"fangirl" is a gender in itself

this is another post about tlou but also....gender & the "hysteria" of loving something

I’ve never full-on wept with any TV series the way I have with The Last of Us. Consistently, in almost every single episode of this season, I’ve cried, and, at least 3 times, full on bawled my eyes out. When I even think of certain moments, now, specific images or scenes, or hear a song (“Long Long Time” primarily, but also now “Just Like Heaven”), my eyes well up. For some reason, this show has planted what feels like a permanent stinging sensation in my chest, bittersweet, akin to the way cordyceps might twine around your lungs and ribs and make it harder to breathe. I know it might feel like overkill, to claim that this is a perfect piece of television, and I know there are flaws, as with any and all media, but the pure immensity and consistency of feeling it’s drawn out of me, blood to surface, is what makes it perhaps one of my favorite shows ever. Really it shouldn’t be the case—it’s another post-apocalyptic drama about found family and grief. Really it should feel formulaic, even, in its beauty. But it manages to feel completely new, and inimitable in some fundamental way.

The queer longing, the queer grief, the constant presence of explicit and unromanticized queerness in itself; the tenuous and tender, thorny relationship between Ellie and Joel, between each character and their own fractured history; the bleak, often gorgeous, often unsettling, landscapes, all that open silence and rot; the music always haunting, always punctuating certain moments in some indelible way; the rage and reliance on that rage to keep you alive in a world this struck with loss; the strangeness and unique nightmare of girlhood in an apocalypse. I don’t know. Something, in all of this, magnetizes me, and it hurts in a deep, uncanny place.

I haven’t felt quite this immersed in any piece of media since I was maybe 14. That particular level of whole-hearted and unapologetic, frantic devotion is a feeling I thought would be felt only as a teenager and never again. That you outgrow that type of obsession, that type of frenzied interest. I’ve been thinking about something from an Eileen Myles poem that seems to summarize this desperate identification: “Everybody / has one missing piece / and all the beauty’s / about it.” Maybe this form of media consumption—which transcends mere enjoyment, and shapeshifts into a gigantic longing that’s hard to name or accurately describe—derives from that “one missing piece.” Maybe the beauty we unearth in a media obsession is really, of course, functioning the opposite way—the obsession is unearthing whatever capacity for beauty we contain, pushing sediment up to the surface, revealing craters of emptiness or longing or grief via the accessible route of a storyline and characters. I’ve noticed that this kind of obsession usually arrives during periods of emotional bareness, at least for me; that, when we feel most unbearably exposed to ourselves in all our garden-variety pain and loneliness and anxiety and guttural gnawing emptiness, when we feel most peeled-to-the-bone, we latch onto whatever we can. Or, we appreciate art in a very different way, without the remove that might more healthily characterize most of our lives.

Maybe that obsession, at its most intense (for me, age 12-14), can be destructive, can be too akin to delusion or avoidance, but I think there’s also an earnestness that emerges, one you cannot easily inhabit otherwise. I think that a piece of media that makes you rediscover your most uncomfortable and perhaps your oldest pain, the media that makes you feel some kind of empathy or grief for an unspoken loss or self, that brings you, involuntarily, to this verge of pure emotion, can be a kind of antidote to the overwhelming, self-mocking, droll irony that culture seems to primarily rely on and propagate now. I mean that it can feel like a valve has been loosened, crying because of a fucking zombie TV show, and just feeling the feelings and not immediately critiquing or belittling them, not immediately smashing them out, not mocking the earnestness of being in total thrall to something, in entering a fictional world and not trying to be cool about it.

I still cringe at my tween/teen self, yes, at the unhinged, swoony, teary melodrama of my obsessions with certain people or things—primarily I’m talking about my One Direction days here, yes. I cringe at the shit that self would do, enthusiastically, an enthusiasm that truly is absolutely excruciating to recall now. Fandom and all its infighting, and also its commitment to a shared “hysteria” (with all the gendered connotations); all of it does embarrass me to remember, but, I’ve slowly developed more tenderness for that younger self, for that particular time and experience. I mean that, as annoying as I’m sure I was, that was the last time I loved something without feeling the need to apologize for it, to temper that love, to sever myself from earnestness, from appearing too invested, too interested, too affected. I recently re-read this piece I wrote back in 2019, for Lithium Magazine, about teenage girls’ fan-art—now, I’d be a lot more skeptical of….capitalism, and Etsy….as a means to any type of liberation, but I think the central defense, at the heart of the essay, holds up. I’m going to be extremely obnoxious here and quote myself:

“You begin with a love that surpasses all else, unhinging you from your squalid, preteenaged self. That streetlight like a stained-glass window; that profound, worship-deserving creature living in the mundane, tricking everyone else into underestimating its holiness—everyone but you. You listen to a song and you are disassembled, you are understood. You stare at photos of a stranger’s tattoos for hours, you conjure up heart-hungry fan fiction and make your own Wattpad account, you assort the lyrics and the videos and the everything on a Tumblr page. You compose a shrine from your own flushed loneliness, yes, but also from something more important—from your need to be seen, to be articulated, to be a visible, complex, worthy anything. It isn’t desperate, it’s glorious. But devotion in the hands and hearts of girls, of course, is always called hysteria.”

I mean. Yeah. I have to remind myself of this now. The wall between me and my feelings is so thickened and ossified by SSRIs, by all the burnout and dissociation, and so forth, and to experience a flutter of that old passion for something, that old pulse of earnest and invested reaction, is a life-affirming thing, I’m realizing, not an immature one. Or perhaps it is immature. Perhaps we don’t bloom into glossy, unfeeling, cool and collected, best versions of ourselves once we wade into adulthood, or ever, really. Perhaps the most embarrassing and childish instincts are the truest ones; perhaps they are actually the very sensations that sustain and make life livable. Perhaps it is necessary to find whatever anchor you can, I mean, even if it’s silly.

I am not 14 anymore, thank god. But The Last of Us tugs out an ember of my 14-year-old self and I love it, mostly, for that. For the way it insists on love—even reluctant and begrudging and complex love, found love, non-romantic love—as the bruise of life that, yes, is a bruise, because loss always inevitably accompanies it, but also, is the only reason to do anything, to keep moving, to keep trekking through snow and making probably bad decisions and no one is quite “good” or “bad” on this show (except David, fuck that guy) and it feels most true in that clear ambiguity. The show feels like it prods at every emotional wound in me possible. The depiction of Joel, of a masculinity that shifts and wavers and yes is still attached to the old bullshit/hardness of patriarchy, but a masculinity that nonetheless becomes a form of gentleness, of care, is particularly painful to watch, because, as I think anyone socialized as a woman would tell you, you’d be hard-pressed to find it anywhere in real life. TLOU doesn’t conjoin “masculinity” or gender itself with this type of gentleness, inflected by and with trauma, with loss, though; Ellie and Joel both care for each other, and Bill and Frank, and Henry and Sam, and Ellie and Riley.

There is also a nuanced depiction of girlhood, of that strange tender precipice between childhood and adolescence, between what can feel like a more gender-lenient space into the role and shackles of “woman,” in TLOU. That Ellie is played by a nonbinary actor (Bella Ramsey, who deserves every Emmy ever), I think, makes the qualities of the role so accurate and complex to me—I perceive Ellie as being girl’d in the same way I felt girl’d, for different reasons (I never showed a hint of rage), but the alienation I sense in her, from the role, from the performance, is deeply, achingly familiar. Episode 8 pinpoints this dynamic, shows us the reality of patriarchy’s continuing leakage into even the post-apocalypse, portrays the cruelty and horror of what a 14-year-old girl would likely be subjected to without reveling in that horror, without making it everything, without contrived trauma-porn. I appreciate Joel’s character, for all his flaws, especially for the way he actually doesn’t seem to push any prescriptive gender roles onto Ellie, really—the way he comes to care about her as his child more than forcing her into a strained vision of “daughter.” Not much to ask, but this specific strand of freedom, in a parent’s connection to their kid, I think, is pretty fucking rare.

Episode 8 is honest about how, though Ellie gets to exist in many ways as a person rather than pushed into gender roles, gender still exists; patriarchy and misogyny and cis men still exist, other than the “good ones.” Power and its imbalances outlast apocalypse, unsurprisingly. (spoiler alert-ish here?) David’s character is one of the most chilling and accurate depictions of grooming I’ve ever seen, the manipulative kindness familiar, the eventual descent into unhidden monster equally so. What made me weep is the way Ellie, after surviving David’s attack, got to express her rage, not softened or aestheticized, just a fierce and devastating explosion of this newborn anger, violent and bloodying and unrepentant.

To see a girl hack an abuser’s face to pieces incited a flooding catharsis in me that I think maybe everyone who grew up as a girl will know, will feel. She doesn’t go unbelieved, doesn’t go unsupported, and the heartbreaking thing is, this alone feels like a miracle, like a plot twist, when I wish it weren’t so unfamiliar. Joel comforts her, but he didn’t save her. She saved herself. But she’s also traumatized, she’s also still so young, still an open wound; there is no easy route to ferocity, no painlessness. But Joel is there, and he holds her and calls her “baby girl” and I know it’s been said a million times, but watching that moment of sheer tenderness, of quiet reassurance, revealed my own longing for such a thing, splintered the oldest parts of myself, torched a hidden grief for my own girlhood wide-awake. There is something healing about seeing a moment like this onscreen, one you want to experience for your child-self, and there is something completely annihilating about it, too, gutting you from the inside out.

I’ve said a lot and I’m not really sure what this essay is actually about. Many things and maybe nothing. Maybe how girlhood is a thing I keep returning to, a horror movie and a love story and a crushing inchoateness in my gut that will probably never fully resolve, never fully disappear. I wish I could stop holding onto it, could let it live in the past as a discrete object, a complete sentence, a finished past, but I can’t. And maybe I’m saying that for me, The Last of Us depicts girlhood, depicts growing up and love and apocalypse, in ways that feel true enough to touch, to feel everywhere. And that feeling this engaged with a piece of media also resurrects that girl-part of me that won’t ever fully die, and I’m appreciating that insistence, on undeath, on hanging around (much like an internal zombie tbh) more and more, keeping me afloat when nothing else does. Maybe that girl-self, that slippage of me and past-me, is a traumatized irritating shitshow but also maybe she’s how I’ve survived a lot of life, maybe she’s the closest thing I get to a lifejacket, to an anchor, to a refuge.

Another line I return to, in that same essay: “What we call girliness is often what we are afraid to own up to in ourselves, and shouldn’t be.” I still believe that, even as I float further and further away from “girl,” from “woman” or anything near it. I still want those shards of earnestness to gather and shine through all the empty rooms in me, to glimmer under the skin.