I Could Make You Care

And like, I do get that her leaving without knowing if the Lone Wanderer ever woke up/lived is arguably a bad choice, but 1) your face is such a painful reminder for her and 2) it’s so much more interesting when characters make bad or questionable decisions. I thought we liked complicated characters?? Or is she not allowed to do that. I think Madison making the decision to not stick around is a very compelling choice for her character; it doesn’t read as not caring, it reads as genuine fear of having to lose you. If she doesn’t have to acknowledge the Lone Wanderer might be gone, then they can continue to exist in a more nebulous sense. There is no “end point” for them. She can avoid accepting the fact that an entire family she loved is dead. She can avoid the survivor’s guilt. And who’s to say that she isn’t continually impacted by this grief? In the end, she just wants to be left alone and do her research in peace. Madison Li is exhausted—she’s lost everyone, her work continues to be invalidated, and Brotherhood or Institute, she’s continually being bossed around, had her work used in ways she does not agree with, or even lied to. I think she’s allowed to feel upset. 

Dr. Li is very decidedly not a selfish person. She’s not acting this way out of some sense of greed or entitlement; she genuinely just wants to do work she’s passionate about and not have to worry about surviving. Her goals are always focused on wanting to better the wasteland itself. She wants to help people. If you speak to her in FO4, she remarks:

“All those innocent people up there... dying. And here I am surrounded by technology that could make their lives better.”

“All those people dying in the Commonwealth while I was surrounded by food, medicine and comfort. How could I be so blind to the Institute's greed?”

And she will become furious if you’ve convinced her to return to the Brotherhood because she’ll be asked to work on Liberty Prime again. 

“And for a moment there, you almost had me thinking that you actually cared about the Commonwealth…”

Liberty Prime’s creation is literally one of the major reasons she left. 

“I left the Brotherhood because they had me work on weapons of war…I was tired of being stepped on and used….”

In fact, if you speak with her after you destroy the Institute with the BoS, she’s one of the few NPCs I can think of who is genuinely angry with you for doing so. It’s not out of any loyalty to the Institute, but the fact that you still killed a bunch of people. She is actively critical of the Institute just as much as the Brotherhood, but she is still aghast that you’d kill so many people. That you weren’t using Liberty Prime as leverage for surrender, but that you went the route of destruction. 

And that seems to be the recurring theme for Dr. Li. Her life is defined by loss. She’s often caught in the middle of terrible situations with hard choices to make at every turn. 

[to the Sole Survivor] “…you were sleeping peacefully in your little tube while I went through a very special kind of hell.”

Perhaps it’s not unique—everyone who’s born and raised in the wasteland has struggled with hardships in similar or even greater scale. And Madison gives off the impression of someone who does recognize just how lucky she’s been comparatively. She will remark in FO4 about the things she’s gotten to have while others suffer. It very clearly weighs on her. And despite her debatably better circumstances, it doesn’t mean the traumatic events she’s suffered are any less impactful and heartbreaking. You cannot blame her for being jaded. It seems like no matter what she does, she will lose someone she loves. Even her one friend in the Institute—Virgil—ends up having his death covered up. Over and over again, it’s nothing but loss. Dr. Li continues to be one of the most enduring characters in the series. She’s someone who struggles to deal with her grief and puts walls around herself to try to protect herself and what little she has left. She makes wrong choices in her pursuit of doing good, and she’s well-aware of being stuck in the middle. And I think that self-awareness—hypocrisy, even—is not out of insincerity, but rather that she’s human. 

“When she died, I think... I think he gave up. I know he wanted to keep you safe, but I think part of what he did was run away.”

Sound familiar?

Ultimately, She wants to leave the wasteland better than she found it. Better than it found her. Her life is defined by death, by being left behind, and if she can do something to make up for it, she will. She doesn’t like to talk about herself, and instead wants her work to speak for her.

“[They] turned my work into a weapon of war.”