The final moments of episode three of the TV series however, tinged with golden hour sun and set to one of history’s most emotive pieces of music, Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”, are a marked departure from the game’s portrayal.īill and Frank having this great love story where they get married before he dies feels so much more heartbreaking than seeing him as a mere corpse in the game 😭 #TheLastOfUsHBO has done it again. In the game, Frank is only seen after he has taken his life, and he does so to escape Bill’s unbearable paranoia. “The relationship between Bill and Frank felt real and relatable and I was so pleased with the angle they chose ,” says Matt Mather, 28, who started playing The Last of Us a few years back.
It was a very typical relationship.”ĭespite the world’s end raging in the background, Bill and Frank still manage to fight over how their garden looks, tend to an allotment, and enjoy dinner and wine out in the sun. “It was a great representation of, actually quite a healthy relationship, all things considered. “I thought it was great to see,” he says. He’s pleased to see that with the TV series, that ambiguity is blown apart. However, Jon thinks that Bill and Frank’s relationship in the game fell foul to the “Bert and Ernie” effect, whereby anyone who wants to ignore their queerness can do, because it’s only alluded to. “You don’t really get that in many other games.” In The Last of Us II, players see main character Ellie come out as LGBTQ+, and Jon thinks it’s “one of the first major games that really addresses the struggle”. Jon Franklin, a 36-year-old social media manager, agrees that The Last of Us as a game was seminal in its portrayal of queer characters.
“It was nice to have something that was just about two people that were in love, rather than this story about queer trauma,” he adds. But it wasn’t about getting gay-bashed, it wasn’t about AIDS, it wasn’t about an awful coming out story. “It’s not to say weren’t going through trauma, because you know… it’s the apocalypse. “A lot of representation in television and games, it’s always very tropey, there’s always a lot of trauma,” he says. Nick Offerman as Bill and Murray Bartlett as Frank in The Last Of Us (HBO) “I was quite emotional for a good couple of hours after watching it,” Hardwick says, stating that the “groundbreaking” TV iteration of Bill and Frank’s story was better than the game’s portrayal “in every way possible”.
Seeing Bill and Frank’s evolution is, for many LGBTQ+ gamers, special. Ten years later, and that subtle relationship has blossomed into a queer romance epic for the ages, with fans and critics already hailing it one of the TV moments of the decade.
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