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dilliebar · 4 years

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The Story of Dinah: A TLOUP2 Theory

Hey guys! So during this quarantine I’ve been looking for stuff to do to keep myself busy, and among playing The Last of Us for the billionth time I also decided to continue analyzing the content we’ve gotten so far. Tbh I gave up a while ago trying to find out what’s gonna happen in TLOU2, but after one google search, though, I actually think I’ve found a pretty solid theory that explains a lot of what we saw in the trailers/screenshots/etc.

!!! Note that this does include content from the leaked gameplay videos and from the leaked screenshot that surfaced a while ago. only read on if you’re okay with knowing spoilers !!!

**Note: I was not raised around a specific religion and my only knowledge of the subject has come from what I’ve read on the internet and the information I’ve gained from different Jewish and Christian interpretations of the passages talked about in this theory. None of these are my personal opinions and please correct me if anything is misinformed. Thank you.

So the majority of us know that something is going to happen to Dina and/or Ellie, and the first question is, what?

Well, obviously what’s different from the original game and p2 is that p2 is going to have to do a lot more with religion, as Dina is confirmed to be Jewish and we also have the Christian group, the Seraphites. The theme of religion is pretty much the basis of this theory, and it all starts with the origin of Dina’s name.

Now when you probably saw the title of this post you were like “yo that’s not how you spell her name”, and that, my friend, is where you’re wrong. After digging a little bit into the origination of Dina’s name, I found that it stemmed from the Hebrew name, Dinah. The first famous holder of this name was a woman who had a small, yet significant role in one of the books of the Jewish bible (or the Torah, please correct me if I’m wrong). Now, I would’ve written this off as a coincidence, but after looking into the story of Dinah I noticed some similarities between her story and bb Dina.

The passage basically tells the story of Dinah, who ventures out to meet the people of the world, and while doing so is sexually assaulted by the prince of Shechem. When her two brothers hear about this, they’re enraged, and slaughter all of the men in the city and rescue her.

The reason this caught my eye is because Dina and/or Ellie being sexually assaulted is a pretty common theory among the fandom right now, and after applying this to the trailers, screenshots, leaked footage, and the leaked screenshot, it makes a lot of sense, especially with Dina being Jewish. So without further ado, let’s look at what this means for the story.

I. What Happened

So if we’re following the original story of Dinah, the first thing that would happen is that Ellie and Dina head out on patrol the night after their kiss. Obviously this would mostly serve as a tutorial-like introduction, but it would also serve as the setup for the rest of the game. This is where the basement scene comes in, in which both of them are attacked and/or assaulted, and for whatever reason, they take Dina and Ellie escapes.

A lot of people have been speculating that the game revolves around the sole idea of revenge, and while Ellie’s clearly pretty jazzed off about whatever happened in the gameplay and release date trailers, it’s likely more of a “side quest” aside from her actual goal: to get Dina back. Naughty Dog games in the past, including The Last of Us, have always had a certain goal in mind that you’re working towards throughout the game. This also aligns with the story of Dinah, as she isn’t killed, but taken.

In addition to the supporting story, much of the leaked footage aligns with this, as well. For example, in the leaked gameplay in which Ellie wakes up bruised and beaten in a theater and calls out for Dina and Jesse, but why would Dina be there? If Ellie’s main goal is to get revenge on the group who wronged them, then neither Dina nor Jesse being there would make a whole lot of sense unless they all just want to have one big traumatic experience together; however, if Dina was taken, it would make sense as to why Ellie and Jesse would go after her, because they both have strong feelings for her, want to get her back, and want to seek vengeance. At the same time, by the cuts and bruises littering Ellie’s back, we can see that something clearly went down very recently, which was likely the rescue of Dina. We can also confirm that this wasn’t a dream or some wacky acid trip, too, because in the leaked screenshot we can see Ellie and Dina exploring Capitol Hill in Seattle together.

Now of course we all want to know that Ellie and Dina live happily ever-after, and this might (?) be true according to the story of Dinah, in which both of the brothers (represented here by Ellie and Jesse) return safely home with Dinah. Since this is where the story ends, is this where the game takes a twist? Possibly, but we’ll never know for sure until we play it.

II. Whodunnit?

Alright, so I’m gonna break this down into the two groups that are confirmed to be in The Last of Us 2: the Seraphites and the WLF. Though none of this is stemmed from the story of Dinah, the biblical meanings behind their names matched up pretty darn well with what we know about them already.

Now, the thing is, after trying to look up the Hebrew origination of the word “seraphite”, I found that it wasn’t actually a word at all. What I did find, however, was the definition of the word “seraph” which is “of the highest order of the nine-fold celestial hierarchy, associated with light, ardor, and purity”, with another description being a “six-winged angel”. The Latin suffix, “-ite”, means to be a follower. In other words, the Seraphites see themselves as either messengers or followers of god. This description makes a lot of sense, as in the trailer with the mystery-woman, the Seraphites say to “clip her wings” in reference to Yara.

When it comes to the WLF, the meaning behind their name is much more simple. As we can recall from the gameplay trailer, we hear the Seraphites shout out “WOLF!”. In addition to this, poster released shortly after the mystery-woman trailer portrays a wolf shaped by flames. Thus, I decided to look up the biblical meaning of a wolf, as the two groups are likely at odds. Unsurprisingly, the term “wolf” is generally used to describe those who pray on the weak.

After looking at these two groups, I concluded that the culprit is ultimately the WLF for a few reasons:

1. The meaning of the wolf in a biblical context (which was first mentioned to describe one of Dinah’s other brothers, by the way)

2. In the release date trailer, we can definitely see the attire of those who attacked the two. They’re wearing jackets; the man who initially attacked Ellie is wearing a cap. If we look at the gameplay trailer, the Seraphites distinctly wear robes, and so they are likely out of the question.

3. In the release date trailer, Tommy says “you don’t know how large that group is; how armed” all the while displaying a group of men with guns, and one verrrryyy important dude that I haven’t really seen a lot of people talking about. And that is this guy:

OK, I know, it doesn’t seem like that big of a revelation but take a look at this guy’s face, and then scroll back up to the beginning of this section. Look similar? They’ve got the same hair, skin tone, attire, etc. In addition, the people with guns in the photo also have similar attire and weaponry to those in the release date trailer. At the same time, in the basement scene, we can also see a man in similar attire and a similar skin tone holding Ellie down (though to be fair, we can’t see his face, and so this may not be the same guy, but the attire definitely separates them from the Seraphites).

Did maybe the Seraphites get a lil’ chilly and decide to wear jackets if the attacked Ellie and Dina? Maybe, but my bet’s on the WLF.

III. Patching Up the Plotholes

Alright, so this theory definitely leaves a couple of plotholes that I wanna possibly cover (though it should be noted that these are speculation):

1. As we see multiple times in both the screenshots and gameplay, Ellie entered Seattle alone. Where did Jesse come in?

2. Joel is in multiple screenshots, and also talks to Ellie in the release date trailer. What does he got to do with this?

So first of all, answering the question of where Jesse came in is fairly easy to answer, and it’s that he followed Ellie. As seen in the release date trailer, about a handful of people in Jackson left to go out on patrol other than Ellie and Dina, one of them being Jesse. Given the incident that happened in the basement, I’m guessing Ellie didn’t decide to keep scavenging for supplies and returned to Jackson early in order to recover and spread the news, which means Jesse likely wouldn’t have been back yet, and didn’t hear the news and go after Dina until he returned to Jackson. Then the question of the change in seasons comes into play. If this theory is true, I’m guessing that the basement scene took place near the end of winter, while Ellie/Jesse going to Seattle took place in early Spring, or that Ellie/Jesse left as soon as possible and the journey took longer than expected due to multiple obstacles like what happened in the first game.

Now, when it comes to Joel, I returned specifically to the story of Dinah. A while after the incident, when Jacob (the father of both Dinah and the brothers) is blessing his children, he expresses his disappointment in the two brothers as “in their anger they slew men” and “cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath, for it was cruel”. Based on this, I believe that the multiple screenshots from the game are in the context of Joel expressing his disappointment in Ellie, as she likely went out of her way to kill more people than she had to in order to get to Dina. This also correlates to the reveal trailer in which Joel says “you really gonna go through with this?” and Ellie replies, “I’m gonna find, and I’m gonna kill, every last one of them”.

~Conclusion~

Alrighty, so that’s pretty much it. Again, I don’t know if a lot of the biblical stuff is accurate since I wasn’t raised in a strictly Jewish nor Christian household, but I was intrigued by some interpretations and frankly I really wanted to get this out and see what everyone else thought about it. Please, if you have any additional thoughts about this, correct something I said, or point out any other plotholes, leave a comment! I’m in desperate need for some TLOU2 action.

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committothedish · 5 years

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THINKING OF YOU / MY CONDOLENCES / ON PINING

In museums, often private homes of esteemed hoarders whose day to day lives are opened up to tourists and art students alike for a small fee, you’ll get these pine cones placed on old chairs in lieu of a ‘do not sit sign’.

This is just one of the ways in which nature does the talking far better than bureaucracy ever could. The pine cone says “this will be uncomfortable, because it’s not allowed / because it’s not allowed this will be uncomfortable”. It also gives a sense of the chair’s fragility “please don’t come near me because I might break apart and the insurance forms will be a nightmare”.

Pining the verb has nothing to do with the arboreal noun, despite forced parallels in certain women’s magazines drawn between a tree’s sap and our use of “sappy” for romance. But it does have to do with fragility (a masking of-, warning about- or dealing with-).

To pine is to feel more brittle than usual, reliant on another person or place or state’s ability to keep you intact, and ‘Intact’ feels like a portmanteau of contact and intimacy. This is by chance, but useful here.

Pining comes both surprisingly and unsurprisingly from a German old English word and therefore probably from a Latin one - pinian and poena, suffering, punishment. Fight the urge to think of pine needles and how much those could sting, because it really isn’t about that.

To want to the point of suffering / to the point of punishment. A place could be pined for via homesickness or wanderlust, a physical or mental state could be pined for using nostalgia or false memory or a misleading journal entry (the journal being at once a bespoke playground and cemetery for pining of all kinds).

Pining for a person carries a mix of all the above - perhaps the most specific and the most obscure - distressingly vague when rose tinting to that extent ruins all the tiny, boring and annoying minutiae .

The three are easily substitutable - pining for a place could be mistaken for a person with whom you experienced that place, or an obsession with a state of mind might only have been facilitated with the right geography, or at a time before real distressing things happened. To pine, ultimately, is to project - and realising that’s still a valid feeling with valid effect / affect takes work.

Pining itself is work too of course. To dwell or to speculate on or be distracted by or to lose sleep over something pined-for is exhausting.

Not always obvious or sweaty or factory-like but brain labour usually takes place behind the scenes, never really clocks out, and it certainly doesn’t get paid to do it.

There are psychological cash bonuses though - something as organic as a sensory reminder or as banal as an email, a direct message, a photo. A pining person’s brain will grab onto anything which validates all this painful work and dine out on it for another couple weeks.

Do you ever really know for whom or what you’re pining ?

I have a blurry picture of somebody or somewhere in my head but they seem always just a stand-in. Freud would love this part:

Today I’m in agony over a man I barely know and who is considerably older than I am. This agony is actually about my now-estranged father - an idea(l) of him from childhood in certain urban settings which have my first date with the met-three-times man in common - the West End - where I went as a child and the buses felt so enormous.

Which am I pining for : the older man, my dad, my childhood, or the borough of Westminster / Camden, the date-format itself?

Is my brain telling me I did not receive adequate love during / within these places and times, that I have some love I still need to feel on Tottenham Court Road? If I get what I need will I be less fragile, less afraid of buses?

It’s frustrating: pining has a habit of piling up. Visiting a nostalgia-ridden place with somebody great can compound and confuse the original want. And then I’m scared to visit that place because it will remind me of the somebody, who in turn reminded me of somebody else, and the happiness I felt (or did I?) when I went there with them.

- Pining has physiological results

- Pining is difficult to pick through, and has me wishing for some kind of suffering colander to tell me which parts need attention and which parts need, for now, to be parked.

- Pining is occasionally delicious, and since (at least etymologically) it could sit well within the arena of self-harm, there is something in pining’s pain which is beautifully designed to distract from some other more urgent task.

Pining shuffles the priorities like a deck of cards, just one of its incredible talents awarding fantasy real world consequences.

Consequences: Checking a phone, throwing up, checking an inbox, the mail, isolation, shivering, diverting or diluting conversation, cutting it off entirely, the thousand yard stare mid-sentence, crying, appetite suppression or exaggeration

A pining person isn’t a particularly interesting hang out unless you yourself are the pinee, in which case you’ll be treated to a fierce engagement driven by a lifetime’s worth of magical thinking and undisclosed hurt. You may receive full eye contact, and yet it’s not really your eyes they’re seeing, but some weird mirage of salvation or escape. This happens a lot at dinner.

It’s Proustian, it’s Procrustean. It’s not you it’s me but it’s not really me either - and actually in a way I wish you weren’t here right now so that I could get on with the business of pining in peace. This brings everything back to the unsuitable chair with the pine cone - come closer but stay away, this isn’t what it looks like

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