The Power of Narrative

I’ve played The Last of Us more times than I care to admit (not on the very easiest level, but the next one up from there). And I’ve watched the Max mini-series adaptation more than once, too. Not because I needed to rewatch it to understand the plot. I already knew what would happen. But because it feels different every time. The story doesn’t just unfold. It burrows. It lingers. It pulls at something deep.

There are moments in life where the power of storytelling just devastates. Not because it’s flashy, but because it tells the truth. Not in a literal sense, necessarily, but in the way it distills big, unwieldy, impossible-to-nail-down human experiences into something real and comprehensible. For me, The Last of Us does that with aching precision.

It’s hard to explain why certain stories stick. But I have a few thoughts about why The Last of US does. For me, it’s the emotional realism. It’s the way the game and the show handle crisis, love, grief, and loyalty with layered and painful humanity. These characters aren’t archetypes standing in for moral dilemmas. They are the dilemmas. As I watch Joel make a decision that prioritizes one girl over the entire human race, instead of responding with abstract judgment, I’m just… wrecked. I get it. Even if I wouldn’t have done the same, and I honestly don’t know that I would or wouldn’t have. (I also understand the critique that the Fireflies really wouldn’t have been able to create a humanity-saving vaccine to scale, but I digress…)

There’s something powerful in this narrative that I rarely get from academic texts. And to be clear, I say this as someone who studied value theory and spends a lot of time inside the world of moral and ethical philosophy. There’s value in the rigor of those frameworks, no doubt, and I love lingering in that space as well. But it’s one thing to read about utilitarian tradeoffs or the tension between deontological duty and care-based ethics. It’s another thing entirely to feel the weight of those decisions as they play out in a story that gives them blood, breath, and consequence.

In reality, we rarely make choices in a vacuum. We make them while exhausted, heartbroken, terrified, or holding onto hope by a thread. The best narratives don’t just remind us of that, instead they immerse us in it. They let us sit with ambiguity. They help us empathize, not with caricatures, but with complicated people doing the best they can with what they have.

I think that’s the real power of storytelling. It’s not just to entertain or distract. It’s to help us practice being human. To train the muscles of empathy. To wrestle with the messiness of life in a space where the stakes are simulated, but the emotions are not.

So if a video game ever made you cry, or a television show left you gutted in the best possible way, that’s narrative doing exactly what it was meant to do. Helping us feel. Helping us think. Helping us understand.

And, if we’re lucky, helping us grow.