Ellie is my absolute favorite video game character of all time, and probably always will be. In the video game world, favorites can be hard for me to choose. There are so many wonderful games, characters, storylines and genres that it can be very overwhelming to try and pick favorites. For me though, Ellie came easily. There will be spoilers in this post, so just consider yourself warned.
Strong Female Lead
Not only are The Last of Us games phenomenal in every way, Ellie is the type of character that I am always drawn to. What separates her from the other strong female characters to pick from is her age. She is by far more mature than she should be at her age of 14. Everything she went through and the world around her has forced her to grow up and do whatever it takes to stay alive.
I also see a lot of myself in Ellie, especially by the time the events of the second game unfold. Her anxiety, monophobia and PTSD are things that I can relate to on a personal level, which makes me feel connected to her. Naughty Dog does a fantastic job portraying those things, as well.
Where It All Starts
In the first game, she and Joel develop their relationship by surviving together on their journey across the United States. Joel is apprehensive at first, no doubt because he lost his daughter at the beginning of the outbreak. Since then, he has pretty much closed himself off to most people. What starts as a favor for Marlene, ended up being a life-changing struggle for survival.
Their one goal is to find the Fireflies and hopefully utilize Ellie’s immunity to find a cure for the cordyceps outbreak. Tess and Joel aren’t sure if they can trust Ellie at first, but a job is a job for them. On their way to the Boston capitol building, Tess is bitten. When she shows Joel how bad it already is, she begs him to believe that Ellie is immune and to help her find the Fireflies. Tess decides to stay behind and distract the guards instead of continuing with them and potentially turning.
Ellie doesn’t take this well and holds on the Tess’s death throughout the game, and later other’s deaths, as well. Ellie has pretty much lived within a Quarantine Zone her whole life, so she hasn’t known danger like Joel has. She also hasn’t come to terms with what it means to be a survivor like he has. She still feels guilty for being alive, and needs her immunity to matter.
On top of that survivor’s guilt, she also has monophobia. Monophobia is the fear of being alone. She expresses this fear with Sam the night before he turned. She eventually tells Joel about it too, when he comes to find her at the farmhouse after she runs away from Tommy’s.
At this point, Joel is still apprehensive about getting attached and wants Tommy to finish getting her to the Fireflies, but Ellie has already grown to need him. When she finally tells him that everyone in her life always leaves except for him, it made him realize that they both need each other. It also sheds more light on the fact that she can’t let go of those that died during their journey like Tess and Sam. In her mind, it was all because of her immunity.
After that, there is a point where Ellie had to nurse Joel back to health after a very bad wound. She eventually gets captured by David and his group of people who are cannibals. This experience no doubt adds weight to what she is already feeling, and is the cause of some of her PTSD.
This whole journey isn’t just about saving the world, it is extremely personal for Ellie. If you played through the Left Behind DLC of the first game, you’d understand why Ellie needs her immunity to mean something. At the end of the first game, she touches on this a little with Joel. She mentions her best friend, Riley, being there when they both got bitten together. They were going to wait it out together, but Ellie ended up being immune.
For Ellie, a cure would mean that Riley’s death would end up mattering. It would also mean that she had a purpose to fulfill. She could never come to terms with why she survived and Riley didn’t.
When Joel made his decision to save Ellie’s life and kill all of those Fireflies, I don’t think he realized what he is doing. Not only were those people just trying to save the world, but Ellie wanted her life to mean something. She needed it to.
The Second Game Picks Everything Back Up
We see the aftermath of Joel’s decision in Part II. Now 19, Ellie is still obsessed with what happened with the Fireflies and things didn’t quite add up for her. It begins to drive a wedge between her and Joel as she doubts what he told her about them finding other people with immunity. It just isn’t enough for her and she needs more answers.
Finally, he comes clean when he finds her at the old hospital where he killed the Fireflies and she doesn’t take it well. Not only had he taken away the opportunity for her immunity to matter, but he killed the only people capable of making a cure. She agrees to go back to Jackson but no longer wants to continue their relationship.
In a flashback towards the end of the game, it shows when Ellie told Joel that she was ready to start trying to forgive him for lying to her. This just so happens to be the night before Abby kills him. I think that’s what really drives Ellie’s need for revenge. She is finally ready to make amends with him, and he is taken from her. What’s worse was that it happens right in front of her. This is easily another moment that causes her to suffer from PTSD.
I know that this part of the game is very, very decisive. There were a lot of fans of the franchise who did not agree with Joel’s death or having to later play as his killer, Abby. However, I personally think it is a very real representation of how things would play out, and here’s why.
Abby is seeking revenge for her father’s death and has finally tracked down Joel. Her father was the doctor who Joel killed to stop the surgery on Ellie at the end of the first game. Knowing that and still hating Abby is just hypocritical in my opinion. You can’t root for Ellie’s revenge without at least understanding Abby’s need for it, as well.
As Ellie seeks revenge, her girlfriend Dina comes with her. Dina sees Ellie through some of worst things Ellie has ever had to do. She truly does some dark stuff on this journey. She hunts down everyone who was with Abby the night Joel died and kills them. At this point in the game, you are still rooting for Ellie. It is satisfying to bring these people to justice. Once you play through Abby’s side and see the other side of things though, the game really starts to paint Ellie out to be the villain, or at least as someone who isn’t in the right.
That isn’t quite the case though, because in their world no one is good or bad. In order to still be drawing breath in a post-apocalyptic world, you have to do whatever you can to survive. Every person Joel, Ellie or Abby killed had friends and families. What I found interesting about this game is that you don’t even find yourself questioning that until you’re forced to see the big picture through Abby’s story.
By the time you play through Abby’s story and begin to grow attached to her friends, you have already played through Ellie’s side and killed them all. You know how their story ends and that guilt begins to set in. Not to mention the fact that when Abby finally got her revenge, the only casualty was her target, Joel. She and these friends that Ellie eventually murders, all let Ellie and Tommy live when they killed Joel. Abby even says that to Ellie at the theater when she is trying to find out who killed her friends. She said, “We let you live and you wasted it.”
Bottom line is, everything has consequences. As a player of these games, it is easy to kill numerous ‘enemies’ until you find out their backstories. As soon as they are humanized, it is much harder to justify any of those actions. Ellie, Abby, Joel and everyone else in this world are all the same really. Just because we knew and loved Joel, doesn’t make Abby any worse than Ellie who killed hundreds of people on her way to Abby.
Ellie and Dina barely made it home safely after their encounter with Abby in the theater, but Abby is still alive. At this point I was personally fine with this. Ellie had taken enough away from Abby just as Abby took enough away from Ellie. However, as Ellie and Dina settle into their new life together, it becomes more clear that Ellie still hasn’t gotten the closure she needs. She still has a hard time dealing with Joel’s death too, constantly seeing it being played through her mind in episodes of PTSD.
When Tommy brings news of Abby’s location to their farmhouse, this is all it took to send Ellie down another hellbent revenge spiral. Dina tries to convince Ellie to stay by saying that Abby doesn’t get to be more important then their family. Ultimately though, Abby being alive still eats at Ellie too much and she has to go find her again.
When she leaves a second time to go find Abby, I found myself having a hard time agreeing with that decision. Much like I didn’t agree with Joel when he decided to save Ellie rather than let her be used to find a cure in the first game, I didn’t think she should go after Abby again. However, these games weren’t made to satisfy what I wanted as the player, they were made to make you play through these character’s decisions, regardless of how you felt about them.
In the end, she realizes that both her and Abby have been through enough. During their battle at the end of the game, she finally remembers Joel smiling, rather than dying. I think this makes her realize that she’s able to move passed all of this without anymore bloodshed. It is just unfortunate to watch the wake of destruction these two leave behind in their pursuits of revenge.
When Ellie get back home and sees that Dina is gone, it sets in that her worst fear is actually upon her. She is now truly alone, but it is all her fault. She wasn’t able to let go of this idea of revenge until it was too late.
I think these games teach so many different lessons and that is what makes them so wonderful. In games like Uncharted or Tomb Raider, you kill countless individuals but are still seen as the hero. As a player you don’t stop and think about it actually being murder, it’s just a fun action video game. You are never faced with the consequences of those kills.
The Last of Us takes a harder look at all of that. Naughty Dog tells their story with such realism, it is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It is what makes the experience so memorable, though. There hasn’t been another video game that has done that for me. I think that’s also what makes Ellie such an easy choice for a favorite character.
She is by far, more fleshed out than most video game characters. Her journey with Joel in the first game solidifies their bond and creates such a beautiful experience within a desolate world. Her story of revenge in the second game really makes you think about what is good and bad, and holds a mirror up to what we never want to look at.
Whether Ellie is a good or bad character is up to the player, and the same can be said about Abby. In the end though, they are both just survivors in an awful world. I don’t think this makes Ellie a villain, it just proved that she was human like everyone else. Losing someone you care that much about in a world where finding something to live for can be difficult would effect anyone that way.
