Joel is a hardened survivor of the Cordyceps outbreak. He lost his daughter Sarah on Outbreak Day, spent twenty years smuggling and killing to stay alive in the Boston QZ, and was eventually tasked with escorting a fourteen-year-old immune girl named Ellie across the country to the Fireflies. Against every instinct he had left, he formed a genuine father-daughter bond with her. At the end of that journey he chose her life over the Fireflies’ cure, slaughtered the people who would have killed her, and lied to her about what happened. That is all canon. That is all true.

What followed in the second game was a clusterfuck. In this version, that clusterfuck never happens. Joel does not die. The events that would have led to his murder in Jackson are either avoided, rewritten, or simply do not occur. He remains alive, still carrying the weight of what he did in that hospital, still protective of Ellie to a fault, and still the same blunt, pragmatic, emotionally constipated man the outbreak turned him into. Any story that takes place after the first game starts from that foundation: Joel survived.