter these parallels to show how much more terrifying David is than the Infected, because he’s human. Everything he does is something terrifyingly human. Lying and manipulating his way to horrifying goals. The fact that he doesn’t do what Infected do, he does what humans do makes everything he does so, so much scarier than the Infected.

The clickers use noise to find their pray while hunting, but David uses noise to yell vile, disgusting things to scare his.

The clickers are animals, they just do what’s instinctual of them, but David chooses every second of the story to be inhuman. He manipulates and lies and acts to hurt others. The infected are creatures, but David’s a monster. Infected only know what’s ahead of them, but David plans ahead. He knows full well what he’s doing, but he does it anyway. He manipulates and scares his hive-mind into submission. He makes the conscious choice to eat people. The infected do what they do to survive, like all animals. David does it because he likes it.

And we all knew by the end of the episode that David wasn’t like the Infected in another way, too. He wasn’t planning on eating Ellie.

It’s terrifying and brilliant, like all of episode 8. They use these parallels to make David so much scarier than the Infected, for so many reasons. It shows how much depth and thought is put into the show, and the way that behind every scene there’s so many layers of meaning and parallels.

TLDR; Craig Mazin and Ali Abassi are geniuses. They created parallels just to flip them to show us how much more terrifying David is than the Infected.

Absolutely beautiful (the art and the episode)😭❤️

for a long, long time

Scenario: hostage situation. It doesn't have to be exactly this, but maybe someone who got bit gets past the defences and lives in Jackson for a day or two and then when symptoms start to show in public and guns get drawn, he grabs the nearest person (ellie) and decides to take her with him to the edge of town so he can leave without getting killed. Negotiation and panic and anger + or - maria and tommy etc. Could be fun

I combined this idea with another and by the time I finished it, it lined up with a Whumptober prompt😅

Thanks for the suggestion!!

ellie, the most lovable girl in the QZ <333

Your trademark is thoughtful analysis! 💜

Awww, stop it! That’s too nice!