#Fallout meta

[artbyblastweave]

At a high level, Dead Money feels like it's in some kind of conversation with player expectations surrounding RPG companion mechanics, both in the base game of New Vegas specifically and in RPGs more broadly. But special mention goes to Dean Domino, whose entire character is a one-two punch in service of this point.

The first punch being that he's one of the few characters in the game who genuinely punishes the by-then-thoroughly-inculcated reflex to just automatically select any skill check you're capable of passing. One-upping him through the barter check in your initial conversation guarantees that you'll have to kill him later, potentially hours of playtime after the perceived slight in question- which is certainly a fitting character beat for a man who's been trying to ruin his dead one-sided rival for 200 years for the crime of being happier than him. If you decide you want to keep him alive, you actually have to maintain a specific tonal approach throughout your interactions with him, picking dialogue options that assuage his neuroses, frequently bending over backwards to manage his ego. He isn't a base-game companion you found standing on the edge of a life-changing precipice, waiting for a push towards a good or bad life outcome; all that's up in the air here is how you react to his 200 years of accumulated awfulness.

And this, in turn, leads you (or at least led me) to the follow-up question- if you do thread the needle, stay in his good books, put up with all his bullshit, say all the right things so that he genuinely likes you when you meet for the last time at the Tampico theatre- why? Given the levels of meta-knowledge about the story you need to bring to the table in order to successfully jump through all these hoops, you almost certainly know what he did, and if you're playing as the kind of positive-karma character typically associated with a quote-unquote "golden ending," you've probably killed other characters for less. But those other characters weren't framed to you as companions. No help in firefights, no combat barks, no unique perk with bespoke art, no achievement nudging you towards the conclusion that saving everyone is the best possible outcome. Certainly none of the miserable anti-charisma that's charming in fiction and homicide-inducing in an actual workplace-slash-kidnapping. If you go through all the work to save him you're probably letting your embrace of the game-logic framing run counter to how the vast majority of personalities would likely react to him. Certainly I'm guilty of this- every time I've run the DLC, regardless of how I'm roleplaying, I've slipped up and let the seductive logic of party-member-as-puzzle-box override any previous commitment to just doming the fucker this time.

[telumendils]

i honestly think the ghoul believes lucy is just full of shit until she gives him those vials. like he does not believe she is genuinely that good of a person because no one is that good of a person anymore, and because she is the product of vault-tec middle-management. he is constantly expecting her to show her "true colors" (hence "there you are, you little killer" after she bites off his finger) until that moment when she chooses to help him despite the fact that he's done nothing to deserve her kindness. COMPELS ME!!!!

[sad-endings-suck]

One of my favourite specific tropes has got to be murder bride.

[mswyrr]

Walton Goggins killed me with these comments re: Cooper seeing Janey again

[beauty-4-thebeast]

Can we talk about this scene again?

Barb pitches the taffy to Cooper, while she knows he's gonna hate the taste. And when you look closely at her face, it becomes clear she is manipulating Cooper, preparing the ground for what she wants him to do, while she knows he isn't the kind of man to like working for an evil corporation. There are glimpses of both uncertainty and resoluteness on her face when she flirtingly talks about the taffy.

I bet nobody would have paid any attention to the way Cooper touched her hand with the very finger that Lucy bit off later if Barb hadn't emphatically spoken about "someone touching you for the first time". And Cooper just says, "May I?" and lets his finger slide along her hand. He's taken in, hook, line and sinker, by her charm, he would do anything for her.

Skip forward to the present day when he's looking for Wilzig's head and sees Lucy sitting at the bank of the river. Note how beautiful the scenery is, blue water and lush green vegetation, it’s almost romantic. And when Lucy turns to him she - what? She gives him a friendly hello and a most charming smile. Even my heart melted when I saw it.

But Cooper knows better this time. Instead of going along with her being all nice and flirty, he strikes her down. He may be harsh but he doesn't let himself be dragged into another dishonest exchange. Not anymore.

[twosides--samecoin]

Can we talk about how beautifully Lucy's character represents someone picking up Fallout for the first time?

She has all the perks she thinks she needs to have and is prepared as she thinks she needs to be until she barely survives her first fight against a raider. Dr. Siggi tells her if she insists upon being here, she must adapt. Lucy tells The Ghoul "I won't ever be like you" but has no idea what he had to do (or what she will need to do) to survive. She wants to be kind and fair to solve problems but utterly fails speech checks. She gets lost in side quests. She's shocked to learn her privilege when she sees a family of skeletons sat around a table who took poison together, and is forced to encounter it again when she says the "I recognize my privilege" line to Ma June and Ma June rejects her for it - getting by in the Wasteland is a life hard lived, one she can't understand.

And in the end she encounters a painful truth she couldn't have imagined. She finds what she's looking for and it's all fucked up. And her last move is still choosing kindness. She is faced with some bullshit "choose between two factions" decision that feels like it has no meaning in the face of war and cruelty. But when one door closes for her, another door opens for The Ghoul. So she chooses to follow him; to give back instead of take. And the world moves on. There's a billion more quests to follow. Lucy isn't done with the Wasteland yet, and the Wasteland is not yet done teaching her the game.

[goldenrulemotherfucker]

Real talk, I came to the Fallout series a total newb, knowing nothing about the lore/games and came away with a new favorite show, easily in my top five. In particular, something it does exceptionally well is narrative payoff. Nothing in this show happens just to happen; every choice the characters make shapes their future arcs. As a SFF writer myself, I'm not only impressed--I'm inspired.

I feel this way about the entire story, but in terms of Lucy and Cooper specifically, we get so many great payoffs from their interactions. When he doesn't share his water, it seems like he's just being a dick until we learn that his canteen is full of dirty water. (Yes, he was still being a dick, but he knew she naively thought he was drinking clean water.) When he forces her to use the knife in the "ass jerky" scene, he's absolutely being cruel, but he's also extremely fatigued to the point of near collapse, which only becomes clear only after she's out of sight at the Super Duper Mart. When he cuts off her finger, it seems like nothing more than him "getting even," when he actually took a much-needed replacement part for his hand (from someone he assumed wouldn't be alive much longer).

These interactions are all brutal, give us new insights into both characters, and also set up a massive payoff in Lucy's "golden rule, motherfucker" moment. Even after everything he put her through and how he treated her as disposable, she does the opposite and shows him empathy and kindness. To put it plainly: Her choice in this scene wouldn't carry half as much weight if he hadn't repeatedly treated her like shit. Coupled with her ability to self-rescue, the scene cements who Lucy is as a person--both for the viewer and for Cooper. (And what happens next? He watches a film clip where his old self looks right at him and delivers the line about a villain being ugly and strong but having no dignity.)

The moment when Lucy gives him the vials could have been enough of a payoff for their arc by itself. But it sets up an even better one: The next time they cross paths, he treats her differently. Having already seen himself in her, and knowing that they both want answers to the same (or very similar) questions, he invites her to accompany him on his journey this time--no longer as a pawn, but as someone he trusts and respects at least a little. As a direct payoff for her memorable act of kindness toward him, this fucking rules. It's surprising while also feeling completely earned. "Golden rule, motherfucker," isn't just a satisfying moment (or my favorite line), it shapes the characters' future.

On Lucy's side, when she decides to follow him, she has no reasons to trust or respect him (yet); she likely just recognizes that he's currently the only person who will lead her to the truth. But she's only met the Ghoul so far, not Cooper Howard. She doesn't know that his primary motivation has been searching for his family this whole time. She doesn't know that she's seen him before, in those old movies she watched at home. She doesn't know why he shot the billboard.

Now, I'm not making predictions about how their future arc will play out (nor am I asking for them), I'm just along for the ride. But I feel confident that there will be many more great payoffs to come now that they've gone from "hostile forced proximity" to "traveling together by choice." I've rarely been so pumped for a second season. <3

[findher-ogg]

I think Piper Wright Fallout 4 is one of those characters who's good in theory but not in practice. I was thinking about her as a character in relation to her setting and I genuinely think her archetype would be better suited to the NCR than it is to the Commonwealth.

Which I think comes down to how Bethesda handles their games, environment and attitude wise, as opposed to Black Isle and Obsidian. The West coast has basically recovered. New Vegas is a tourist attraction. The NCR are on a rapid tirade of imperialist expansion that's only achievable because they, as a nation, have recovered from the war and grown from it. If you compare Shady Sands in Fallout 1 to Diamond City in Fallout 4, its kind of funny. Shady Sands started out with decent houses made from dirt, with solid foundation and some of them having actual windows. The average settlement in Bethesda Fallout (like Diamond City or Megaton), meanwhile, are just shanty towns made from tin.

In the Commonwealth's case this is made even more insane by the fact that Fenway Park (where Diamond City is located) is surrounded by mostly intact houses that, with a bit of fixer-uppering, could be lived in relatively normally compared to the tin shacks of Diamond City. I think Megaton gets more of a pass because the Capital Wasteland got nuked to shit, but you get me.

Returning to Piper for a second, let's take a look at her character: she's a spunky, somewhat annoying character who's very invested in the freedom of the press and so forth. She's got a working printing press and everything, which is super impressive considering how run-down the rest of Diamond City is aside from the Valentine Detective Agency signs (seriously, where did they find the materials for those). She runs Publick Occurences solo with her sister, and it's all well and good. Ignoring the witch hunts she sends people on about synths.

And I get it. I think this specific gripe with Piper as a character comes from having played this game for the first time in 2024. The synths don't really hold up as an allegory for anything, and the entire story surrounding them is very "trying to be progressive in 2014". Which is fine, I think it is just a symptom of the era the game came out in, but still.

Piper's character, as a spunky yet annoying journalist who believes the people deserve to know what's going on, would be far better suited in a more developed location on the West coast -- specifically, Freeside or somewhere within the NCR.

I think Piper would suit the Followers of the Apocalypse, for example, serving as an informant to keep them in the know about what's going on between the Strip, the NCR and the regular Freesiders. Plus, having a funny, anarchist-themed newspaper you can receive in-game where she touts her hatred for the Securitron police force is a funny mental image. Equally, I think she'd suit living in Shady Sands -- right at the heart of the NCR's seediest political manouvres as the decisions are made. Imagine her as a journalist who frequently pushes back against the Mojave expansion, for example, and how the NCR is putting too many resources into a lost cause instead of more important things like healthcare or housing. That way, you could still keep her extreme hatred for the upper class in The Stands while making it make more sense within the setting.

Leading on from this, this made me realise how Bethesda also just aren't very deliberate with how they utilise history in their games. Which makes sense, to a certain extent, given how destroyed absolutely everything on the East coast is. But still. It's a little stupid.

The core conflict of New Vegas -- the Legion vs the NCR -- is actually a really deep-cut history reference at its core. The NCR is the Bear, the Legion is the Bull. In mid-19th century California, people watched bears and bulls fight for fun.

There are other, better examples, I'm sure. But I'm British and this is my personal favourite example, so this is what I'm using. History plays such an important part of New Vegas' themes and messaging -- it's a story about how, when, and why humanity needs to move on from the past and look towards the future.

Bethesda Fallout, by comparison, will frequently and shallowly tout "nukes bad" while letting Liberty Prime lob them at Super Mutants, or encouraging players to nuke each other's houses in Fallout 76.

Piper exists partially as a nod to the Boston Herald, and how it's one of the longest-running/most influential newspapers in America. A lot of publishing has its roots within Boston, and I think it's an interesting reference to take.

And I think this is a part of Fallout that Bethesda does get -- a lot of what people do in the post-war world is inspired by what came before. Caesar's Legion and its ideologies come from Edward Sallow not understanding basic Roman history properly and using it to fuel his agenda because it looks cool. The Minutemen are exactly that. The New California Republic are the new US government, right down to the borderline facist intentions and ideologies. I could go on.

And this comes from Fallout being a series about the cyclical nature of violence. "War never changes, but men do through the roads they walk" is the story here. War cannot change if men do not change, because war exists in an endless cycle of violence that can only be broken if man chooses to break it. And they've failed at it so far, right?

And this is where I go back to Piper. Her nod to history isn't as intentional as anything in New Vegas, and I feel like she would have been better served as a character if she was in New Vegas instead. Because her entire character would make more sense if she was living in the more developed and rebuilt towns of the West coast as opposed to a dilapidated shanty town on the East.

I have more thoughts about this but tl;dr Bethesda should really put more effort into making sure their history references and homages make sense to the setting contextually, in the same way that New Vegas does. That game was developed in 18 months and still has far more care put into its historical references than Fallout 4 does. And I love Fallout 4.

[breckstonevailskier]

"The End" and "The Beginning"

It's interesting to notice that the first episode of Fallout is called "The End" and the last episode of season 1 is called "The Beginning". But that's because there are a lot of hidden meanings.

"The End":

The reason this episode has this name is because it specifically refers to the big moments going on in Lucy's and the Ghoul's lives.

The "End" of Cooper Howard:

We open on October 23, 2077, with Cooper Howard performing for a kid's birthday party. During the party, the Great War breaks out as the bombs fall on America. This marks the fall of America.

But it also marks the "end" of Cooper Howard. Because the last we see of Cooper, he's riding away on Sugarfoot with Janey as the bombs fall. When we next see him, he's the Ghoul, and he's very much suppressed any attachment to the identity of Cooper Howard. He wears a tattered jacket and a bandolier over his old movie costume, and he's pretty much done everything to disassociate himself from his old identity, right down to using the Southern accent he used in his movies as his main accent.

The "End" of Lucy MacLean the Vault Dweller:

The episode being titled "The End" also fits the fact that we're seeing the final days of Lucy's life as a naive Vault Dweller. After all, a common theme amongst the Fallout games where the player character starts in a Vault is that you're irreversibly changed when you set out into the Wasteland.

And for Lucy, this moment where she passes through the vault door might as well be a metaphorical "death" scene, as demonstrated by how the blown out lighting makes it look like she's stepping "into the light".

"The Beginning":

This episode's title is also about pivotal moments for Lucy and the Ghoul, but also a few others.

The Beginning of the Great War:

This one's technically a bonus. But this episode is where we get to see the exact moment the Great War actually began: in a dimly lit room where Barb and other collaborators from Vault-Tec and other big corporations met.

The New Beginning of Cooper Howard:

Over the episodes that follow the Ghoul's little misadventure with Lucy, we see that her refusal to break despite his efforts to bring her down to his level have instead had the effect of helping him rediscover his old morals.

Here's the notable things the Ghoul does between the Super Duper Mart and when he meets Lucy again:

He takes the heat for Lucy's killing of the organ harvesters and some of the feral ghouls under questioning from Sorrel Booker.

He re-adopts CX404 and renames her Dogmeat, something that's intercut with flashbacks of him with Roosevelt, his pre-War Border Collie.

He shows sympathy for Lucy over her feeling betrayed by her dad, given he went through the same thing.

But the most telling clue that Cooper Howard has found a new beginning is the fact that his last line of the season is said in his own accent, not the Southern twang he's used as the Ghoul or in his movies:

The Beginning of Lucy MacLean the Wastelander:

A common thing we've seen across the Fallout games is that Vault Dwellers who leave their vaults can never go back.

The Vault Dweller from Fallout 1 gets banished from his Vault due to having been radically changed by his experiences in the Wasteland.

The Lone Wanderer of Fallout 3 fled into the Wasteland after nearly being killed by the Overseer. But they can't go back to the Vault for the sake of maintaining piece there following a civil war.

Lucy continues this grand tradition.

When she left Vault 33, she only went out with the intention of rescuing her dad and returning with him to the Vault. But as Wilzig warns her, she'll change, whether she wanted to or not.

Wilzig: You come from a world of rules, of laws. This place is indifferent to all of that. I do not think you would be willing to do what it takes to survive up here. Lucy: I'm not going back without my dad. Wilzig: If you insist on staying, then you will have to adapt. Question is will you still want the same things... when you have become a different animal altogether?

We see that Lucy does change. She becomes more jaded, cynical, violent, and less trusting of others, though she refuses to compromise her morals.

But once she gets to Moldaver, she ends up learning that all these things she was forced to endure these past two weeks were done on false pretenses: her dad's no saint at all. He's a war criminal responsible for the deaths of over 30,000 people out of petty jealousy because his wife dared to take Lucy and Norm away from him to live on the surface.

She can no longer recognize the man she once idolized and called her dad, because he was never real. She can no longer recognize herself as 'Lucy MacLean, Dutiful Vault Dweller" because that girl died when she stepped out of Vault 33. Her whole life has been nothing but lies.

And that feeling is only reinforced by what the Ghoul says: "You want to know how I know your daddy, don't you? Let's just say that everything about your whole little world was decided over 200 years ago." And while the Ghoul continues talking and tells her that she'll be killed by the Brotherhood if she sticks around, he's blurred out, visually conveying that Lucy has tuned him out and her inquisitive mind is stuck on the last sentence.

She wants answers, and the one who can help her find them is the man who pistol-whipped her, used her as bait for a Gulper, cut off her finger, and sold her organ harvesters.

She can't go back to Vault 33 again. Maybe she returns to rescue Norm and Chet, but there's no way she can ever live there again.

So she does the only thing she can do in this situation: she puts her mom out of her misery, and embraces the identity of "Lucy MacLean, Wastelander".

Ella Purnell said it best: "By killing her mum in a mercy kill, she’s doing exactly what the Ghoul did to Roger [in episode four]. She’s learnt from him. She has turned into him. When she said, “I’ll never be you,” maybe that’s not true. And in that moment, when she shoots her mum, it means so many things. It means, ‘I’m coming with you.’ It means, ‘I’m gonna meet my makers.’ It means, ‘I fucking hate you, but I have turned into you, you were right.’ It means she’s letting go of her golden centre."

The Beginning of Lucy and the Ghoul's partnership:

And of course, "The Beginning" is the start of Lucy and Cooper Howard's partnership.

It's a big shift for them to have gone from Lucy being his hostage...

...to her being his traveling companion.

Now it can truly be a mentor-mentee relationship where they bring each other to a sort of middle level, where Cooper softens and rediscovers his old ideals while Lucy hardens without compromising her morals.

I think Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins described this best in Variety's interview about shooting the Griffith Observatory finale (skip to 17:55):

Purnell’s lightbulb moment hit when she realized it all came back to the Ghoul. “Part of the Wasteland that I carry with me literally is, it’s not the Wasteland; it’s the Ghoul. I’ve turned into him when I said I wasn’t going to do that,” says Purnell. “Most of Lucy hates herself for what she’s turned into, hates him for what he’s turned her into. But she doesn’t have a choice. She can’t stay here. When he says, ‘Do you want to go meet your makers?’ Lucy is never going to say no to that. And so, it’s not a broken ‘okie-dokie.’ It’s an acceptance of what’s happened to her. It’s an, ‘OK, there’s nothing else for me to do except put one foot in front of the other.’” Goggins says the scene was one of the “most fulfilling parts” of the project since it started so brutally and ended slightly softer but not overly sentimental. The actor is glad the co-creators didn’t lean into that sentimentality. “It isn’t father-daughter,” he says. “I think it is a person who has seen the loss of innocence in another person and deeply empathizes with it because he himself went through a similar experience 200 years earlier and is still reeling from the loss of that innocence that his tone changes. And when he says, ‘Are you coming?’ I just think that’s a pretty cool way to go out.”

[emmcarstairs]

From Gloves to Fingers: The Ghoul and Lucy MacLean

Despite their mostly practical usage nowadays, gloves used to be a powerful tool in society. There were rules about how and when a person should wear them, and what messages they relayed to others. Gloves were more than a fashion accessory; they had symbolic functions. Across various sources, such as visual media, art, and literature, gloves are associated with notions about power, protection, purity, as well as sexuality.

In the following analysis, I will examine the Ghoul’s gloves in Fallout (2024) as a visual key to understanding his character, motivations, and relationship with Lucy. 

What if I told you that the first thing we see about the Ghoul, his introduction to us, is his gloved hand?

His character is shrouded in mystery, and his gloves facilitate this impression. When a character hides their hands, we assume they have secret or evil intentions. That’s why gloves have come to be associated with villains. And at first glance at this character, this assumption would not be far from the truth. But in the Ghoul’s case, it’s more complicated than that. Let’s roll back to the beginning!

As soon as we learn that the Ghoul used to be the famous Hollywood actor Cooper Howard, and the face of Vault-Tec, we start to make the connections. For instance, we know he refuses to do the thumbs-up for the photo during the birthday party. The thumbs-up, his thumbs-up in particular, is a symbol for Vault-Tec, a company he has grown to despise. So it isn’t surprising that he would try to conceal his relation to the company, figuratively and physically.

Two hundred years later, we learn about the nature of ghouls. Radiation has ravaged their skin and appearance. In this case, the gloves might serve the cosmetic purpose of hiding most of his scarred body. 

However, it all comes down to the image he presents to the world around him. His gloves, and his hat, are accessories for the costume he’s chosen to wear. He doesn’t go around by the name of Cooper Howard anymore; he has built himself a new identity, using props just like an actor would. He is recognizable by these attributes and they are a makeshift armor for the real man underneath it. I’d even argue that his gloves act as a physical and psychological shield between him and the atrocities he’d committed to survive.

Now that we’ve discussed the symbolism of him wearing gloves, it’s time to ask the important question. Do we see the Ghoul’s ungloved hands? We do. Two times. And both of them are connected to Lucy: one in her presence, one in the presence of her finger.

The first time we see the Ghoul’s ungloved hands is after the significant scene of him mercy killing Roger and feeding on him in front of Lucy. The fact that Lucy witnessed him eat, not just any food but human flesh, is extremely important. In that scene, he reveals his animalistic nature. It’s an intimate scene because he begins her initiation into the Wasteland by offering her his knife to cut off some pieces herself. In a way, he shares his meal with her. Her repulsion is clear but she relents. It’s important to keep this scene in mind.

Cut to the scene with him with no gloves. At this point, he’s shown her a part of himself. In the past, the removal of gloves was a sign of closeness, and even inferiority. He has shed his skin, literally in the form of his gloves. He has allowed himself to be vulnerable in her presence. He’s naked in a way we haven’t seen before. It’s no wonder what happens next has so many sexual undertones.

To put it plainly, in this scene we see the Ghoul relishing the taste of irradiated water while Lucy is right next to him… thirsty. It’s an interesting juxtaposition to a previous scene when Lucy politely asked for water but he denied her (with his gloves on, retaining a metaphorical barrier, an air of superiority). She then saw the pool of water but resisted drinking from it while he taunted her. Now, it seems different. He watches her with a silent challenge in his eyes, tempting. She isn’t asking him anything this time. All she sees is the water, the means to quench her thirst, and… his ungloved hand.

Personally, I find the choice to include his hand here very interesting. What happens next, even more so; Lucy succumbs to her thirst. In contrast to her hesitation and revulsion with slicing pieces off Roger for food, she eagerly drinks the irradiated water the Ghoul drank moments ago. It’s a desperate physical need, and it’s out of her own volition. If you don’t see anything sexual about this frame, I don’t know what to tell you:

It’s worth mentioning the way the Ghoul stoops to her level here which enables the iconic “Oh, I’m you, sweetie.” She’s almost his equal here, as they stare after she’s drunk the water, their hands ungloved.

Lucy, being ever the opportunist, sees his weakness and tries to run away. Her attempt is short-lived because he catches her in his lasso. And all the build-up ends in one of the most memorable scenes in the show; and for a good reason!

In their struggle, Lucy takes advantage of his exposed hand, his weakness, and bites his finger off. It’s almost like she’s turned into him: an animal tearing flesh. The gloves would have protected him against harm but he’s taken them off, he has allowed himself to be vulnerable around her. Perhaps, he underestimated her.

In a violent imitation of a lover's touch, he cuts her finger off. This is the first time they touch hands. In the past, a woman had to be wary of a man’s ungloved hand because it signified danger and the loss of her chastity.

In Lucy's case, chastity refers to her naivety about navigating the world around her. The Ghoul opened her eyes about the surrounding world, but she dared to go one step further and stole something of his, a part of him. For two centuries, he's managed to keep his ten fingers intact, a sign of his competence, and it's none other than Lucy who overpowers him this way. So he feels obliged to take a part of her to replace his missing one. It's very much an exchange of rings/vows type of situation. But I digress. 

After the finger exchange and the visual replacement of Lucy's finger, which for a second looked to me like adding a band/ring, we see the most significant scene for her character yet. She survives alone in the Super Duper Mart and despite it all, retains her principles, by saving his life. She emerges the victor, both in terms of survival and morals. But how does the exchange affect him? 

In a rare scene of self-reflection, the Ghoul watches his old human self on film. The gloves are back on and he mimics pulling the trigger, nothing unusual.

But as we watch him rub the leather of his missing finger, we know that something has shifted. Beneath the seemingly intact glove, there is a missing piece. Try as he might to conceal it, and even if it's unnoticeable to others, he’s aware of its absence. Despite the external armor, the damage is internal.

Which brings us to the second scene with his ungloved hands: the scene of him sewing Lucy’s finger on his hand.

The Ghoul is held responsible for the thrashing of the Super Duper Mart. While they question him, he asks for the needle and thread (red thread of fate, anybody?) in his bag. As he unrolls the piece of cloth, we see Lucy’s finger.

Here I want to make an important note: In the past, gloves were considered an extension of the wearer’s body; another symbolic body part. In the classic novel Little Women, Meg loses one of her gloves and it turns out that the man who is interested in her romantically – Mr. Brooke – has hidden it in his pocket. Later, characters would consider this act a declaration of his intentions toward her. The Ghoul has neatly packed away Lucy’s finger in his bag. The subtext is definitely there. 

In the first scene when he was ungloved, it was in Lucy’s active presence. In this scene, she’s not here but her presence is felt, and not only because it’s her finger he’s sewing. While he is attaching the finger, he takes the blame for what she did in the Super Duper Mart. He throws away the act for a moment, his hands are ungloved and unprotected, as he surrenders himself in her name. The intimacy of the mere image of him sewing a part of Lucy’s body on his own, literally tying the knot, deserves its own analysis.  

You could say it fits him like a glove. ;)

This is the last scene we see him without gloves in S1. But every time we see his gloved hand afterward, we are reminded that he carries Lucy’s finger. It’s a symbol of what Lucy reminded him of: his lost dignity. It’s his trigger finger, a moral compass. It led to him shooting her dad when she herself wavered, but also letting him go alive. And it’s her replaced necrotic finger which pulls the trigger when she mercy kills her mother, a lesson she learned from him. Their fates have intertwined and their fingers are the perfect representation of that. 

With the focus on hands and fingers we saw in S1, I expect this symbolic storytelling to continue and expand in S2.

[starofhisheart]

We talk a lot about him seeing his old self in Lucy, and their journeys mirroring each other, but let's talk about the function of dogs in relation to Cooper and the Ghoul.

Dogs are an important way of showing the Ghoul's humanity

Seeing how one of the things that got human Cooper to change his mind about listening in on his wife we know how deeply he cared for his dog

Dogmeat may not be the same dog

But through him we see glimpses of his humanity

Because even after the dog's usefulness has run out (tracking the head is no longer needed) he STILL keeps him around. And damn, if that ain't proof there's a heart in there I don't know what is.

[artbyblastweave]

What's effective about The Superhuman Gambit, right, is that the AntAgonizer and the Mechanist are modelling a very 1950s superheroic paradigm basically to a T. The question of why you need a superhero around- the gag that superpeople do nothing but pointlessly fight each other for the sake of it- has been the number one criticism that basically every non-parodic piece of superhero media published after 1986 has attempted to pre-empt. Contemporary superheroes might encounter and defuse high-stakes crises at a completely unrealistic rate, but within the logic of their stories, contemporary superheroes pull their weight- by authorial fiat, their worlds would constantly be suffering mass casualty events if they weren't out there doing their thing. In the 1950s, though, all of this shit, by editorial mandate, was completely siloed from real stakes, even a lot of forms of real crime that were considered too risky to acknowledge as a thing in that political climate; it was all cops and robbers, themed heists, superdickery, nothing of substance, because the entire medium was declawed by the Wertham Scare.

A superhero isn't any more of an outlandish person to have in the Fallout Universe than the kinds of people that are the protagonists of these games. Moreover the actual powersets on display aren't even particularly stupid. Being able to control giant ants with your mind is the kind of thing that nets you feudal territorial holdings if you take it seriously, stupid costumes or no- ditto for being able to field an army of battle-ready robots. Canterbury Commons is very pointedly the site of the one group of people in the game who are trying to get, like, an actual economy going. They're the economic analogue to Project Purity. If either of these assholes threw their personal armies behind that project, the setting would look very very different by the time you climb out of the vault. But they aren't allowed to be the kind of superheroes who notice that, or apply themselves in that way, or really meaningfully engage with the world at all, because, again, they're specifically 1950s superheroes. And this all dovetails really well with my read that Fallout 3 is largely a game about people burying their heads in the sand, immersing themselves in a nostalgic past as a way to avoid thinking about the horrors of the present.

[media-illiterate]

FOTV'S PLOT MAKES NO SENSE

So since this is going to have MASSIVE spoilers for the new show, I'll put most of it behind a readmore. But, TL/DR: Destroying Shady Sands would not bring down the NCR, because they have at least seven other major cities that could and would take over!

So, lets start with a map:

This is map (made by me) very roughly represents the NCR as it exist circa 2277. All major settlements are labelled, but do note that there are dozens of minor settlements scattered around the whole of California, and into Oregon, Nevada, and Mexico.

Nuking Shady Sands, even if you used the largest nuclear bomb ever made, (The Tsar bomb: coming in at 100 megatons, it is the upper limit of practicality for a bomb, because any larger and the explosion would've vented into the upper atmosphere and reduced the bomb's effect), it would still only destroy Shady Sands. Maybe vaults 13 and 15, the closest settlements to it (given their nature as vaults, however, I think they'd survive).

Notice all the other settlements? WHERE DID THEY GO, TODD?

Now, exploding Shady Sands would still be really fucking bad for the republic, but I think it would be fully survivable. We don't have hard numbers for the population of the NCR, but in New Vegas it is explicitly in the hundreds of thousands, (and rising). So we can substitute the demographics of, say, Alaska (710,000 people). The largest city in Alaska, Anchorage, has ~290,000 people living in it, as of the 2020 census. That's a large chunk of the state's population, but its not even half.

I think Shady Sands would probably be a lot smaller than the Hub or Boneyard (not to mention San Francisco, Vault City, or New Reno) because it started out as a small farming village when the others were already major settlements. So, at most, nuking Shady Sands would only disrupt the NCR, not kill it. Even if the NCR broke up in the aftermath, Lucy's vault should still be smack in the middle of the Boneyard, probably one of California's largest settlements.

But! That's not all! Not only does this show contradict established canon at every turn, it doesn't even do it well, because there is an argument to be made that a few well placed nukes could bring down the NCR!

And its already part of the damn game:

This handsome, gravelly-voiced genius already mathed out how to, as he calls it, "cut the bear's throat": bomb the NCR's trade routes to the outside world, and watch them wither away on their own. His plan is a thousand times more interesting, and more feasible, than how the show brought down the NCR (blowing up one (1) city and acting like that would destroy an entire nation).

In fact, if they really wanted to get rid of the NCR, they could've easily just made that ending to Lonesome Road canon. But, lets face it, this show cannot be bothered to even look at the games for inspiration.

I like almost nothing I see coming out of the show. Its a thin veneer of fallout painted onto a story that bulldozes the very series it claims to be part of. The zombification of ghouls, the centering of the Brotherhood, the badly written raiders playground of a wasteland: its all of Bethesda's worst writing choices, just transmitted to a new medium.

I hate it here.

[mswyrr]

Giving her his back was acknowledging she had the right to kill him if she wanted.

That's why he made her walk out ahead with her back to him when he was being an asshole.

He reversed it by letting her have his back and the choice of what to do with him.

[beauty-4-thebeast]

Yet another Ghoulcy parallel to relish!😃