Toxic Fandom and Threats to Abby from The Last of Us: Fiction WITH Reality?

More than ten days have passed since the highly-discussed moment many of us weren't expecting and others, well, yes… were. The gap between gamers and non-gamers had never been wider than when Abby, the daughter of the doctor Joel cold-bloodedly killed in season one, got her revenge, making Joel suffer and, finally, taking away his life in front of Ellie. Similarly to the deaths of Glenn in The Walking Dead or Hank's in Breaking Bad, just to mention some examples and putting aside differences, the Internet exploded. Sure, we are talking about events that happened in 2013 and 2016 respectively, times when social media didn't yet blur the lines between the private and the public, individualism and collectivity, or rather… between fiction and reality.

This phenomenon isn't new, but it gained an unexpected strength in the last years, and it isn't even focused on one specific matter: we have the power to criticize absolutely everything, even when we don't have much knowledge of what we are watching. A clear, alarming example of this issue is what's happening with people's violent reaction to the actress who plays Abby, Kaitlyn Dever. But this has happened before—even though there are still people who haven't learned anything yet—with Bella Ramsey and the complaints regarding how different she was from Ellie's character, or also with Pedro Pascal himself. If we could go back in time and cast Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Cailee Spaeny—the two most-mentioned actors by the public—for the roles of Joel and Ellie, we would surely hear complaints about their acting. Are we doomed to these micro-cancellations caused by Instagram comments or is there a way to right this wrong?

Part of the problem lies in the unobjectionable fact that The Last of Us is much more than a video game. Its cinematographic narrative made fans get emotionally involved with the characters and their complex moral dilemmas. Joel and Ellie's relationship was the heart of the first 2013 game and, certainly, of season one of the series that premiered ten years later. MAX had done it again…

When the second part of the video game arrived during the peak of the pandemic, the twist was devastating for many players isolated in their homes: Joel was brutally murdered by Abby after… Well, I already mentioned everything. I can't repeat it because I get a lump in my throat but, luckily, I know how to separate fiction from reality. The decision of the creator, Neil Druckmann, of killing Joel wasn't superficial; it was a premeditated act, later justified narratively, looking to explore the ethical and moral limits in the processes of revenge, dehumanization and trauma. Nonetheless, a significant part of the audience reacted with anger, not only just against the game, but also against its creators and, specially, against the actress that brought Abby to life. So, this has been coming for a while.

Laura Bailey, the voice actress who played Abby through the motion capture technique, at the time suffered from death threats, insults and harassment on social media. Neil Druckmann, the game's director, was also the target of personal attacks. The concerning part wasn't just the intensity of this reaction, but also its own nature: a collective incapacity to process that Abby is simply a fictitious character, part of a story designed to confront us, and not to fight us. Many fans justified their anger saying they felt "betrayed," as if a friend had been murdered without any reason. Aren't we capable of analyzing just for a second our impulses or are we stuck in an ironically virtualized reality? This visceral answer, emotionally authentic but extremely concerning, turned into hostility against the real people behind the project. Empathy towards Joel transformed into hate towards Abby and, then, towards those who brought the character to life.

Nowadays, video games are looking to give us a sense of absolute immersion and evoke real feelings, like it happens to us with cinema. We relate to the characters, cry their losses and celebrate their victories. This shows us how the narrative gap between both formats, which is gradually narrower, prompts the sense of discordance produced from both sides. But when that empathy isn't accompanied by a critical consciousness of the work's moral limits, it can lead to a disproportionate collective hostility that will imminently lead to chaos.

For years now, the culture of fanaticism in entertainment has been nurturing many people in platforms like Twitter, Reddit and YouTube, where they not only limit themselves to consume things as if they were nutritious sustenance but also feel a kind of ownership of them. The concept of "toxic fandom" isn't born from a simple dissatisfaction about narrative decisions but from the mere illusion of having a right: the idea that a story must unfold according to the audience's expectations. Like in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, remember? That interactive film from the universe created by Charlie Brooker in which we made the decisions and, based on that, the story could follow different paths. The false hope of believing that everything can turn out based on what our hearts desire shows us another problem, an even greater one: our selfishness.

A selfishness that reflects a huge cultural immaturity: as a society, we have a certain preference—or, at least, that's what most people are made to believe—for simple, predictable narratives, in which good wins and our favorites are safe. And when that doesn't happen, meaning, when we witness unpredictable narratives in which the "bad guys" win, we prepare to target tooth and nail those responsible without understanding that life, ironically, can also turn out like this. Actually, I would even say it almost always turns out like this. Are we prepared to enter the "next level" of the gamer experience, whatever it is, or are we headed for destruction?

Published on MAY 8, 2025, 22:05 PM | UTC-GMT -3

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