The Last of Us Fan Theory: David is Ish

I'm not normally a fan of fan theories (Ironic, I know) mostly because they have absolutely no real evidence to support them whatsoever (Unless they're by Game Theory), especially those about kids tv shows, like all the kids in Recess are dead or Ed Edd N Eddy takes place during the apocalypse. Sure they're fun to think about but if anyone actually thinks these have any proof or legitimacy to them at all, that is when I start to get frustrated. But with that being said...I have my own theory that I want to talk about, the possibility that in The Last of Us, David is actually a broken down Ish.

(Spoilers Ahead)

Now for those of you who have never played The Last of Us or you never found out about Ish, allow me to explain. Ish was a fisherman who was in the middle of the ocean when the zombie virus struck, so when he returned to land with everything destroyed, he had no place to go but the sewers, where he began to build himself a little nest. After a while Ish began to meet other survivors and ended up forming a small community down in the sewers and began to rebuild society, that is until the zombies make their way in and ruin everything, Ish and an unspecified amount of survivors manage to make it out, however most of their party were left behind. Ish and his crew are now broken and struggling to survive and...that's it, that's the last we hear from them. Ish was simply just a little side story that you could discover on your journey's through the sewer. It's completely passable and your experience won't be at all affected, it's just a neat little subplot to learn more about throughout this level and you never get a conclusion on what happens to him.

David on the other hand, is a major character in the winter section of the game, he was a cannibal who was in charge of a group of hunters and other cannibals. David is shown to clearly be a broken man, a person who at one point might have been a good human being but the apocalypse has slowly been tearing away at his humanity and now he is on the brink of insanity. Now here's the thing, we are never given a clear time stamp of when Ish's story takes place, it could have been a week before we found the sewers or it could even be several months, we don't know, but all we do know is, he was not the same man he was before.

Let's take a look at the similarities the two of them share, they are both leaders of a group of survivors, they both yearn for a family to look after, they are both optimistic people though they do have their limits, and they are both broken men. Here's what I think happened, after Ish's sewer home was destroyed him and a group of others made it out, we don't know who exactly, we just know that within the group were a mother who he had feelings for and a group of children, there could have been other survivors, we don't know. All we know is that they were all that Ish had left, he even says in one of his letters how easy it would be to end things right now, but he won't...for them. One of the major themes in The Last of Us is survival and more importantly, what you survive for, as Joel said "I have struggled for a long time with surviving, and no matter what, you keep finding something to fight for". 

Within the months of Ish with the mother and the children, he begins to grow more attached to them, even seeing himself as some sort of father figure. Also within those months the group starts to expand, they meet other people and their group gets larger, and it is entirely possible that within that time span, something happens, David loses those that he now considered his family and that last straw of humanity he had was gone. He was now a different man, Ish had become David.

So during winter when he meets Ellie, David begins to have those feelings he did back with the old group, that feeling of being a father, something that he could have with Ellie if she would just let him, but of course the fact that he is now a nutter means that it's not exactly going to be easy to convince her. But he keeps trying because she can now be what he fights for, the replace what he already had, to become Ish yet again.

-Danny