"...and one of the first 'Ah ha!' moments I had kind of working on the story and the structure is when we figured out Joel's arc. And his arc is all about this irrational love you feel for your kid - that you would do anything to take away their pain, and definitely anything in the world to save them from harm. And it's about how far this guy, who's become a father to Ellie, how far he's willing to go to save her. Clearly, he's willing to give up his life - that comes pretty easily for him because he doesn't care much about it. But then we see he's willing to give up his friends' and family's lives, or put them at risk. All these walls and defenses that he's put around himself to kind of protect his emotional state, he's willing to throw all those down and put those at risk, because it's worth it. It's worth putting that at risk to have that love of your kid, even though that you might have to deal with something horrible happening to them. And he's willing to put his soul on the line, right? Damning the rest of mankind in exchange for this girl's life.
But what happens here on this lie, and in this emphasis on the lie, is... this is kind of taking his journey to the end of the line. That he's willing to put his relationship with Ellie on the line. The thing that he cares for the most. He's willing to risk that, you know, to protect Ellie.
And that final pause... and when Ellie says 'okay' means that she gets it. She knows he's lying, but she's willing to kind of put that behind her and accept it for a chance for them to find peace together... well, at least that's how most people interpret the ending... So I want to talk about my interpretation of that ending... The thing with that ending is it kind of misses Ellie's arc.
...So Ellie starts out clinging to these parental figures, thinking she needs someone much stronger than her in order to survive in this world. It starts out with Marlene, and pretty quickly it shifts to Joel as they go off on this journey. And she looks up to Joel - she wants to be like him, she wants to win his respect. And it's this kind of theme that we emphasize throughout the entire story - an example of it is like when Ellie is talking to Sam, she talks about how her greatest fear, more than anything, is ending up alone.
And yet as the story develops, we see that she's quite capable, and in fact she's been capable this whole time. And at many times, like, she stands up to Joel and forces him to respect her as an equal. And at times even more than that, right? When Joel is, again, we get to this moment that he is incapacitated, and as a player you become Ellie, and you get to see how strong she is, and how she tends to Joel and eventually kind of brings him back to life... And it's as Ellie that you kind of confront the worst of mankind, and you fight a character that does horrible things not for survival but for enjoyment... It's the only boss fight in the game, and this whole sequence is structured purposefully in such a way so that you think, in the last moment, Joel is going to burst in through that door and save Ellie. But in fact... Ellie saves herself (in kind of a brutal way).
And then we kind of pay our respect to that sequence... and show that it has a toll, and just because we're creating strong characters... doesn't mean that they can't have moments of weakness - that they can't be vulnerable. And at this moment, Joel does his best to cheer Ellie up, to bring her out of this dark place that she went to in her mind. And he opens up to her in ways that he's never opened up to anyone since the death of his daughter... But again it's Ellie who lifts her own spirits when she finds kind of the beauty in this herd of giraffes.
And we come to that ending, and that lie, and that 'okay'... and what does that 'okay' mean? Well it's definitely not a complicit 'yeah i'll go along with you'. In fact... it's the opposite. It's Ellie for the first time waking up and realizing that she can't rely on him anymore. That while she loves him for what he's done for her, she hates him for robbing her of that choice. She knows that she has to... she has to leave him. She has to make her own decisions, and her own mistakes... that's her arc going to the end of the line. And the thing she wanted most in life is this father figure, but to become truly independent, she has to give that up.
And that's kind of like... those two arcs... are the core truth for me in this story. That all the sacrifices we make as parents... is to give our kids tools to make their own decisions."
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