Fallout 4 fandom, please, I beg you: give me your terrible fem OCs.
I'm on my hands and knees here. Even if you're 'just' writing smut fics. Please.
I want to see a Sole Survivor who was a shitty person before the war, and isn't really any better after. She can improve over time — absolutely. We love character growth; but let her be selfish and bitchy. Petty. Lazy. Mean. Let that still peek through even after/if she does the work and becomes a better person.
Show me a Sole Survivor who loves her dead spouse but will still absolutely fuck that hot Minuteman/merc/ghoul/spy/whatever postwar because she's lonely, or horny, or has bad coping mechanisms, or desperately wants someone to love her, or thinks cozying up to someone dangerous or powerful is her best shot at survival.
And while we're on that topic, you don't have to make the fridge spouse an abusive asshole just so she can feel like it's okay to get laid or love again after he's dead — she can actually just do that, because women's lives don't end if their spouse dies. She can and should move on when she's ready to (or even before then), regardless of what kind of person he was.
Let her have casual sex with whoever the fuck she wants — because it's fun, or maybe because she's fucked up and traumatized and afraid of real intimacy after losing everyone she loved to a nuclear apocalypse.
Give me a Sole Survivor who doesn't try to make the world a better place. Or if she does, maybe it's accidental, a byproduct of her relentless drive for revenge. Or she does it for her own reasons, not because someone else asked and she doesn't want to let them down (also, if she is a people-pleaser, let that be something she works to change, to heal from, because that shit's bad for you).
Let her enjoy killing sometimes. Let her be greedy. Let her have fucked-up/intrusive thoughts and make inappropriate jokes that make people just stop what they're doing and stare at her in shock. Let her be tired of fixing everyone else's lives. Let her say no.
Let people admire her — not because she's so sweet and kind and helpful and would give you the shirt off her back and is an amazing mom and takes care of everyone around her all the time — but because she doesn't let people walk all over her. Because she's assertive and takes no shit. Because she took what she wanted or needed or deserved, instead of standing around waiting for someone else to maybe hopefully decide to give it to her.
Let her have a personality. 'Nice' is not a personality.
She can be so many things. Anything you want. Friendly. Mean. Helpful. Angry. Sad. Charismatic. Awkward. Optimistic. Depressed. Quiet. Boisterous. Confused. Competent. Horny. Asexual. Cis. Trans. Mentally ill. Disabled. Crippled by PTSD. Fascist. Outsider. Victim. Aggressor. Domme. Sub. Switch. Brat. Addict. Teetotaler. There are So. Many. Choices.
And if you actually really like the goody two-shoes schtick? You do you. Read what you like, write what you like. But personally, I'm burned the fuck out on the sweet, friendly, cheery little Noras who never did one wrong thing their whole damn lives (also, I've ranted about it before, but Codsworth can say over 900 names for a reason. They wanted you to name your character. Pick. Something. Different). I'm bored with the relentless do-gooder Charmers, the overeager optimistic Generals who run around saving the world all day. Even if you don't wanna play raider or techno-fascist or slaver (and I get not wanting to!), she can pick one of the 'good' factions and still not be a paragon of sweetness and light and selflessness.
I genuinely believe we can do better by our fem OCs, and I believe they deserve it — so do we. Masc video game main characters already staggeringly outnumber fem ones (and so many of the fem ones are SO poorly written). So when we get a choice about it, and so many people turn around and decide to make their girls into the sweet, pliant, helpful, delicate, nurturing, family-oriented, maternal little ladies everyone expects us to be in the real world every goddamn day? It fucking hurts.
Maybe it's time to think about why we do that. Maybe it's time to change that.
Please stop suffocating your fem OCs in the same frilly pink boxes (coffins, more like) we've spent our lives trying to break out of. It's fiction. Let her live a little.
(Just to be clear, this all applies to other Fallout OCs as well, but I see it the most — and it's the most pronounced — with Sole Survivors for some reason)
