| “ | Please don't hate me. I'm happy.
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Joy Cirelli is a character in Silent Hill: Ascension. She is Toby Cirelli's sister and is recruited by cult member Rachel Hernandez to be an initiate in The Foundation.
When a Foundation ritual between Rachel and Joy goes wrong, she is killed by the Entangler, setting in motion the Hope's Junction, Pennsylvania storyline.
History[]
Background[]
Joy and Toby lost their family at a young age. Their troubled youth led them to addictions to cope with depression, with Joy turning to narcotics to stay afloat. As she grew up, she abused harsher substances, becoming heavily dependent on intravenous drugs by her young adulthood. At some point after the local steel mill incident, Joy suffered an almost-fatal overdose at home. Toby, who was strongly intoxicated at the time, was unable to help her and call for aid. Luckily, Joy was saved in time, and is put under watch and taken to rehabilitation to forgo her addiction. [1][2][3]
Toby listens to Joy's final voicemail.
She was promptly approached by Rachel Hernandez, a rising member of the local religious organization operating in Hope's Junction, promising help and support to get her clean from her struggles and to start a new life. Toby was strongly opposed to Joy's recruitment, believing Rachel to be the guilty party for the steel mill accident that forced him to be an outcast in town, but Joy proceeded with her induction hoping to improve her life.
Despite her efforts, the Foundation's therapies had no major breakthroughs for Joy. A ritual ceremony with Rachel was arranged for her as a last resort to achieve cleansing, and to become free of the pains of her past. Knowing it was an important night for her future, Joy tried to contact Toby and talk to him, but he didn't answer his phone. Joy left him a voice message, and joined Rachel at the Foundation's building for the ritual. [1]
Silent Hill: Ascension[]
The Entangler appears behind Joy.
On the night of the ritual, Joy was due to be purified through bloodletting. However, when it came to cutting her wrist, Joy got second thoughts and refused to continue the oath. As fog rolled into the ritual room, a monster appeared, making Rachel panic and try to get Joy to finish her prayer. Too scared to finish it, Joy was trapped in place by the monster's cords, forcing one of them down her throat and snapping her neck in the spot. However, while Rachel perceived her death to happen that way, she was unable to realize that in the real world she had strangled Joy to death after she hesitated in the ritual. [1][4]
Joy urges Toby for revenge.
That night, a drunk Toby paced around the forest near the lake, harboring troubled feelings over the news of Joy's death. As he listened to her final voicemail again, he heard Joy's voice and stumbled upon a vision of her dead body on the floor. An apparition of her, conjured by the fog, urged him to seek revenge against Rachel and the Foundation for her, suggesting him to "burn all of it down."
Joy's body was put on display at the Foundation's ritual room table the following night, the sight of which caused Rachel to become overwhelmed in front of the cult's elders. The cause of her death became an important topic for the cult's next moves, as elder Barbara suggested that her death had to do with the Withering phenomenon setting root in Hope's Junction. [1]
Joy appears to Toby stabbed with syringes.
Throughout the next days, Toby continued to be haunted by apparitions of Joy, always pressuring him to take action against the Foundation, blaming him for her fate and the state of the town, and leaving signs behind that pushed Toby deeper into despair even after his attempted attack on Rachel's clarity ritual. She appeared to him stabbed in needles, reminding him of her overdose, and in one occasion she vomited a Wanderer in front of Toby, before it became a vision of Rachel before his eyes and terrified him away. [2]
As the cult attempted to recruit Toby into the Foundation as a means of control, he tried to get his friend Eric out of it. Joy appeared to Toby once again to laugh at him once he failed to convince him to leave. By this point, Toby had grown numb at her apparitions, choosing to ignore her and push through. She would return to him later, encouraging him to take on Rachel's offer to join the Foundation. Her intentions were far from noble, as she expressed that if he were to enter, he'd be able to destroy the cult from the inside. Toby gave into Joy's suggestion and accepted the invitation. [3]
Watching as Toby is dragged into the fire.
Toby was sent to the abandoned steel mill in a mission to prove his commitment. Once there, Joy's echoing voice drew him to the ruins of the furnace that caused the accident, making him experience a vision of the accident's chaos. From the flames, the Entangler trapped Toby and drew him into the fire, while Joy smiled in satisfaction and walked away, leaving Toby to scream in fear about his fault and begging her for forgiveness. As it turned out, Toby was unharmed in the real world, and the experience led to Foundation leader Xavier Candless to determine that Toby needed to sacrifice himself to stop the Withering. Toby confided on Joy about his dilemma later, unsure of whether he should sacrifice himself or not. As he suggested that he could try killing Rachel in revenge, the silent Joy vanished from his side.
Joy appears for Toby's death.
The night before Toby's severing, he received a call in the bar's bathroom, where he had originally listened to Joy's voicemail for the first time. Her voice came through, initially repeating her words from her final message to him, but swiftly turned into an admission that he was the problem, and that only he could make things right. [5] Toby would go through with the severance ritual the next morning, and in his final moments before dying from a self-inflicted stab to the abdomen through Rachel, Joy appeared to watch him, letting him tell her his final words: "I made it right." [6]
Rachel is accused of murdering Joy.
After that point, Joy's apparition disappeared from Hope's Junction for several weeks. It became clear that Toby was not the one source of the Withering in town, leading to several clashes in faith that ended in most of the Foundation's members quitting or dying. While de facto leader Krista Lee prepared the Ascension ritual to save Rachel and her daughter Faith, the former wandered into the ritual room where Joy died time ago. Rachel was surrounded by fog and faced Joy's apparition for the one and only time, who reenacted the bloodletting ritual and then accused Rachel of murdering her during it to save her reputation, after being unable to help her overcome her struggles. When she forced Rachel to admit to Joy's murder, her response was to blame the Foundation for leading her astray and that she really believed she was helping Joy. Joy vanished for the last time after the confession, discontent with how it was too late to admit it. [4]
Behind the scenes[]
| “ | Joy Cirelli. 20 to 30 years old; Eastern European, Hispanic, Indigenous, Mediterranean, Mixed Ethnicity, white; woman. Loving, kind, and positive in life. Joy was a lost soul. She's innocent and a follower. But in death, Joy is Sinister and haunting as a delusion. She's vindictive and vengeful, goading Toby to succumb to his worst impulses. She likes butterflies, her brother, and being sober. She dislikes negative energy, being overwhelmed, and also her brother. Surfacing the tragic qualities of Joy's life helps balance out a lot of the antagonistic roles that she plays in scenes.
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Joy Cirelli first appeared in the interactive television series Silent Hill: Ascension, voiced by Katie Self.
References[]
| v · e · d |
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| Characters |
| Major Characters |
| Astrid Johansen - Brit Johansen - Eric Hernandez - Karl Johansen - Rachel Hernandez - Toby Cirelli - Xavier Candless |
| Other Characters |
| Aurora - Barbara - Eva Johansen - Faith Hernandez - Ingrid Johansen - Joy Cirelli - Krista Lee - Lejo Kant - Mette Dahl - Nils Grønbekk - Nora Jackson - Olivia Haugen - Orson Johansen - Zayn Davies |
| Monsters |
| Crawler - Fighter - Hanger - Snarler - Stinger - The Bruiser - The Collector - The Entangler - The Immolator - The Smotherer - Wanderer |
| Locations |
| Hope's Junction - Stilledalen |
| Terms |
| Monster - Fog World - Otherworld - Paul Radcliffe - The Foundation - The Heralds - The Purifier - The Withering |
| Archives |
| Episodes - Story Branches - Cameos - Arcane Library - Soundtrack |