SPOILERS AHOY: I talk about Ellie’s role in “The Last Of Us” in great detail, Left Behind included. If you’re a PlayStation 3 owner that hasn’t played either.. what are you doing? Needless to say, I was completely blown away by Naughty Dog’s smash hit survival-horror/action game “The Last Of Us” in 2013. Its marriage of storytelling and gameplay is relatively unmatched in the gaming industry today, and its moral ambiguity in its narrative, haunting beauty in its environments, and its incredibly thought-provoking ending has stuck with me since its release. However, one aspect of the game completely took me by surprise and stole my heart in the process: Ellie.
[promo title=”She’s a Natural”][/promo]
What initially blew me away about Ellie was the way she was presented. In a business where female characters in video games are pretty faces behind walls of cleavage, here’s a fourteen-year-old girl with freckles, stringy hair, and a thin scar through her eyebrow. In a medium where a secondary female protagonist is barely presented in the box art, here she is taking as much space on the front as the title, more-so than Joel, who you play as in 80% of the game. In a media jungle of laughable dialogue, the “damsel-in-distress” character frame and thrown-in romantic interests, here’s a potty-mouthed, switchblade-thrusting innocent with an admirable curiosity of a world dead long before her time. She can hold her own in a fight, she masks fear and insecurity with cusses, threats, and fake smiles, and the relationship between you/Joel and her can be best-described in one word: natural.
[promo title=”A Girl to Protect, But Not One to be Catered To”][/promo]
Ellie isn’t the princess to be saved at the end of Bowser’s castle. She definitely isn’t a Rambo-matching, dual pistol-wielding survivor/tomb raider like Lara Croft. She has comfortably found a sweet spot in between, and her surprise playable section in the main story explored that, and further established her abilities in “Left Behind”. She isn’t as gruff or physical as Joel, but her talent with ranged weapons (her trademark being the bow-and-arrow) make her a threat on her own terms. In the main game, you don’t train her and care for her the way you do with Clementine in TellTale’s “The Walking Dead”, but rather you learn to trust her. I can’t even begin to list the numerous times she spared me a gruesome death in Survivor Mode thanks to a brick she lobbed at an angry face or a spare medkit she passed me. The game didn’t hold my hand and tell me to check on Ellie, I was doing that myself. I was rotating the camera to make sure she was in my view, and I made sure to wait until she was behind cover before I did anything reckless to expose us.
[promo title=”Love, Friendship, and Everything in Between”][/promo]
When interacting with Riley in “Left Behind”, I found Ellie in her natural habitat. It didn’t really occur to me how restricted and shy Ellie felt when initially talking to Joel until I saw her laughing and goofing around with Riley, exploring an abandoned Halloween shop, or chucking bricks at abandoned vans in a contest to break all the windows first. The way she explored and interacted with her environment reminded me of my high-school misadventures, where it all came down to my friend and me, unbridled and unchained from an adult’s supervision, disapproving glare or daunting shadow, and just being our potty-mouthed, inquisitive selves.
I remember how hard it was being myself as a teenager, and it didn’t even occur to me how hard it must have been for Ellie & Riley. Contrasting with her developing relationship with Joel, hers with Riley is pre-established and I found myself laughing at their inside jokes and reminiscing, or simply dropping an endearment when sharing a heart-felt moment. One scene, however, blew me away completely. Riley finds a working stereo in an electronics shop and urges Ellie to dance with her, after having a heated spat of how Ellie felt about Riley leaving to join the Fireflies in a new checkpoint. The two girls are giggling, having fun, and all the walls that Ellie set up for herself suddenly melt away. She stops dead in her tracks, looks up at Riley and tells her not to go. Riley tears off her Firefly tag, and Ellie leans in to kiss her.
I almost fell out of my chair.
The kiss itself didn’t last 3 seconds, and it was just as powerful to me as her coming of age Winter segment in the main campaign, or Bill finding his dead partner in an old house. It made me think, and think hard. Whether or not Ellie was gay, it didn’t matter. She naturally did what all teenagers do in that kind of situation, especially with somebody they care the world for: act on instinct. She needed to let out all of her emotions, she needed to let Riley know how grateful she was for her, and in a world where 80% of the remaining human population is cynical, angry, bitter, and resentful, love is rare, and it is precious. That is why I, as difficult as it was, sided with Joel when he kidnapped Ellie from the operating table. That is why I understood his pain, and have all the more love and respect for Ellie as a character. She is human.
[promo title=”What We Should Take From Ellie”][/promo]
Not every female character has to be sexualized and not every female character has cater to the male audience. She doesn’t need to be a complete powerhouse, and she doesn’t have to be rescued time and time again. What makes Ellie so special is that she is just like any other teenager her age, and reflects on what made that time so confusing and yet so important. She is completely genuine, and the game does not force her upon you. You welcome her, and you savor the time you spend with her. Thanks to her portrayal, maybe other developers can take the hint as to what makes a character great: not their gender, not their sexual orientation, but rather their human qualities, personality, and drive. Take a page from Ellie. Take a page from The Last Of Us.