HBO’s The Last of Us show has been nominated for several MTV Movie awards, however its the “Best Kiss” nomination that has us scratching our heads.

The show has been nominated for five total awards ranging from Best Show, Best Hero, Best Duo, and Breakthrough Performance — however it’s the Best Kiss nomination for a very weird scene involving a survivor and one of the infected.

Spoiler alert for those who haven’t seen the HBO series based on Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, however, episode 2 had a scene where Tess (played by Anna Torv) and an unnamed zombie (played by Philip Prajoux) shared a kiss.

This wasn’t any old kiss – oh no – this was a kiss where Tess stands still and the zombie very slowly and perhaps erotically inserts his fungus tentacles into her mouth. It’s the stuff of nightmares and your typical hentai animation, but it’s nominated for an award.

Here’s the scene:

The showrunners apparently wanted to answer the question – what if you got peacefully infected by a zombie?

“What does it look like if you just stand perfectly still and let them do this to you?” Mazin said in an interview with Variety. “Then we landed on this nightmare fuel. It’s disturbing and it’s violative. I think it’s very primal in the way it invades your own body.”

The Last of Us has been available to stream via HBO Max since January 2023. In related news – HBO has already greenlit the show’s second season – read more about that here.

This is Niche Culture. In this column, we regularly cover anime, geek culture, and things related to video games.