[Character Application] Ellie | The Last of Us

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CHARACTER

Name: Ellie
Canon: The Last of Us
Gender: Female
Age: 14
Wing Color: Fluffy pale yellow, like a chick

Canon Point: Between the chapters "Fall" and "Winter"

Canon Point Explanation: This is a big turning point for Ellie's character; she's seen and done a lot, but she hasn't lost hope or the more upbeat aspects of her personality, a lot of which fade significantly during the "Winter" segment of the game. I wanted the benefit of all the bonding she's done with Joel without her becoming too dark.

History: Wikia

Personality:

"Everyone I have cared for has either died or left me."

Ellie is one-part insecure teenager and three-parts sass. As a survivor of what is essentially a zombie apocalypse in all but name, with no parents to raise or coddle her, she's very rough around the edges, but at the core she's still a good kid. She's vulnerable and influential, but she's still willing to stand her ground when it counts.

Raised through a variety of orphanages, handed off to a military boarding school at 13, kidnapped by a renegade terrorist group, and then bitten by an infected and forced to watch her best friend devolve into a flesh-craving monster, Ellie hasn't had an ideal childhood. As a result, she has a hell of an attitude. She's watched a lot of people die, some of whom were close to her, some because of her, and some died to protect or help her. By the end of the game she's tired of death and watching the people around her be hurt or killed for her cause and just wants it to be over, so it's clear that beyond her strong front, it's having an effect on her, as it should, since she's still just a normal kid even in the apocalypse. After her first kill she has to sit down, claiming to feel sick. She's strong, though, and determined- even after that kill, she still wants to carry a gun, and willingly uses it to gun down anyone trying to hurt Joel.

"You know what? This isn't that bad."

Despite her lousy attitude, Ellie can easily recognize and revel in the joys of life, few and far between they may be. She loves the simple act of riding a horse or hearing stories about what the world used to be like. She complains about finding a cliffhanger in a stolen comic book when comics are no longer produced at all. She sees bits and pieces of light in a pretty grim world, and it helps people warm up to her even with all her sassing.

She bonds easily with people, connecting well within a few days of being with them (or even a few hours, in the case of Sam and Riley, who are much closer to her age than the adults who surround her), and she has a certain degree of charisma that can help people see past her bratty behaviour. She's playful, she has a good sense of humour (or at least she thinks so), and she loves snippets and whatever hints or information she can get of the world as it was before the apocalypse. She sees the bright side of things when many others wouldn't - she's quick to say "better than nothing" when she and Joel discover that the tape she stole from Bill isn't very good music (to them).

"Don't tell me that I would be safer with someone else, because the truth is I would just be more scared."

Beyond her strong front, Ellie wants to be loved and cared for just as much as any kid. When asked by Sam what she's afraid of, she tries to play it cool by mentioning scorpions, but then admits that her true fear is being alone. Ellie uses her attitude and her bratty comebacks to test and push people away, but no matter what kind of horrible or gory things she witnesses them doing, or even just hears about - gruesome murder of living humans, destruction of anything unwanted that crosses their path, and the slaying of undead monsters - and she's willing and able to overlook it as long as they stay with her. She's even willing to kill people herself in order to protect her companions. With Joel, especially, there's very little she wouldn't be willing to do in order to keep him safe; it's arguable that she's started to think of him as her surrogate father despite his words to the contrary (and her own claim to not be his daughter, Sarah), which is something she'd never had before getting to know him. Their relationship is extremely important to her.

"Man... I shot the hell out of that guy, huh?"

Her determination is worth noting especially; what starts out as just a simple escort mission for the Fireflies becomes, in time, a trip across the country, going from one disaster to the next, with encounters with infected, bandits, ambushes, and cannibals between. The respites are few, and the longer the journey lasts, the less cheery she becomes, instead gaining momentum and determination to just finish it- find the Fireflies, create the cure, save mankind. Ellie herself says, "It can't be for nothing." She is brave and optimistic, but her actions and the weight of her journey have had an effect on her. At her canon point she hasn't lost the lightness of her personality, but if too many bad things happen to her without some sort of balance, and that part of her can slip away. It's why Joel is so important- he provides the gruff, serious attitude that keeps them alive. When he's taken out of commission, Ellie has to take on that persona as the frontrunner of their expedition, and in return a part of herself is lost and never quite recovers.


Strengths

Physical: The most obvious strength is very situation-specific - Ellie is immune to the cordyceps infection. After being bitten, the infection became a mutation in her brain, and as a result she can breathe in spores and be bitten by the undead of her world and not get sick. It's likely that she'd be immune to other types of zombies, but this strength is pretty irrelevant without them. She's handy with a switchblade, and is profficient with both a handgun and a sniper rifle as well as a bow and arrow, and knows how to ride a horse. She can also drive stick, not that it matters much. She's pretty sneaky and light on her feet; she can creep around zombies and bandits alike without being caught if she's careful. She's also small enough to fit into areas that an adult couldn't access and light enough to be tossed up to high places. Just game mechanics, really, but potentially useful. She also has some knowledge of treating injuries, at least enough to stitch Joel's wounds and care for him when he's too weak and sick to look after himself. Either she learned it growing up in a post-apocalyptic world or she figured it out from the medical stuff Joel carried around, but either way, she kept him alive.

Mental: Ellie's smart for her age. She can figure out a fair bit without it being laid out plain for her, such as knowing she was used as a distraction by Riley to steal something, or that Joel was planning to leave her with Tommy before he got the chance to come out and say it. She also determined the right way of how to keep Joel from bleeding to death after he passed out from his injuries when they left the university at the end of "Fall". She's not afraid to ask questions, even if she might not like the answer she gets. She's also very street smart and quick to think even during conflict; she proves that when she uses her bite mark (and thus her infection) to distract David and his partner so she could escape before they killed her. She can keep her cool in the middle of panicking; when Joel is run through, she is fretful and not sure what to do, but she is regardless able to get him through the building and out of the area, then patched up and in a protected place when he passes out and is unable to care for himself.

Emotional: Even though she's grown up through the apocalypse, Ellie's pretty optimistic. She doesn't let much get her down, and even when she does get upset when bad things happen, she gets over it relatively quickly, or at least is able to bury whatever she feels in favour of clinging to her optimism. Her cheer helps her companions keep on trucking despite their many hardships, so they come to depend on her for it. Henry specifically notes "she doesn't seem bothered by all this" after only knowing her for a few hours.

Weaknesses

Physical: Beyond her immunity to infection, she's a normal teenage girl. She's not particularly strong or muscular. Her strengths of size in accessibility puzzles become weaknesses in combat, so she's better with one-on-one stealth fights or just escaping danger than she is in big gun fights. There's also no substitute for experience- she's pretty good with weaponry, but not exceptionally skilled, and she has a long ways to go before she's on par with Joel or any of her adult traveling companions. Even with her switchblade, the weapon she's carried the longest, all she really knows how to do is slash, stab, or threaten without technique or refinement. Additionally, she can't swim, so she'd be screwed in deep water.

Mental: Smart as she is, she still lacks experience in life skills as well as her lacking physical abilities. She can take care of herself reasonably well, but she still needs a guiding hand at times when it comes to navigating the world, developing her survival skills, and she makes plenty of stupid decisions, such as stealing a horse and running off into dangerous territory just to make Joel chase after her, or even the original idea to go with Riley into an unsafe area where they were both bitten. She puts lives in danger unnecessarily because she's reckless.

Emotional: She's just a kid, so she doesn't have as tight a rein on her emotions as she'd like people to believe. She's prone to tantrums and fits of immaturity, she speaks her mind regardless of consequence (such as sassing Bill with fat jokes when he'd already threatened her with a machete), and she'd probably get herself killed much earlier on in the game without Joel around to shut her up.

Anything else?: I'd like for Ellie to eventually get Callus, the horse she and Joel received from Tommy, as well as her mother's switchblade upon arrival. That's pretty much it.

SAMPLES

First Person:

Training Wings Thread

Third Person:

It takes Ellie a long time to feel safe outside.

It's an ingrained attitude, that caution, the fear of being attacked at every corner, something she'd been trained to experience over the months of traveling across the dangerous countryside of post-apocalyptic United States. "United" being such a joke now, of course. Even the names of cities were now laughable landmarks at best, a far cry from the cities they used to be. She'd seen pictures, scattered and faded across the years, her imagination filling in the gaps. Places filled with people, normal, every day folk who went to work every day and came home to their families, ate dinner that didn't taste like shit at a round table covered in fresh food, doors unlocked and friendly neighbours all around.

"The American Dream", they used to call it. Now that's all it really is.

Here, though? People do that. She's seen it, here and there, from the workers at the shop who do it for free, who do it because they're bored. They go to work every day and come home at night and take home food they get from a real grocery store and eat normal meals with their makeshift families just to do it again the next day. All that, without killing anyone for it.

And she's still ducking around in the corners of that society, watching from the corners, because she's waiting to wake up again, find Joel unconscious or dead on a ratty old mattress in an abandoned town just X of Salt Lake City (CHECK), with Callus stomping to be let out of his garage and her stomach growling for food they don't have. She peeks into windows and hides when she sees people coming and she wants it all, she wants it so bad. But more than anything she wants to survive this place, and secretly, she just wants someone to take her in and tell her that it's over, that she doesn't have to be afraid anymore.

That isn't how life goes, though, when you're living in the apocalypse. Even when the dream is so wonderful you want to cry. You hide, and you go hungry, and you want more than you'll ever get, but you survive.

But then, finally, she walks outside with her knife in her pocket. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and someone actually smiles and lifts a hand to greet her as they pass by. She doesn't even know them.

Safe.

It's a good feeling.