I'm becoming a little disenfranchised with the current wave of zombie stories - or at least, the best of the lot. Longform storytelling devices such as video games and TV shows are finally tapping into what was previously an almost exclusively less than three hour limit.   The results are astonishingly well executed, but expose the general bleakness of the zompocalypse environment almost a little too well.  Spoilers ahead for:  The Last Of Us, The Walking Dead, and The Walking Dead the video game.

The Last of Us is a perfect game, and it has a perfect ending (assuming you didn't forget what your run button was before you booted up your last playthrough).  There's no doubt in my mind that the people doing the work on this game got across everything they wanted to with their brutal and vicious combat system and the illusion of choice at the end.  It wants to be a problematic story, and it is.

The game wants you to disagree with Joel, but it also wants you to understand him.  Unfortunately I did less of the former and more of the latter, figuring out early that Ellie was probably going to be in life-threatening danger at the end of the game and fully understanding the price I'd have to pay to get her out of it.

The argument I see postulated is that Joel is a sociopath; I think he's a product of his environment.  The Fireflies never really resolved their innate distrustworthiness with me - a running plot point from the prologue that is really only handwaved in the first chapter. When they failed to give the choice to Ellie, I don't believe that Joel had one at all, and although I toyed with the possibility of letting the lead surgeon go, it was both entirely right for the character and entirely right for the person doing the cost-benefit analysis (the risk/reward of a potential vaccine is an entirely separate rant - essentially, I doubt it's as pretty as it sounds).  Joel's flaw is actually the same as the Fireflies - he lies, he conceals - and while it spells doom for him somewhere down the line I'm left hopeful about when that girl grows up and starts making her own decisions.

The Walking Dead game is starting another round, but I didn't finish the last one after it got so far under my skin.  The story execution wasn't as clean, the characters I liked continually died, and at the end of episode four, the obvious bite that was obvious so irritated me that I didn't really feel like watching to see how it panned out.  This is the theme of all the titles with this name, be they graphic novel, show or game - hope constantly dies, and then you have to go find some new hope.  Who grows, in the end?  The flowers in the corpses, and the disease in the minds of those who are left.  They're all worth watching, but I want that happily ever after to be at least a possibility.