  |
This article's content is marked as Mature The page contains mature content that may include coarse language, sexual references, and/or graphic violent images which may be disturbing to some. Mature pages are recommended for those who are 18 years of age and older. If you are 18 years or older or are comfortable with graphic material, you are free to view this page. Otherwise, you should close this page and view another page. |
|
| “ | After all we've been through...Everything that I've done, it can't be for nothing. | „ |
| ~ Ellie to Joel in the Spring chapter. |
Ellie Williams is one of the two main protagonists (alongside Joel Miller) of The Last of Us franchise.
Despite her somewhat heroic nature in the first game, she becomes more villainous in the sequel, where she is blinded by revenge and uses extreme methods of violence against her enemies, leading to her accidentally killing a pregnant woman in self-defense and threatening to kill Lev, a child.
She is voiced and motion-captured by Ashley Johnson in the video games, who voiced Terra in Teen Titans and Teen Titans Go! and Sunny in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien. In the Japanese dub, she was voiced by Megumi Han.
Overview[]
| “ | Endure and survive. | „ |
| ~ Ellie. |
A nineteen-year-old survivor, Ellie is "mature beyond her years" as a result of the circumstances of her environment, and after being bitten by an infected, is revealed to be immune to the Cordyceps. With the Fireflies believing that they could make a vaccine, Marlene tasks Joel and Tess to take Ellie across the states to reach St. Mary's hospital in Salt Lake City. During her journey, Ellie forms a bond with Joel, who becomes her surrogate father and protector. In the sequel, Ellie swears vengeance against the group that murdered Joel, traveling to Seattle where her morality is tested for her pursuit.
Powers and Abilities[]
Ellie is very skilled with knives and guns despite not being granted one until she saved Joel from a Hunter. She is also quite good at tracking and hunting as she was able to shoot a rabbit during Winter presumably from a far distance and managed to land a few good shots on a deer she was tracking. She is also a very good marksman, being able to snipe for Joel while he cleared a path of Hunters. Ellie is an equally skilled craftsmen as Joel, being able to create Medical Kits, Molotov's and Nail Bombs.
She is also immune to the Infection as such spores or bites don't affect her. It's also revealed that Ellie knows how to work a car and is adept at horse-riding, being able to ride away from Joel and Tommy's dam by herself. She excels at stealth as well. An example of which was when she was able to creep up on a Hunter while he was attempting to drown Joel and shoot him, although this could because the Hunter didn't notice her because he was too focused on drowning Joel.
Though she is an equally adept survivor as Joel, her age, size and strength prevent her from physically fighting a human or Infected and has to slash with her knife. She can also be ambushed, tracked or knocked out. An example is when a group of cannibals located her back to her hold by following the horse tracks, being locked in a chokehold by David and tracked yet again by the latter.
She was unable to swim during the events of the first game, but she managed to learn this ability by the events of the second.
Personality[]
| “ | I'm gonna find... and I'm gonna kill... every last one of them. | „ |
| ~ Ellie swearing vengeance. |
Having been raised in an environment where modern standards and values have deteriorated, Ellie is considerably a rash, impulsive, coarse and temperamental girl, and isn't fazed by the notion of using violence as a means to an end or profanity as a way of expressing how she feels. However, she manages to maintain a particular innocence as she has yet to see the darkest sides of human nature and retains a palpable trust in people. This serves as the juxtaposition to Joel's wary, morose outlook on post-pandemic life. She apologized to the soldier scanning her for stabbing him and hoped to prevent him and Ramirez from harming her with non-lethal means.
Ellie is also perceptibly clever and witty and will do whatever it takes to keep Joel and herself alive. She takes orders from Joel, but all the while makes it clear she does not "need any babysitting at all."
Ellie is enthusiastic about the outside world, given her confinement to her quarantine zone during her childhood. She is obsessed with things she collects from others, illustrated through her interest in music, movies, books, and video games. She frequently remarks her amusement upon finding interesting collectibles throughout her trip, which often clashes with Joel's physical indifference. Ellie begins to learn about the world before the Cordyceps brain infection due to the oddities she finds and from Joel. She is amazed by the trivial matters that people were concerned with, specifically females, before the apocalypse such as boys and what shirt goes with which skirt.
Ellie seems to adhere to no religion, as seen when she claims that she goes "back and forth" when asked by Sam if she believes in an afterlife. She says that she would like to believe it but admits "I … guess not."
Ellie also suffers from a case of monophobia (fear of being alone) and states to Sam that she fears ending up alone. The cause of this case is possibly related to her estranged parents and the deaths of her best friend, Riley, and hired guardian, Tess Servopoulos. Coincidentally, both were victims of the fungus, and both had gotten infected while in her company. Soon after admitting her fear to him, Sam joins the list.
Ellie showed difficulties in positioning herself as a young kid in an adult's eyes, and sometimes even tends to "supervise" adults. She also takes "justice" into her own hands on her relationship with anyone and does not think she requires any adults' consent. This self-parenting trait is related to her time spent in an orphanage, where she had learned to fend for herself. An example is when Joel falls on an iron rod. Though not shown, she takes Joel (by horse) to an abandoned mall in order to find supplies to stitch his wound up. Afterwards she takes him to an abandoned house on a pulley attached to her horse and continues to nurse him back to health, while at the same time getting them food, and medicine from David.
Joel teaches Ellie how to play guitar, which she does for pleasure, meditation of sorts, remembering her journeys with Joel, and simply to entertain others.
Ellie claimed to believe Joel that the Fireflies couldn't make a cure for the cordyceps fungus, and had numerous other immune people like her that they tried and failed to replicate immunity from, however, the suspicious manner of her removal made Ellie doubt his reassurance, thus she explored the hospital in which she was almost operated on. Upon learning Joel had lied, Ellie was enraged, and their father-daughter relationship completely collapsed; while Joel would periodically check in on her well-being, Ellie refused to interact with him.
Years later, shortly before the main events of The Last of Us: Part Two, Ellie and her girlfriend Dina were insulted by a homophobic member of the community, who was confronted by Joel. While Ellie rejected his help, she agreed to finally talk with him. Joel explained his rationale about how the procedure would have killed Ellie, yet had no guarantee of actually producing a cure, plus noting that it was unfair to make a child die for an implausible solution without even considering her feelings; Joel noted that given the chance, he would save her again, thus didn't regret his decision. Ellie was still angry that Joel took the choice from her too, as she believed her life "would have f**king mattered" if the procedure was completed. Despite her grudge, Ellie finally appreciated Joel's motivation in saving her, and understanding he didn't mean to cause her pain.
Ellie would continue to play guitar to amuse and seduce her girlfriends, even after her estrangement from Joel.
Ellie and Joel's relationship hadn't been repaired to their previous parental-child closeness, but she had finally began to forgive him, and was willing to rebuild what they had before. However, Ellie would never have the chance, as Abby's obsession to avenge her father - the head surgeon of Ellie's operation, who Joel had killed - lead Abby to capture Joel, and had started to slowly beat him to death with a golf club. Ellie managed to breach the room in which it was happening, but Abby's friends caught her and kept her restrained, forcing her to witness Joel's brutal death. Ellie's subsequent vengefulness may be partly a projection of her own guilt for ostracising Joel from her life for years, and now being denied the opportunity to reconnect with her father figure, she falls into blind rage, seeking to punish those who stole him from her, rather than deal with the fact that she sacrificed years earlier she could have shared if not for a misguided grudge against him.
Ellie's guitar-playing would still act as a way to woo Dina, but some songs she played privately in memorial of Joel.
When necessary, Ellie was able to kill, though preferred to avoid it if possible; even infected she felt reluctant about killing, though would. Eventually, she grew somewhat numb to violence, but not enough to fall into wanton bloodshed. However, after Joel's death, Ellie became incredibly bloodthirsty, slaughtering multiple scavengers and rival factions that got in the way of her revenge; when confronting Abby's friends, Ellie had adopted a trait from Joel that he never showed her, which was the ability to painfully torture people for information. When Ellie confronting Abby's final friends, Owen and Mel, her desperation to find Abby intimidated them, so that Mel foolishly attempted to attack Ellie, which she retaliated with a fatal stabbing; Ellie likewise reacts to Owen's attack by stabbing him, then attempting to interrogate him, albeit all he conveys is an incomplete message that Mel is pregnant. When Ellie discovers Mel was pregnant, she is horrified and filled with self-disgust; this, along with a death of another friend, and finally her and Dina being almost killed by Abby, only saved by the muscular girl's ward, Lev, makes Ellie abandon her revenge, going to a farm to help Dina raise her son.
Yet Ellie was still significantly traumatised by Joel's death; she tried to adapt to the peaceful life with Dina, but was haunted by flashes of his gruesome death. Thus, when Joel's brother Tommy comes to tell her that he had tracked down Abby, Ellie couldn't resist the need for revenge. Dina threatened that if Ellie left, then Dina won't be at their home when she returns; despite Ellie's love for her, her love for Joel and need to avenge him ultimately eclipsed it, thus Ellie loses her last close relationship in the process of trying to "atone" for a lost one.
On the hunt, Ellie ends up caught in a trap made by the Rattlers, a group of violent scavengers and slavers. Using her immunity to cordyceps, Ellie is able to use an infected to kill one of the two Rattlers that find her, then break out of the trap; she holds the second at gunpoint, interrogating Abby's location out of him, then ruthlessly executes him. Ellie is able to massacre multitudes of the Rattlers, then after learning Abby's location from them, she freed a large group of their prisoners, using the chaos of their escape and uprising to cover her further exploration.
Ellie finds a somewhat emaciated Abby tied to a post, then frees her, who then frees Lev. Ellie follows as Abby carries Lev to a boat. Abby's experiences of causing the deaths of her friends, killing former WLF allies, as well as suffering imprisonment and starvation from the Rattlers, had made her unwilling to engage combat with Ellie when the latter demanded a reckoning. While she was bluffing, another indication of how dark revenge had made Ellie was when she held her knife at Lev's throat, threatening to kill the child unless Abby indulges her with a fight. Ellie and Abby fight brutally, with Ellie stabbing her a few times, then Abby biting off a few of Ellie's fingers; ultimately, Ellie was able to overpower the weakened Abby, holding her head under the water to drown her. However, just as Ellie was able to achieve her revenge, her memory of Joel made her hesitate, and remembering how he wanted her to have a safe life, away from violence, caused her to relent. Ellie sadly tells Abby to leave, while she wallows in grief.
As Dina promised, she and her son were gone when Ellie returned home. Also, unfortunately, the loss of her fingers robbed her of the ability to play guitar anymore, thus she lost yet another reminder of Joel. She leaves the guitar and exits the house to parts unknown. Ellie's thirst for revenge twisted her into a monster that remorselessly murdered any and all in her path to vengeance; while at the very end, she was able to bring herself back from the brink with the knowledge her beloved father figure wouldn't want that life for her, she had already made a blood-soaked path to rot her soul with guilt, lost the only positive relationships she had left, lost the ability to play the guitar that Joel taught, and was still strangled by grief.
Trivia[]
- Ellie doesn't realize that Joel saving her was the right decision as making a vaccine would have never worked from the start as vaccines prepare someone for infection, not curing them and there aren't many resources in the world to spread it out, only allowing to save a few people at most since she's the only person who is known to be immune.
- Another issue is that the Fireflies were a small scattered group, consider terrorists by FEDRA and rivals by raiders or other factions, thus none would trust the group in their claims that they were providing a vaccine.
- There is also the issues of production and distribution. No such mechanisms remain that could create enough doses of the vaccines; and the absence of clear, reliable roads or even railways, and the absence of refrigerated vehicles; then vaccines themselves may have limited shelf-lives, which would expire before covering coast-to-coast.
External Links[]
- Ellie Williams on the Heroes Wiki.
- Ellie Williams on the Last of Us Wiki.
[]
 Villains
| ||
|
Survivors Smugglers Fireflies Washington Liberation Front Others | ||