Abstract

In January 2023, HBO aired the episode “Long, long time”, the third installment of “The Last of Us” series, an adaptation of the video game franchise released in 2013. The episode portrays the romantic relationship between Bill and Frank, characters who receive in-depth narrative arcs in the audiovisual version, causing uneasy tension in the reception by the game players and spectators of the series. The discussion proposed in this work addresses the possibilities of intertextual relationship (Kristeva, 1969; Figueiredo, 2010) between the fictional material constructed in the source text of “The Last of Us” and its audiovisual version (Elliot 2003; Stam 2006; Hutcheon 2012), considering both the specifics of shifts between different media languages and the notion of re-encounter in the reception experience (Soalheiro 2022). Thus, we will cast a gaze on the disputes that arise when the series challenges the expectations of both game fans and series viewers by extending or modifying characters and situations previously solidified in a transmedia cultural text (Szwydky 2020). We question the revisiting of these characters and their narratives in creating a new product that, in another media language, produces a new re-encounter experience in reception, generating an updating experience of the cultural memory of the fictional material.