How to Write a Character Who GROWS on You (The Last of Us)

Kelly is an annoying clueless brain dead American teenager and what's weird about that is that the character works the character finds a way to make a personality like that which is usually just unpleasant actually really engaging and that is so impressive to me because annoyingness is one of the most disengaging traits that Katra can have makes you want to click off to stop watching to punch something but they did it they wrote a good annoying brain dead dumb character and let me just say before YouTube I work with teenagers I still work with teenagers and Ellie is pretty darn spot on in my opinion she is exactly the kind of naive needling infuriating bubbly thoughtless oblivious overconfident insulin clingy Moody weak disobedient Punk that your average American Teenager actually is and that is the first thing I find so interesting here it tells me so much that when I saw this world full of Stone Cold Killers like Joel and tough as Nails revolutionaries like Marlene and child corpses and mushroom people and oppressive militarized authoritarian governments which is not my world at all here was this idiot from exactly my world just standing here like DOI and even if a character like this in a different context says like best friend in the coming of age teen drama or a rebellious daughter and a family comedy would 100 disengage me in this kind of story I was kind of transfixed I was looking at her like huh and she was like DOI and I was like hmm and she was like Grumble Grumble and I was like aha very interesting I didn't immediately like the character or identify or feel attached but I did find her compelling and then I did become attached I found certain annoying things still annoying but also Charming or at least interesting and I found myself wanting to see more scenes of her annoying troll I think there's a good place to start kind of broadly here why does scarcity or distinctness re-engage me despite the annoyingness and fine it makes sense that you can make something rare or different enough and it becomes interesting and like a whack-a-mole sense but I think there's something more going on here we can learn a bit from a certain dog put a dog in a field saying this is fine and we don't blink an eye put him in hell that's interesting to us that resonates that's what we make into a meme and that's the Nuance here because no dog would actually say this is fine if his house was on fire or whatever but when you think about it if the world were to end and civilization deteriorated and zombies did overrun the Earth 14 year olds would 100 still be dumb and annoying and yeah not all 14 year olds you would have kids who were traumatized and jaded and hurt Etc and those ones would be less annoying they would just have awful lives and stuff like that but once you did have a new post-apocalypse generation growing up in some kind of society even if life is hard even if they all may have some level of trauma or psychological or something or other despite that they still are mostly blank slates compared to the adult generation they did not see the world end they did not witness regular people gunning down other regular people for no reason they did not watch their own children die in their arms and a little Story Time interlude here this Blank Slate phenomenon is something I first thought about in the moment I actually got on video it's on my channel even I was in Rwanda I was walking through this field in a really poor area and I see this little boy just appear out of the Bush he just want to see what's going on and the day before I had been going around to museums and sites where mass murder happened the genus and I spent that whole day learning about just the worst things I've ever learned about and I saw this little kid and I realized he was there for none of it and who knows maybe he saw his really hard life maybe he has his own trauma or inherited trauma but he was one of tons of kids I saw in this country then not even 30 years ago had undergone some of the most extreme National trauma ever but the beautiful thing about how life works is that old Generations die and new generations are born and we get another shot this kid has a chance to live an entire life without ever experiencing what his parents went through and that is such a relief and like a species-wide existential sense and also like I mentioned there's a really poor area but to this kid and to the other kids I saw playing around here this was normal and they still seemed like happy normal kids and again who knows for sure maybe not these kids in particular but I was at schools and stuff I saw a lot of kids I talked to a lot of adults who work with kids and they told me the same a lot of kids in good spirits despite harsh conditions because people adapt to their circumstances and young people in particular are surprisingly good at adapting and to Ellie who doesn't know anything else is fairly normal to her that the world is this dangerous unpredictable place with the zombies and the killers in the government but she's at that age he's had a life that still hasn't robbed her of that blank slate brightness and vivaciousness and optimism that kids naturally have and the way that comes out is being dumb it's not being as careful as you should be it's thinking you're stronger than you are it's being all curious and excited about all the sparkly shiny new experiences finding dumb ways to entertain yourself when you have nothing else to do instead of you know worrying and having panic attacks and spiraling and hating life you know adult things Ellie being such a dorky loser is a welcome sight because we know what that means we know horrible repeated trauma is the dorky loser killer we know really bad life experiences are what naive attain obliviousness we know getting hurt really badly is what scares away our natural youthful overconfidence and optimism and seeing that it's possible to go 14 years in a world like this without having encountered enough of that to destroy that part of you on the surface we may be annoyed but deep down we're happy to see that and not just happy we are craving anything that reminds us of life before we lost all hope and innocence and there are a few things as pure as the childlike excitement of just a brand new experience Ellie rides in the car for the first time and she is stoked she's making jokes she's listening to new music music you know but she doesn't and it's really fun for both of you and that emotional aura that kind of follows her around and seems like this it's hard not to feel that it's hard not to enjoy that even for Joel that kind of joy is so absent in the life like his you know this tough guy who's seen it all and done it all that aura is contagious it's beautiful it's peaceful it reawakens a part of you thought died a long time ago died when the whole world died but no it's still alive it's right here the Innocence the simple joy and simplicity by the way it's not a big part of all this because life gets progressively more complex for most people as they age you look at Joel and he is going through like a dozen calculations every second to make sure everything is safe and secure and meanwhile Ellie just wants a gun she wants to explore she wants to help people she wants to laugh being around someone who's seen the world there's not such an exhausting confusing mess it's invigorating it's healing and that's a lot of what Joel is responding to it's a lot of what I was responding to as well as a viewer that healing Simplicity just cuts through all the annoyingness and that's why even initially it's so compelling and eventually why it's so Charming so that's my step one here that's my idea for like the broadest level of what's going on here moving One Step Closer let's ask the question annoying why why do teenagers do this or hold on let me ask this the way my voice usually sounds want to ask this question without YouTube voice oh my God why do teenagers do this why do teenagers do this pretty straightforward it's to get adults to pay attention to them but in a way that's not embarrassing or disempowering teenagers are past crying they're past pulling on mommy's skirt they're past asking for attention directly that's little kid stuff that's embarrassing and also now they're old enough they're independent enough that adults don't have to chase them around and make sure they don't break or starve or die or whatever now they're just regular people who don't really matter like most regular people and that's painful and they haven't learned how to build relationships in a socially acceptable way yet so they're out there flailing around like the awkward losers they are and oh suddenly everyone is paying attention to me well better than nothing let's keep doing that and sure there's probably also hormones and edible rage and existential dread going on under the surface too but overall that's the story of The Annoying teenager which is a hopeful beautiful story Ellie really wants to be Joel's friend she wants to be everyone's friend she's someone we see consistently trying to connect to everything around her she loves life if she didn't she'd be doing everything she could to not interact with Joel and dog and horse and whoever and that's another reason why the more we see this the more it becomes Charming rather than just annoying because we understand what she's trying to do and what's behind it all is not coming from a place of aggression and angst she's trying to get Joel to laugh she's trying to get to know him she's trying to get him to teach her things she knows he thinks are valuable and before I go on I cannot tell you how happy I am that they took us all the way from no bond to very close bond with just this stuff because they had an emotional heart-to-heart scene locked and loaded available to use but they waited to have that scene until after we had the bond now that it would have been necessarily bad to do this Bond through the heart to heart but it's a method of creating a bond between characters that can just so easily go wrong it's like before this we got the characters for real with all their barriers and difficult personality traits Etc but wait a second hold on wait here let me go into this corner and construct a moment that sets the characters up to show who they are inside in other words to be without any other character defining barriers and flaws and basically to have like a completely different personality and then we'll do the connection then how convenient and then we'll take them out of that back into the real world and now they're magically friends and this is kind of a harsh way to characterize that it works in sometimes it's great I don't mean to imply it doesn't but it's almost too easy it's too intuitive it just begs writers to be sloppy about it and The Last of Us just went in the complete opposite direction they took the Hard Road they said nope we're gonna build this relationship with Ellie being her annoying self and with Joel being his grumpy self and we're not gonna do it with feelings we're gonna do it with stupid puns and the first few times it's not gonna work and then it's gonna work and not only that it's gonna be beautiful and it's going to be people's favorite scene the whole show forcing the relationship to form through this difficult path from within Ellie's seemingly negative traits it is so much stronger of a foundation to build a relationship on Joel is finding a connection with Ellie because of her personality instead of despite her personality and that makes it a much more unique star experience we become much more attached to it because of that uniqueness okay and I think everything I talked about up until now is really only half the equation because we haven't yet talked about Ellie's three most important scenes and I want to frame this discussion by talking about static traits versus Dynamic traits and there's two levels of the succinction for the first think of Navi versus Joffrey two insufferable characters and navi's annoyingness is just there making things it's static but Joffrey's obnoxiousness matters to the story it interacts with plot arcs and character arcs and within every single Joffrey scene we get these micro Stakes of how is this character going to react to him are they going to give in to him are they going to slap him around a bit and Stakes like that impact like that that's one kind of dynamism make something the story bounce up and down we like that and Ellie's annoyingness is dynamic like that it makes her relationship with Joel bounce up and down how is he gonna react this time is he gonna push her away or is she gonna build some kind of connection you heard that then you must have heard that he wants to shoot you that is good writing and important and not what I want to focus on there's another kind of dynamic which is rare but so much more interesting to me and especially in the last of us because I don't think I've ever seen it done like this with a trait like this it has to do with those three pivotal Le scenes the first is the scene of her shooting the Kansas City guide in episode four the second is the end of episode 5 with Henry and Sam and finally her confrontation with Joel in episode 6. and for these scenes I'm not gonna go beat by beat because I think big picture there's something way more significant going on anyone watching the show just thinking oh God this character is so annoying every time she opens her mouth I want to die jeez even if you haven't noticed any of the interesting compelling character stuff beforehand I think everyone wakes up when this scene happens even for people who find her to be this obnoxious pest this scene is different and I mean if we're talking about people who dislike Ellie that is Joel Joel does not like her at this point but it's almost like any relationship he does have with her goes on pause at this moment this event which she's witnessing right now which she has to do here for the Observer it cuts through anything else about who she is her personality the relationship whatever that doesn't matter or when a kid is confronted by something like this Joel forgets everything else and he is just a human for a second he just wants to make sure she's okay and she's really not okay and then it happens again in episode 5. after a whole episode where we got to see Ellie being her silly playful self and after seeing her doing something kind of stupid in a really teenagery way that we absolutely judge her for at the end there's another moment of everything going wrong and there's this really scary instant where we feel something break inside of her let me know that little cry something about that feels so real and so terrible and again we see this change in Ellie and Joel sees it too in this moment she is not being annoying she's not complaining she's not making stupid puns she's not excited to explore the world her teenage attitude is gone her bubbliness is gone her brightness is gone giving a character a trait that can just go away that's the other kind of dynamism the really scary kind the trade itself can be there or it can vanish and it's scary when it's a defining part of who this person is to us we see this void and it doesn't matter if we like what was there before it's scary seeing that void it's scary seeing a child get hurt and change even if they're annoying we don't want to see a kid stop smiling and stop laughing you know who's less annoying Joel and we do not want to see Ellie become Joel and that is thematically what this entire story is about how do we deal with not people dying not the planet dying not human life dying how do we deal with What Gives Life Meaning dying thematically it would be just as sad to see Ellie lose her actual life as it would be to see her lose her bright joyful attitude about life and I love the way this is all expressed because it's not a binary did she keep it or did she lose it no we see her fighting to keep it we see her struggling to not let these things affect her and it is in this naive lost teenagery way she acts tough like it didn't bother her and it is so transparent and even she knows it's transparent but she doesn't know what else to do she might even be trying to act here like she thinks Joel would act and meanwhile Joel naturally just as a father just as a human being is realizing that this is important to protect just like her life and then in the final scene in episode 6 we catch a glimpse of that void and it's even worse this time and Ellie tells us that this void has been growing for way longer than we realized and Joel is faced with this beautiful agonizing impossible Choice which do I protect Ellie's life or Ellie's Soul do I value this girl's physical life or her inner life and the incredibly Bonkers awesome thing about this is that he doesn't realize he's making the same decision for himself for his own world does he choose to go back to his void world where all that matters is empty survival or does he choose this new world where his own life has meaning it is seriously hard to read a story they have Stakes that are higher than the world ending but in The Last of Us what's on the line is What Gives Life Meaning which tragically and beautifully can still exist in a post-apocalyptic world it is showing us that with Joel and Ellie as a microcosm and when the moments like these scenes as a micro microcosm and doing it like this showing characters getting hurt and part of what makes them human just vanishes lots of stories have scenes where young kids see terrible things and are paralyzed and are traumatized but the whole context of this story what it's about makes these scenes come off as so much darker so much more horrifying we're not just seeing trauma we're seeing the void left by the apocalypse it's like the story's world has burned away every other facet of life every material good is gone civilization has gone physical life is close to gone it's burned all that a wish that the only thing that remains is this is distilled meaning and the story asks what is that worth maybe it's worth even more than all of what we burned away oh man it's a good story so basically no she's not too annoying that's my answer I think it's fine so to sum up concisely in the form of some concrete writing advice if you're toying with unlikability or annoyingness in particular in one of your stories here's what we've learned from Ellie connect your traits to the world shape them with nuances to find a natural form they would take in their environment something that's interesting and maybe unexpected and has depth to all characterization but especially risky characterization needs to Anchor itself into something deeper something that has stronger resonance than its surface form and these traits also need to have dynamism through their stakes and impact on the story and other characters and through development and change and this is all in the context of bringing more meaning to your overall themes the overall ideas you want to communicate through your story subscribe if you're a writer looking for a community of people to talk writing with check out my patreon we've been building a little Community there with the patron group calls and also with some other developments that are in the works so check that out if you're interested shout out to new High tier patrons Zachary Albertson Brian Hughes okay I am so excited about my next video it's going to be on the Last of Us World building and something really really interesting they're doing with a zombie archetype and just FYI I have to wait until the season ends so stay tuned after that it's probably going to be the beginning of that week after the last episode airs but that's it for now hope you enjoyed and thanks for watching

Channel: schnee

Views: 122,962

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Id: 8rjnU7Gl8aI

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 05 2023