SOME PLACE WARM I COULD NOT ESCAPE.

Part of Clarice’s older brother Paul’s plotline was that at one point the NCR institutionalized him. He really should’ve been in a jail cell but he provided military police with information so he got a cushier punishment. And while blasted out of his mind on pacifying medication - more than the usual dose because he was a big fucker - in an art therapy class, Paul did a portrait of President Tandi with a fleshy, pulsating red passage where her face should’ve been, somewhere between an ear canal and a menstruating cavity, ala Genevieve Figgis’ portrait of Queen Elizabeth in Drippy Drippy Do. (This is privately a reference to that time Paul killed his mother by caving her head in, but that’s not common knowledge.) In and of itself it’s not particularly noteworthy but part of me wonders if, after the Legion’s rise to power, that portrait ended up in a museum or something, rendered politically relevant by the things Paul’s nephew was responsible for.

Weird how Edward has a Freudian excuse and Joshua doesn’t. You’d think it would be the opposite, right? Joshua is supposed to be more likable than Edward and I don’t think we’re meant to infer Edward was expressly coercing Joshua into anything. In that way, Joshua has the characteristics he needs to for his environment. Where did this preexisting appetite for atrocity come from? If you asked me I’d say “Mormonism,” being spoon fed religiously tinted national propaganda featuring snuff film violence like Laura Loomer when she was a kid. But I don’t know if the writers wanted us to think that, they’re pretty forgiving about the dark side of Mormon culture ingame. In that sense, you can see a glimmer of the rest of Honest Hearts’ cast of characters’ emotional & social characterization - barebones if not nonexistent - in Joshua’s emotional & social characterization. He just has the features he needs to have, in this case lifelong sustained bloodlust. If he were from the NCR, like Edward, you could chalk it up to neoliberal culture. What is New Canaan’s culture? They forgave a war criminal. It seems we’re supposed to admire that.

Legion soldiers live in their gendered expectations but Legion priestesses subvert them. Legion priestesses are getting married to god so most men can’t have sex with them. Legion priestesses raise and deliver babies but largely don’t birth them themselves - at least, giving birth isn’t an integral part of their groups public identity, the way it is for the wife class. Part of me wonders if they receive hysterectomies upon induction, or if women who’ve reached menopause or are otherwise rendered infertile (potentially by pregnancy) are singled out for priesthood. In a broader ideological sense, the priestesses keep the male soldier-slaves perpetually emasculated by emphasizing how their social status is lumped together with the female slaves, representing a status of post-body existence that is cut off to them.