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The Last of Us' third episode was directed by It's a Sin and Umbrella Academy's Peter Hoar, who wanted to show that gay love is as normal as any other kind of love. He says he tricked audiences into experiencing it so he could get that message across, conveying that queerness isn't something to shy away from.

Warning, spoilers for The Last of Us HBO.

Episode 3 is a touching love story between Frank and Bill, letting us be the fly on the wall as we watch them grow grey together while the years pass by. It's heartwarming, but it also resonated with so many for its unashamed queerness.

"Sometimes you have to sort of trick the rest of the world into watching these things before they're like, 'Oh, my God, it was two guys. I just realized'" Hoar said in an interview with Inverse. "I think then they might understand that it's all real. It's just the same love."

The third episode made huge changes to Bill's story from the games. Rather than Frank having died before we meet him, with Bill still around as a bitter old man, the two take their own lives together. It's a bittersweet ending that sees them leave the world hand-in-hand, content with the life they've led. Not only is it a huge change, but it moves away from the bury your gays trope that the first Last of Us game was mired in.

"I've been asked if [I] was worried about it being so different from the game," Hoar said. "I just read Craig [Maizin's] scripts. They're so good, so clever and so warm, that I actually forgot that it was so different. It was only really when Bill is shot, and you think, Oh, god. It's Bill that's gonna go. It's not Frank, it's Bill. And then [the] very next scene is Frank on the porch, in a wheelchair.

"I never worried that it was different. Neil [Druckmann] was the first person that said, not to me, but to the world, 'I'm not sure that the fans will like Episode 3 because it's very, very different.' I was like, 'Oh no! Don't say that Neil!'"

However, while it made huge changes to the ways in which Bill's past was told, for many, these changes made up for the shortcomings of the game, only heightening his and Frank's love story.