There's a scene in The Last of Us Part 2 where, after approaching a workbench and dismantling your gun, you are mauled from behind by a group of rogue assailants. They have the upper hand, having quietly arranged a tactical formation on the dilapidated building's upper floor--they take cover behind sofas, kitchen counters, and half-open doors. But this shocking scene isn't all that surprising--or at least it wouldn't be, if you'd been reading the handwritten notes sporadically dotted across the surrounding town.
The Last of Us Part 2 weaves together a grimdark narrative filled with colour and noise, and yet, it teems with quieter, often untold stories contained within the pages of its virtual journaling. A man loses two sons to a radical religious cult because he was too afraid to leave the safety of their aquarium hideout, and dies sitting in the chair they berated him for never leaving; a parent passes away beneath the crumbling roof of a flooded factory, with medicine he never got to deliver to his sick family; a soldier whiles away his final hours behind the blast doors of a bank vault, dying to protect something that was not his own from a group of thieves seeking to capitalize on the maelstrom induced by the cordyceps outbreak. These are the quieter tales that The Last of Us Part 2's world is founded upon.
The stories of Ellie, Dina, Abby, and Lev are essential to The Last of Us Part 2's overarching narrative, but not necessarily to the construction of its wider world. They mirror it in unique ways and react to it at different times with distinct emotional responses, but their tales are likely no more significant than those we don't play through. This can be said of most stories: Just because Frodo bears the One Ring doesn't necessarily mean that his particular hardships are greater than those of anybody else--something that is particularly resonant in J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings books, where Saruman returns to destroy The Shire, taking the lives of the nameless and unwritten in the process.
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