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Before Annie became the tiny fire-wielding girl with a bear, she took cues from Lina Inverse, the explosive teenage sorceress from the anime Slayers. Riot originally planned for Annie to be a teenager too, but they eventually settled on a younger child instead, and looking at her now it's hard to imagine her any other way.
Early on, the working names for the leads were Joel 'Miller' and Ellie 'Williams,' but Naughty Dog dropped surnames entirely for the finished 2013 game. Fans kept using the old names anyway, and eventually the studio made it official - 'Miller' was confirmed as canon in Part II, and Neil Druckmann later confirmed 'Williams' for Ellie himself.
There's a bittersweet story behind all the 'Uncle has lumbago' jokes. John O'Creagh, who performed and voiced Uncle, passed away from a blood clot complication partway through the game's production. Rockstar removed most of his recorded lines out of respect, though the unused files still sit in the game's data. The one performance of his that made it into the finished game is his singing during the celebration scene at Beecher's Hope.
Keep an eye on the background wanted posters and you'll spot a torn one reading '...endish' with a familiar face. That's Cavendish of the White Horse, a character who won't actually show up in the story proper until much later arcs.
Rat traps scattered around rat-infested areas can be baited with cheese, and other players (or rats) can come along and try to grab that cheese off the trap. Because of how the mechanic works, it's been used as a sneaky way to transfer effectively infinite cheese to an ironman account, which definitely wasn't the intended use.
The Barrows equipment that made the six brothers seem practically unbeatable in battle wasn't blessed by Saradomin at all — it was handed to them by Sliske, and it came with strings attached that none of them realised until it was far too late to back out.
Ask around Castle Skingrad about the Surilie vineyards and Shum gro-Yarug will tell you he 'helped him drink his wine, and he always has some mighty fine wine.' That's almost word for word from Three Dog Night's 'Joy to the World,' the one about Jeremiah the bullfrog. Slightly odd choice for an Orc, but it works.
In the game, Joel finds a devastating note written by Frank to Bill before Frank takes his own life. The HBO show flips the whole scene around - it's Bill who leaves the letter, addressed to whoever finds his house after he and Frank die together. Same heartbreak, told from the opposite direction.
