A Queer Sephardic Teenager Turns to Judaism to Fight the Zombies
Clementine began her existence as a video game character, in Telltale Games’ landmark Walking Dead series, back in 2012. There, she was an 8-year-old kid we met in Atlanta just as a zombie apocalypse chugs into motion. As sometimes happens in popular culture, Clementine’s story curiously resembled that of a character in another fictional property released at almost the exact same time: The Last of Us (TLOU), which appeared first as a video game on PlayStation 3 in 2013, and more recently as a series adapted for HBO.
Like Ellie in TLOU, Clementine contends with zombies who are never called zombies (instead Ellie has “infected” and Clem has “walkers”). Like Ellie, she connects with a morally compromised surrogate father to whom she serves as a moral compass (Ellie:Joel::Clem:Lee), travels across several U.S. cities to get to a safer place, loses friends and learns to fire a gun for self-protection. Both characters appear across media forms, too: Ellie, a comic book fan herself, also appeared in a spinoff 2013 comic called “American Dreams” drawn by Faith Erin Hicks, and now Clementine headlines a comic series written and drawn by the wonderful Tillie Walden.
If you track Ellie’s and Clementine’s stories up to the present — in The Last of Us, Part 2, which came out a few years ago and is currently being adapted for HBO, and in Walden’s newest comic, “Clementine: Book Two,” which is being published on October 3 — you find that these two teenagers have something else in common, something somewhat less predictable from the generic conventions of zombie media.
They both have Sephardic girlfriends.
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