Entry Seven

Images courtesy of Naughty Dog, Inc. (2013)

It’s cold. There’s snow everywhere. On the ground, falling from the sky. We need food…I’ve been hunting with the bow. Gunshots would draw infected or bandits, and I don’t want anyone to find our shelter. I shot a rabbit, but it won’t last us long. A deer went by, so I left the horse tied up and tracked the deer through the woods. That’s a lot of meat. I got in a few shots, and chased after it until it went down by some sort of abandoned town-ish place. Creepy. 

 There were these two guys hiding just by where I took the deer down. I guess they’ve got a larger group close by. They wanted to make a trade for some deer meat. The one guy sent the younger one back to the group for some antibiotics. I told them that if he comes back with two bottles of penicillin and a syringe, then the deer is theirs. Medicine is worth more than food right now. I already got a rabbit. There’s plenty more in these woods. It’ll just take me more time. I wish it wasn’t so cold. Winter sucks. 

Of course, a pack of infected ambushed us while we were waiting for the guy to come back. We held our own and picked ‘em all off. Joel taught me good, I guess. The other guy came back after we wiped out the infected, and he gave me the medicine I asked for. I left the deer with them and went back to my horse. It was getting dark, and I had to get back to our shelter. I hope that Joel is okay. We only have one blanket for him…I hope it’s enough. This medicine will help, though. I’m sure of it. I have to help him. I can’t do this without him. Joel…

This entry is from Ellie’s point of view, since at this moment in the game, the player is controlling her instead of Joel. Here, we see Ellie’s character development from “innocence” to “experienced” come to fruition. I wanted to create this entry from Ellie’s perspective in order to illustrate this development, and it follows with the gameplay of the chapter. This allowed me to really explore the idea of a “role reversal” as the method through which to analyze her progress from naïve to experienced. Ellie is not just showing her experience through her actions, but in actually taking the lead on their quest in its entirety. This is clear in Joel and Ellie’s role reversal, in which Joel is the “damsel in distress” and Ellie is the “knight” coming to his aid. This episode is all about Joel being unable to do these things for himself, and his situation is out of his control; he had a severe injury that was becoming infected, and the extreme cold of Winter wasn’t helping. Ellie had the ability to be mobile to hunt for food and seek medicine for Joel. Ellie also actively participates in the chivalric code by upholding her fealty for Joel, and by functioning as a warrior to protect him. She moved him on horseback while he was unconscious, found shelter for them in an area that is close to subsistence and away from people (infected and otherwise), hunted and cooked animals for food, and maintained their weapon resources—all on her own, with the goal of protecting and healing Joel. However, Ellie has these abilities to understand the landscape, track and hunt animals, and kill infected because of Joel’s teachings. In this way, their role reversal is the result of the “innocence” to “experienced” development. We see something similar at work in the early Holy Grail quest narratives, which typically follow two protagonists: one who is naive, and one who is experienced. The experienced knight is wise to the ways of knighthood, and readers follow his adventures and rarely see him make mistakes. The innocent knight grows throughout the narrative, beginning as oblivious to the conduct of knighthood, and ending his journey more wise and experienced than he began. In this case, Ellie is representative of the latter. She knows about the wisdom of the experienced knight (Joel), and uses him as a model for her own development as she goes through her own trials. We can also identify that Joel and Ellie share an affective quest along with a physical quest. They both have their physical quest goal set to finding a Firefly lab so that they can analyze Ellie and hopefully produce a vaccine or cure. Their affective quest involves each other; namely recognizing the other as a surrogate figure. Joel lost his daughter, and Ellie lost her parents. Both have lost friends--even had to kill friends who had gotten infected. Through all of that loss, they recognize that they trust and rely upon each other in more ways than just for protection. They need each other emotionally, to fill the gap that left each one a little empty inside. Joel began this narrative with an angry, selfish disposition, and he did not want to see his quest with Ellie to the end. He tried to pawn her off on other people, tried to just quit, and was down-right mean, especially to Ellie. At the end, he respects her, enjoys interacting with her, jokes with her, and coaches her; he values Ellie as a person, and depends on her to be there and stay with him. Similarly, Ellie began this journey completely ignorant to the world outside the QZ, was unnecessarily loud, disrespectful, and selfish as well. She talked back to Joel all the time, but at the end, she would talk back at him to make him laugh. Joel and Ellie's shared affective quest becomes incredibly apparent during this episode because she is the character that the player follows. We hear her thoughts, watch her actions, and understand her motives; we see her face when she is desperate and concerned. Their affective quest is legitimized by our recognition of Ellie's emotional reciprocity. Joel has been protecting her all this time, and this is her opportunity to protect him. 
Quest Expectations/Terms: Innocence vs Experience; Knights; Damsels in Distress; Recursivity