Jesse Pinkman

FULL NAME: Ellie "Williams"
AGE: 14
D.O.B.: August 9th, 2019
HEIGHT: 5'2" / 158cm
WEIGHT: 51kg / 112lbs
EYE COLOUR: Green
HAIR COLOUR: Auburn
DEFINING MARKS: Freckles on her face, scar on her right eyebrow, bite mark on her right arm.
ALIGNMENT: Chaotic Good
CLASS: Protagonist/Deuteragonist
RELIGION: Atheist/Vague concept of God and no concept of religion. (Dialogue from the game: Sam: Henry says that, "[people who die have] moved on". That they're with their families. Like in heaven. Do you think that's true? Ellie: I... go back and forth. I mean... I'd like to believe it. Sam: But you don't. Ellie: I guess not.)

Ellie was born several years after the spread of fungal pandemic. As a result, she grew up in an oppressive military zone quarantine in Boston, Massachusetts, with little knowledge of the world before infection... Read more.

Born six years after the cordyceps brain infection (acronym: CBI) pandemic destroyed the world, Ellie has never known a normal life. In fact, post-apocalyptic America is normal to her. If she were to find herself in a place thriving with civilian life and what most would deem "normal", she'd find it weird as hell, if not frightening. She even incredulously commented to Joel when they came across a rusted out ice cream truck abandoned in the middle of an overgrown suburb, "You're totally fucking with me," when he told her that ice cream trucks "would drive around and play real loud, creepy music and kids would come running out to buy ice cream." "Man," Ellie replied to him, "you lived in a strange time."

If someone were to ask Ellie to describe herself, she'd probably shrug and reply, "I dunno. A kid? I guess?" Because that's exactly how Ellie sees herself: just an average kid, who lives in a pretty shitty world with pretty shitty people but, hey, that's just the way life is. Everyone else in her world has to deal with the same shit. Ellie doesn't know life any other way. She doesn't view herself as special or important, and she views her immunity to CBI as a curse far more than she'd ever view it as something that makes her unique or lucky. She knows she's lucky, in that being immune to the infection is something everyone would scramble for if they were given the chance - but in being immune, she's lost people she loves and cares about, she's watched people die because of her, she has the entire fate of the world resting on her tiny, scrawny shoulders and that responsibility is a heavy and terrifying burden to carry if she were to think too deeply about it.

On an unconscious level, she does think about it - she talks to Joel about having a dream where, "I'm on this big plane full of people. And everyone is screaming and yelling 'cause the plane's going down. So I walk to the cockpit, open the door, but there's no pilot. I try to use the controls but...I obviously have no clue how to fly a plane. And right before we crash, I wake up." The crashing plane being a metaphor for how out of control she feels, her inability to control the plane being a metaphor for all this responsibility resting on her shoulders but having no clue how to handle it or what's going to happen, and the screaming people being a metaphor for all the lives she feels responsible for.


Still, she soldiers on, because that's what you have to do in the world Ellie comes from, no matter how horrible or bad things may be. And having a purpose, being a potential cure for mankind is what keeps Ellie going - it's the one thing she can do, sacrificing herself so that humanity may have hope of survival, to ensure that everyone who has died because of her won't have died in vain.

Outside of being immune, Ellie really is an average teenage girl. She loves animals, she loves telling stupid jokes, she will do dumb things like blow raspberries or will huff and make dramatic teenagerish remarks just to be a little bratty and insolent. ("Argh, sooo hungry," she pines at one point to Joel, and when he replies that he, too, is hungry but they'll have to wait until they're past the place they're travelling through before they scrounge up some food, Ellie replies somewhat dramatically, "Well, if I starve, you're responsible.") She pokes fun at porn magazines, thinks superheroes are cool, loves reading comics, will flip the bird at people, is enamoured by the idea of video games, and always has a few joke books in her backpack. In short, Ellie really is your typical, pretty average teenage girl.

Having been born and raised in the Boston QZ and knowing no other way of life beyond the quarantine zone walls, she lived what people from her world would probably call a more privileged life than many. She was always fed, always had shelter, always had a bed to sleep in, didn't have to worry about the endless terror of surviving that those living in the slums of the zone, or worse, those outside the walls had to face. When coming across graffiti on an abandoned QZ wall that said, 'Give us our rations', Joel explained to her that the military sometimes ran out of food but mostly held onto it. "That never happened in Boston," Ellie remarked earnestly, to which Joel replied, "Trust me, it happened all the time."

Sheltered doesn't mean life wasn't hard for her, though, and sheltered doesn't mean she didn't get up to trouble. She had a long record of "fighting, theft, running away... fighting, disobeying orders... and more fighting." Being bullied by other kids, including Riley when Ellie first met her, and surrounded by soldiers frantic to hold onto control within the QZ, Ellie learned how to defend herself in tight and dangerous situations. She fights dirty, doing whatever it takes to stay alive - stabbing, biting, throwing bricks, breaking fingers, crouching behind walls and cover in wait to jump out and attack when an enemy is close by.

She's been hardened by the harsh and cruel reality of living in a dog-eat-dog world, but she's not without compassion and she has a heart of gold underneath it all. Perhaps it's because she's never known any other life except life in post-apocalyptic America that her view of the world isn't as bleak as others. She is endlessly curious about the world, particularly about the world that was before it caved under the weight of apocalyptic destruction. When danger isn't imminent, she's forever exploring her surroundings, poking around possessions left to rot in abandoned buildings and houses when she and Joel are looking for supplies, or jumping up on her tiptoes and craning to look up on shelves to see what cool or weird things she might find there. Magazines, cassette tapes, old books, toys - she is fascinated by it all, and will sometimes not just pick things up to examine them but even take them with her. (She usually doesn't keep them, though - she only holds onto things that are sentimental to her, like the letter from her mother, or mother's pocket knife, or Riley's Firefly pendant, or the walkman she has with a mixtape that Riley gave her.) She's can be a sneaky thief simply to sate her own curiosity, but also sometimes out of genuine thoughtfulness for others - like when she picked up the toy robot for Sam when no one was looking, after Sam's brother, Henry, told him to put it down. Later, when Henry was distracted and talking to Joel, Ellie stole the opportunity to give the toy robot to Sam, telling him, "If [Henry] doesn't know about it, he can't take it away from you." She did the same with Joel: when Maria told Ellie about Sarah, Ellie swiped the old photograph of Joel and Sarah and gave it to Joel when he finally starts coming to terms with the loss of his daughter.

She asks a lot of questions. She's full of them: questions about life before the outbreak, about the way people did things, about the food people ate and why models on decaying billboards always look so fucking skinny if they had so much food to eat back then. "That girl is so skinny," comments a mystified Ellie at one point in the game, "I thought you had plenty of food in your time." "We did," replied Joel. "Some just chose to not eat it." And when Ellie asked why the hell not and Joel replied simply, "For looks," Ellie remarked with scoffing disbelief, "Psssh. That's stupid."

She has a defiant and bratty streak to her, and she can be opinionated to the point of not knowing when to shut up at times, and she has a wildly foul mouth. In The Last Of Us, Ellie is the character who swears the most, with "fuck" or some variation thereof often tumbling out of her mouth over fifty times throughout the game. She has a temper, too, which flares up when faced with situation of injustice or when she's frustrated. She can be downright indignant and when she knows she's right, she will stand her ground. She will call people out on their crap, sometimes with a eye roll and an, "Ooookay, don't be a dick," or sometimes with far more heartfelt fierceness, like when she confronted Joel in the farmhouse about how she wasn't Sarah and that she would simply end up more scared if he abandoned her.


She isn't conflicted about death - in the face of death, she knows it's either her or them - but she doesn't like having to kill. She's learned to look the other way when Joel is the one pulling the trigger, or to approach killing others with no room for remorse outside of cold efficiency. When Joel and Tess smuggle Ellie out of the QZ, Ellie is close to horrified when Joel and Tess kill the soldiers that capture them, and she exclaims weakly, "I feel sick," the first time she shoots a man dead who was trying to kill Joel. It's through Joel and through their journey across America in search for the Fireflies that Ellie learns to shut herself off from the reality of killing people in order to stay alive. She has killed dozens of men and Infected by shooting them with bullets or arrows, throwing molotov cocktails and nail bombs at them (which she learned how to craft from Joel), stabbing them to death and, in one case, hacking a man's face to pieces with a machete.

However, she is still visibly disturbed by acts of cruelty and savagery, regardless how hardened she becomes. It's simply not in her nature to be cruel, to be callous and cold, to be uncaring and uncompromising, and it's not in her nature to dismiss it when confronted with cruelty. A few times when she and Joel come across piles of bodies that had been burnt alive or killed for their clothes, Ellie can't help commenting things like, "That's a lot of people that didn't make it," or, "Jeez. I don't think these people were infected..." - a direct contrast to Joel, who would always brush it off with, "Doesn't matter, let's keep going," or, "There ain't nothin' you coulda done for 'em, anyways."

For a girl who's lived in such a cruel world filled with so much death and despair, Ellie can be remarkably empathetic. When she knows someone has an emotional trigger or something that's raw and close to their heart, she won't deliberately go poking at it. She takes on board what people tell her about themselves, she listens, she observes people. She will set aside her own feelings for the sake of others, like when Joel finally began opening up to her about his daughter, whom he lost many years before - Ellie herself was carrying around a great deal of sadness and pain, but she put that aside to allow space for Joel to open up about Sarah. Contrary to this, however, Ellie can also be impulsive and rash, and has a lot of trouble keeping her mouth shut, especially when she finds herself butting heads with someone. She doesn't always think her actions and choices through, and there have been times when Joel has had to step in and tell her to shut up.

The thing Ellie fears the most, even more than Clickers, perhaps arguably even more than death, is ending up alone. She confides this explicitly to Sam when he asks her what she's afraid of, and she very revealingly says to Joel when she realises that Joel is handing her off to his brother to get her to the Fireflies, "Everyone I have cared for has either died or left me. Everyone fucking except for you. So don't tell me that I would be safer with someone else, because the truth is I'd just be more scared." Joel, by that point, had become such a constant in her life that the thought of losing him terrified her; and so, in her mind, it was easier to leave him before he had a chance to ditch her. When Joel was gravely injured by being impaled on a piece of rebar, she starts to panic and desperately pleads with him to get up and keep going - "Get up, get up, get up! You gotta tell me what to do! Come on... You gotta get up…!" Her fear of being alone stems back to when she and Riley were bitten by an Infected person when they'd sneaked out to an abandoned mall together. She and Riley had decided to wait it out, turn and die together, but Ellie never turned.


This survivor guilt of being left behind eats at her every day, and this very same survivor guilt is reinforced time and time again during her trip to find the Fireflies, with Tess getting bitten and dying, and then Sam getting bitten and also dying. She feels like the blood of all their deaths are on her hands, and while most people might count themselves incredibly lucky to be immune to an infection that has destroyed over half the world's population, Ellie sees it as a burden of guilt. It's why getting to the Fireflies, to give herself up for a reverse engineered vaccine, is so important to her: it would at least mean that all those people whose blood she feels is on her hands won't be for nothing.

Due to having no parents and no parental figures in her life, up until she meets Joel, Ellie has no real concept of what a healthy relationship is - anyone that shows her kindness and who proves their loyalty, she shows kindness and loyalty to in return. Anyone who doesn't intend to hurt or kill her, or hurt or kill those whom she loves and cares about, Ellie will probably hold them in reasonably high esteem once she gets to know them, doesn't matter how shitty they might actually be and doesn't matter what awful things they might have done. She has seen and experienced the absolute worst of humanity - everyone has done shitty and horrible things in the name of survival in her world, and so she doesn't necessarily judge anyone for that.

That's not to say that she trusts easily, though. When she first meets Riley, Ellie takes an instant dislike towards her because of the way Riley treats her. When she first meets Joel, she takes an instant dislike towards him because of the gruff and dismissive way he treats her. Even despite how untrustworthy she is initially when she first meets people, she often can't help warming up to them if they treat her with kindness. In both Riley and Joel's case, she warms up to them because of the way they protect her, look out for her, keep her safe, and she very quickly becomes very attached. She seems in some ways utterly dependent on those whom she grows attached to. And perhaps, on an emotional level, she is, because of how terrified she is of ending up alone.

Ellie is at heart, however, fiercely independent. It's not Joel who saves her when David psychopathically stalks and tries to kill and rape her - it's Ellie who saves herself. And it's not Joel who keeps her going and who gives her something to fight for when she withdraws into herself after what David did to her - it's her own inner strength. After her harrowing encounter with David, Ellie falls into a very dark place, becomes withdrawn and quiet, very unlike herself. Even Joel notices how closed off she is, going so far as to comment, "Everything all right? You just kinda seem extra quiet today," to which Ellie is quick to reply, "Oh. Sorry," - because she's become so used to apologising to Joel for her emotions rather than talking about them. And, having learned from Joel from all the times he told her not to talk about difficult or painful things, she does the very same in this instance: refuses to talk about it, keeps it locked down, shuts Joel out the way Joel has shut her out for months on end.

And yet, despite this dark and lonely place of trauma she winds up in, she manages to find beauty and hope in the world that's worth fighting for when she and Joel come across the giraffes roaming free just as they reach the city where the Fireflies are stationed. Just when it seemed to her that there's no hope or point, she finds a renewed strength within herself to keep going. This is the very core of who Ellie is: a strong, brave, independent girl, with many flaws and shortcomings for entirely understandable reasons; a girl who doesn't fully recognise the enormity of her own inner strength on a conscious level, even if she's fully aware of how capable she is.

Ellie has no supernatural or superhuman powers. She is, however, very adept to surviving in pretty horrific conditions. Mostly through Joel, Ellie learned how to craft weapons out of scavenged materials (molotov cocktails, nail bombs, smoke bombs, melee weapons) and learned how to fight to survive with harsh brutality. She's a crack shot with a bow and arrow and with firearms. She knows how to ambush and also knows how to sneak around with stealth, undetected. She has some basic medical skills - she knows how to do sutures and how to administer needles. She is otherwise skilled at crafting homemade med kits out of scavenged materials and quickly bandaging up wounds. While living in the military school in the Boston QZ, she at some point learned how to drive a manually geared vehicle, and she was taught how to ride a horse. If puns are considered a skill, she's very skilled in telling hilariously bad puns.