PixlBit

Is Joel really a bad guy? This is the one thing that's really bugged me since finishing "The Last of Us" (TLoU). Not because I think he's a bad guy, but because it seems like most of the things I've read and heard on the ending of TLoU are folks talking about how horrible of a person Joel is. I really don't understand this logic. It's the apocalypse. His daughter, the most (and maybe only) important thing in his life, is shot by the military in the first 20 minutes of the game and dies in his arms.

Now, I don't know how many of the people calling him a "bad guy" have kids, but as a father, if that happened to me I can promise you that I'd have a pretty negative opinion of the human race in general. But what I found to be the most interesting aspect of the story was Joel's journey. He started the game as a working class guy with a teenage daughter, and then to have her ripped away from him at the very beginning of the entire world going to shit. Twenty years later he appears to be a shell of a man, smuggling things in and out of the quarantine zone, with little to no regard for human life. Things happen over the course of the game that tell us that Joel has done some bad things to survive over the years, though I don't think that it was anything as vile as what David and his crew were doing.

But then Ellie is thrust into his life. A girl that's about the same age as his daughter when she was killed. And it's obvious from the start that Joel has built up this wall to prevent him from caring for people. Hell, he spends the first half of the game trying to get rid of her. But throughout the whole thing it's obvious that he cares for her safety, whether he would admit it or not. But it's when he's standing there at the point of no return, that point of leaving her or staying with her, that his true feelings come through and he completely gives in to the fact that yes, he really does care for Ellie. We see this in the very next scene with him seeming immediately more open and comfortable with his acceptance of his feelings for Ellie.

I found the part where you play as Ellie and ultimately meet David to be a really nice twist on joel and Ellie's relationship. He's been taking care of and protecting her all this time, and now that he's given in to the fact that he cares for her, something happens that causes their roles to reverse and she has to care for him for a time. And the fact that he doesn't quite get to her in time to kill David himself, but does get there in time to hold her and comfort her after she kills David, was an incredibly touching moment in the game.

After this moment we see an even more attached and open Joel. Except this time Ellie is the distant one, no doubt still trying to cope with the traumatic experience she suffered in the previous chapter. And then she sees the giraffes, and she's given hope that there's still something worth living for, and that not everything in the world is wicked and vile. And all of these things, all of this development of Joel and Ellie's relationship from the moment they met, to the moment that Marlene tells Joel that they're going to have to kill Ellie if there's to be any hope of finding a cure, comes to a head when Joel is being escorted out of the hospital by the Fireflys.

It's in this moment that we really see who Joel truly is. Here's a man who had what mattered most to him in the world, his daughter, taken from him, not by the infected, but by normal people. A man that's spent twenty years building up walls to keep him from giving a shit about other people, or the world for that matter. A man that gets a second chance at being a father, at loving another person, and now he's supposed to just stand by and let this person be killed, because there might be a chance to save to the human race? The same human race responsible for all of his past pain and suffering? And people are surprised by this? Or think this is wrong? I think that not only are Joel's actions at the end of the game justifiable, but that they are morally acceptable.

As depressing as the story is, in the end it's a love story. Joel loved Ellie, enough that he would rather save her than the world. The fact that he lies to her at the end about what happened with the Fireflys is really the perfect ending to his journey. In the beginning he couldn't wait to get rid of her, but by the end he was willing to risk everything to keep her. That, to me, is not a bad man.