How The Last of Us Part II Makes Female Violence Complicate Redemption
The Last of Us Part II places women at the centre of a revenge story and refuses to make their violence easy to categorize. Ellie, Abby, and the women around them are capable of tenderness, cruelty, loyalty, and devastating brutality. Their actions are shaped by grief and political violence, but the game also asks what happens when pain becomes a moral permission slip.
This focus makes the game especially valuable for feminist analysis. Female characters in popular culture are often expected to be sympathetic, nurturing, or redeemable through self-sacrifice. Part II challenges those expectations by allowing women to occupy roles traditionally assigned to male protagonists: avenger, soldier, torturer, killer, and reluctant protector.
The game’s treatment of redemption is therefore unstable. Nobody can undo the harm they cause. Instead, redemption appears as a limited choice to interrupt violence, even when forgiveness, justice, and emotional healing remain out of reach.
Women Who Refuse Moral Simplicity
Ellie begins the game as a grieving young woman who pursues Abby across Seattle. Her rage is understandable, but the game does not treat understandable rage as automatically righteous. Each act of revenge creates new suffering, including for Ellie herself, Dina, Jesse, and the people she encounters.
Abby is introduced through an act of spectacular violence: she kills Joel in front of Ellie. This framing encourages the player to see her as an antagonist before revealing her history, relationships, and vulnerabilities. When the perspective shifts, the game forces players to inhabit the life of the woman they have already condemned.
That reversal exposes how quickly audiences can grant complexity to one female character while denying it to another. Abby and Ellie are both shaped by loss, but the player’s attachment to Ellie initially makes Abby’s grief seem less legitimate. The game turns that emotional bias into part of its subject.
Violence Beyond the Male Action Hero
The women of The Last of Us Part II do not simply imitate male action heroes. Their violence is connected to institutions, intimate relationships, survival, ideology, and expectations about care. Abby belongs to the Washington Liberation Front, a militarized organization that normalizes violence as collective duty. Ellie’s violence is more personal, but it increasingly takes on the structure of a mission.
Abby’s physical strength also complicates conventional representations of female bodies. She is muscular, disciplined, and visibly capable, yet the narrative does not reduce her to an empowering image of invulnerability. She is frightened, manipulated, traumatized, and frequently dependent on others. Her body becomes a site where gender norms, transphobia, and militarism collide.
Lev’s presence makes those pressures more explicit. As a trans boy fleeing the Seraphites, Lev is targeted by a community that enforces rigid gender roles. Abby’s decision to protect him does not erase her earlier actions, but it creates a relationship in which care interrupts ideological loyalty. Her redemption begins through responsibility toward someone vulnerable, not through a declaration of innocence.
The Player’s Complicity
The game’s structure makes the player participate in the moral discomfort it creates. Players control Ellie while she attacks Abby’s friends, then control Abby as she fights Ellie’s allies. The mechanics remain familiar, but the emotional meaning changes depending on whose story is being played.
This is a form of ludonarrative tension: the game asks players to question actions they are simultaneously required to perform. Combat systems reward efficiency, while the narrative increasingly emphasizes the humanity of enemies. Names, voices, companion dialogue, and environmental details make anonymous targets harder to treat as disposable obstacles.
| Character | Relationship to violence | What complicates redemption |
|---|---|---|
| Ellie | Personal revenge shaped by grief and survivor’s guilt | She must recognize that vengeance cannot restore Joel |
| Abby | Institutional and personal violence tied to Joel’s death | Protecting Lev offers a new obligation without erasing past harm |
| Dina | Care, protection, and boundaries amid escalating revenge | She refuses to make love a reason to accept endless damage |
| Lev | Survival under religious and gendered persecution | His vulnerability reveals the social systems behind individual violence |
| Mel | Medical care entangled with a militarized community | Her presence highlights the human cost of ideological conflict |
The player is also asked to confront the pleasure of domination. Stealth, dismemberment, and close-quarters combat can feel satisfying even while the story condemns revenge. That contradiction does not make the game morally consistent; it makes the player’s own appetite part of the conversation.
Care Is Not the Opposite of Power
The game resists the idea that care belongs only to peaceful characters. Dina fights to protect herself and Ellie, while Abby becomes a caregiver without losing her capacity for violence. These roles overlap rather than cancel each other out. A woman can provide comfort and inflict harm, sometimes within the same relationship.
Dina’s pregnancy intensifies this conflict. She is frequently positioned as someone who needs protection, but she also makes clear choices about her safety and emotional limits. When Ellie leaves the farm to pursue Abby again, Dina’s refusal to continue the relationship is not framed as a failure of compassion. It is a boundary against being consumed by another person’s trauma.
The farm offers a temporary image of domestic recovery, but it cannot permanently contain Ellie’s unresolved grief. Its collapse suggests that healing cannot be performed as a return to a perfect household. Care requires consent, reciprocity, and presence; it cannot survive when one person treats everyone else as secondary to revenge.
Redemption Without Innocence
Abby’s path toward redemption is not a cleansing transformation. She does not apologize directly to Ellie, nor does she repair the communities damaged by her choices. Her change begins when she rejects the demands of the WLF and risks herself for Lev and Yara. That decision is meaningful because it costs her status, security, and eventually nearly her life.
Ellie’s final decision is even less secure. At the beach, she has already lost much of what she hoped revenge would protect. Releasing Abby does not restore Joel, Dina, or her former identity. It is an act of refusal: Ellie chooses not to complete another cycle of punishment.
The game leaves open whether this choice represents forgiveness. It may be better understood as relinquishing ownership over another person’s suffering. Ellie cannot make Abby pay enough to make her grief disappear. Redemption, in this sense, is not a reward but a break in repetition.
Reading Female Violence Through Feminist Criticism
A feminist reading should avoid celebrating every violent woman as liberated. The game is more complicated than an argument that women deserve the same destructive power traditionally granted to men. It asks what happens when women enter violent systems and whether those systems change them more than they change the systems.
Useful critical approaches include:
- Examine who receives narrative interiority and whose suffering remains unseen.
- Separate explanation from justification when discussing Ellie’s or Abby’s choices.
- Consider how race, sexuality, disability, gender identity, and class shape vulnerability.
- Pay attention to care work, emotional boundaries, and the cost of militarized loyalty.
- Analyze how gameplay mechanics can make players complicit in the violence the story critiques.
The treatment of female violence in The Last of Us Part II is powerful because it denies a comfortable moral hierarchy. Ellie is not redeemed by suffering, and Abby is not redeemed by becoming useful to Lev. Their choices matter, but consequences do not produce a clean accounting of harm.
Read the game alongside feminist criticism of revenge narratives, trauma, militarism, and queer representation. Explore the wider media archive, share the conversation, and subscribe for more commentary on the stories that shape how power and gender are imagined.