Last of Us strawberries are a symbol – here’s what they mean

obedient dog Building The last of us On a solid foundation of science fiction booksEasily one of the contestants Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin Rebuilt for HBO adaptation. Many of the references are obvious: Joel and Ellie is a successor to the familiar Lone Wolf and Cub The dynamic protector/hardliner, while the zombie speaks for itself. But The last of us Episode 3, “Long, Long Time,” represents a new bright spot on a seemingly less obvious trope timeline: the sweet, sweet power of strawberries at the worst of times.

in “very long timeDoomsday setup and cordyceps survivor Bill (Nick Offerman) finds his world rocked when Frank (Murray Bartlett) shows up on his doorstep. What begins as a meal evolves into a long-term love affair filled with romantic rebounds, heated fights, and sweet gestures for the casual marriage. While the episode was praised for deepening the game’s depiction of Bill and Frank’s unspoken relationship in the games and a tearful ending, it was the small moments that allowed it to really spark. The One Who Holds Me: To break the hard shell of his loved ones, Frank trades Tess (Anna Torv) a gun for a few strawberry seeds and surprises Bill with a well-tended garden. Bill sinks his teeth into one of those post-apocalyptic strawberries, and damn it, it’s sexy. Bill’s face says it all: This is the stuff. Strawberries.

The sight is easy to read: strawberries, in all their glory—sweet, aromatic, tart on the tongue, perhaps even leafy—are the fruit of an earlier world. From the decomposing fungal overgrowth a new life breaks out, the strawberry. And not only is the earth fertile enough to allow rebirth, in this case, the missing ingredient was love. A bite of strawberry’s The last of us It is the taste of hope. (And one that can be easily destroyed by a fungal infection).

Druckmann and Mazin are not alone in finding solace in strawberries. In 2021, writers Lana Wachowski, David Mitchell, and Alexander Hemon find humanity in the form of strawberries. Resurrection Matrix. In this much-anticipated sequel, Neo reunites with his old friend Niobe in the thriving underground community of IO. Since Neo was last separated from the Matrix, humanity has recreated life under the scorched skies by mining the code of the familiar parts of everyday life and reassembling the digital bits into the genetic code. While nothing is real in the Matrix, a reverse engineering process allows IO scientists to recreate a real luxury: strawberries.

Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

twenty years ago The last of us or Resurrection MatrixPeter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens remix J.R.R. Tolkien’s reflection on the joys of Middle-earth to make Strawberry all the more important to two hobbits on Mission Impossible, for a moment at least. Feel apocalyptic. in The return of the kingIn one of the weakest moments in the journey to destroy the One Ring, Sam asked Frodo to revive his soul through the Memory of the Senses.

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo?” Asked. “Spring will soon come. Orchards will blossom. Birds will nest in the hazel forest. They will sow summer barley in the lower fields… And they will eat the first strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”

Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

Frodo admits he cannot. It doesn’t feel like much of anything. To which Sam basically replies, Fuck this, let’s go. There is no greater drive on the hills of hell than strawberries. (Enough, in Tolkien’s manuscript The return of the kingSam tricks Frodo into remembering the taste of rabbits, and only in the Gray Havens chapter does the author muse on delicious strawberries and cream in the Shire—Jackson and his co-workers raised the delicacy for use in their version of the scene.)

The strawberry craze as a symbol has recurred beyond the fruit itself. at HBO’s We delaySimilar to the post-apocalyptic 2021 drama Eleventh station (Based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel), Jeevan (Himesh Patel) calls his ER doctor sister Sia (Tia Sircar) as a viral pandemic begins to spread across Chicago. Her warning is immediate: it’s too late to flee – take cover immediately and barricade the door. But amidst the spiral of anxiety, Sia also finds time to reminisce with her brother on their childhood years. This may be the last time they talk, so why not recount the time Jeevan “drank strawberry Yoo-hoo on Jenny Kemkin”?

Later in the episode, Jeevan runs off in search of groceries in a last ditch effort to stay alive, but lingers when he gets stuck in a memory vortex. the strawberry… Yo-hoo…

Photo: HBO Max

There is no shortage of strawberries as a symbol of purity over time, from Let’s eat strawberries instead of people’s letters Soylent Green to Multiple plays by Shakespeare to the Bible, at least based on Some explanation. Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 drama Wild strawberry, in which the sick doctor reflects on his tortuous life as he prepares to die, feels particularly appropriate to the collective understanding of strawberries as the fruit of the good times; In Swedish address smalltronstalt Literally a “wild strawberry patch” but metaphorically is an idiomatic expression for a place or moment in time associated with a feeling of great happiness.

But in a series of post-apocalyptic novels, the more classic representation of the strawberry as a pure, organic entity seems more like what Bergman was after: a symbol of what was savored again, but only as a passing story. The last of uslightness of it all, he leans right in and takes a bite of the feeling.