#bonk thoughts

i keep seeing discourse ab this show and. i’m trying so hard not to care bc it’s all annoying to me lol but the one that keeps coming up is ellie wasn’t angry enough. but, the reason it feels that way and that maybe she’s “happier” in the show is because the timeline is different

in the game, joel dies, ellie is on her revenge path after a few days. in the show, ellie is physically hurt. she cannot go find anybody right now, she’s being held in the hospital while she recovers. also, she just lost the most important person in her life, she’s being kept under as much surveillance in that hospital as they can get. this whole process takes three months. that’s three months that ellie has already been actively grieving. all that rage is building inside her, probably venting in very strange ways as she’s being held up, but ultimately she’s trying to suppress it. why? she wants to leave, because she wants to fucking kill abby.

that’s why they make her talk to gail before she goes. that’s why she’s happy as a clam during the whole conversation. if you genuinely watched that and thought “wtf why is she so okay right now” i fear you were not the intended audience for this show. it’s been said over and over which is why it’s fascinating that people are still missing the whole point.

Ellie. Is. Lying.

She is lying to Everyone. she is fucking livid. she’s heartbroken, so much so that she’s numb. she’s coasting. the whole time she’s just coasting, waiting for the moment she explodes—the moment she finds abby.

that’s why you think she’s “out of character”—but she’s not. think about how she acted in season 1. she was silly and aloof and chatty and witty; and she was grieving. she had just lost her best friend and first crush and first kiss, the most important person in her life at that point had just died. but she put on that face. that goofy smile and stupid puns, that is the face she puts on while she grieves because she doesn’t want her devastation to be anyone else’s business. this is also interesting when you look at her behavior after the david situation, she is not herself. she’s fully dazed over and quiet. that was the tipping point for all this trauma that she just shut down. she couldn’t hide all of it anymore

you can also see it in the flashback episodes. she becomes more and more reserved (not necessarily angry, but certainly pulling away a lot) as she begins to really sort through truth and lies. that anger does come back until it has a reason to (eugene).

the timeline of ellie’s grief is so important because is shows that she has had ample time to put together a version of herself that works publicly. that falls apart when things start to get real, because what’s real is she is murderous and she is going to do terrible things (which she will end up regretting but that’s a whole other thought i have). dina’s “pep talk” wasn’t explaining to ellie why ellie needs to be angry, it’s her explaining why she, dina, wants to be a part of this. ellie knows why she is there, but she doesn’t want dina to be apart of the horrible acts she’s going to commit, she wants dina to remain her safe place and her sense of self—the self that still had joel. but selfishly, she can’t make dina not go, because she wants her there.

i also think that’s why ellie wasn’t mad about the pregnancy like she was in the game. it’s been months, the grief has settled into being familiar at this point, she’s not constantly on the edge; unlike the game where the wound was still fresh and that news was shocking, so since she’s hurting, she reacted hurt. but since in the show she has a bandaid on, she was able to avoid the hurt reaction.

lastly, to act like game ellie was constantly the worst version herself every minute she’s in seattle is just so dramatic and wrong. ellie and dina have nice moments, ellie has moments where she is sad and happy and angry and bittersweet. her grief is not simply rage—it’s human. that’s how the show is doing it too. it’s weird when someone you love dies because somehow, the world keeps spinning. it feels unfair, how dare life continue without someone i cared about with me. but it does, which means even as you miss someone you’re going to have happy moments, and excited ones, and silly ones. that doesn’t mean everything is ok, it just means something is right then in that moment.