The highly anticipated HBO series ‘The Last Of Us’ premiered on January 15, 2023. The pilot episode, ‘When You’re Lost in the Darkness,’ has opened to fantastic reviews and staggering viewership numbers. The show pulled no punches as we get out the first glimpse at the life-threatening Cordyceps Fungus.
Craig Mazin, the co-creator of the HBO series explained if this atrocity is a real-life danger and something the collective humanity should worry about, and addressed how our future could see something familiar to the fungus.
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What Is Cordyceps Fungus In ‘The Last of Us’?
Known to the fans of ‘The Last Of Us’ as CBI, Cordyceps attribute to a parasitic fungal calamity that has rotted the future of humankind. In the video game, the first signs of Cordyceps Fungus were found in South America. Soon, the virus spread to the United States in September 2013.
Soon, Cordyceps Fungus spread worldwide, wiping out 60 % of the total population. It was later given the medical term ‘Cordyceps Brain Infection,’ which turns creatures into a marionette, controlling their behavior before it starts to devour the host from within.
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Is Cordyceps Fungus A Real-Life Threat To Humanity?
Craig Mazin has been quick to address the degree of the exact science behind Cordyceps Fungus, saying, “It’s real — it’s real to the extent that everything he says that fungus do, they do. And they currently do it and have been doing it forever. There are some remarkable documentaries that you can watch that are quite terrifying. Now his warning — what if they evolve and get into us? — from a purely scientific point of view, would they do exactly to us what they do to ants? I don’t think so. I doubt it. On the other hand, he’s right — LSD and psilocybin do come from fungus. What I told John was, ‘What we’re doing in this scene is telling people this has always been here.”
Creative director of the video game ‘The Last Of Us,’ Neil Druckmann, credited the creation of Cordyceps to Sir David Attenborough-narrated BBC documentary ‘Planet Earth.‘ The episode ‘Jungles‘ stuck inspiration with him as it showed an infected ant being killed by Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which would later become the diabolical fungal virus for the beloved videogame, now an HBO series.
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