neil straight up saying “joel never went and hunted down the person who gave the order to kill sarah, that’s now how he deals with violence” gave me the biggest serotonin boost

i’ve ALWAYS thought the people who say “joel would’ve tortured that dude” were completely misinterpreting joel as a character so boom

one more thing to this: joel’s violence has never been needlessly cruel or self serving imo. anytime he’s hurt people it’s been to save himself or someone he cares about

-he tortures and kills the cannibals in order to find and save ellie from david (maybe the torture wasn’t fully necessary but he wanted to find his daughter)
-he kills jerry and marlene to save ellie from the fireflies

he isn’t even the one to kill robert, that’s tess. sure joel fucks him up, but i think that if tess weren’t there, joel would have let him live. he isn’t a vengeful person and THAT’S why ellie sparing abby is the perfect choice for her

when ellie says “if it had been you or me, joel would’ve been halfway to seattle right now” and tommy says “you don’t know that”, he’s right. joel has never exhibited a need for revenge before, who’s to say it would start then

ellie wants to believe that joel would do the same as her because it validates her choice. if she can convince herself that she’s doing the same thing joel would’ve done, it makes everything ok in her eyes. she only realises later how wrong she was

joel isn’t an inherently violent or evil man. he just does what he has to do to protect the people he loves. none of his acts of violence (that we see) are senseless and fuelled by hate, like abby or ellie’s. that’s where he differs from them

sorry for this thread but it’s late at night and i think about these characters way too much

it just really bugs me when people say “man joel would’ve destroyed abby if she had killed tommy or ellie!!” like no you fucking idiots he wouldn’t. he would grieve peacefully because he’s a grown ass man that knows violence solves nothing

some of y’all have this idea of joel that you’ve built up over the years as this sort of action movie anti-hero that may not do the best things but he does them for the right reasons when he’s just a loving father who has had to do awful things to protect himself and his family

if you just thought about joel’s character and everything we’re told and shown about him for 5 seconds before sending your tweet about how “joel was disrespected!! >:(“ we’d all be so much happier