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| It's implied however that what Ellie really wanted was to http://www.rsgaming.com/ sacrifice herself: after watching several of her friends die, Ellie explains I'm still waiting for my turn. Joel has taken away her chance to be who she wants to be, to affect a change. His motives are easy to empathise with, but the audience is invited to view him as flawed, selfish. Nowhere is this more obvious than the Runescape game's penultimate scene, a brief interactive section where the Runescape player controls Ellie.Take a look at the sequence on YouTube. You can see at the beginning how it's toying with perspective.When Joel pulls apart the barbed wire fence, the Runescape player, as Ellie, climbs through and the camera is focused in traditional third-person style on her back. Then it pushes forward and Joel fills the frame. For a moment, it looks as if the Runescape player is back in control of Joel the image looks conventionally like a third-person game.But then there's one more move, where Joel climbs through the fence after Ellie and walks on ahead. The camera now settles back on Ellie, confirming her as the playable character.There's a kind of tussle here by Joel and Ellie, a competition for the attention of both the Runescape game and the Runescape player. Just as Ellie wishes to sacrifice herself, and Joel stopps her, in this moment they again seem to be competing, to be wrestling with each other over who should be in control.the Runescape game is asking questions: Who is the real protagonist? Who do you empathize with? Are you looking at this from a male or female perspective? Joel and Ellie's relationship has become combative. By placing one then the other in the center of the screen, the camera here implies a power struggle between them. Ellie was prepared to sacrifice her life to save the rest of the world. Maybe she should be the hero.And the camera does, eventually, settle on her. But given what follows, it's as if we're only being invited to play as Ellie so we can experience, first-hand, the totality of her defeat, the completion of her subordination to Joel.Ellie walks slowly in this scene. In her eyeline, a squirrel scurries up a tree and she doesn't make a remark about it. This is in opposition to the person she was at the start of the Runescape game an explorer, curious, infatuated with animals. We're in control of her not because she's transcended and become the hero, but so we can understand how far she's been ground down.This is the first and only time we play as Ellie while she's being accompanied by Joel in the winter section, she's by herself. |
It's implied
