CALDERA_Project

I will admit; Night stalkers are my favorite animals in the entire Wasteland. It might be because I am a herpetologist - or it might be because, and let’s be honest here, they are just sweet little puppies with incredibly venomous toxins.

So, let’s talk about that. The dog and the snake, the hunting and the toxins, the ecology and behaviour of the Mojave Wasteland’s Night Stalkers.

Part 1: He got that dog (and snake) in ‘im

Night stalkers are a manmade abomination, and I don’t mean that as an insult. Just like Centaurs, Deathclaws, Spore Carriers and more, Night stalkers are classified as “abominations”, a special class of creature in the wasteland known for being scared off by flares. Funnily enough, the “Animal Friend” perk still affects Night stalkers, which does not happen to other Abominations, which might suggest that Night stalkers are more “animal-like” than the other Abominations (which is why I have placed them in this chapter).

Night stalkers were created in the Z-9 Crotalus DNA Preservation Lab, in the Big MT, by Dr. Borous, as a “hybrid” between a rattlesnake and a coyote. Now, one of the reasons why Night stalkers are not just manmade animals instead of abominations is the impossibility of such hybridization: coyotes are mammals, and rattlesnakes are reptiles. In this sense, it is more likely that Night stalkers are instead a physiological mutation of the coyote (Canis latrans) to “house”, or as the name of the laboratory suggests, “preserve” the DNA of rattlesnakes (of the Crotalus genus) - basically, the coyote was used as a template of sorts to create a dog-like snake, rather than an actual hybrid.

This “fake hybridization” begs the question: are Night stalkers reptiles or mammals?

Reptiles. It’s actually a pretty easy answer. You see, for an animal to be considered a mammal, it needs to have mammary glands, which are usually gathered up in clusters which form nipples and teats, but in the case of monotremes, they are simply dispersed around the skin; these mammary glands are tasked to produce “milk” (a nutritious, fatty liquid) that serves to feed its young. While I have never gotten close enough to inspect if a Night stalker has or does not have nipples, it doesn’t seem likely that they produce milk to feed their young, instead feeding them pieces of prey. They also necessarily shed their skin - rattlesnakes form their “rattles” via shedding their skin, which tears off at the tip of the tail, leaving a little “nub” behind. Gather enough “nubs” and you got yourself a fully functioning rattle. Besides that, they are oviparous (aka they lay eggs) and are venomous (which is a very rare trait in mammals). 

Basically, night stalkers are quadrupedal venomous reptiles. Their body is mainly covered in fur, with certain spots, like the head and the tail, being covered in scales instead. This is not impossible - birds are both feathery and scaly (have you ever looked at a bird’s foot?), so a half-scaly half-furry creature is not out of the realm of possibility. They are nocturnal, following the instincts of both their “predecessors”, and they are social creatures.

Part 2: The Coyote and the Rattlesnake

Being a manmade horror, Night stalkers possess certain characteristics from their “predecessors”, and I will mention the important ones here. It is interesting to mention that Night stalkers have much more “snake” characteristics than “canid” characteristics, which also supports my theory of them being reptiles.

Firstly, they maintain the coyote’s stature and fur, along with the presence of external, movable earlobes - this helps them track down prey at night via sound, which I speculate is the main sensorial organ used in hunting, alongside the sense of smell. I say that, because while coyotes do have good night vision, snakes in general (with the exception of certain arboreal species) are known to have pretty horrible eyesight. It’s possible to tell that Night stalkers have heterochromia, with one of their eyes being decidedly more “reptilian” than the other; I cannot for certain say which adaptation was preserved, but I have never seen a Night stalker blink, so I would wager a guess that they keep the exclusively-snake-like adaptation of having a single, big transparent scale shielding their eyeballs from dust and preventing it from drying out. 

The other characteristic these creatures seem to have inherited from coyotes is not anatomical, but behavioral - parental care and sociability. Night stalkers are known to build nests, keep their eggs warm and take care of their young. Not only that, they are often found in packs; this behavior is not common in reptiles as a whole, and definitely not seen in rattlesnakes. The only known reptile that performs this sort of extensive parental care are crocodilians, and, in snakes, exclusively the Python family (a family of constrictors), being known for brooding their eggs (until they hatch, at least. Then, it’s every man for himself). Besides the parental care, reptiles are as a whole solitary (with, of course, a few exceptions). Pack-bonding and parental care seem to have been inherited traits from their canid “predecessors.”

Speaking of parental, they are oviparous and have internal fertilization - This means that, while the egg cell is fertilized inside the female, the fetal development happens outside the female. Some animals, like frogs and fish, have external fertilization: the female will lay her eggs, and the male will fertilize them afterwards. This isn’t really possible without the aid of water to carry the sperm into the eggs, which is why reptiles, birds and mammals (who breed outside of the water) have internal fertilization. The fact that they lay eggs leads me to believe that Night stalkers, instead of having external urogenital organs, have instead a cloaca: one single opening, connected to the urinary, digestive and reproductive tracts. To perform internal fertilization, the males would possibly have a retractable intrusive sexual organ (standard in male reptiles); considering the snake DNA, it would probably take the form of a hemipenis.

Hemipenises are snake penises. Every male snake has two (yes, two) hemipenises, and each hemipenis is forked - two penises, four heads. The theory is that they have two penises so they have a higher chance of breeding repeatedly, but it’s not exactly known why they are forked. It is theorized that it has either something to do with preventing accidentally trying to breed with other species, or with the angle logistics of breeding balls (when certain species of snake will just form giant groups and… well. Go for it as a group activity). I’m not certain if Night stalkers would have one or two hemipenises - parental care and pack dynamics lead to less promiscuity, taking away the need to have two penises at once (and four heads), but I’m sure not enough time has passed for them to slowly lose their penis abundance to the throes of evolution, so make that what you will.

Besides… All of that, as mentioned earlier, Night stalkers shed their skin. While snakes shed their skin as a whole, crawling out of their old skin like taking out a glove, other reptiles (such as lizards, crocodiles and turtles) shed their skin piece by piece, which is far more likely for the Night stalkers to do, considering animals with fur don’t tend to shed their skin in big clumps, instead shedding individual skin cells all the time. This means that the Night stalker’s rattle is formed by a somewhat big shed in the end part of their tail, that comes off in the specific way required for the rattle to be formed - speaking of which, this means that Night stalker hatchlings, fresh out of the egg, are incapable of making the rattle noise, since they have not had enough skin sheds to form a rattle big enough to, well, rattle.

Another adaptation necessary for their nocturnal hunter lifestyle is their pits and their tongues. First, we’ll talk about their pits - specifically, their heat sensing pits. Rattlesnakes are snakes from the Crotalinae subfamily (named after themselves), and their beaming characteristic, and the one that gives them their common name, is the presence of a pit or a fossa located in the loreal area (between the nostril and the eye) that houses several extremely sensitive infrared-detecting cells (or, heat-sensing). That’s right - when you see the face of a Pit Viper, that hole in their face is not their nostril, but in fact, their loreal pit! 

Looking at the big, round holes in the very much snake-like head of a Night stalker, it is my belief that those openings are not the creature’s nostrils, but instead their loreal pits. Their nostrils would be similar to pit viper nostrils - thin slits hidden by bigger scales, higher on the snout and closer to the tip.

Now, their tongue. Much like all snakes, rattlesnakes (and, by consequence, Night stalkers) have a forked tongue - this is their main mode of smelling things. Many animals, including coyotes and rattlesnakes, have an organ called a Jacobson’s Organ, also known as a Vomeronasal Organ. This organ is a bundle of sensitive nervous cells located in the roof of the mouth, near the nasal septum, whose function is to help with detecting scents. Snakes track their prey by flicking their tongues out and around, gathering scent particles - when they retract their tongue, they press the tips of their tongue directly on the vomeronasal organ, which is highly sensitive. Due to the forked shape and the sensibility of the vomeronasal organ, snakes can identify which fork of the tongue has gathered more scent particles, and therefore, where the prey has gone (so if their left fork has gathered more scent particles, then the prey has gone to the left, and so on!). This, alongside their loreal pits and their big coyote ears, makes the Night stalkers extremely good at hunting prey without the need of extraordinary sight. 

Keeping it inside the mouth, we can also talk about their teeth, and by consequence, their venom. Rattlesnakes are pit vipers, and pit vipers - as the name suggests - are vipers, snakes from the Viperidae family. These snakes are all venomous, so much so that they have an entire exclusive dentition to themselves that is specialized for inoculating venom: solenoglyph dentition. This means that these snakes, and Night stalkers, have one set of very large fangs at the front of the mouth, which are not only hinged, but hollow - they are capable of “retracting” their fangs by bending them inwards so they’ll be able to close their mouths (even with the giant fangs), and, unlike the other snake fangs that have a little groove that directs dripping venom into the prey, have a hollow passage connected directly to their venom glands. By squeezing their own venom glands, the venom will then shoot through the little duct directly (and much more deeper) into the wound.

Part 3: Speaking of Venom...

This is where things get even more complicated than before. There are more than 50 different species of rattlesnake, and while most of them have the same acting venom, some don’t. So, before I rattle (ha!) off which species is most likely to be the "predecessor" of Night stalkers, let’s talk a bit about venom as a whole.

Venom, also known as zootoxin, is a type of toxin produced by animals that needs to be inoculated (injected) via sting, bite, etc. The process, called envenomation, is performed by a specifically evolved venom apparatus - an organ that has the sole purpose of producing, storing and inoculating venom. 

They can kill through the action of four different types of toxins. Necrotoxins, such as the venom of the Brown Recluse Spider (Loxosceles reclusa) causes necrosis on all nearby tissue. Cytotoxins induce apoptosis (programmed cell death) in nearby cells; they can act as cardiotoxins, AKA targeting the cells of the heart, or as hemotoxins, targeting and destroying blood cells. Myotoxins are the ones that target muscle mass, causing severe paralysis of all muscles. The last one are neurotoxins, which can either cause rapid involuntary muscle contractions, or total neural paralysis. 

For rattlesnakes, the main toxin is a type of myotoxin; in fact, the first myotoxin to be isolated and identified was Crotamine, extracted out of the venom of a South American Rattlesnake (Crotalus durissus). This fact is rather funny, because this species of snake is known for its venom being mainly neurotoxic, unlike most other species of rattlesnake. The other, more rare toxin present in rattlesnake venom is neurotoxins, which are decidedly more dangerous than myotoxins, since they target the nervous system.

It is my belief, due to both geographical distribution and lethality of Night stalker venom, that the species of Crotalus that was used to create the Night stalkers was Crotalus scutulatus, appropriately named the Mojave Rattlesnake. 

The Mojave Rattlesnake, besides being abundant in the Mojave Desert, is also the source of the infamous Mojave Toxin - a potent neurotoxin, similar to the ones found in South American Rattlesnakes, that blocks the nervous cells tasked with movement. This paralytic nature, if untreated (which, considering this is the Wasteland, is unlikely) will eventually cause the diaphragm to also paralyze, effectively suffocating the victim to death. This effect depends on the size of the snake and the size of the victim - Night stalkers would have a much more lethal dose, which suggests that the paralyzing nature of the venom could act even more quickly, leading to death in a few hours, with bigger individuals (like adults) being more lethal than smaller individuals (like hatchlings and juveniles).

End Notes

Hi, My name's Alren, but lotsa folks just call me Ren. I'm a disabled young adult unable to get a job for structural reasons. Commissions are currently my only income source and I want to, eventually, leave the state and possibly country I'm stuck in entirely. Prices have been updated in accordance to recommendations from other artists. Once you recieve a first sketch check I ask for half the payment up front to avoid being scammed, upon completion I will ask for the other half. Upon completion of your commission you will receive both the flat image as PNG and the MDP or other edittable file so you can make any color or minor edits you desire. Once you have the image you are free to fiddle to your hearts desire as long as credit and my signature remains attached. I retain rights to use it as examples for future commissions but will ask permission on if I can post it or not. You are free to repost (Linking back to me), Display, personally print and use for streaming assests, but any amount of larger scale printing I ask for an additional license fee, if I have found you to have done large scale printing of merchandise without paying this fee, I will refuse to work with you again and seek legal aid.

If you want larger versions of the example images, please just message me and I can supply, thank you.

In Addition to larger character illustrations, I offer five dollar chibi headshots, these will require full upfront payment but are typically back to you faster, examples below:

Lonely Temple Location art.

Done in procreate (No AI)

currently using antifandom

tag was the senior of the entire fallout wiki community. she is an official Fandom employee. i trusted her and she made me feel like i was special.

she asked me to publish the Fort Abandon design docs for Van Buren, which leaked to her while involved with a fan game who had permission to view the docs privately. she provided me with the converted wiki text and coached me on how to lie about it.

I had just started calling myself a professional researcher of this IP and its history. She positioned it as something that would help my career. In reality Tagaziel had specifically agreed to never allow these documents to be published at Nukapedia, because doing so meant Chris may withhold the rest of them from the community.

Tagaziel worked on the Fallout IP one time, editing for a tabletop book in 2023, after I personally reached out to the company and arranged this for her.

when i needed tagaziel to protect a minor of color from organized racist stalkers in our community, she threatened to ban him just to control me. I tried to talk to her about this for months and she only bullied me.

she disowned me when i pushed back against the white nationalists and organized abusers who have seized Nukapedia

in the year since Nukapedia was seized by her abusive friends, i've been very careful not to negatively affect her in spite of everything she has done to me and the community. i put great effort into respecting her space and attempting to forgive her.

this morning, she deleted an evidence document containing 180 images of misconduct by the three organized abusers who control the website. (wayback link, images broken but retrievable).

she did this despite not being directly targeted by any current tensions. she did this completely independently.

She did this while a teenage boy who cosigned that document is trying to defend himself from organized abusers slandering him, emotionally blackmailing him, and abusing their staff powers to punish and ostracize him.

Nukapedia, the Fandom Fallout Wiki, is a place of suffering and cruelty and darkness. I trusted my friend Tag to stop it. She told me to trust her. She watched them harm kids and she threw me away because I tried to do the right thing. She hated me for telling the truth because the truth was inconvenient to her.

The Fallout Wiki is a severe ongoing danger to the marginalized people and youth of our community.

The alt-right gang who have occupied Nukapedia for the past 12 months is trying to abolish voting. They have been talking about it for a month and this morning they announced their intentions to fast-track it. They want to do this so admins can efficiently silence all disobedient voices immediately without evidence or possibility of community assessment.

This morning, an authority used an unprecedented "admin decree" to excommunicate a teenage boy, admin of the Fallout Fanon/RP wiki. They are trying to demonize and excommunicate him because they were unable to privately pressure him into promoting an adult he was known to be uncomfortable with. They also explicitly condemn him because they discovered he had told adults what they did to him.

They are saying Fandom "dismissed" the Vote of No Confidence he cosigned, and call it a "campaign of misinformation." They argue this "dismissal" proves they are all innocent of all charges and insinuating they must punish anyone who challenges them, including anyone who signed that document 6 months ago.

In reality, one of their ringleaders buried the document without Fandom permission, and was subsequently issued a global ban and stripped of rights. They are simply lying and trying to intimidate everyone into complying to their abusive false narrative. The community was also told "the situation on the server has become so detrimental to the mission and wellbeing of the community that we can not permit our platform to be used as any endorsement of joining and participating in that server." The In-Group have aggressively pretended the server is still a formal function of the site. Fandom absolutely did not "dismiss" any criticism against these people whatsoever in the past year, they are simply malicious liars.

.https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/User_talk:UrbanAnge1#Clarification_about_comments_in_Discord

.https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/User_talk:Arcaneous#Notice_of_Affiliation_Termination

.https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/User_talk:Jspoelstra#Clarification_on_'admin_decree'_terminating_MD_affiliation

O'saa is a misogynist and a psychological abuser. Mara is a far-right bully who celebrated the purge of everyone who made white people uncomfortable. Urban has abused multiple minors. This will be illuminated for the community over the course of the following weeks. They all frame themselves as victims and anyone affiliated with me as subhuman because I tell the truth about them.

As their next project, they plan to fashion special pages for an 18+ server where alt-right talking points are explicitly allowed, and as well as discussion of beating and sexually degrading a banned woman. The admins of that server referred to the previous NP head as a "whore", an 'old crying bitch,' and a "street walker." They "joked" about finding her in real life, siccing a dog on her, and stabbing her. They shared old screenshots with NP staff of her being bullied to her face for being a "whore." Again, this will be unpacked in every bit as much detail as necessary.

multiple open catholic christofascists have been given egregious special protection by admins after blatant acts of politically radical harassment and vandalism, such as "Catholic Crusader," unbanned by the head admin unbanned despite his only contribution being malicious vandalism of the LGBT page.

They run their "lovebombing-gaslighting-emotional blackmail" routine on anyone who displays potential in the space, including corporate employees tasked with handling them.

In all my past PSAs I have urged the community to stay away. But kids keep getting hurt at Nukapedia. We cannot keep ignoring it or hoping it fixes itself. They have their next targets in their crosshairs and they will find another kid to torment. We have to do this.

For the safety of the youth and disabled of our community, I'm asking you to make a Fandom account with usernames different from your tumblr and Discord user names, and to simply speak up when you see anything concerning. Several community forums will occur soon, which will ping all editors, so make a contribution, poke around, and attend discussions. Ask questions. Do not let strangers pressure you into compliance without evidence of their narrative.

When you see the blatant consolidation of power in the hands of those who already hold it--AND YOU WILL--object openly and do not apologize.

The people orchestrating this number about 10, they can gather around 20 votes at most, and they survive on absolute and brutal narrative control. 3.4k people engaged with my first PSA about NP in a week.

They want you to think you are 'not a real member' and they are, but many of them do not edit the wiki at all. All you need to do is join and speak common sense in community discussions.

Today I'm just hoping to attract a few adults willing to speak sense and call out bullying when they see it. The goal is harm reduction, and in such a small room, every voice makes a huge difference. I recommend you coordinate with the progressive people you meet there, out in the open.

This is a minor PSA i'm opting for because frankly i've been awake for a long ass time watching this implode and the coming weeks are going to shape the future of the community. They intend to allow this to escalate tremendously, hopefully that won't be necessary. A structured project of resistance and accountability will be launched in the coming days and will continue until progress is made.

This is necessary because children are going to keep coming to the site through google and these people are going to keep predating on them. They single out talented young people and pressure them to join in their alt-right bully mob, and those who refuse are inevitably targeted with harm, harassment, defamation, gaslighting. Month after month they keep fucking with kids, disabled people, queer people, and people of color. Talented young people keep pouring out of this place, abused, pursued by white men fixated on slandering their name and finding them offsite.

As far as I know, they have purged all queer people and people of color out of any position of power or respect. Their tokens have slowly been purged, leaving them a coalition of MAGAboys, cryptofascists, and gamergaters united under casual White Nationalism. The very few remaining marginalized staff and elders simply maintain silence out of fear they will be next. They need you to change the temperature in the room so it will be safe to speak.

like. to have this much time and space to think about my favorite setting is a ridiculous privilege. so many artists work so hard to treat us to more of this world all the time and they get so much hate for it

the only thing that actually pisses me off now is lore that misguidedly or deliberately points towards social regression. like the "thin blue line," anti-DEI, and cryptonazi horseshit in the margins of Fallout London, or the regressive conspiratorialism promoted by the tv show. (that World Health Organization-RobCo link suggested in season 2 materials is just straight up InfoWars conspiracy presented as lore. fucking disgusting actually)

that and just naked hypocritical consumerism like Beth's style of merchandising and monetizing

wherever fallout lore manages to not be regressive and hateful, it really bottoms out at "quaint" and should be treated as such. radically changing ghoul lore is goofy but it's not hateful or dangerous & fallout was never internally consistent so yahtzee.

i could tell you why fallout 76 is not a good or ethical product but so could anyone on the street. i'd rather tell you about the wonderfully transgressive and creative subtext you probably wouldnt even find by personally playing it. i'd love to talk about the ideas i've expressed and discovered in the online sandbox. some very talented and special people were allowed to make their mark on the story and the world and even if i don't recommend it, it's fallout, and it's special.

have you seen the new vegas modding scene? holy shit. here's a random small mod that constitutes a delightful, intricate window into the world of fallout. youd probably never find it otherwise. there are hundreds of things this cool on the nexus i'll never discover. fallout

check this out. last night i was portal gunning through my files and i found a devastated sandscape city inaccessible in a mod that added skyscrapers to new vegas (highly recommend). turns out it's leftover from another mod, which contributed assets to this one. they had made intricate amusement park rides out of existing assets, such as the circular girder at the lucky 38 being deployed as a ferris wheel, with no hint of artifice

Fallout is an excellent sandbox, with some truly moving story beats and absolutely breathtaking atmosphere at times, its a testimont to the love of so many of its writers, actors and set designers, to the love of its fans and players and those who have been meaningfully touched by it, including us. I don't often talk about it but, Caldera changed my Life, for the Better, being brave and stepping into the spotlight with cilantro, and being *well received* for it helped genuinely undo a small lifetime of trauma and fear, it gave me the chance to stop feeling like I had to hide under a rock, it gave me the idea that maybe, just maybe, theres a path out of my shitty situation. You were no small part of that Calder, Thank You.

So Yeah, Fallout is goofy, and contradictory, and sometimes it REALLY fucks up (coughcough, doggod, coughcough), but that has never made me love it any less

-Ren

I believe Fallout lore should be a little bit like comics: Something that inspires later writers to tear the canon apart, paste it back together, reinvent it, critique it, parody it, make a version that's better out of spite or passion or good natured ribbing on their part for their favorite silly or corny or edgy or just-missed-the-mark plotline.

It's a space with the potential to be weird and wonderful, especially with the directions fans and unofficial media take it - ancient cities & creatures out of pulp horror, eternal tempests & the storm chasers that ride the wind, competing sects & heretical worshipers, mishmash worlds & meta commentary, a looking glass to our own world & history through the lense of another, and what comes after.

More than anything, being able to communicate all these ideas, differing opinions, absurdly disparite directions and takes serves to inspire. Angles I can't see, ideas i could never articulate, worlds that are not my own yet i find wonderful to explore. Sharing these spaces hasn't just made me love Fallout, but made me able to engage with & explain AUs and personal ownworks i haven't been able to properly work on in a decade.

More than anything, though, all this helps me believe in a better horizon - that even this art can mean something, that things will change for the better in spite of hardships, that even after the end of something they'll be new life in the wastes left behind.

If i could be forgiven for being corny, maybe i could claim it's given me New World Hope :p

Fallout nv is epic

Awe fuck I thought I fixed that, I'll dig out the files and get on that soon, along with a better system for the hairline since people are always struggling with which ones go on which heads, Thanks for the heads up!

My thinking at the time that I wrote that post-and, to some extent, my thinking to this day- is that Arroyo and The Brotherhood of Steel are depicting a level of cultural change and mutation that doesn't necessarily align with the time frame on which they're claiming it happened. What's depicted isn't strictly impossible, but the specific aesthetics they're using are usually used to indicate way more time has passed.

With the Brotherhood, the primary referent for their regression to neomedieval monasticism is A Canticle For Leibowitz, a novel from the 50s about a post nuclear monastery that's dedicated, half-successfully, to preserving technical and cultural knowledge in the new dark age; the book opens when they've been at this for about 600 years, with the attendant levels of ritualization, information decay, and historical misinformation about the old world that would imply. Fallout frames the Brotherhood as having ended up in a similar spot, structurally and culturally, after only 80 years, and under the leadership of the grandson of the guy who started the thing. It's not impossible, you can make it work, but ultimately they're using aesthetics that gesture at it having been a longer time.

Arroyo is the other big example of this; 80 years after fallout 1, they've developed a "tribal culture," complete with ancient traditions and mythologization of historical events, despite the fact that the whole settlement was founded within living memory by a person who isn't even confirmed to be dead when the game starts. It's only been three generations! Tandi is still alive and running the NCR! This one's even more egregious than the brotherhood, given the existence of that gigantic fuck-off stonework temple complex ripped out of Indiana Jones. Where did that come from?

Some of this might be is that the nature of 90s graphics prevents you from seeing what Arroyo culture looks like "on the ground" in higher fidelity , which would make the cultural continuity between "exiled vault 13 dwellers" and "sustenance farmers" more obvious. Part of it is that my understanding is that Fallout 2 had a much more disjointed production than Fallout 1, so it's possible different teams were operating under different ideas about the chronology at play. And some of it is that Fallout 2 is a game that, to it's frequent detriment, leaned way harder into 90s pop culture wackiness and, to be blunt, outright racial caricature, than Fallout 1 did. It's possible that having the descendants of Vault dwellers re-organized as a stereotypical "tribe" as envisioned in 50s pulp sci fi is just an extension of the same unfortunate impulse that resulted in the game's depiction of San Francisco as Kung Fu Movie Town-The franchise's use of "Tribal" as a category is already pretty fraught in ways I'm not the best equipped to tackle, but Arroyo's depiction might be wrapped up in that.

The diagnosis notes for our fallout 2 reimagining actually covers this - 80 years not being that long to develop a totally divorced culture, combined with the fact the 'Village Elder' is literally the Vault Dweller & Pats DAUGHTER led is to conclude it was in fact an artificially constructed Neoculture born from the Vault Dwellers traumas & controversial exile.

Breaking it down as such, things begin to make sense:

they constructed an elaborate 'trials' system as a family in order to avoid the situation the VD experienced of being forced into the wastes without proper training in self defense

by going with the low end in the potential canon-ages, the VD was 16, emphasizing the traumatic nature of fallout 1 & having the founding of the Arroyo Clan as a response to that.

albert, natalia, & max all have reasons to reject vault society & want to make their own as well

we had the vault dweller both dislike the bos & internalize some of their ideas about the dangers of prewar artifacts - especially poignant to combine it with their discussion with the master leading to the spark of 'what if we created a new, more unified society'

[vault dweller voice] quit your vault job. join me and my friends socialist commune.

so the vault dwellers legacy here is rejection of the old world due to trauma (thus mirroring the master)

Which in turn makes the Chosen One's path synthesis of that legacy with their own lessons.

It's extremely easy to make Fallout 2 is about coming to terms with generational trauma and coming out with hope & solidarity in the face of it. Your companions include super mutants, you can embrace technology, you lead the vault to your town & let them join.

The Enclave is glorification of the past, like what the Vault Dweller learned to fear - ut the chosen one rejects both paths in favor of fusing ideas of harm and ideas of help to forge a new one for a new world.

Or, from the village elders perspective:

the men who kicked your family out after traversing hell to save them came, and then you were taken to a metal hell like the ones your parent described battling the Master Of Unities in, stories that gave you nightmares of pulsating flesh screaming in your ears for decades.

now they speak of that dreaded fev, that horrific glowing goo that haunted your parents dreams and then yours. a horror that twists, breaks, amalgamates, flesh to bone to wire to flesh to pulsing screaming halls echoing.

but your child. your beloved child, chosen one, who you sent on a journey you couldn't make, battered from years of fighting the wastes to keep your safe haven home from all your inherited nightmares -

I have commissions open now! If you have change spare and want me to draw your weird furry, come poke at me over on My Ko-fi page or DM me to negotiate for something slightly more complicated.

Esteemed Bethesda voice actor Wes Johnson is currently hospitalized. You know him from his impassioned performances as Sheogorraht, Fawkes, Mr. Burke, and the Silver Shroud. Johnson is a long-time friend to the Fallout fan community, and contributes his talents to the Fallout For Hope charity project.

Here are a couple resources for y'all to check out and get started with on your own. :)

Medicalizing Sex: The Erasure of Sexual Diversity, authored by tumblr's own @dabwax. Check out the works cited page, too.

InterACT's "What is Intersex?" FAQ

InterACT's "Intersex, Gender, and LGBTQIA+" FAQ

InterACT's Intersex Resource Topics page

InterACT's Guide for Allies

Intersex Awareness Day

Human Rights Campaign: "Understanding the Intersex Community"

Bogi Takács' database of intersex #ownvoices books

Today, the USA federal Department of Health & Human Services released a groundbreaking report linking the ongoing practice of non-consensual surgery on intersex infants to harmful outcomes and health disparities.

This report is the strongest statement from a US federal agency on intersex bodily autonomy to date.

The report recognizes the “well-documented medical harms to intersex people across their lifespan resulting from childhood medical interventions performed when the child was too young to participate in decision-making,” yet observes that medical providers still recommend these practices against growing evidence.

HHS recommends changes to “promote bodily autonomy and informed consent” by “ensuring all non-emergent care is guided by the express wishes of the intersex individual themselves.”

Read the report, created with contributions from interACT staff and our Medical Advisory Group, and many intersex community members!