#craig miller

[legends-expo]

We're thrilled to be able to announce that we will be welcoming Craig Miller back to Legends Expo this September!

As the original Director of Fan Relations at Lucasfilm, he created and ran the Official Star Wars Fan Club, and wrote almost all of the articles for the first two years of Bantha Tracks. Join us to hear him share stories from the early days of fandom!

Legends Expo is a fan-run convention celebrating the books, comics, games, and other media that built the original Expanded Universe. It will be held on September 13th & 14th, 2025 at the Burbank Marriott Convention Center. Tickets available now through our Square site!

[mearchy]

On my rewatch of TLOU I realized there were some details that I missed before that help to paint this huge picture about the importance of the preceding Tess/Joel relationship. The first and most obvious is that Joel mentions passingly that he and Tommy met Tess pretty early on, and it sounds like she stayed with him when every other group they were in fell apart, and even when his own brother left. So they’ve been surviving together for at LEAST 15 years, probably longer than his daughter was even alive, which is a length of time I just didn’t fully process before.

We never hear the full goodbye/suicide letter from Bill, but a lot of people have pointed out that over Joel’s shoulder you can see Tess’s name mentioned at least twice at the end — including something about her deciding what to do. We know that basically every time we saw Tess directly interacting with Joel before she died, she was the one giving him directives and making the final decisions. She says outright that he listens to her. This is not a man who trusts fucking anybody after everything he’s been through. But he trusts Tess. She comes up behind him in bed while he’s sleeping, and in a world of raiders and robbers where hypervigilance is a necessity, he barely even stirs.

Now, one of her last lines before she dies is “I never asked you for anything, not to feel the way I felt—“ and he tries to say something and she shuts him down. But here’s what gets me: before that, before they realize she was bit, she turns around and in her dying frantic anger she yells “that is NOT MY HOME!” about the QZ. And it’s like okay… where else could she be thinking about, if she’s spent all these years on the road with different groups, with Joel, and then at least a decade in the QZ? What is she defining as home right now? Why is this correction so intense? And it could be about Detroit, about where she came from and isn’t (apparently) attempting to go back to. But then. But then she turns and she looks directly at Joel. And she’s got the most tragic expression on her face. And I wonder if in that moment Joel knew she meant that he was her home, even if she had never said it that openly before. Wherever he went, she would go. Haring off on a wild chase after his brother across the country? She’s there. She’ll do anything to make it happen. She’ll beg and barter and kill for this truck battery, for a mission she doesn’t even have half the same stakes in. She was his direction and his driving force and a safe place for him, but he was her home.

Thinking about this almost changed the tenor of the remaining story with Joel and Ellie to me. The hospital massacre felt perfectly in character the first time I watched, but when I rewatched with both the Sarah and the Tess story in the forefront of my mind it felt even more fucking inevitable. Joel is Orpheus. This couldn’t have gone any other way. He could never have done anything else. He has failed the two most important women in his life. He has failed a daughter, and he has failed a partner twice over- first by letting her die, and second by letting her die believing she was unloved. How can he fail Ellie now? He has to burn the entire world, tell any lie, just to keep her alive. There is no other option, no other outcome. There is no living Joel post-canon without the hospital massacre.

And the revenge for it will be what kills him.

[gay-mafia-stickball]

Can we spend a few minutes on the giraffe scene? Because right before this, ellie is completely checked out. She’s traumatized, she’s distant, and she’s so completely absent. But beneath all of this trauma, she’s still a kid, and now she’s a kid who just saw a weird, fucked up leopard camel llama thing, probably for the first time, and it’s eating out of her hand with a weird, fucked up blue tongue as long as her forearm. She may be traumatized out of her mind and living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but that childlike wonder is still there, and Joel hasn’t looked more proud in the entire series.

[toointojoelmiller]

Joel Miller...

guard doggin'

wrappin' a foot

computerin'

fixin' a boot

lettin' himself in

[earstwo]

“I think that letter underscores for him that no matter how hard he tries, and no matter how strong his instinct is to preserve and protect the people that he cares about, he can’t.” - Craig Mazin

[azertyrobaz]

“Out of respect. It’s wonderful.”

[hnn3ydew]

Assortment of fallout drawings cause guess what I started getting into 🧐

[tlou-obsessed]

can you imagine the devastion he felt as they basically said they were gonna kill Ellie? He has been closed off for 20 years, basically surviving from day to day, unwilling to feel any emotion, locking it all away, staying away from children. We see that from the moment he meets Ellie his emotions are already bleeding out, he has a hard time controlling them, in his core he is made to be a father, to direct all his love to someone. Without Sarah there was no point anymore...

Now Ellie has made his way through all that devastion, she has poked his dad side, she makes him wanna be alive, he can finally direct all that love somewhere again, and now they dare take her away? again? over his dead body.

[cirrus-aureus]

oooold art… from very old rp.

ой короче я обосрусь теги ставить и у меня не вместится все но… папа пожалуйста не трогай мой писюнчик пожалуйста не надо прошу.

обещал себе не приманивать сп фандом.

#насри себе в штанишки

[chronicallyonlinewriter]

screaming into megaphone

GIVE US A TOMMY PHOTO, YOU COWARDS

[legends-expo]

Photos by Thor Parker / Bekah Marie Photo

We had such a great time with all of you a year ago today in Burbank, CA! We'll be back in the Los Angeles area in 2025 for another convention celebrating the Expanded Universe!

[wedgeantill]

LAYER CAKE (2004) dir. Matthew Vaughn

[rasin-c00ldude]

ME AND MY FRIEND CORE !!!

im not gonna say whos who.:3

[toointojoelmiller]

things to look at here: Joel's face when they turn around, and how it changes when he realizes what he's looking at the way they're walking so close that Ellie's touching his shirt casually, comfortably, affectionately the way he becomes a human shield and covers her body with his ouch.❤️‍🩹

[probssomethingorother]

a man on a mission

source vids [x] & [x]

[thehotpilot]

i know the decision is supposed to be morally impossible to make but it’s almost laughable how easy it is to side with joel. the last of us has spent week after week crafting a narrative in which ellie is her own fully formed person, giving her agency and power and depth and dreams of the future she would never know she’d never see because the fireflies reduced her to a means to an unstable end that they can’t even guarantee exists.