Now that The Last of Us season finale has aired, gamers and TV watchers can all agree that the core message of The Last of Us franchise is that mushrooms are evil and make the world a worse place.
In The Last of Us, mutated cordyceps fungi are parasitic infections that make victims violent and aggressive, in a manner very similar to zombies. Every time I accidentally eat a mushroom in a poorly labeled shepherd’s pie, I want to punch a hole in the wall. However, who is to say that we aren’t currently being brainwashed by mushrooms in the real world?
I took a course on TikTok (pathetic, I know) over the summer and the class was merged with people studying fungi on a commune in upstate New York for some reason, and these mushroom people are possessed. They’re roaming the countryside, raiding our trash cans, and scouring mushrooms off the ground to further their evil ends.
And the worst part? Mushroom people inevitably grow their own mushrooms, likely due to fungi-based mental programming which forces them to spread more spores. The mutation that started The Last of Us is already halfway finished.
Apparently Joel had to make a “hard choice” at the end of The Last of Us’ season finale, but I just don’t agree. Joel can either sacrifice Ellie to create a vaccine that will fight off these horrible fungi, or he can subject Ellie to a lifetime of torment where every day she has to deal with legions of cordyceps-ridden abominations. Sounds like an easy choice to me!
If anything, Joel is a hero. Every person he kills is one less poor sap who has to live with the fungal freaks for the rest of their lives.
Listen, I’m going to level with you. I never watched The Last of Us. I never even played The Last of Us video games. My understanding of the plot is exclusively based on secondhand info from online discussions. And I don’t need to play the game, because I already know the moral of the story; mushrooms are disgusting and will cause the downfall of the human race.
