Giving Pandemic a Face: Ecophobia in A Plague Tale: Innocence

Many apocalypses involve the collapse, corruption, or imbalance of nature, revealing themselves to be ultimately human-caused. Media depicting these often lean into our fears of the natural world around us. This paper examines how ecophobia – the irrational hatred, fear, or indifference of the natural environment – may be applied to investigate an ecocritical reading of the game A Plague Tale: Innocence focusing mainly on its narrative. Through its young protagonist Amicia and her ailing brother, the game explores pandemic apocalypse through the eyes of children to terrifying effect, but ultimately falls into a trap of ecophobia rather than critiquing it. Ecomedia scholars should extend the examination of ecophobia as a lens across a broad range of media because ecophobia helpfully blurs the line between representation and the histories and politics we live by, allowing scholars to simultaneously address the virtual and the real, themselves already blurred categories, especially in games.