Pleasures of Adaptation
Survival Strategies in HBO’s The Last of Us
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17819126 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emily Sanders (0009-0009-1450-9143, Film Independent, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 66-82 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Somatechnics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2044-0138 • E-ISSN: 2044-0146 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/soma.2026.0481 |
| OpenAlex | W7154611974 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
This article examines adaptation and representations of queerness in season one of HBO’s The Last of Us. This article considers the television show as a series about adaptation, both as form and as theme. Inspired by the critical discourses of adaptation studies, I examine the function of pleasure in the plight of apocalyptic survival. From adaptation studies, I centre pleasure as a feature of successful adaptation. However, the aspects of pleasure examined here are specific to the show; I do not compare the show’s narrative to the original videogame’s narrative. I specifically attend to the depictions of queer and sexual pleasures and their relationship to survival. This article is guided by the pulses of queerness and futurity offered by queer theorists José Esteban Muñoz (2009) and Lee Edelman (2004) . Queerness is a tension in the television series’ narrative. Many of the episodes’ storylines feature queer characters living in an apocalypse. This itself feels like a revision, re-visioning queer survival after (and without naming) the HIV/AIDS epidemic. However, the frameworks of the characters’ survival support Heather Love’s (2007) criticism on homonormativity as a depoliticising form of contemporary inclusivity. It is instead the Cordyceps, the mushroom zombies that bring Armageddon, who I posit as the locus of queerness. Through a close analysis of depictions of pleasure in season one of The Last of Us, I postulate the Cordyceps reveal pleasure as a driving impulse of survival – a kind of grotesque and horrifying ‘community care’ – offering an imagination of queer futurity and survival that is absent (or repressed) in the show’s queer human counterparts
Criticism · Masculinity · Narrative · Pleasure · Queer · Queer theory · Cinema and Media Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |