aintyourdad | app: havenrpg

Name: Froda
Contact Info: PM this journal, or

frodabaggins
Other Characters Played: N/A
Preferred Apartment: None

Character Name: Joel
Canon: The Last of Us
Canon Point: End of Winter, just after Ellie kills David.
Background/History: The Last of Us | Joel

Personality:

"I've been on both sides."

Joel is, in his own words, "a survivor". That may seem simple enough on the surface of it, until one understands just what it is that he has survived - a horrifying pandemic that decimated the human population, caused panic all over the world, led to the institution of martial law, and Joel has lived through twenty years of it.

Everyone in Joel's world has suffered terrible loss, and he is no different. The death of his daughter Sarah in the initial outbreak - not to the fungus, but to a soldier's bullets - traumatized him severely, and to a large extent, it started him down the path he's been on. Joel became strongly averse to making emotional attachments, and in fact has gone to great lengths to keep himself at arm's length from other people. Death is a brutal, terrible fact of life in Joel's world, and strong emotional attachments are as much a liability as a strength.

In order to survive, he's unlearned most of what might be called conventional morality - he's not just killing infected on a daily basis - he's also not above brutally murdering other (non-infected) people when he perceives them to be a threat to his own survival (or the survival of those few people he cares about). Joel's mindset can be summed up quite simply as "kill or be killed". Needless to say, he is highly desensitized to violence. He drops numerous hints throughout the game of the various lengths he's gone through to survive, and also clearly has taken steps to justify those tactics to himself over the years - smuggling, weapons dealing, torture, assault and murder all seem to be part of Joel's repertoire. The ease with which he kneecaps a man he took captive for interrogation in the Winter chapter speaks to the kind of brutality he's become accustomed to.

Due to his mindset, most of Joel's relationships take a practical turn - temporary alliances borne of necessity, essentially business relationships. This is exemplified in his relationship with Bill, the half-crazy survivalist - their relationship is predicated on the exchanging of favors, and ends as soon as the business deal is complete.

But Joel isn't a completely heartless killing machine - if anything, the reason he has so carefully constructed this facade of hardness and brutality is because he still most definitely has a heart, capable of feeling fierce love for others. For one thing, he does seem to have a soft spot for kids (his early hostility to Ellie notwithstanding). He's pretty good with them on the whole, and finds the thought of hurting them particularly distasteful. Furthermore, Tess represents a rather large soft spot, if she can be called that, in his life. The two were a team, back in Boston, practically inseparable, and it's implied that they had some kind of romantic or sexual relationship at one point. Joel's refusal to speak about Tess after her death speaks to his feelings for her - unable and unwilling to grieve properly, he shunts those feelings away.

There's also Tommy, Joel's younger brother. Their relationship is quite rocky, but as with Tess, it's clear that Joel is very protective of him and does care about him a great deal. Tommy implies that Joel is the primary reason he survived the first years of the outbreak, though they often have very divergent moral viewpoints. Much like with Tess, the shared history he has with Tommy ensures that even after years of estrangement, their bond is still quite strong, and his protective instincts are still there, no matter how much Tommy may resent him for some of the things he's done.

And then there's Ellie. The fourteen-year-old girl Joel gets saddled with because the damn Fireflies can't seem to stay alive long enough to make the rendezvous. Joel has spent twenty years killing and smuggling and chipping away at his own conscience and carefully building up walls around himself, and then he finds himself on a cross-country trek to try and cure the whole damn disease and this one girl starts to methodically chip away at his defenses, one by one, drawing him out, whether he likes it or not.

It would be fair to say that Ellie becomes a substitute, in Joel's mind, for his daughter. Where he was unable to save Sarah, perhaps he can save Ellie - and he will go to any lengths to do that. Whether this makes him a better person is arguable - whether this is even healthy is pretty arguable, really. He doesn't necessarily become softer or less likely to kill people, particularly when he believes Ellie's life to be in danger. On the contrary, by the Winter chapter, he will go to extreme lengths to protect the girl. Whatever the case may be, his feelings for Ellie are fierce and undeniable: where once he was hostile to her, there is now a deep bond based on their shared experiences and, yes, he loves her. Their partnership is one of symbiosis - they're both aware that they probably wouldn't survive without each other. By Winter, she has become his primary reason to keep surviving.

Abilities/Powers:

Joel is a badass normal, with no magical or supernatural powers. That said, emphasis on the badass - he's survived the zombie apocalypse for twenty years, so he's got really good instincts, is highly clever and resourceful and can improvise tools, med kits, weapons, bombs, etc. with whatever he's got to hand. This guy is also nearing 50 and he's perfectly capable of beating men to death with his bare hands without skipping a beat. Tough is an understatement. He's also got nearly preternatural hearing - an absolute must when infected "clickers" are around.

Items/Weapons:

+ His ratty brown backpack.
+ His gas mask.
+ His revolver.

Sample Entry: here

Sample Entry Two:

There was something off about this place.

Okay, so on the surface of it, there wasn't a whole lot different about this place from anywhere else Joel had been lately - it had the same desolate, abandoned look to it, after all. That's not what was off about it. It wasn't a big town, but after hours of scrounging and mentally mapping the area, he hadn't managed to leave town. He should've been able to leave town, but somehow, he just kept going in circles.

That, and Ellie was no-fucking-where to be found, which was the most worrying part of all. The last thing he could remember was a burning building, and the girl viciously hacking away at - well. Joel, still trying to get his bearings and shake off the last vestiges of fever, had needed to pull her bodily off the corpse as she sobbed and struggled.

He didn't know what had happened to her, but whatever it was, clearly was something she should never have gone through. That was on him, and now she was nowhere to be found.

"Ellie?" he called, poking around yet another abandoned building. He swiped up a can of something - beans, maybe - automatically as he spotted it, but his focus was clearly elsewhere. "C'mon, Ellie, I ain't gonna let 'em hurt ya anymore," he insisted. Where the hell was she?

He was running out of steam, fast, and he really needed to sit down and take a look at his healing wound. But as long as he was stuck here, separated from the girl, Joel had unfinished business.