t4t Bi-Aroallo Agenda

“And I suppose this gets at the Big Idea behind Dogmeat’s relationship to you in Fallout 4. Like your character, Dogmeat is caught out of time. This dog doesn’t belong here, and neither do you.*”

The Dog in Fallout Demo is kicked out of the house by his owner. The parallels are obvious there.

Dogmeat in Fallout 1 lost his owner, who was a reference to Mad Max 2, and it’s pretty obvious that the early games especially draw a lot from that series. He is begging someone to open the door, let him in, let him have a home, and he will never succeed. His only recourse is to move on with someone else. You can win him over with food, and you are on a quest for water. No matter what, he is canonically doomed by the narrative.

There are several dogs in Fallout 2. K-9 and Robodog are both literally shaped by the Enclave like you end up figuratively shaped by them. They are the products of the Enclave’s twisted science, and if not for circumstance you would have been kidnapped with the rest of Arroyo to be used as a test subject. K-9 specifically was forced to watch as the bastard Enclave scientist he tried to kill conducted horrible experiments, not unlike how you are helpless to stop the devastation of your people or the extermination of the talking deathclaws. Dogmeat is the same one from Fallout 1, a special encounter found in a time traveling pop culture reference/meta moment—because this is Fallout 2 and all sort of wacky shit happens in this game. You receive him by showing your vault jumpsuit to your ancestor—proof that you are the Vault Dweller’s legacy, that you are stuck dealing with the Vault Dweller’s legacy, that even in this extradimensional location beyond time and space you cannot leave behind the Vault Dweller’s legacy any more than Dogmeat can leave behind his first owner (the Mad Max reference, who attacks you if you hurt Dogmeat). Finally, Pariah Dog is an unlucky but very hard to kill wretch who brings ruin wherever he goes.

Fallout 3’s dog, as Anon mentioned, is lost and fighting for his life with his owner gone–maybe you should have been worried about the fact that the James analogue here is already dead. He can come back to life through the power of DLC by producing puppies–a promise of new life after devastation.

Fallout: New Vegas has two dogs, Rex and Roxie, both of whom were cybernetically enhanced by Old World technology, with Roxie specifically being made in Big MT. You can purchase cybernetic implants, sure, but more significant is the fact that playing Old World Blues guarantees your brain, heart, and spine will either be replaced by or altered by machinery. Like Roxie, you were an organic being (a human/a dog) suddenly and forcibly fused with technology because of someone’s curious whims (The Think Tank/The Courier themselves); like Rex, you now have a brain that can pop out of your skull. Speaking of Rex’s brain, you survived brain damage thanks to a kindly stranger’s intervention, and you can pass on the favor by giving Rex a new brain to replace his aging one. In a game deeply preoccupied with kings literal and metaphorical, Rex is literally named “king.” He has an extensive backstory of wandering the Wasteland, but it isn’t any more relevant than yours is right now. Also, he likes The Kings.

Fallout 4’s Dogmeat is a perfect German Shepherd in a world of mutants. It is a dog out of time, waiting for the chance to be with a loved one. It is the missing piece of your white picket fantasy:

You had a dog and it ran away–the one crack in the perfect facade (if Bethesda weren’t cowards, they’d do something with that idea of your past life being a playacted farce of Americana). It’s almost as if the dog sensed danger on the horizon before you did and ran for the hills. For all you know, Dogmeat is descended from that dog fucking around in the post apocalypse. It’s like the universe is rubbing your misfortune in your face. Here’s your dog, 200 years too late to complete the set. Finally, in an echo of Fallout 3, Dogmeat foreshadows the inevitable tragedy at the end of your quest. You’ll never get back the original dog or son you lost 200 years ago–the dog is long dead, and Shawn is both an adult who grew up into someone unrecognizable and terminally ill. But the game offers you replacements–Dogmeat and Synth!Shawn–and gives you the option to love them instead.