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A P P L I C A T I O N
Oct. 3rd, 2017 02:00 pmPLAYER
NAME: Avali
CONTACT:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
ladyavali
ARE YOU 18 OR OLDER: Y
CHARACTER
NAME: Joel
CANON: The Last of Us
AGE: late 40s
CANON POINT: Post-game
HISTORY:
The start of the game begins in Texas, 2013, with Joel's tween daughter asleep and snoozing on the couch alone in the middle of the night at just before 12am-- precisely the moment that Joel comes home from an obviously grueling day at work, arguing on the phone with his younger brother Tommy about how he 'can't afford to lose this job'. The call's clipped short, his daughter Sarah wakes up, and he makes absolutely no attempt to hide how flat-out exhausted he is when he nudges her over to drop himself down on the couch as well. The two exchange some sass that most parents would find horrifying (Dr. Phil would have a field day) when she gives him a brand new watch for a birthday gift. Eventually she nods off on the couch watching television with him and he carries her up to bed before leaving the house again.
Parent of the year.
Joel doesn't come bursting back into the house until much later, rushing over to load his revolver and warning Sarah that there's something wrong with the neighbors. Cue one neighbor slamming himself through plate glass in a bloody, gory mess and throwing himself at the both of them. No one in the audience is surprised. Joel empties his gun, Sarah mentally checks out (a tiny child not going into a screaming fit witnessing some serious business is a diamond in the rough) and the both of them retreat to Tommy's recently pulled up pickup truck. And yes, you guessed it, according to news reports people are 'sick' which is turning them 'aggressive'. (This is the point where all zombie survivalists would immediately retreat to their fully stocked underground bunkers, but apparently Joel, Tommy and Sarah haven't watched that many horror movies because they make a B-line for the highway.) They pass houses burning, families rushing to pack into cars and minivans, and even a familiar group of neighbors stranded and walking with their child along the side of the road. Tommy moves to stop and help them, while Joel-- what a champ-- grabs the steering wheel and demands he keep driving.
Yeah he's that guy. Keep that in mind because it doesn't get any better.
They get stuck in a traffic jam in the city, wind up in a car crash trying to avoid it, Sarah hurts her leg and Joel runs through the terrorized crowds to carry her to safety with Tommy in the lead. Brave and selfless, Tommy pins a door shut behind them, fending off a pack of infected so Joel can run ahead with Sarah. It's not too far of a run before he's saved by a soldier outfitted with full armor and a gas mask, but the soldier keeps them at bay, threatening that if they take one step closer, he'll shoot. Patching in a call to get orders (reiterating the fact that there's a little girl: hint #1 this isn't a good call) he says he's sorry before moving to turn his gun on Joel and Sarah.
Bullets are fired-- sending Joel and Sarah tumbling down into the dirt-- the soldier closing in to finish them off when Tommy shows up (with mild scratches, total hero) and shoots him. It'd be a happyish ending if not for the fact that Sarah's distressed gasps alert Joel to the fact that something's not right when he scrambles over, blood soaking through her shirt. A few heartbreaking moments of pleading and quiet panic follow till Sarah goes quiet and Joel clutches her to his chest, weeping and rocking and winning pretty much every award for the 'what the hell who thought this was a good idea for a video game opening' category.
Twenty years later and Joel is graying and stiff, like the old man from UP only instead of starting out nice and turning into a jerk, Joel starts off as a kind of a dick and evolves into superdick. He spends his time smuggling goods in and out of the quarantine zone with his boss (I could say partner, but she wears all the pants. All of them.) Tess. The two are owed a shipment of weapons, they head over to collect, and shoot/ bash in/ neck snap their way to the fellow responsible for screwing them over. When they find him? They're really not nice. Like, breaking your kneecaps because you owe them 5$ kind of not nice. They also shoot him in the face. Total role models, these two.
Standing over the dead body they're then met by the woman who'd purchased the gun shipment. Knowing they need to get their goods back despite the fact that the exchange has already made, Tess and Joel agree to help the woman (Marlene, leader of a resistance group known as the Fireflies) by transporting cargo through the city just outside the QZ. Unfortunately for them, the cargo turns out to be a little girl. (Not in a box or anything, just a living, walking, breathing teenage girl named Ellie.) With much fuss and irritation, Joel takes up babysitting duty, and the three of them move out to get the job done and get their shipment back. Not five minutes in and they're jumped by a military patrol that initiates a scan to see whether or not they're infected. Joel and Tess read clear, but before they can get to Ellie she stabs the soldier in the knee before Joel and Tess take out the rest. It's not until the coast is clear and Joel gets his hands on the scanner that he recoils: Ellie is infected.
The idea that they've been set up is the first to cross his mind, but Ellie explains that she's been bitten and is immune, showing a bubbled up bite mark on her arm. The Fireflies hope that by studying Ellie's immunity they can create a cure for the cordyceps infection, so getting her to a research facility on the other side of the country is their top priority-- hence the need to get her through the city to the designated meeting point. Suspicious, but not entirely deterred, they move on while dodging both the military and infected till they reach the end goal, only to find the Firefly team sent to pick up Ellie have all been killed. Joel moves to call it, but Tess says they can't go back: she's been bitten along the way, and the best she can do is fend off the military squad closing in on them to buy Joel and Ellie time to find another group of Fireflies for the sake of developing that cure. It's very sad, very touching, and Joel throws a hissing tantrum about it like the unreasonable creature he is.
Joel knows they need a car if they ever hope to make it anywhere without getting them both killed, so he heads over to call in a favor from his super paranoid friend Bill. On a 1-10 scale of zombie survivalist nutjob, Bill's a solid 15. The guy owns his own booby trapped town, freaks out because Ellie is-- to his mind-- stranger danger, and spends the whole time working their way over to find the one working battery in town that they need spitting curses in a fretful panic. They hit a few snags and snares along the way, but ultimately succeed and drive off into the sunset, Ellie in the backseat reading a stolen porn magazine.
From there they're attacked in Pittsburgh by a group of people known as 'hunters' (who ambush and kill other survivors for resources like clothing, food and weapons) and escape the city due to a dose of ruthlessness on Joel's part, and the assistance of a pair of young brothers named Henry and Sam. The pack bond a bit-- particularly Ellie and Sam, who are near the same age-- but it's all cut short when Sam is bitten and attacks Ellie, forcing Henry to shoot his own brother. Unable to cope, he turns his gun on himself and pulls the trigger.
After that there's a hike up to Wyoming where Joel heads to find his younger brother Tommy in the hopes that he might still have some of his Firefly contacts. Unexpectedly finding his brother happy and married, living in a self-sustaining community protected by an electrified wall/fence, using a nearby dam for electricity. It's apparent right from the start that Tommy is doing better off in life than his older brother, and instead of being happy for them, the first thing Joel does is ask him to leave his life there behind to take Ellie to the Fireflies instead. When Tommy, shocked and somewhat offended, says he can't, Joel goes off like a lit bomb, shoving all his frustration at Tommy instead of admitting that yeah, it is kind of crappy to show up on someone's doorstep after so many years demanding a life-threatening favor.
The dam is then attacked by a pack of hunters which interrupts the very touching family reunion, and by the time the scavengers are cleared and Joel is back with Ellie, he breaks the news that he won't be traveling with her anymore and that Tommy will be taking his place. Ellie, predictably, doesn't take it well. Stealing a spare horse and running off, Joel and Tommy give chase, eventually tracking her to a mostly intact ranch home. Ellie butts heads with Joel, telling him that everyone leaves her before he cuts her off to complain about his own problems again. Hunters show up again, the trio clear the house, and on the slow ride back Joel decides to be slightly less of a jerk: he tells Tommy to go back to his wife and that he'll be finishing the trip to a Firefly research facility in Colorado with Ellie.
It'd be sweet if not for the fact that he probably could have saved everyone the stress by just being a decent adult and not asking his younger brother to go in the first place, but hey, baby steps.
Joel and Ellie reach the University of Eastern Colorado and find it abandoned (notes stating that they packed up their research and equipment to migrate to Utah) but before they can get out of dodge scot-free... more hunters show up! (it's kind of a repeat theme, okay) While scuffling with one of them along a second story railing, Joel is pressed over the edge and lands on a protruding steel pipe, effectively impaling himself through his lower right side. Ellie takes point through the rest of the fight, shooting a clear path and assisting Joel as he limps along towards the horse they've left parallel parked out front. Shortly thereafter he blacks out, and wakes-- weeks later-- in the basement of an abandoned lakeside house. Ellie's nowhere to be found.
Hobbling out into the daylight in pain (though the severe infection in his body already clearing from a strong dose of antibiotics that Ellie had found and administered prior to her abduction) Joel spots a lingering group of hunters and manages to capture two of them, dragging them back to the house for a dose of brutal torture in order to pinpoint where they'd taken Ellie. Once he has what he needs, he kills them both and heads to a nearby town hoping to save her. By the time he arrives, Ellie's already saved herself: tearfully and repeatedly slamming a machete into the head of her attacker. For the first time since the two had met, Joel moves to take Ellie into his arms, tugging the machete from her and muttering that she'll be all right.
They reach Utah after the end of winter, Joel cheerfully chirping as they climb their way through the city about all the things he's going to take her to do once the Fireflies finish their research. Ellie, distracted and distant, doesn't respond to much of it till she spots a meandering pack of giraffes that've escaped from the Salt Lake City zoo. The two share a brief talk about what's ahead and Joel offers a chance to just turn around and go back (gold star sticker for more selfishness, Joel) but Ellie declines, saying that after everything they've been through, it can't have been for nothing.
It's all pretty calm-- actually it's all just pretty, thanks to summer wildlife blossoming all over the place-- and Joel and Ellie work their way down into a flooded tunnel system where Joel's heavy butt drops them both down into the water. Ellie attempts to save him, but seeing as how she can't swim, quickly starts to drown. The Fireflies show up just in time to keep her from dying while Joel is performing CPR.
Though they also hit him in the head with a rifle, so that's not all that pleasant.
Joel wakes in a hospital room to find Marlene sitting beside him. After a brief exchange about how miraculous it is that they survived and Marlene talking about using Ellie's mutated tissue to create a vaccine, Joel comes to the realization that because the infection grows all over the brain, they intend to kill her to create the cure. That doesn't go over well. Marlene instructs her guard to escort Joel out, with the addition that if he tries anything, to shoot him.
He winds up trying. A lot. Specifically Joel fights his way through the entire hospital to get to the operating room, kills one of the doctors when he threatens to stop Joel by brandishing a scalpel, and lifts the unconscious Ellie from the operating table to make a break for the exit-- mirroring the initial run at the start of the game with Sarah in his arms. He's stopped by Marlene who begs him not to take her, promises that this is their only chance and that Ellie will only die out in the world, or worse. Joel shoots her.
Ellie wakes up in the back seat of a truck, with Joel promising that it turns out the Fireflies never needed her to make the cure because as it turns out, a bunch of other people were also immune. As the game ends, Joel and Ellie make a quick hike over a cliffside towards the entrance to Tommy's town once again. Ellie asks him if he was telling the truth about the Fireflies, and Joel, being just as selfish as ever, says 'I swear'.
PERSONALITY:
"I struggled for a long time with survivin'. And you— No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for."
Joel is, as the history section pretty much sums up, a selfish person. Before the outbreak he got married early due to getting his girlfriend knocked up, and from there on out the relationship went downhill rather quickly. By the time the game starts and his daughter has hit teenage years they've already separated, and it's not difficult to see why. He leaves his daughter unattended in the dead of night, his work life is very obviously not in order, and shotgun weddings don't often make for stable futures. After the outbreak, he only gets worse.
Joel and Tommy did some shady things to stay alive (Joel tells Ellie that he was a hunter himself at one point, and Tommy also states pretty plainly that being unable to stomach some of the things they did eventually led him to the Fireflies, though eventually he found the resistance just as unsatisfying) but the fact that Tommy finds an out-- starts a family and settles down protecting others-- while Joel continues to shoot, maim and kill his way through life speaks volumes. He could have easily stopped, could have picked up his life and moved on the way his younger brother did. He chose not to.
Not only that, when Tess faces her death and tells him, bottom line that they are 'shitty people' (choosing to do something good with what's left in her life rather than selfishly keep running till she turns into a mindless creature) Joel reacts with pure, genuine shock: denying her description and telling her they are survivors with the implication that it justifies every last horrid thing they'd done. Something he repeats at the end of the game despite everything he's been through. Instead of owning up to his mistakes, his poor choices, Joel time and time again repaints the world the way he wants it to be. He can't understand why Tommy isn't willing to just pick up and leave the life he's made to take Ellie to the Fireflies, he isn't willing to let Ellie make her own decisions if it means giving up her life for the sake of saving humanity. And what he doesn't understand or want is-- for the most part-- what he rejects entirely.
There is a very, very fine line in this, however. Joel's devotion to the people he cares about keeps him from tipping over the edge entirely. That's not to say he's selfless when he's around them: Joel expects things to go his way and stays stubborn as anything about his opinions, but he is willing to die to keep Sarah and Ellie safe, was willing to settle down with Tess if she was ever ready to stop. He loves, even if it takes one hell of a lot to make it happen. It's just a selfish, stubborn, almost intolerable sort of love. And by the end of the game when he can't even tell Ellie the truth despite her obviously knowing it already, it's painfully obvious he needs her more than she needs him.
POWERS:
He's great at punching things, being ungraceful in every possible aspect of the word, not dying while chewing on expired, unlabeled pills and jamming screws into guns to make them better. His weakness is he's a big brat and doesn't take anything well except for injuries. (Joel does okay with those.) Also can't climb anything ever.
Seriously though, he's just an old guy with a beard.
SAMPLES
1ST PERSON: NETWORK SAMPLE
3rd PERSON: LOG SAMPLE
MISC
PLANS: Get in, punch things, build some stuff, be an irritant re: friends and foes alike.
Eat pills off the ground.
Normal stuff.
CHARACTER @ID SUGGESTIONS: NA, hit me with your best shot
HOW DID YOUR CHARACTER JOIN COST? No memory. He's too stubborn to acknowledge his own thoughts half the time, anyway.
NAME: Avali
CONTACT:
ARE YOU 18 OR OLDER: Y
CHARACTER
NAME: Joel
CANON: The Last of Us
AGE: late 40s
CANON POINT: Post-game
HISTORY:
The start of the game begins in Texas, 2013, with Joel's tween daughter asleep and snoozing on the couch alone in the middle of the night at just before 12am-- precisely the moment that Joel comes home from an obviously grueling day at work, arguing on the phone with his younger brother Tommy about how he 'can't afford to lose this job'. The call's clipped short, his daughter Sarah wakes up, and he makes absolutely no attempt to hide how flat-out exhausted he is when he nudges her over to drop himself down on the couch as well. The two exchange some sass that most parents would find horrifying (Dr. Phil would have a field day) when she gives him a brand new watch for a birthday gift. Eventually she nods off on the couch watching television with him and he carries her up to bed before leaving the house again.
Parent of the year.
Joel doesn't come bursting back into the house until much later, rushing over to load his revolver and warning Sarah that there's something wrong with the neighbors. Cue one neighbor slamming himself through plate glass in a bloody, gory mess and throwing himself at the both of them. No one in the audience is surprised. Joel empties his gun, Sarah mentally checks out (a tiny child not going into a screaming fit witnessing some serious business is a diamond in the rough) and the both of them retreat to Tommy's recently pulled up pickup truck. And yes, you guessed it, according to news reports people are 'sick' which is turning them 'aggressive'. (This is the point where all zombie survivalists would immediately retreat to their fully stocked underground bunkers, but apparently Joel, Tommy and Sarah haven't watched that many horror movies because they make a B-line for the highway.) They pass houses burning, families rushing to pack into cars and minivans, and even a familiar group of neighbors stranded and walking with their child along the side of the road. Tommy moves to stop and help them, while Joel-- what a champ-- grabs the steering wheel and demands he keep driving.
Yeah he's that guy. Keep that in mind because it doesn't get any better.
They get stuck in a traffic jam in the city, wind up in a car crash trying to avoid it, Sarah hurts her leg and Joel runs through the terrorized crowds to carry her to safety with Tommy in the lead. Brave and selfless, Tommy pins a door shut behind them, fending off a pack of infected so Joel can run ahead with Sarah. It's not too far of a run before he's saved by a soldier outfitted with full armor and a gas mask, but the soldier keeps them at bay, threatening that if they take one step closer, he'll shoot. Patching in a call to get orders (reiterating the fact that there's a little girl: hint #1 this isn't a good call) he says he's sorry before moving to turn his gun on Joel and Sarah.
Bullets are fired-- sending Joel and Sarah tumbling down into the dirt-- the soldier closing in to finish them off when Tommy shows up (with mild scratches, total hero) and shoots him. It'd be a happyish ending if not for the fact that Sarah's distressed gasps alert Joel to the fact that something's not right when he scrambles over, blood soaking through her shirt. A few heartbreaking moments of pleading and quiet panic follow till Sarah goes quiet and Joel clutches her to his chest, weeping and rocking and winning pretty much every award for the 'what the hell who thought this was a good idea for a video game opening' category.
Twenty years later and Joel is graying and stiff, like the old man from UP only instead of starting out nice and turning into a jerk, Joel starts off as a kind of a dick and evolves into superdick. He spends his time smuggling goods in and out of the quarantine zone with his boss (I could say partner, but she wears all the pants. All of them.) Tess. The two are owed a shipment of weapons, they head over to collect, and shoot/ bash in/ neck snap their way to the fellow responsible for screwing them over. When they find him? They're really not nice. Like, breaking your kneecaps because you owe them 5$ kind of not nice. They also shoot him in the face. Total role models, these two.
Standing over the dead body they're then met by the woman who'd purchased the gun shipment. Knowing they need to get their goods back despite the fact that the exchange has already made, Tess and Joel agree to help the woman (Marlene, leader of a resistance group known as the Fireflies) by transporting cargo through the city just outside the QZ. Unfortunately for them, the cargo turns out to be a little girl. (Not in a box or anything, just a living, walking, breathing teenage girl named Ellie.) With much fuss and irritation, Joel takes up babysitting duty, and the three of them move out to get the job done and get their shipment back. Not five minutes in and they're jumped by a military patrol that initiates a scan to see whether or not they're infected. Joel and Tess read clear, but before they can get to Ellie she stabs the soldier in the knee before Joel and Tess take out the rest. It's not until the coast is clear and Joel gets his hands on the scanner that he recoils: Ellie is infected.
The idea that they've been set up is the first to cross his mind, but Ellie explains that she's been bitten and is immune, showing a bubbled up bite mark on her arm. The Fireflies hope that by studying Ellie's immunity they can create a cure for the cordyceps infection, so getting her to a research facility on the other side of the country is their top priority-- hence the need to get her through the city to the designated meeting point. Suspicious, but not entirely deterred, they move on while dodging both the military and infected till they reach the end goal, only to find the Firefly team sent to pick up Ellie have all been killed. Joel moves to call it, but Tess says they can't go back: she's been bitten along the way, and the best she can do is fend off the military squad closing in on them to buy Joel and Ellie time to find another group of Fireflies for the sake of developing that cure. It's very sad, very touching, and Joel throws a hissing tantrum about it like the unreasonable creature he is.
Joel knows they need a car if they ever hope to make it anywhere without getting them both killed, so he heads over to call in a favor from his super paranoid friend Bill. On a 1-10 scale of zombie survivalist nutjob, Bill's a solid 15. The guy owns his own booby trapped town, freaks out because Ellie is-- to his mind-- stranger danger, and spends the whole time working their way over to find the one working battery in town that they need spitting curses in a fretful panic. They hit a few snags and snares along the way, but ultimately succeed and drive off into the sunset, Ellie in the backseat reading a stolen porn magazine.
From there they're attacked in Pittsburgh by a group of people known as 'hunters' (who ambush and kill other survivors for resources like clothing, food and weapons) and escape the city due to a dose of ruthlessness on Joel's part, and the assistance of a pair of young brothers named Henry and Sam. The pack bond a bit-- particularly Ellie and Sam, who are near the same age-- but it's all cut short when Sam is bitten and attacks Ellie, forcing Henry to shoot his own brother. Unable to cope, he turns his gun on himself and pulls the trigger.
After that there's a hike up to Wyoming where Joel heads to find his younger brother Tommy in the hopes that he might still have some of his Firefly contacts. Unexpectedly finding his brother happy and married, living in a self-sustaining community protected by an electrified wall/fence, using a nearby dam for electricity. It's apparent right from the start that Tommy is doing better off in life than his older brother, and instead of being happy for them, the first thing Joel does is ask him to leave his life there behind to take Ellie to the Fireflies instead. When Tommy, shocked and somewhat offended, says he can't, Joel goes off like a lit bomb, shoving all his frustration at Tommy instead of admitting that yeah, it is kind of crappy to show up on someone's doorstep after so many years demanding a life-threatening favor.
The dam is then attacked by a pack of hunters which interrupts the very touching family reunion, and by the time the scavengers are cleared and Joel is back with Ellie, he breaks the news that he won't be traveling with her anymore and that Tommy will be taking his place. Ellie, predictably, doesn't take it well. Stealing a spare horse and running off, Joel and Tommy give chase, eventually tracking her to a mostly intact ranch home. Ellie butts heads with Joel, telling him that everyone leaves her before he cuts her off to complain about his own problems again. Hunters show up again, the trio clear the house, and on the slow ride back Joel decides to be slightly less of a jerk: he tells Tommy to go back to his wife and that he'll be finishing the trip to a Firefly research facility in Colorado with Ellie.
It'd be sweet if not for the fact that he probably could have saved everyone the stress by just being a decent adult and not asking his younger brother to go in the first place, but hey, baby steps.
Joel and Ellie reach the University of Eastern Colorado and find it abandoned (notes stating that they packed up their research and equipment to migrate to Utah) but before they can get out of dodge scot-free... more hunters show up! (it's kind of a repeat theme, okay) While scuffling with one of them along a second story railing, Joel is pressed over the edge and lands on a protruding steel pipe, effectively impaling himself through his lower right side. Ellie takes point through the rest of the fight, shooting a clear path and assisting Joel as he limps along towards the horse they've left parallel parked out front. Shortly thereafter he blacks out, and wakes-- weeks later-- in the basement of an abandoned lakeside house. Ellie's nowhere to be found.
Hobbling out into the daylight in pain (though the severe infection in his body already clearing from a strong dose of antibiotics that Ellie had found and administered prior to her abduction) Joel spots a lingering group of hunters and manages to capture two of them, dragging them back to the house for a dose of brutal torture in order to pinpoint where they'd taken Ellie. Once he has what he needs, he kills them both and heads to a nearby town hoping to save her. By the time he arrives, Ellie's already saved herself: tearfully and repeatedly slamming a machete into the head of her attacker. For the first time since the two had met, Joel moves to take Ellie into his arms, tugging the machete from her and muttering that she'll be all right.
They reach Utah after the end of winter, Joel cheerfully chirping as they climb their way through the city about all the things he's going to take her to do once the Fireflies finish their research. Ellie, distracted and distant, doesn't respond to much of it till she spots a meandering pack of giraffes that've escaped from the Salt Lake City zoo. The two share a brief talk about what's ahead and Joel offers a chance to just turn around and go back (gold star sticker for more selfishness, Joel) but Ellie declines, saying that after everything they've been through, it can't have been for nothing.
It's all pretty calm-- actually it's all just pretty, thanks to summer wildlife blossoming all over the place-- and Joel and Ellie work their way down into a flooded tunnel system where Joel's heavy butt drops them both down into the water. Ellie attempts to save him, but seeing as how she can't swim, quickly starts to drown. The Fireflies show up just in time to keep her from dying while Joel is performing CPR.
Though they also hit him in the head with a rifle, so that's not all that pleasant.
Joel wakes in a hospital room to find Marlene sitting beside him. After a brief exchange about how miraculous it is that they survived and Marlene talking about using Ellie's mutated tissue to create a vaccine, Joel comes to the realization that because the infection grows all over the brain, they intend to kill her to create the cure. That doesn't go over well. Marlene instructs her guard to escort Joel out, with the addition that if he tries anything, to shoot him.
He winds up trying. A lot. Specifically Joel fights his way through the entire hospital to get to the operating room, kills one of the doctors when he threatens to stop Joel by brandishing a scalpel, and lifts the unconscious Ellie from the operating table to make a break for the exit-- mirroring the initial run at the start of the game with Sarah in his arms. He's stopped by Marlene who begs him not to take her, promises that this is their only chance and that Ellie will only die out in the world, or worse. Joel shoots her.
Ellie wakes up in the back seat of a truck, with Joel promising that it turns out the Fireflies never needed her to make the cure because as it turns out, a bunch of other people were also immune. As the game ends, Joel and Ellie make a quick hike over a cliffside towards the entrance to Tommy's town once again. Ellie asks him if he was telling the truth about the Fireflies, and Joel, being just as selfish as ever, says 'I swear'.
PERSONALITY:
Joel is, as the history section pretty much sums up, a selfish person. Before the outbreak he got married early due to getting his girlfriend knocked up, and from there on out the relationship went downhill rather quickly. By the time the game starts and his daughter has hit teenage years they've already separated, and it's not difficult to see why. He leaves his daughter unattended in the dead of night, his work life is very obviously not in order, and shotgun weddings don't often make for stable futures. After the outbreak, he only gets worse.
Joel and Tommy did some shady things to stay alive (Joel tells Ellie that he was a hunter himself at one point, and Tommy also states pretty plainly that being unable to stomach some of the things they did eventually led him to the Fireflies, though eventually he found the resistance just as unsatisfying) but the fact that Tommy finds an out-- starts a family and settles down protecting others-- while Joel continues to shoot, maim and kill his way through life speaks volumes. He could have easily stopped, could have picked up his life and moved on the way his younger brother did. He chose not to.
Not only that, when Tess faces her death and tells him, bottom line that they are 'shitty people' (choosing to do something good with what's left in her life rather than selfishly keep running till she turns into a mindless creature) Joel reacts with pure, genuine shock: denying her description and telling her they are survivors with the implication that it justifies every last horrid thing they'd done. Something he repeats at the end of the game despite everything he's been through. Instead of owning up to his mistakes, his poor choices, Joel time and time again repaints the world the way he wants it to be. He can't understand why Tommy isn't willing to just pick up and leave the life he's made to take Ellie to the Fireflies, he isn't willing to let Ellie make her own decisions if it means giving up her life for the sake of saving humanity. And what he doesn't understand or want is-- for the most part-- what he rejects entirely.
There is a very, very fine line in this, however. Joel's devotion to the people he cares about keeps him from tipping over the edge entirely. That's not to say he's selfless when he's around them: Joel expects things to go his way and stays stubborn as anything about his opinions, but he is willing to die to keep Sarah and Ellie safe, was willing to settle down with Tess if she was ever ready to stop. He loves, even if it takes one hell of a lot to make it happen. It's just a selfish, stubborn, almost intolerable sort of love. And by the end of the game when he can't even tell Ellie the truth despite her obviously knowing it already, it's painfully obvious he needs her more than she needs him.
POWERS:
He's great at punching things, being ungraceful in every possible aspect of the word, not dying while chewing on expired, unlabeled pills and jamming screws into guns to make them better. His weakness is he's a big brat and doesn't take anything well except for injuries. (Joel does okay with those.) Also can't climb anything ever.
Seriously though, he's just an old guy with a beard.
SAMPLES
1ST PERSON: NETWORK SAMPLE
3rd PERSON: LOG SAMPLE
MISC
PLANS: Get in, punch things, build some stuff, be an irritant re: friends and foes alike.
Eat pills off the ground.
Normal stuff.
CHARACTER @ID SUGGESTIONS: NA, hit me with your best shot
HOW DID YOUR CHARACTER JOIN COST? No memory. He's too stubborn to acknowledge his own thoughts half the time, anyway.
