The director of Hollywood’s television adaption of the one of the most popular video games of all time admitted to tricking audiences into watching his shoe-horned political messaging.
Peter Hoar, who helms the HBO Max series The Last Of Us, made it clear that a plot featuring survival in a post-apocalyptic world wasn’t his main focus as much as inserting the videogame’s non-existent gay romance.
“Sometimes you have to sort of trick the rest of the world into watching these things before they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, it was two guys. I just realized,’” Hoar declared during an interview that was published ahead of the controversial third episode of the miniseries.
“I think then they might understand that it’s all real,” he added. “It’s just the same love.”
Of course, the “toxic” fandom Hoar is targeting his ire toward and thinks is bigoted actually doesn’t care about gay romance – if it’s a meaningful part of the plot. No one cares if people are gay or straight; the problem comes when forced narratives drive a story rather than a compelling story driving subplots.
The third episode deviated from the story arc – and could probably be taken out without missing a single beat in the larger quest of the main characters – by focusing its time on a tangential storyline that, again, was not present in the source material and has no bearing on the larger plot.
The Daily Wire described the detour.
In the first two episodes of the series adapted from the popular video game, the show focused on fighting zombies. However, the third one veered off course with a self-contained romance between two surviving men Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) who hadn’t been infected with the virus.
Most reviews praised the episode itself for being well written, well acted, and offering a genuine story of love and sacrifice. These are all good things and make for good viewing. However, in the context of the larger culture wars, it’s yet one more bait-and-switch that fans are so tired of.
Basically, the director and showrunners took a popular IP and obliterated it in order to satisfy their own agendas.
Indeed, as reviews on Rotten Tomato noted, the romance would have been a dud regardless of the type of love it was.
“If episode 3 was about a heterosexual couple, fans would still be bored and disappointed,” one reviewer wrote. “Most fans are watching for the adaptation of a video game about fighting zombies, not a full episode about romance. We all know why the episode is receiving high praise, let’s calm down.”
“They didn’t respect the existing story in the game with this episode 3, terrible!” another said.
And again, this is the whole point. Episode 3 just didn’t need to happen to tell the story of The Last Of Us. How hard is it for Hollywood to faithfully adapt beloved tales of hardship, struggle, survival, and triumph?
The exact same thing has played out in Star Wars, Marvel, Lord of the Rings, and pretty much every modern-day adaptation. Fans tune in because they are attached to the world created by the original authors and connected with the characters.
They despise being misled and watching their entertainment replace well-constructed, complex characters and stories be reduced to narratives revolving around identity politics.
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