Dads, Daughters, and the Living Dead
Samantha Trzinski, Contributing Editor
In 1996, Resident Evil demonstrated the potential of video games centered around zombie outbreaks and reanimated corpses. The fixed camera angles, the enemies that could come back if not killed correctly, the gore, and the unnerving music all contributed to the game’s success, transforming it into a horror classic. The past ten years, however, have witnessed a shift in video games focused on the living dead. Games like The Last of Us, The Evil Within 2, and Resident Evil: Village are, at their core, about their father-daughter relationships – not about zombies. These survival horror games lean heavily on their fatherly heroes who will do anything to save their children. The underlying fear that defines these games has little to do with the monsters and macabre elements. Rather, these games draw on a primal fear of losing one’s children.
In The Last of Us and The Evil Within 2, the player assumes the role of a gruff father who has lost his daughter. The Last of Us begins with a harrowing cinematic in which Joel’s daughter is shot and killed by the military as the cordyceps infection spreads; the tragic death of Sebastian’s daughter Lily in a housefire is central to The Evil Within 2. These losses lead to both Joel and Sebastian descending into immense sorrow that defines their characters throughout the course of their respective games. These heroes both assume the stereotypical role of the gruff father figure – a man who chooses to isolate himself to avoid the pain of loss. Joel becomes a closed-off survivor who is coarse, mean, and interested (at first) only in self-preservation. Sebastian becomes an alcoholic, haunted by his daughter’s untimely death. On the surface, these men are initially far from the heroes that the game demands them to be. However, the player knows these tragic backstories and sees how these characters are shaped by their pasts. This sympathy that the player develops for Joel and for Sebastian allows them to see pass their gruff exterior. The player roots for the hero and hopes that he will learn to love again.
Resident Evil: Village takes a different approach to the father-daughter relationship set against a backdrop of the living dead. Ethan Winters, the game’s hero, is dissimilar from Joel and Sebastian. He, too, has experienced immense trauma from the events of Resident Evil VII. In this preceding game, Ethan travels to a plantation in Louisiana to rescue his missing wife, Mia. This plantation is occupied by a mold-infected family who try to hold Mia captive and kill Ethan. Despite the immense trauma Ethan suffers in this previous game, though, he does not transform into the gruff father stereotype. The opening cinematic for Village paints Ethan as a loving husband and father who, though haunted by the memory of the horrors he faced in Louisiana, is relatively healthy and mentally stable. However, tragedy again strikes as Ethan’s newborn daughter Rose is taken, and Ethan is thrown into action in the Eastern European countryside to save his daughter’s life.
Rose meets the most unsettling fate of the abducted children in these three games. She is dismembered into four pieces which are distributed amongst the leaders of the village. Ethan is forced to fight his way through the various parts of the village and kill the leaders to retrieve the pieces of his daughter, who, because she is infected with the same mold from Resident Evil VII, can be put back together again. While the fates for the daughters in The Last of Us and The Evil Within 2 are also horrific, neither seem as dark as that of Rose. Joel’s daughter Sarah is shot and killed early in the game – given the other deaths in the game, hers is one of the most merciful. The Evil Within 2’s Lily is alive and (physically) unharmed as her mind is used as the core for a simulated world.
While the goal of Resident Evil: Village and The Evil Within 2 is to find and rescue the heroes’ daughters, the driving force behind The Last of Us differs. There is no way to save Joel’s daughter; the game’s opening cinematic makes that clear. Instead, the game centers around the paternal bond that Joel develops with his surrogate daughter Ellie. While the characters clash at first, they grow closer as the game progresses. Throughout The Last of Us, the player follows Joel and Ellie as they travel across the country and face varying threats of death together. By the time that they reach the game’s final stage, Joel and Ellie are like father and daughter. They joke together and tell stories; they imagine what they will do once their quest is complete. They imagine a life together as a family.
Ellie does not replace Joel’s lost Sarah, but she does help Joel learn to love again. The player learns through the course of The Last of Us that Joel had largely isolated himself throughout the initial decades of the cordyceps infection, befriending exceedingly few people. Through his relationship with Ellie, though, he begins to trust and laugh again. He sees aspects of his daughter in Ellie, perhaps because they are similar in age. However, Sarah was from a prelapsarian world – a time before the cordyceps infection and the end of civilization. She is representative of Joel’s life before it all fell apart. Ellie is not soft, innocent, and pure as Sarah had been. She is coarse and sarcastic, hardened by the world in which she has grown up. She and Joel are alike in that way. As Ellie continues to mature in The Last of Us Part II, she continues to remind the player of Joel. She dresses similarly to him. She plays guitar like him. She talks like him. In the game’s sequel, the player sees the father-daughter relationship that developed between these two characters. Although Joel and Ellie are not biologically related, these similar mannerisms demonstrate the familial relationship that they shared.
Resident Evil: Village also allows the player to see the impact that a paternal bond has on its rescued daughter. Although Rose is a newborn throughout the main plot of Village, the game concludes with a cinematic in which a teenaged Rose visits her father’s grave. In this cutscene, Rose is the spitting image of her father. She has Ethan’s blonde hair, and she wears his jacket. The game demands for its player to see Rose as a continuation of her father through her character design. Certainly, no aspect of Rose’s person reminds the player of her mother Mia.
Rejection of the maternal figure appears in all three games. In Resident Evil: Village, Mia is presented as the original cause for Ethan’s and, by extension, Rose’s trauma. As a high-ranking Umbrella employee, Mia placed both her husband and her daughter in danger. Her involvement with Umbrella led to Ethan’s death and resurrection in Resident Evil VII and made Rose, as a half-mold hybrid, a target for Mother Miranda in Village. In The Evil Within 2, Sebastian’s wife Myra is also to blame for their daughter’s fate. The game demonstrates Myra’s role in keeping Lily in the STEM machine to use her as the core for its simulated world. In both games, the mothers are presented as the catalysts for the fathers’ trauma.
The Last of Us diverges from this maternal blame; however, mothers are strikingly absent from the game. Sarah’s mother is absent from the opening cinematic, and Ellie’s mother is also missing. Although Ellie’s mother is mentioned briefly by the Fireflies leader Marlene, she does not play a role in the game. The 2023 HBO television series adaptation of The Last of Us develops Ellie’s mother in more detail, but these aspects are missing from the game. Marlene is, perhaps, the only maternal figure in the game as she functions as a surrogate mother for Ellie. However, like the mothers in Resident Evil: Village and The Evil Within 2, Marlene, too, transforms into a quasi-villainous character. Toward the game’s dénouement, it is revealed that Marlene would let Ellie die for a chance to cure the cordyceps infection.
The mothers who appear in these games are far from the self-sacrificial stereotype that is expected. The rejection of this stereotype in these games results in somewhat of a gender reversal. The women transform into callous or unattached characters who cannot connect with the games’ daughters. They become decidedly masculine in the wake of the apocalypse, interested only in the greater good or in their personal desires. In contrast, the men in these games become more emotionally invested in other characters, specifically in their daughters. These girls remind the fatherly figures of a happier time and embody the comfort and hope of a prelapsarian world.
It is no coincidence that these three games, centered around father-daughter relationships, villainize maternal figures. The idea of the “monstrous mother” is common in works of horror, appearing in cinematic classics like Psycho and Carrie. Because these maternal figures do not offer affection or safety to their daughters and instead actively threaten their lives, these daughters need to be saved or protected by father figures. Joel, Sebastian, and Ethan may be the only hope for Ellie, Lily, and Rose, respectively – but the reverse is also true. These father-daughter relationships are intrinsically codependent and are the only chance at happiness that the games offer for their central characters. Though this codependency affords the chance at joy to these characters, it can also be damaging, as we see with Ellie’s need for revenge in The Last of Us Part II with Joel’s death.
Sebastien and Lily from The Evil Within 2; screenshot uploaded to The Evil Within Wiki by Quietman21.
Survival horror games such as The Last of Us, The Evil Within 2, and Resident Evil: Village invite their fatherly protagonists to become the heroes that their daughters need as the world is infested with the living dead. These father-daughter relationships are the basis for the games’ horror. While the living dead and the thought of civilization’s end are both terrifying, the thought of losing one’s child is worse. These games rely on the primal fear of losing one’s children, which allows for the genre to persist even as the living dead in video games become less unnerving. These games demonstrate that the loss of one’s child is far more terrifying than the fall of human civilization or the rise of the living dead.
Games that rely solely on macabre and grotesque horror, like the original Resident Evil, no longer impact the player as much as games that tap into basic human instinct and emotion. The fear in these games derives from the heroes’ fatherly roles and the threat of losing their daughters. The daughters in these games become representative of hope – it is essential that the hero saves his daughter, even if he dies in the process. Joel, Sebastian, and Ethan evoke empathy, and the player becomes willing to venture into any horror that the game offers in order to save the daughters in need. These father-daughter relationships make these survival horror games more complex than a purely zombie-driven game and present a powerful driving force for the hero’s actions. These games explore what it means to be a father and question what a father would be willing to do to save his child’s life. Even when facing impossible odds and the end of times, these fathers see hope through their daughters’ eyes.
