When a bigot justifies their bigotry by saying they’re defending children or they just want to “let kids be kids.” These people are either lying or blindly regurgitating a lie, because they don’t want queer kids to be kids. They don’t even want queer kids to exist. They want to homogenize, indoctrinate, and promise a happy life within the shackles of the world.
In The Last of Us Episode 7, Ellie’s overseer at her FEDRA school makes no comment on her being queer, as no one but she knows this. He does, however, proudly reinforce the structures that benefit him at the expense of others. He tells her that superior officers get their own bedrooms, good food, and they don’t have to go on patrol, and instead tell other people to go on life threatening missions. He tells her all this, as if to say, “and all this can be yours.”
Meanwhile, Ellie wants to just be a kid, in a world where kids don’t necessarily last long. But even if someone only lives to the age of 16, they deserve to just be kids. This includes Riley (Storm Reid). Riley escaped the FEDRA school weeks prior, and is now a part of The Fireflies. She sneaks back into Ellie’s room so they can spend a night being little teenage rebels. No, not rebel in the Firefly sense of fighting against an authoritarian government, but in the sense of breaking curfew, stealing a bottle of liquor, and breaking into a mall to play arcade games.
Riley is better known as the friend Ellie was with when Ellie got infected. This knowledge lingers like a ticking time bomb. At first, as they happily inflict fatalities in Mortal Kombat II, you’ll beg for them to maintain awareness of the coming threat. You’ll want them to stop having fun, to realize there’s an infected down the hall, and they just have to dispose of it. When you see Ellie wants to kiss Riley, but doesn’t, you will accept the inevitability of the coming threat and prioritize their right to be kids. When Ellie gets mad about the explosives Riley’s guarding for the fireflies, you’ll beg her to shut the hell up and just be a kid. Even though we know that Ellie will survive her infection, this knowledge provides no comfort, because right now, all that matters to Ellie is Riley.
In this grand scheme of her life, Ellie embraces her queerness early on. She certainly did it earlier than I did. I was 28, and sincerely wish I could have had a better sense of who I was as a kid. But even if it’s early in the grand scheme of her life, it’s at the end of her time with Riley, and may as well be at the world’s end.
As heart wrenching as this is, as devastating as this sobering realization of their limited time together may be for them, you’ll still want the only thing you can want for them: to be kids.
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