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So what differentiates necessity in terms of how it characterizes the world of The Last of Us is that necessity isn’t just an aspect of this world – it defines this world.

Everything we talked about up to now was a foundation for a result of ‘necessity’.

Deterioration per se isn’t what shapes these characters’ stories – it’s what the deterioration forces them to do.

The characters’ wounds rob them of their ability to live how they want. All the death and the cruelty and the desperation, the darkness – each one of these aspects is stamped with that necessity label. That is its identity.

The centerpiece of what’s happening with every character, with every arc, practically every beat, is this tension between what they want to do and how they’re forced to act out of necessity.

And I want to draw your attention to specific unbelievable nuance in this at the end of episode 5. It’s this terrible scene and we can look at this big picture – brother killing a brother is disorder, it’s a necessity, but I want to talk about the way it happens. [Invah note: his little brother is a zombie who was attacking someone] The way his hand moves, the way he actually commits this act – it’s too sudden, it feels cold and harmless, but it’s almost something beyond that. We don’t get the big buildup, we don’t get the intense moment of decision – it’s almost like it happens before he can decide to do it. It’s like a reflex. It’s more than just disorder – this is wrong, this is not how it’s supposed to happen. The reason why it happens this way is because this is Henry’s life – he is a puppet to necessity. The need tears his hand away, the need squeezes the trigger.

It is barely a choice of his own because that’s how all of these characters live.

So I opened this video with a question: if The Last of Us is a zombie story, where are all the zombies?

Forget The Last of Us for a second – why are zombies a thing at all?

Why are we afraid of the dead coming back to life? At someone’s most simple level, zombies are a type of monster. All monsters are unnatural things – this is a dead thing that is also alive. That’s a paradox, it’s not supposed to exist. Okay, what about a little bit more complex? We are afraid of death – death coming to get us. That’s scary. It’s being attacked by our fear of our own mortality.

But these definitions have explained some things about zombies in a general sense, but they do not succeed in tying everything together.

Why do zombies eat brains? Why do they moan and groan? Why do they slowly lurch and put out their arms like this? Why do they also sometimes run and chase us down? Why do we see zombies, plural – why don’t we see hordes of swamp monsters? Why don’t we see endless ranks of vampires attacking towns? Why don’t we get ghost apocalypse stories?

No, we get zombies and endless hordes overrunning the planet and causing the apocalypse.

That is the archetype that fits the-end-of-the-world archetype. Why?

Why do they go together?

If I am writing a horror story, I can make Cthulhu, I can make a Kaiju, we can do a scary place, we can do a scary creature, we can do an evil person, we can do an evil inanimate thing, we can do birds, we can do empty space – lots and lots of different ways of manifesting horror, focusing horror.

But Gothic Horror, in terms of its three major tropes, is distinct from everything I just listed.

Those three major archetypes in Gothic Horror, if you’re not familiar, are vampires, werewolves, and zombies.

And what makes them distinct is because these are monsters that humans transform into.

Every vampire used to be a regular human, every werewolf too, every zombie, and then they were bitten and they didn’t just change – they transformed. They become something different in their entirety, a new type of being that functions completely differently than a human, whether that’s about how they survive or about how they become a wild animal or about a complete loss of sentience. They don’t become more evil, they become something that is evil.

Their existence becomes an existence of evil, necessarily harmful.

So what is that? There is a classic answer to this that I first heard from Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering, but he didn’t make it up either. This is a widespread theory: the Gothic Horror tropes are cautionary tales.

They’re designed to highlight human vices, the terrifying parts of our inner selves, and show us what happens if we let that take us over.

Vampires equal lust, werewolves equal anger: our lusts can become violent and predatory, our anger can turn us into feral beasts – these inner demons can turn us into outer demons, because this thing that we dearly hope is this tiny little part of us in the back of our minds can consume everything that we are.

So I left one out – what is the terrifying inner part of our existences that’s embodied in the zombie archetype?

As the theory goes, it’s mindlessness. We do not want to become these automatons just sleepwalking through our own existence, forced to do whatever we can… our autonomy and self taken away

That is death to us.

Vampires and werewolves – lust and rage – those are these simple concrete feelings, impulses. Zombies get to something much deeper. It’s an existential fear. It is a threat to humanity as a whole in a way that lust and rage are not. Mindless existence is a scarier fate than death, than actual non-existence.

We would rather wink out of existence entirely than let something else take control…

David is an unbelievable character. Again we get that wrongness, that complete and total disorder. David is a man of God – his position should demand the highest ideals of morality, and he is the worst of the worst that we’ve encountered by far. And why? Because the winter was hard, because they had no food, because they had to survive. Necessity. Even his advances on Ellie he couches in the language of necessity: “Lord knows I could use the help. We do whatever we needed for our people.”

And because of that, his actions show him to be this absolute predator in every sense of the term.

In the name of survival, he is willing to perpetuate his existence by killing and eating humans.

David is living the life of a zombie. Everyone in The Last of Us is living the life of a zombie: they are forced into a necessarily predatory existence. All meaning in their lives is obliterated, all of who they are is consumed by the need to survive.

Is this really a human life?

This story shows us zombies and it shows us humans, and within the series of humans that it shows us, that sequencing, it shows us someone living by empty necessity in an everyday way.

It shows us necessity robbing our autonomy within parts of our lives and then within more of our lives, and we begin to see people who are consumed.

We see the world drain of meaning. Everyone is forced to live this life that’s wrong, that is unnatural to them, and we get to see the horrifying transformative results of being forced into empty lives of pure survival.

This is a zombie apocalypse that turns everyone into zombies – mindless shells of humanity that will do anything to propagate the collective existence.

–J.D. Schnee, excerpted and adapted from The TRANSCENDENT Worldbuilding of “The Last of Us”

I have been a support to some of the homeless in my area, and one woman I had been helping showed up on my doorstep sobbing after her boyfriend attacked her the night before. She had to tell him she was going to the bathroom so she could get away and get to help.

One thing that jumped out at me, especially since she was covered in bruises, was that she said she ‘can’t keep doing this’ because ‘her body can’t take it anymore’. Experiencing abuse when you’re older means you don’t bounce back as fast (especially if you’re drinking or using drugs).

We experience the opposite as children – as our bodies heal so quickly, the ‘evidence’ of physical abuse almost seems to evaporate – the nail marks my infant son had on the back of his neck from a ‘carer’ who was trying to force him to eat disappeared in 3 hours.

Or if you are a person of color, your bruises may not show as starkly; or medical professionals/law enforcement may not recognize them for what they are.

When people think they need to endure physical abuse because they ‘love’ the abuser, I don’t think they realize that this ‘endurance’ is often based on having a younger body that can heal and recover.

…or a mind that isn’t struggling to remember, and connect with the world.

If they lack accountability, they will shift the blame.
If they lack communication skills, they’re going to say that you are arguing.
If they lack emotional intelligence, they’re going to call you sensitive.
If they lack self-awareness, they’re going to criticize everybody else around them, and those flaws.
If they lack honesty, they are going to distort the truth to fit their narrative.
If they lack boundaries, they are going to overstep yours and make-believe they’re not even there.
If they lack integrity, they’ll justify anything wrong that they do.
If they lack empathy, they are going to dismiss your feelings.
If they lack confidence, they are going to belittle anyone to make themselves feel bigger, and that might mean you.

–@baransuserenity, via Instagram

They also demand complete authority but make everything the victim’s responsibility.

And finally, they will continue to outline all the ways you are ‘wrong’, trying to make you change and submit, but won’t leave you (unless it’s to punish or discard you).

Whenever you are in an abuse dynamic, you and the abuser are essentially competing over whose version of reality is considered real in the relationship.

Once you start to ‘accept’ the abuser’s version of reality, you will be more and more confused because the abuser’s reality is a fantasy while reality is still real.

The better thing to do is to recognize when you and another person’s experience of reality does not overlap enough.

So many victims of abuse are arguing with the abuser over what is reality, when what is actually happening is that they cannot tolerate reality. The abuser cannot control reality but they can force or coerce you into pretending their fantasy is real: it’s The Emperor Has No Clothes.

A person who is actually caring about you cares about your feelings, your perspective, and creates space for you both in the relationship.

Abusers make you ‘pledge allegiance’ to them or to ‘love’ or something, whereas healthy people understand that we are all individuals even when we are in relationship with each other.

The key thing about this ‘subtype’ of abuser is how they weaponize the healthy relationship paradigm at you.

They aren’t working together with you, they are using relationship and abuse tools as a cover to seem like the ‘healthy’ person over you. When in reality, a healthy person – when presented with an unsafe person – would distance themselves, and a healthy person doesn’t seek to dominate others.

While it’s widely believed that those who commit acts of aggression lack the ability to discern between right and wrong, in most cases, this isn’t exactly true.

This misunderstanding can make violence more difficult to predict because aggression can fail to match this “psychopath” stereotype.

The truth is that much of the time, dangerous people think like everybody else.

Most of us believe that non-violence is preferred—but we also believe some exceptions to non-violence exist. We think introducing aggression is wrong—but we also think defensive aggression is allowed. We can’t punch first, but we’re allowed to punch second.

This is where we need to pay attention to the hidden psychology of violence.

Someone who becomes aggressive usually hasn’t changed their beliefs about violence itself; instead, they believe they’re the second one demonstrating it. They’re punching back. With a reflex for feeling “targeted” or “singled out,” they consider their violence to be defensive in nature. It’s their ability to mentally move into this “punching back” position that increases their risk.

Their perceived grievance sets up the violence.

This aggrieved algorithm isn’t only observable to therapists who specialize in predicting violence. One particularly large study including nearly 500 men concluded that while certain personality traits are associated with workplace violence, it’s the perception of being persecuted that strengthens the odds of these traits turning into aggression.

What happens when grievances deepen?

For someone to justify their aggression, they must consider the offense against them to be severe. Without that perception, the moral justification for violence doesn’t add up. This is where grievance deepening plays a part.

Grievance deepening is when someone magnifies their initial complaint, making it seem much more significant.

For example, an employee doesn’t simply disagree with their performance evaluation, but instead, they insist, “You’re taking food out of my kid’s mouth!” A second employee isn’t only frustrated because they weren’t promoted; they assert, “You’re ruining my marriage by not rewarding my work.”

The greater their sense of being wronged, the closer they move towards the exceptions of non-violence.

It’s grievance deepening that provides the moral justification for the violence to come.

–David Prucha, excerpted and adapted from The Hidden Psychology of Workplace Violence

This is a kind of toxic anger that results from disordered or warped thinking patterns, processes, or misunderstanding either of the self or of the world and others.

This is why hostile attribution bias is the number one predictor for abuse:

An unsafe person’s thoughts and thought patterns are often a result of cognitive misalignment with reality.

Their pathological aggression stems from thoughts that are:

• cognitive distortion-driven
• perception-distorted
• schema-driven hostility
• thought-disordered
• perception-warped

There is a difference between anger (the emotion) and reactive aggression (the action taken as a result of the emotion)

…and the emotion itself is a result of perception distortion in the first place. So an unsafe person (1) mis-thinks, then (2) feels an extreme feeling as a result of their distorted belief, and (3) acts on that rage with aggression.

They typically feel their hostile aggression response is justified.

This is the hidden psychology of violence.

• Anger is energy, and it’s showing you that something is misaligned with your values. Use it as a motivator for change and not something that’s just going to consume you.
• Your anxiety is trying to get you to prepare, and to focus on what you can control and to release what you can’t.
• Your exhaustion is a warning sign that is telling you to prioritize your rest before your body forces you to.
• Guilt is a reminder of your values, not your worth. Acknowledge the lesson, make amends if you need to, and then move forward.
• Boredom is creative potential that’s wanting to be explored, so challenge yourself to try something new instead of staying stuck.
• Loneliness is calling for connection, so reach out to others or deepen your relationship with yourself.
• Your fear is pointing out what truly matters to you, so use it to be courageous instead of avoiding things.
• Your disappointment is a tell-tale sign of unmet expectations – use that as an adjustment, not a reason to give up.
• Your resistance is an indication of an outdated pattern, so use this as an opportunity to break the cycle and choose a different response.
• Your envy and comparison to other people is showing you what’s possible and what you want in life, so use it as inspiration and not self-criticism.
• Your overthinking is your mind searching for safety, so you’ll want to regulate yourself and bring yourself back into the present moment.
• Your insecurity is a call for self-compassion.
• Your doubt is asking for clarity, so try to ask yourself questions and get curious about yourself instead of just assuming the worst.
• Your numbness is an emotional overload: you need to give yourself space and give yourself time to regulate.
• Your need for control is a fear of uncertainty. You need to build trust with yourself to understand that you can handle whatever it is that might happen.
• Your people-pleasing is a form of self-abandonment. Try honoring and validating your own needs.
• Your procrastination is self-protection, so identify the fear of whatever it is that you’re going after and tackle it one little bit at a time.
• Your perfectionism is a protective coping mechanism that’s not allowing you to be vulnerable. You need to allow yourself to be seen and understood, not only from other people but with yourself.
• And your desire for change is proof that you’re already doing it, so give yourself a little bit more credit anyway.

–Sarah Welch, adapted from Instagram

In the beginning, an abusive partner is anything but abusive.

They are generally doting, kind, and affectionate. They often mirror your values and goals in order to reel you in. But, over time, that changes.

If your partner begins to change their opinions and values quickly during your relationship, that’s a sign your partner may be abusive.

For instance, maybe when you met, your partner told you how much they admired your hard work and devotion to your career, but now, you notice subtle digs about how you’re always working or you should stay home with your children.

This inconsistency applies to day-to-day disagreements as well.

A disagreement that may have been easily resolved a few weeks ago can easily lead to a knock down, drag out fight that continues for weeks on end the next time. After this long fight, your partner will likely shower you with love and affection or promise to change.

The cycles of confusion with intermittent positive reinforcement creates a strong chemical reaction in your brain called “trauma bonding.”

Trauma bonds cause the target to become unconsciously addicted to the abuser. The brain responds to the intense highs and lows and conditions you to crave the abuser and hold out hope that they’ll become the loving person you first met once again. Trauma bonding is one of the reasons the average victim of abuse will leave seven times before leaving an abuser for good.

Expecting more from you and others than they do themselves

Abusers often have double standards. They will look down on others for the same things that they do. For instance, abusive partners may call someone derogatory terms because they slept with their partners, but the abuser has had even more intimate partners. Or, they may tell you you spend too much money, but they buy themselves something even more expensive.

Pushing boundaries or arguing you out of your boundaries.

In order for abusers to thrive, they have to be able to break your boundaries. They will start in small, subtle ways. But, over time, they encroach more and more on your boundaries.

They may begin to text and call you constantly when you’re spending time with others. They will begin to coerce and guilt you into doing things you don’t feel comfortable doing. When you push back, they’ll lash out or try to convince you things aren’t happening the way they are.

–Sarah Stewart, excerpted from Early Warning Signs of Abuse

I think it gets confusing for people who are on the receiving end of advice because we just say “red flag” and they don’t seem to get a grasp on how serious their situation actually is. We’re saying ‘red flag’ to cover both problematic/non-optimal behavior as well as outright abusive behaviors (even if they haven’t yet escalated).

Abuse Watch: “We have all the ingredients for abuse.”

Abuse Warning: “We are having abuse. Right now. It just may not have hit you yet.”

See also:

Signs/patterns of abusive thinking that underlie abuse:

1. their feelings (‘needs’/wants) always take priority
2. they feel that being right is more important than anything else
3. they justify their (problematic/abusive) actions because ‘they’re right’
4. image management (controlling the narrative and how others see them) because of how they acted in ‘being right’
5. trying to control/change your thoughts/feelings/beliefs/actions
6. antagonistic relational paradigm (it’s always them v. you, you v. them, them v. others, others v. them – even if you don’t know about it until they are angry)
7. inability see anything from someone else’s perspective (they don’t have to agree, but they should still be able to understand their perspective) this means they don’t have a model of other people as fully realized human beings

They have ‘so much trauma’?

That means they need to heal, they do not need to be in a romantic relationship. This means therapy and time to themselves.

This should be anti-attracting to you.

We know we’re in a healthy place to date when this (emotional ‘need’) doesn’t hook you emotionally into wanting to caretake someone but makes you go “OH, you definintely should not be dating right now”. That weeds out abusers who perform victimhood to trap their victims, as well as people who are just emotionally a hot mess.

Wanting to ‘heal someone with your love’?

That just means everybody here needs therapy. They don’t ‘need your support’, they need the support of a mental health professional. This instinct right here is what entangles (co-dependent) victims with abusers over and over.

We are not mental health professionals.

(Co-dependent) victims often put themselves in the position of a mental health professional trying to figure out the abuser’s trauma. Which is crazy because professionals are not supposed to be doing that in a non-professional capacity: doctors don’t treat their family and neither do therapists.

Their reasons for their bad behavior do not matter.

This kind of abuser fails by not being emotionally responsible for themselves and their actions, and not managing their own trauma and CPTSD.

If your default response to the idea that someone needs help is that YOU want to rush in romantically as help, then you are at-risk for abuse in relationship after relationship.