What does Last of Us say about fungi?

In the beginning, Joel will have to move inside confined spaces, thick contamined air fully surrounding him. In order to protect himself, he will put on his old gas mask that he's been using for years. Somehow that's sufficient. The spores apparently don't contaminate his hair, his clothes, his backpack, his weapons. Once he's cleared the area, he simply takes off the mask and moves on.

So I'm not sure if anything of substance can be learned from this game.

I have not haha, although maybe I should :)

They're making an HBO show for it too by the creator of Chernobyl. It's a fantastic story and I'm glad more people will experience it.

The sequel just came out as well. Without saying too much, it was "controversial" to a lot of people seemingly aligned with bigotry but I thought it was amazing.

To others: If this were reddit, the mere mention of the game would spark outrage. I'm not sure if that will happen here but I see an alarming amount of hate speech here these days so I'll just say - I'm not accusing literally everyone who hated the game of being a bigot, but there sure were a lot of them.

It was also controversial for a lot of reasons that had nothing to do bigotry, such as the way the main character from the previous game was handled, the depressing character arc of the main character of this game, a POV switch that many players found alienating, and an abrupt ending.

Now I don't agree with any of these criticisms, since I thought the game was amazing---but one has to recognize that there were defensible reasons to dislike the game.

I tried to address this in my last sentence but didn't want to get too specific because of spoilers. To clarify, I agree. Art is subjective and people who didn't like this game for non-bigoted reasons are absolutely allowed to have that opinion.

I just don't think I've ever seen precisely this level of toxic outrage over a video game before. A loud minority of gamers have always been super toxic (e.g. gamergate) but they hit peak levels of insanity when this incident.

It was actually the last straw for my reddit usage when I realized r/TheLastOfUs2 had been hijacked by people determined to censor any positive takes on the game. I've deleted the app and no longer visit the site and my mental health is already better for it.

Thanks for sharing. The HBO produced Chernobyl is one of a very few "really, really good" things I've ever watched. It kept my attention, my wife's, and my kid's. And we are very different people, with vastly different interests.

Absolutely. I loved that show. The Last of Us is obviously fictional but the stories have a very similarly melancholic tone so I have high hopes for it.

Edit: I wouldn't go googling it btw. Even if there aren't spoilers in the results YouTube, etc. will think you've played it and the aforementioned controversy has created a lot of trolls determined to spoil the ending in comments and article/video titles.