By pretty much every objective measure, HBO’s adaptation of the hit postapocalyptic video game The Last of Us has been a roaring success. Never before has a video game narrative been molded into Emmy nominations and such warm reception among respectable critics, industry darlings, and people who have no idea what the term “one-shotting” means. (I doubt Peter Travers was writing glowing reviews of the Mortal Kombat movie, but he did bless The Last of Us.) Season 2, which premieres on Sunday, is sure to receive much of the same adulation as it explores more of a world ravaged by fungus-infected zombies. You’d think that the devotees who first fell in love with the game back when it was originally released in 2013 would be toasting the cultural ascendance of their favorite medium—and especially how the story’s complicated morality has impacted those who’ve never picked up a controller. (Call it catharsis, after decades of artistic humiliation and being derisively dismissed as “nerds.”) And yet, for as long as the show has been on television, its most dogmatic fans have been caught up in a controversy of much inferior consequence: Specifically, they’re furious that Bella Ramsey doesn’t look much like Ellie.
On the most basic level, this observation is correct. Bella Ramsey—who, before The Last of Us, was best known for playing Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones—isn’t a perfect simulacrum of the blended textures that make up the video game’s leading lady. Ramsey has smaller eyes, darker hair, and a different facial bone structure—one that’s, to be frank, less common among Hollywood’s stars—than that of the character found in the mother text. Stuff like this happens all the time with adaptations. It’s both absurd and fruitless to argue that depictions of fictional characters must match the precise dimensions of how they were found in a comic book, or a cartoon, or an expositional paragraph in a novel. (Hell, the Joker has been played by everyone from Jared Leto to Jack Nicholson!)
But you can’t tell that to the internet, where HBO’s apparent failure of eidetic duplication has been taken as a personal affront. Across social media, there are countless tweets and other modes of self-expression comparing Ramsey to video-game Ellie and treating the nonresemblance like a tragedy and an insult. To sum up the grievances, borrowing one X user’s verbiage, “it’s absolutely diabolical lmao.”
Like so many internet controversies before it, the precise contours of these complaints depend on who they come from. Some fans take a much more measured approach, asserting that while they respect Ramsey as an actor, the British performer has simply been set up to fail by clueless casting directors. Elsewhere, you’ll find much nastier, and downright conspiratorial, charges. Why is Ramsey unfit for the role? Because they are “the ugliest woman on the planet,” and a “woke clown,” according to some. (These outbursts also frequently misgender Ramsey, who identifies as nonbinary.) In fact, there is an entire subreddit dedicated to the more reactionary corners of The Last Of Us fandom that is—near-exclusively—dedicated to the birddogging of the actor who won the role. Of the most upvoted posts in the past month is one puts forward the theory that “feminism was created to force popular culture to accept ugly women.”
To be fair, other fans of the show or the video game are perfectly fine with Ramsey’s portrayal of Ellie, or at the very least, don’t want to talk about it anymore. (“Just make 200 more posts about the same thing and I think your healing can finally begin,” reads one exasperated reply to a photoshopped version of a The Last of Us promotional poster that has excised Ramsey.) But even many of these reasonable fans would be hard-pressed to disagree with one of the main arguments driving their more militant peers onwards in their continued hate campaign against Ramsey: the fact that—according to the leading minds of the video game’s commentariat—a much superior Ellie was hiding in plain sight. Her name is Cailee Spaeny, and she is known for her roles in Priscilla, Alien: Romulus, and Civil War (the latter two of which are frequently held up as prime examples of her game-worthy chops). Admittedly, Spaeny does physically resemble a more traditional version of Ellie. Her absence from HBO’s adaptation is mourned with almost mind-blowing sincerity that at times comes across as solidly delusional.
“I wonder if AI is advanced enough to replace Bella with Cailee at least convincingly,” floats one Redditor. (“Please one of you talented mad bastards make this possible for us all please,” reads a follow-up.) There are scores of popular TikTok fan edits wistfully holding up Spaeny as the protagonist of The Last of Us. In the alternative reality that some of the most dedicated fans inhabit, there is no question about it: Spaeny is Ellie (and, in some cases, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, not Pedro Pascal, is Joel).
Look, it’s easy to chalk up much of the anguish surrounding Ramsey’s casting as the result of MAGA sour grapes, lingering Gamergate-ish sentiment, and the adrift minds of teenagers during lunch hour who have become irreparably cosplay-brained by a broken cultural environment. And, frankly, after interfacing with a few of these anti-Ramsey insurgents over Reddit, I think that postulation is spot-on. (None of them had anything particularly interesting to say, nor were they willing to go on the record.) However, I do think there is some important context about The Last of Us that might clarify a few things about this zeitgeist for anyone who has never played the games.
First, and most crucially, this franchise has always been a weirdly intense political lightning rod in the games community, to the point that the first game’s sequel—on which the second season of the show is based—was battered by a storm of anti-woke backlash when it was first released in 2020. It’s hard to articulate why that happened without getting into some heavy-duty spoilers, but basically, much of the game’s plot was leaked before release and attuned the public to a divisive major twist, and on top of that—more damningly—you were to spend much of the narrative playing as a girl, who is a lesbian. That was too much to bear for the world’s pearl-clutching right-wing gamers and their corresponding fleet of grifting YouTubers, who pumped out an endless slew of content moaning about the progressive overreach blighting The Last of Us, and therefore the hobby as a whole. (Remember how horrible it felt to be online when The Last Jedi was in theaters? It was kinda like that.)
Still, that doesn’t necessarily explain why those same people have such a fondness for Ellie—enough so that they’re willing to open fire on Hollywood for its decision not to honor her sharp digital cheekbones. Kalhan Rosenblatt, a reporter (and, full disclosure, a friend) who has covered The Last of Us fandom for NBC, believes this is the result of a highly parasocial relationship that is unique to the immersion of the video game medium. “They grow these very sincere attachments, and when they see an adaptation, they expect to see a continuation of that attachment,” she said. “And I can understand that. These characters are an emotional part of people’s lives. They can become very protective of them.” For what it’s worth, Rosenblatt adores Ramsey’s performance and correctly notes that the voice actress who plays Ellie in the video game, Ashley Johnson, also doesn’t particularly look like the girl in the PlayStation—making the whole fracas over Ramsey’s portrayal somehow even more stupid.
This dynamic becomes even more legible when you remember that The Last of Us shares a lineage with what we gamers like to call “dad games”—as in, video games with highfalutin literary ambitions that attempt to articulate the experience of parenthood, most of which arrived during the past decade, when the typical game developer was aging out of his 20s and starting to have kids. (God of War, BioShock Infinite, and Telltale Games’ take on The Walking Dead all shared this in common.) The Last of Us, by putting players behind the weathered brow of Joel, does everything it can to inculcate the sensation of filial loyalty—which is what makes its ending so cataclysmically perfect. Some members of the gaming community, clouded by the chemicals of unreciprocated patrilineality, took full adoption rights over Ellie, ensuring that any additional spin on the established fiction would be met with resistance. (As for why that has resulted in a desire for their video game daughter to be hot, well, I’d rather not get into that.)
So this issue isn’t going anywhere soon. It’s endemic to the fandom. The Last of Us has been renewed for Season 3, and the distaste for Ramsey will surely grow only more fetid and grody. Funnily enough, I think I agree with some of the agitators, though not in the way they’d prefer me to. I find Ramsey’s range as a performer in the second season I’ve been able to preview so far to be fairly limited—and this is done no favors by a script that asks the star to express exactly two flavors of rage and sorrow. Ultimately, though, that’s the fault of a sequel that’s unable to fully synthesize its overwhelming darkness into a more sophisticated story. Would Cailee Spaeny do a better job? Maybe, but it certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with how she looks.
