****SPOILERS BELOW****
This post contains minor plot points of the HBO series, The Last of Us. Don’t keep reading if you care about being spoiled. But know this, if you stop reading now, you’ll be eternally indebted to me. I’ll guilt trip you for life.
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On the plane back from Auckland, New Zealand, I finally finished watching the HBO drama series, The Last of Us, on the in-flight entertainment system that also offered Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 film, Ran, dubbed in French. Unfortunately for me and fortunately for Mr. Kurosawa, I couldn’t turn the dubbing off and decided that it probably wasn’t the best idea to watch his work on an airplane. What occurred in the next 6 hours successfully ended my months-long TV watching hiatus. It’s nice to watch some TV to make me forget about TV.
The Last of Us is adapted from the 2013 video game of the same name and follows hardened softie Joel, who is tasked with taking a young teen Ellie, across the United States in apocalyptic conditions brought upon by a fungal infection affecting the human population.
I’m not sure why the game or the show avoids using the word “zombie” but essentially the fungi, called cordyceps, causes humans to turn into zombies that can only be killed with a blow to the head. I’m not sure how familiar audiences were with cordyceps before the show aired but if you’re a nature documentary enthusiast, consumer of Cantonese soup or a hungry caterpillar, cordyceps should already be a household name.
蟲草 or bug grass or caterpillar fungus is what Chinese people and Chinese medicine practitioners call the dried corpses of cordyceps infected caterpillars. The cordyceps infect and take over caterpillar host bodies and gradually kill them, eventually causing a long winding spore to rupture from their heads. The Last of Us game and show take inspiration from how the cordyceps infect the caterpillars, so imagine mushroom-like spores rupturing out of human heads instead. The bug grass can rack up hefty sums of money in the Chinese medicine market because they apparently have many herbal properties that can make you horny.
The last thing the apocalypse needs is a bunch of horny people. Horniness persists in even the most dire of circumstances. Life finds a way.
I’m really confused by traditional Chinese medicine because all the supposed benefits always seem to revolve around sexual performance. And the reasoning behind a lot of the remedies is simply because the special ingredient itself looks phallic. It’s the same stupid reason why oysters are known as aphrodisiacs. Oysters look like vulvas! Unlike the whole oyster thing, which I think only weirdo men believe, Chinese medicine is believed and practiced amongst a lot of Chinese people and even more weirdo Chinese men.
For example, deer antler horns are big in Chinese medicine. Poaching deer and endangered animals for Chinese medicine is wrecking the environment but those ingredients sell for a lot of money and supposedly make a great male supplement. The word they always use on their packaging is “vitality.” Good for male vitality. Who cares what the actual antler horn is made of, the antler looks like a dick! That’s good enough for me! Let me eat it and last another 3 seconds in the bedroom. I’m powerful. Like a stag.
Same thing with rhino horn and ginseng and snakes and what have you. That snake over there! It’s long and hard. You know what else should be long and hard? My penis! That’ll show you. Everything can improve sexual performance. Never mind popping a viagra and calling it a day! Maybe if you just eat a 12-inch ruler, those stats will magically digest into your penis. I have no credible background in Chinese medicine to be ranting about all of this but neither do the Chinese medicine people.
There are non-dick related reasons why the cordyceps are good for you but frankly I’m tired. My grandma used to cook with the caterpillar fungus and pop them into her soups. Her soups are delicious and boiled for hours but the caterpillar fungus is an added herbal medicinal component with no real flavor profile. For the longest time, I thought that the bug grass was just a mushroom that grew in the shape of a caterpillar. A show of defense mimicry to stop predators from eating the fungus. Those are just mushrooms, don’t worry. No. That’s an actual caterpillar.
Human zombie soup boiled for 6 hours with a dash of salt. I’m sure that the cannibal who isn’t Ron Howard in Ep 8 would appreciate that meal.
Food is scarce. Love is even scarcer. Or does it define everything that we do? The end of the show got me thinking about how the greater good doesn’t really matter because the few people we love in our lives, apocalypse or no apocalypse, are the only ones worth living for. We also got a subjective point-of-view of what’s going on in the minds of the people who have recently been infected. A real-time look into the minds of those who’ve reached the point of no return and are on the fringes of becoming sub-human. What’s going on in that little caterpillar brain before it’s taken over by a parasitic fungus? “At least I’m on this beautiful earth with all my friends!”