#In accordance w this hc I will now be referring to swank as swank fisheyes bc im the meanest person ever

[infestedguest]

A favorite Benny Gecko headcanon of mine is that before House “civilized” the Chairmen/Boot Riders his name was literally just Gecko.

The name Benny is a double reference to both the most powerful trump card in the card game Euchre, and to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, the real life mobster who owned the Flamingo Hotel and Casino and who drove a lot of the development of the Las Vegas Strip in the 1940s. Benny’s entire brand is pretty clearly influenced by Bugsy Siegel, both out of universe by the devs as well as in universe by House and possibly Benny himself, especially considering the buffalo plaid suit. (Bugsy Siegel almost definitely also existed in the Fallout universe and played a similar role as he did irl because the Fallout timeline branches off from ours in 1945, only two years before he was assassinated).

It’d be one hell of a coincidence if that was the name he had as a tribal, and since we know that House’s reinvention of the strip families was specifically in the image of the old world, it only makes sense that that would include names. Swank probably wasn’t called Swank before the Boot Riders became the Chairmen either (I mean, his name is literally Swank).

Gecko doesn’t seem like a particularly unusual name for a tribal to have. It’s the name of a fairly common hostile creature in the Mojave Wasteland that the Boot Riders probably encountered regularly. Geckos were likely at least associated with combat or ferocity in their culture, which given Benny’s description of them when you talk to him at the fort were probably traits that the Boot Riders valued. Thus it isn’t that hard to believe that a Boot Rider would name their kid Gecko. Alternatively he may have earned the name after some kind of encounter involving one or more Geckos, if earning names was a thing in their culture a la the Khans.

We can assume that the usage of Gecko as a sort of surname for Benny could’ve been started by other members of the Chairmen while they were still getting used to the name transition. Like, imagine every single person you know suddenly has a completely different name. Informally tagging a person’s Boot Rider name onto the end of their Chairman name could’ve been a way to prevent confusion in the early days of them being Chairmen. (The implication of this subheadcanon being that every Chairman has a “surname” like this, which I personally think is really cool). People outside of the Chairmen probably just assumed those were their full names, so now they basically are, at least in the public consciousness of the city.

Another possible contributing factor to it’s usage as a surname is the general usage of surnames by other groups the Chairmen interact or associate with, especially the NCR. If House didn’t give the Chairmen last names, or if last names just weren’t a thing for the Boot Riders, it doesn’t seem unreasonable for them to just put their Boot Rider name as their last name when signing paperwork or whatever, or whenever else other people expect them to have one, especially if my subheadcanon from the last paragraph is true and they were already kind of using them that way anyway. Also I like to think there were at least a few Chairmen who, when asked what their last name was, assumed the asker meant the last name that they had.