Just like the season before it, The Last of Us season 2 walks a line between faithfully adapting its source’s already cinema-inspired material and expanding on that material to meet the medium of television. And so, as players watched in 2020’s The Last of Us Part 2 and viewers watched a few weeks ago in The Last of Us season 2, there’s a scene early in the story when Ellie and Dina are necking during a slow dance, and an older man — Seth, the community bartender of Jackson, Wyoming — tells them to cut it out, they’re in public.

OK, Seth, harsh, but not unreasonable. But then he makes the real source of his disapproval clear by calling them a lesbophobic slur. Joel decks him, Ellie redirects her anger to Joel for presuming she can’t defend herself, and we move on. Or, at least, I might have been able to move on. But The Last of Us, the TV show, keeps coming back to Seth the Community Bigot, culminating in some of the most pivotal scenes in this week’s episode.

The Last of Us seems to want me to believe that the only overt prejudice to have survived the apocalypse is queerphobia. But prejudice is not set dressing, not a one-off tool to construct a character beat. And when the folks behind the show insist on including one and hand-waving others, they’re telling on themselves.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for The Last of Us season 2 through episode 3.]

If I might repeat myself a little bit, none of this would have stuck in my craw so much if TLOU season 2 didn’t keep presenting Seth to me and asking, But what if he was really an OK guy? Things like this just happen, TLOU season 2 is saying. Seth’s not a bigot, he just had a heated gamer moment!

Bullshit. It is definitionally bigoted behavior for a man to harbor such distaste for queer people in his heart that cannot see a couple kids get a little smoochy while they slow dance without getting so angry that his mouth opens and slurs two members of his own close-knit community in public.

To be clear, if Seth and Ellie were real people in a real community, I think episode 2 presents the........

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