#but stilll Bethesda bungled his story

[lordsammichsilas]

I've been working on some comic stuff and decided to take a moment to write another piece about my favorite tin can soldier.

I've noticed a lot has been made about how Danse's vocabulary and how he speaks. A lot of fan wikis online attribute it to his being a synth. Piper even mentions it after the initial conversation with Maxson at the beginning of Blind Betrayal. MacCready will mention Danse is about as emotional as a bag of hammers, assuming it's due to Danse's synth nature.

The thing is, his being a synth isn't the reason he's like that. It's the Brotherhood.

Think about the other synths in Fallout 4. Nick, Sturges, and Magnolia for example. They speak like regular people. It's because they live among regular people of the Commonwealth. The only synths who speak in a robotic fashion are gen 1 and 2 synths. Gen 3 synths are indistinguishable from humans and get socialized as such.

Danse was in the Brotherhood where he had been a paladin for at least a decade. The most recent years of that are in Maxson's Brotherhood. Arthur Maxson and most of those loyal to him do not like outsiders and do not want the Brotherhood fraternizing with outsiders. Fiction and entertainment are contraband on the Prydwen, something that alienates soldiers from the people of the Commonwealth even more. It's the reason Danse calls movies a “moving picture show” and comics “illustrated manuscripts”. The Brotherhood is what alienates him from humanity, not his being a synth. If you only know existence as a soldier and you don't take interest in human things with other humans, you end up speaking like that. (Think about a lot of right wing weirdoes online talking about the objects of their moral panics and how they sound.)

Edit: another point I want to add here is that not only is he isolated from the rest of the populace due to being in the Brotherhood, but there’s a chance he’s isolated from the lower rank soldiers in the Brotherhood itself. In a structure with a strict hierarchy, I wouldn’t be surprised if high ranking officers fraternizing with knights and initiates is discouraged. You get the feeling that he’s never confided in anyone since Cutler died when speaking to him as the Sole Survivor.

Danse held a fairly high rank in the organization. One could expect him to be pretty literate and have a decent vocabulary. (There's also the common critique that the military is a cult in its own right and just mindlessly following orders turns you into a soulless robot to a certain extent). Danse is intelligent, but not particularly charismatic. He will openly admit he's not good at talking to people on a personal level because he has no experience with it. Also being a field commander of soldiers and being responsible for their lives requires you to keep a level head and not show emotions.

What I find interesting are the reactions all of the companions have to his being a synth. Even though he was kind of a dick to everyone during companion swap scenes, all of the non-humans (except Strong) are not only against executing him but seem all but willing to throw hands on his behalf. He was horribly rude to Nick and Hancock in particular, however Nick goes out of his way to empathize with Danse and Hancock basically tells Maxson to go do it himself.

With the human companions, MacCready and Cait support executing him. Piper is sympathetic, but still leans on a stereotype to make a comment about how he talks. Preston and even Deacon are against killing Danse, but their commentary after that scene are more about the nature of the Brotherhood itself rather than Danse's wellbeing.

This just goes to another reason I find the writing for FO 4 incredibly frustrating because the storytelling here is excellent. There's a lot of nuances and you actually learn things about the other companions and the world they live in from doing an entirely different companion's story. The solidarity the nonhuman characters show for a synth that was part of an organization that wants to eradicate them and he himself was pretty rude to them while the human characters' reactions are far more mixed is something we need to talk about more.

I'm not normally a huge supporter of redemption arcs mostly because I think they've become a bit overused and not every character necessarily deserves one. I think Danse does because he is someone who means well and fell in with the wrong group in the process. This could have been the start of a really satisfying character arc, but instead all development just stops after your last affinity conversation with him.