![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
application for diadem
Player Information
Player: Noodle
Contact:
Invitation OR characters played: Invited by Hannah (2) aka
Are you over 18?: Yes
Character Information
Character: Joel Miller
Canon: The Last of Us
Age: 56 (Following the events of Season 1, after returning to Jackson, Wyoming with Ellie but not long enough to see her 15th, 16th, or 17th birthdays and their respective transitions. Leave me right here to cry on the floor.)
History: Link
Possessions:
His watch
Canvas Backpack with a gasmask inside and a flashlight attached to the strap
Weapon:
Taurus 66 Revolver, Joel's gun of choice while in Jackson, Wyoming
and for further reference his truck of choice.
Powers/Abilities:
Stealth Skills: He is skilled with chokeholds and stealth, being able to creep up on a human and Infected without them noticing.
Expert Crafting Skills: Joel is also a skilled craftsman and can augment his own weapons. He is also able to craft Shivs, Smoke Bombs, Nail Bombs, and Molotovs.
Interrogation Skills: He is experienced with torture, an example is when he broke Robert's arm while Tess was trying to discover what happened to the weapons he was supposed to deliver to them, when he interrogated two cannibals with a knife to discover the location of Ellie and shooting Ethan in the stomach while trying to find out where Ellie's surgery was happening.
Weapons Master: Joel is also very skilled with guns and bow and arrows.
Master Combatant: He possesses tremendous fighting skills, Miller is a ferocious fighter, being able to overpower enemies much younger and faster than he is. Heβs able to overpower Ethan, a Firefly despite the fact he was being held at gunpoint and he was obviously more military experienced. He was also able to overpower two cannibals despite the fact that he was still recovering from his life-threatening wound.
Application Questions
Who is the most important person in their life and why? What might be different if this person hadn't been around?
Before being asked to escort Ellie to the statehouse and then St. Mary's Joel had very few ties to life and the pursuit of living it in general. Before the Cordyceps outbreak, he'd been a single father with a contracting business he kept going with his brother in Austin, Texas. He had led a typical and mundane blue-collar lifestyle, and though his raise had been anything but wholesome, his 36th year was as close to the "American dream" as a guy like him could manage.
Losing his daughter crippled his resolve, and following a suicide attempt that left him almost deaf in one ear his allegiances have remained unsteady and unreliable. Joel narrowed down his reason for surviving to loyalty, to looking after Tommy, and to people he'd become close with in the aftermath of his loss, like Tess. The reality of life in a post-QZ world with FEDRA and FEDRA collaborators and the Cordyceps virus being what it was made Joel develop a tough exterior even with the people he worked with as smugglers. His circle was more of a triangle that consisted of two others, obligation, and the predisposition to keep his nose to the grindstone.
Joel Miller: I was the guy who shot and missed. There's no story. Sarah died... and I couldn't see the point anymore. Simple as that. And I wasn't scared either. I was ready. I couldn't have been more ready. When I-- When I... went to pull the trigger, I-I flinched. Still don't know why. Anyway, the reason I'm telling you this...
Ellie Williams: I know why you're tellin' me all this.
Joel Miller: Yeah, I reckon you do.
Ellie Williams: So time heals all wounds, I guess.
Joel Miller: It wasn't time that did it.
Despite his desperation to view Ellie as only a job, and a last-ditch effort to do right by Tess who believed in Ellie and her purpose and Marlene's goals before she became a casualty of the venture, Joel winds up endeared to her in their charted course to St. Mary's.
The two of them experience more than just his idealogy of her being cargo and grow close despite the circumstances and his intent to keep her at arm's length. She represents his loss in physical form because of her age and though he tries to shut it out and dehumanize the experience surviving in the post-pandemic apocalyptic shit show that Cordyceps left in its wake is a harrowing and humbling experience. Joel finds a kindship in Ellie despite his desire to remove himself and she saves him in more than just a physical way. In her, he has an opportunity to redeem himself and do what he couldn't do for his daughter when it meant the most. She helps him to rekindle his relationship with his brother in Jackson and becomes a family, a daughter he can do right by and protect from the harsh reality of the world.
Without Ellie, it's likely Joel never would have reconnected with Tommy and though it's difficult to say whether or not Ellie would have made it to St. Mary's without him if she had the world would have a vaccine and potential cure for the outbreak and might well be on its way to a charted course back toward normalcy. Joel, though, certainly wouldn't have survived and it wouldn't have been the infection that killed him but likely a raider, firefly, or FEDRA militant. Given his predisposition toward acts of cruelty and his moral compass being askew and tailored toward an idealism that not all survivors agree with it's safe to say his allegiances and his ends justifying the means would have always been the final nail in his coffin.
Is there an event in your character's life that they'd do differently? How so and why?
This is one of those situations where the obvious answer is the only answer. Joel has spent the majority of the last twenty years punishing himself and paying a self-imposed penance for failing Sarah during the onslaught of the outbreak. As a parent, and a father, his desire to do right by his family and by his kid follows him into the uncertain future without her. Most of his actions are rationalized by that one poignant loss and his emotional state or lack thereof has everything to do with it too.
It carries him through his relationship with Ellie and how that develops too and it solidifies in his desire to do right by her at any cost including the cost of their relationship and their closeness.
Ellie Williams: That was my purpose! My life would've fucking mattered! But you took that from me... you took it from everyone!
Joel Miller: Yes. And I'll pay the price... because you're gonna turn away from me. But if somehow I had a second chance at that moment... I would do it all over again.
Ellie Williams: Because you're selfish
Joel Miller: Because I love you, in a way you canβt understand. Maybe you never will.
Joel never got a chance to do right by Sarah or to protect her. She was a casualty of friendly fire and poor management in a crisis and Joel's desire to avenge her is directly linked to Ellie and clear even in the difference in how he carries them both in the twenty-year time difference between saving them. When Sarah was shot, Joel carried her at chest level, and after his destruction at St. Mary's, Joel held the incapacitated Ellie at waist level to compensate for any stray bullets because his daughter's final moments were seared into his memory and every fiber of his being.
I don't think there's a clearer burden of truth than having to bury your child, and Joel embodies that as a character by burying everything he was with her and all hopes and dreams alongside the remains of the person that he used to be.
What's the greatest challenge you foresee your character facing in the setting?
No man is an island, except for Joel Miller. Joel Miller is a tower on an island surrounded by dangerous waters that are infested by sharks. Joel doesn't like to rely on people and he doubly doesn't enjoy people he doesn't know relying on him. His ties to Jackson being Tommy and Ellie made him more willing to be a community fixture and to make loose ties but the ties that bound him there were the only things that ever mattered. Social reliance is going to be an issue for Joel, and he's going to have to go against his knee-jerk choice of self-isolation and indifference to suffering to make any headway with his personal goals.
What's the easiest thing you foresee your character adapting to in the setting?
This setting and the lifestyle aren't unlike what he's used to in 2023 in a world ravaged by the influence of an illness-borne apocalypse and the desperate lengths that people will take to survive. A lot of the dire straits and life-in-the-trenches scenarios won't bother Joel and he'll measure them on a case-by-case basis.
He'll first be aggravated by being taken from Jackson away from Tommy and Ellie but when he realizes that he can't get back he'll focus on compiling resources, mapping the town, and getting a handle on intel and information that help him case, patrol, and gain an upper hand. Eventually, he might go back to the smuggling detail doing what others won't and putting those good skills to use for profit.
Samples
Sample: Link