âThe leaven which animated my existence is gone: the charm which cheered me in the gloom of night, and aroused me from my morning slumbers, is for ever fled.â
- The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Hey! This question will be in two bits because there isnât many characters per submission: I wanted to pick your brains about the final conversation between Joel and Ellie before he dies, in which she says, "I was supposed to die in that hospital. My life would have fucking mattered. But you took that from me." MY response to this was always an empathetic one, in that she felt like, in a world in which each and every action feels insignificant, giving her life would have meant everything. (1/2)
Question Re: Joel & Ellie convo continued: A friend of mine played it recently, and didn't like it, stating that she came off as very âself-obsessedâ. I think this is a valid reading based on the dialogue, but I was disappointed, I guess, at the lack of consideration! Although I wished ND had looked at the broader picture a little more, I would love to know what your interpretation is of it. Thank you for your time. X (2/2)Â
I can understand and see why, to some people, Ellieâs behavior can seem self obsessed, but this is a person stripped of her agency in a world that is devastatingly lonely and I don't think your friendâs interpretation is âwrongâ, and I'm sure mine is less than impartial and by any means ârightâ. I've been putting myself in her mental space for months now but Iâm not one of the people that brought her to life. I'm sure there are many more unbiased opinions that are far better articulated out there.
I'm just a person with a blog and thoughts and a lot of free time thanks to a global pandemic to think them. In the end its up to individuals to ascribe their own meaning to the media they consume.
Under the cut is mine.
The Last of Us Part II frames Ellieâs journey to âfind and kill every last one of themâ as that of an addict. We watch as the girl we know and love from Part I become consumed by this need to avenge Joelâs death to make his passing matter. That spiral, of life mattering in world that does not care about you, didnât start with Joelâs death, her need to have her life matter (after being told at the age of 14 that she was humanityâs key to a vaccine) started when Riley turned and she didnât. To get to that point on the porch you have to look at Ellieâs history of trauma.
Surviving a life or death situation is brutal, you have moments when you feel happy and suddenly your laughter turns to overwhelming guilt and pain because youâre still alive and that person or group of people arenât and in your mind it becomes and it should have been me cycle. Over and over. You can push your survivorâs guilt aside for a time, but it always comes back. Imagine going through that, and then to weeks later being told that your immunity means something you mean something. Now Ellie has a reason to make the loss of Rileyâs life worth something. Her death and Ellieâs continued living isnât for nothing.
Through Part I we follow Ellie and Joel as they fight and lose so many people whom Ellie forms quick bonds with. Tess, Sam, Henry, even her own mother died shortly after giving birth to her. She continues to live while everyone she cares about around her dies or leaves. You would probably feel a little bit at fault after this pattern repeats and repeats. Ellie has a way to make things right to have all that pain matter. To right what in her eyes, is a great injustice that others die while she lives.
Ellie changes after David, sheâs had to kill someone she made a tenuous connection with to survive an encounter only to have him prove to her she was right to distrust him. Up until then she trusted people easier, wanted to help Sam and Henry when Joel would rather cast them aside. Joel is not there to distrust David and so she does and, his actions as well as some dialogue shows, heâs demonstrably evil. Joel is right to distrust others and that loss of trust in the world festers in her for a while. We see it in spades in Part II.Â
Getting into Utah, Ellie isnât herself. Shes distant, off. Joel has to pry answers and itâs only at the giraffe scene do we see a glimpse of who she was before. Even in that moment she wants to get the Firefly journey over no matter the cost. Joel wants to be selfish and go back to Jackson but she has to see it through. Because it canât be for nothing. The loss of everyone weighs on her and sheâs a kid. There is no one to help her process her trauma. Joel for all his love is a broken, imperfect man, trying to do right by himself after failing his own daughter.
The choice to sacrifice herself is one she wanted to make, but she nearly drowns and instead of waiting (I mean, really yâall waited 20 years you could wait a week for the kid jesus) she loses the one choice that she had left. The one choice she could make. She wakes up on the way to Jackson, everyone sheâs cared about is still dead and now, there is no cure. That alone is devastating enough. Sheâs in a community of people she canât tell anyone about her immunity, thatâs isolating. We see how hard itâs been for her through the reveal of her immunity with Dina, both in the weed den in the theater.
Years pass and this thought that the person you trust more than anyone else lied to you eats away at the back of your mind. She canât escape that guilt either, not trusting someone who risked his life for her the way Joel did, but he dismisses her questions, acts defensive when there are two bodies that her cure could have prevented lying at their feet. Finding out the truth? That not only Joel lied, but that in trying to âsave herâ he killed the only person who could make a vaccine? Not only would her death have meant something, in doing so she could have prevented more death, but now no one is saved. No one lives, except her. And she canât get infected.
In Utah she finds out the truth from a recording. Not the man sheâs trusted. She then has to force Joel to tell her the truth, threatens to leave him and Jackson and the life he had for her to get him to do so. Because to have something so monumental to your personal redemption stripped away like that by the one person who cared enough to stay? Thatâll fuck anyone up.
That moment on the porch is a culmination of all that, with the added pain of having lost Joel, emotionally, as someone she could trust over a short period of time. Joel stood up to Seth for her and Dina, but in her eyes, she had control of the situation and Joel took it from her. She canât fix the world, but she has one choice she is in control of in this moment. She can choose to try and forgive Joel. She can choose to give him a second chance.
Maybe that is self-obsessed to some. Maybe to others its a Joelâs actions are a more egregious motivation of selfishness to save one life when he couldnât save Sarahâs. To Ellie her life doesnât matter, but to everyone who has ever cared for her, ever loved her, it does.
Thatâs the thing with humans, we donât matter in the grand scheme of the universe. Weâre less than a blip trying to be a wave in an ocean more vast and deep than we can ever comprehend. To everyone around us in our individual lives however, weâre capable of being a wave in a puddle at times. We donât always know that though. People are wired to believe they donât matter to others as much as those people matter to them. Thatâs why sometimes dying on a slab seems like the best option.
But I think how varied, and divisive, the response to Ellie and this story has been stands to show one of the points of the game: You can't fully understand what others are going through. You only see what you want to see on the surface until you know their struggles. And then knowing what you know, ask yourself if you could forgive them. There is no true right and wrong, bad or good, under circumstance. Our continued sense of humanity is a morally gray fog we have to navigate each and every day and hope that when the fog clears enough for us to move forward we can see there is something better out there to fight for.
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