History Characters / JoeVsElanSchool

[[folder:Unnamed rebellious kid]]

* TheConfidant: Against Joe's better judgement, Gino -- who openly sees through and rejects Elan's bullshit -- becomes Joe's confidant within Elan. Joe acknowledges that his need for Gino's confidence is almost like an addiction, as it's one of the only "real" friendships he makes in Elan. This almost comes back to bite Joe when Gino starts naming people who'd confided in him, although Gino ultimately doesn't name Joe.

* BigBadFriend: Joe and Gino stay in touch, and Joe later calls him "my best friend." However, their relationship is strained when Gino keeps working for Ron, and when Joe sees an online accusation that Gino may be an Elan recruiter. This eventually culminates in Gino's ambiguous reaction during their last conversation, when Gino looks "almost like he was angry and proud at the same time" after Joe admits to being "Dave Westminister."

* SlutShaming: Part of Elan's modus operandi. Any contact between girls and boys, no matter how benign, is forbidden; and if a girl gets caught, the program makes an example out of her through slut shaming. Christy also tells the girls in Katie's dorm that they'll become prostitutes if they don't lean how to properly clean.

* DisappearedDad: By the time Joe's own marriage has fallen apart and Joe is forced to live at home again, Joe's dad is living in another state.

* IcyBlueEyes: Eva is a drug addict who Joe says initially started off "for sure just using me" and later sleeps around with other guys after telling Joe about her pregnancy, and is depicted with icy blue eyes.

* {{Foil}}: Gino for Joe. He's a few months younger than Joe, and because he's forced into Elan to get out of a supposedly worse sentence, he's arguably in a similar predicament that Joe was in at the beginning of the story. By the time Gino shows up, though, Joe has been in Elan for a few years and is pretty far into his own indoctrination. Gino openly ridicules many of the things about Elan that Joe himself ridiculed at the beginning of the story, and this serves as a brutal contrast to what Joe has become. Later on, though, it's turned on its head: Joe leaves Elan still hating Ron, while Gino has not only bonded with Ron (due to UsefulNotes/StockholmSyndrome), but has also gone into "business" with Ron. To cap it all, when Joe Googles Gino's name after seeing Gino wracked with religious guilt, he finds that Gino was listed as an ''Elan recruiter'' by another Elan survivor. Gino eventually dies of a drug overdose a few chapters after Joe talks about cleaning up his own act.

* SmallRoleBigImpact: P's presence in the narrative isn't very large, but it is far-reaching: he was there for the drug charge that got Joe sent to the Elan School in the first place, he tells Joe that the drug charges were all dropped three months into Joe's stay at Elan, and he also later introduces Joe to Website/{{Reddit}}, which becomes instrumental in helping Joe and the "core group" take down Elan for good.

* TheUnReveal: In Chapter 100, Joe takes some time to reflect on his relationship with Gino, following the latter's death in Chapter 98, and the rumors that Gino, as a part of his mysterious pantership with Ron, might have been working directly for Elan as a recruiter, and could even have been one of the people who opposed Joe and his efforts, in his guise as Dave Westminister, to expose and close the place down. Joe admits he never really discovered for certain if this was the case, as he ultimately concluded that he actually wasn't interested in knowing the answer and he preferred to remember Gino as his friend and nothing else.

* TheUnReveal: In Chapter 100, Joe thinks ponders his relationship with Gino, and the rumors that Gino, as a part of his mysterious pantership with Ron, might have been working directly for Elan as a recruiter, and could even have been one of the people who opposed Joe and his efforts, in his guise as Dave Westminister, to expose and close the place down. Joe admits he never really discovered for certain if this was the case, as he ultimately concluded that he actually wasn't interested in knowing the answer and he preferred to remember Gino as his friend and nothing else.

* TheCaligula: She rules over Elan 8 with cruelty, not taking any kind of slight against her rule, and constantly MovingTheGoalposts with forcing Joe to stay at Elan as her stooge. However, Joe notes that she completely shuts down with a "dumb, helpless, confused look on her face" when two high-strength students take down John during the Elan 8 riot.

* EarnYourHappyEnding: Joe swears off his post-Elan bad behaviors and focuses fully on his self-improvement, falls in love with and marries Maria, figures out a financial situation that allows him and his new wife to permanently move away from his parents, and relocates to New York City.

* EleventhHourRanger: Sofi shows up four chapters before the end of the story.

* MovingTheGoalposts: Christy ultimately prolongs Joe's stay at Elan because she wants to keep him running Elan 8 as her lackey. It takes Ron directly calling her out for it and threatening to "go to the top" to get her to finally schedule Joe's graduation date, which [[ShameIfSomethingHappened she constantly holds over Joe's head]].

** Joe gets interviewed (with his face [[{{Pixellation}} blurred]]) for a documentary about Elan called ''The Last Stop''. However, when he sits down to watch it, he gets a panic attack about three minutes in; he can't even bring himself to fast forward through it to his interview, as even brief snippets of Elan imagery sets off his PTSD. He notes that he still can't watch it to this day.

* LastGirlWins: She's Joe's last love interest in the story, who Joe is still with today.

* LoveInterest: Joe first meets Sofi in the "cold city" after seeing her at a salsa dancing class. They go on a few dates before his visa expires, but he later returns and stays with her for two years.

* SecondLove: Sofi and Joe meet, date, and get together some time after Joe's divorce from Maria.

Sofi is Joe's love interest who he meets in the "cold city" while traveling the world after his divorce.

* SmallRoleBigImpact: P's presence in the narrative isn't very large, but it is far-reaching: he was there for the drug charge that got Joe sent to the Elan School in the first place, and he also later introduces Joe to Website/{{Reddit}}, which becomes instrumental in helping Joe and the "core group" take down Elan for good.

* OffToBoardingSchool: Katie's stepfather sent Katie to Elan over her mother's wishes.

* WhatYouAreInTheDark: During one of his call center jobs in New York, Joe is so disgusted by the center's predatory sales methods that he learns the account deletion code, quietly spends the next four days deleting people's numbers and faking sales, then leaves for good.

* SmallRoleBigImpact: Dee-Ray agrees to provide testimony about Elan, casually mentioning that he wouldn't believe that he endured Elan if not for track meet results on Google. This gives Joe the idea to Google recent track meet results for Elan School, and to use that data to comb through his call center's databases and find contact info for the kids' parents. This directly leads to Katie's rescue from Elan, which in turn leads to Sandra and other children being rescued.

* HateSink: Joe has absolutely no problem vilifying Cirri. Cirri started out as a petty thug, got roped into the Synanon-inspired Daybreak Village in the Sixties, and walks away with it with enough knowledge of its methodology to co-found Elan School. From Elan, Cirri rakes in ''millions'' of dollars in tuition fees at the expense of the children's well-being, and personally oversaw its earliest punishment methods, which included horrors like dumping buckets of human waste on its residents. Joe alleges that Cirri burned down several buildings he owned at Elan and at his racetrack to collect the insurance money, drove his wife to a breakdown that required a hospital stay, and has enough clout in the Maine political scene to [[ScrewTheRulesIHaveConnections keep law enforcement at bay]].

** In the third part, however, Joe finds that this good publicity lasted even after Cirri's death in 2001. To his disgust, he sees that the Maine legislature had a "Jay Cirri Day" and paid homage to him with a speech.

* TheSvengali: More or less becomes one to Gino after Gino leaves Elan, turning Gino into what looks like a drug runner.

** In Joe. He gradually "befriends" Joe in Elan, then later attempts to get Joe to leave Elan with him, and gets into a spat with Christy over Joe's graduation date. During Joe's senior year of college, Gino says that Ron sometimes asks Gino about Joe, which makes it somewhat alarming when Joe doesn't hear from Gino again "for a very long time" after Joe refuses to go visit Ron with him.
** To a lesser extent, Gino, who becomes one of Ron's buddies and flunkies thanks to Gino's lingering UsefulNotes/StockholmSyndrome. Joe doesn't have the heart to tell Gino that Gino's experience with Ron happened almost ''exactly'' the same way it did with Joe, with the only difference being that Joe couldn't stand the thought of Ron after Elan.

* SmallRoleBigImpact: His role in the story isn't very large, but he does get Joe involved with Elan's running team. Joe keeps up with running even after leaving Elan; in a late chapter, Joe mentions that he routinely runs for exercise and exploration while traveling the world.

Gino is a snarky teen from Staten Island, just a few months younger than Joe, who is first introduced in Chapter 54 as a new student. Shortly after the Elan 8 riot, Joe makes friends with Gino, breaking one of Elan's cardinal rules about "contracts" between inmates. The two later keep in touch after Elan.