Before we reach the end of spooky month in a new proposal here after the longest time, there had been a discussion of yet another potential horror candidate I was involved in that surprisingly happens to be a lesser character.
What Is the Work[]
The Last of Us is a horror-survival game series by Naughty Dog and Sony Computer Entertainment (now PlayStation Studios) set during an apocalypse triggered by a man-eating strain of Cordyceps fungus. It chronicles the adventures of a girl named Ellie Williams, who gets adopted by Joel Miller who lost his daughter to a soldier, and dooms humanity just to have her seeing Ellie as his new daughter and the compensation for the one he lost.
In the sequel, four years have passed after Joel made the controversial decision to stop the creation of the cure to the cordyceps pathogen from Ellie who is immune to it, and Abby Anderson, whose father Joel killed, a surgeon involved in the operation on Ellie, finally takes the time to avenge him in a poorly written out act of murder. Ellie eventually goes on to confront Abby, murdering a pregnant woman on the way.
Who Is He and What Did He Do?[]
The large Rattler is a minor antagonist of the sequel, The Last of Us Part II. He is the overweight leader of the Rattlers who leads his men to torture and enslave random people, infected or not they find out of sadism. We first see the large Rattler capturing Abby and a thirteen year old named Lev, fighting back against the latter when he shot his fellow Rattlers down, telling one of his Rattlers to spare them to use as slaves. He orders a small Rattler to tie up Lev saying that he and Abby could be good use for him.
Ellie gets caught in one of the Rattlers' traps, and thus he and the small Rattler attempted to bring Ellie to their base. She jokes that the small Rattler got scared nearly bitten by a clicker, so in return he tried to have one of his men make Ellie get bitten by the clicker only for the small Rattler to have his throat ripped out by it.
The large Rattler kills the clicker only for Ellie to use the small Rattler's gun to shoot his legs. The Rattler pathetically begs Ellie for mercy as she interrogated him on Abby's whereabouts, revealing her location taunting that she would make it before turning her, which failed since Ellie is immune as aforementioned. Ellie ends up killing him to save neither the slaves nor Abby, but out of sadism too, setting out for the latter.
Heinous Standard[]
Whenever dealing with something horror-survival like The Last of Us, one thing the qualifiers have to face should be an insanely high Heinous Standard and this game franchise is no stranger to it either way, with almost every major crime as the bread and butter for the series, such as mass murders, sexual assault, genocide, cannibalism, torture, kidnapping, animal cruelty and even more. Setting the standards are the main protagonists Joel Miller and Ellie Williams. Joel kills the Fireflies leading to Abby's vengeance in his treacherous path to save Ellie from being operated, and Ellie herself has earned her stripes for the highest kill count while murdering in brutal ways for the series, with murdering the WLF foundation members, nearly committing genocide for the sake of avenging Joel solely to kill Abby Anderson, torturing Nora who had nothing in Joel's death when she refused to reveal Abby's location, as well as threatening Lev with a knife to force Abby to fight her despite him convincing Abby not to kill Dina earlier among the dozens of major atrocities she committed, in addition to knowingly refusing to release some of the unconscious Rattler survivors just to find Abby. Besides, we bring up David who leads a group of cannibals with his traumatising violation of Ellie lingering onto the sequel's events.
Since those atrocious actions set up the stage for an insanely heated competition in heinousness, with the setting where it’s every man for himself in a serious crisis, many villains won't easily stand out. However, the large Rattler can barely pass with his slavery being a unique act for The Last of Us, enslaving like hundreds of people, before crucifying them to be tortured and mutilated, and as shown when the Rattler was dealing with Ellie, whenever the captives try to escape or become unmanageable in some way, he tries to infect them with the cordyceps by having them exposed to clickers, therefore using the infected as bioweapons just as punishment which also seems to be something not seen before. After all, those aforementioned unique actions of weaponising the infected as well as the slavery and crucifixion allow him to pass the towering standards with no problem while carrying the same degree of resources as David.
Redeeming Factors[]
At first glance, he seems to have some care for his fellow Rattlers, when he seemingly becomes sad when Ellie killed the small Rattler and used him as a human shield. However, he subverts this when he sells out his men to Ellie so that she won’t kill him, while knowing how dangerous she is to them, which no longer makes it count as a prevention. Other than that, he possesses no other redeeming factors that would interfere with his qualifications.
Final Verdict[]
Probably a firm keep for now.