#fallout rambles

What if after the Ghoul kebab situation, he is summoned finally by Mr. House -or however that goes- and the green dork in the screen is like: "Baby, Hank's a bitch, he totally lied to you. I told you boo, there would be someone even worse. Now let's get together, make a freak team, and kick some ass. and then let's get married lol, maybe. okay whatever"

Like, the way I see it, the Minutemen and the Railroad are two sides of the same coin that is leftist organizing. The Railroad are doing liberation work, the Minutemen are doing mutual aid. If they can coexist, they fill in for each other’s weaknesses and do the most good for the people of the Commonwealth.

I haven’t progressed far enough into this playthrough to know if this is just a Deacon thing or if the rest of the Railroad has the same hatred for the Minutemen, but like… the world is better for having both of them. They could kick so much ass if they cooperated with each other.

What if some Minutemen were working on setting up Railroad safehouses at each settlement? What if PAM used her predictive skills to help the Minutemen figure out how their defenses would be best allocated to protect the most people? What if the Railroad shared their ballistic weave technologies and the Minutemen helped supply them with food and supplies to help synths escape the Commonwealth? What if we could infiltrate the Institute and evacuate synths with the Railroad, then bring in the Minutemen to deal with the wealth-hoarding slaveowner Institute pricks? Like, their approaches and philosophies are somewhat different, but at their hearts they have the same ethics and many of the same goals.

This just reminds me so much of leftist infighting in the real world and how sometimes people get so hung up on what makes their organizations different that they miss opportunities to work together for greater impact.

Anyways, currently musing up an OC who kinda fills in some of these gaps between the Railroad and Minutemen… Sketches and bio in progress rn.

However, I am also going to give a fallout ramble (underneath the cut), soooo... yeah

I didn't have en entire idea where I was going to go with it (I think I was going to end up going with Hatemonger ending up being less of an ass, but I do not remember for the life of me), but between depression kicking my ass and exams and life getting in the way, I figured I would share a full page with text of what I have, even though there isn't plot.

This is how the digital version was going, though. I was trying to work on backgrounds, but it's a little bit difficult on my phone to draw really anything, so I suppose we're lucky I got here.

So, apologies for not going through with getting this done. I hope you all will understand, however, considering mental health and all that.

It's like they thought of the vault sequence first and then made up everything that happens after you get into the institute to fit. My very light headcanon is that for some reason they only needed Shaun specifically, he's a baby so he'd have stem cells they can use or whatever whereas your adult spouse wouldn't, and Kellogg had no orders to retrieve your spouse and so being a vindictiv dick decided to act like a hammer. This kind of would sync up with the fact there are no other kids in Sanctuary or the vault for some reason. However this still barely makes any sense.

You would think in the actual canon, where all the DNA is valuable to the institute, they'd be pissed at Kellogg for fucking up so badly that only 2 prewar specimens survived, you and Shaun. At least so they'd have future sources to pull from and some genetic variety, but no, all synths are based off of 1 dude's DNA, let's hope you and him don't have any congenital medical issues or all the synths are fucked.

I think the thing that pisses me off the most is that I can't find an option to ask Father why Kellogg didn't just talk to our spouse and explain what was going on, because the writers know that that would be unanswerable without fucking it all up. All they can do is gesture at "ooh it's tough to get stuck on what ifs." and "Kellogg was a dick and he outlived his usefulness."

This doesn't help Father's likeability as a character, Bethesda writing is regularly built around story board style spectical moments reverse engineered to "make sense" in the flimsiest possible terms. And in Father's case unlike other NPCs it always feels like he's just being a stupid faux mysterious dick when these events happen.

Why did he put that Shaun bot there and let you get hysterical at it for so long if not to fuck with you and give him an excuse to walk in like "ooh you surface dwellers are so emotional, please calm down so I can explain." Like look asshole, anyone would freak out in that situation, you can roleplay the most rational cold scientist character in the world and they would still freak out in that situation unless they're unrealistically evil because the negative non-freaking out options are written in a cartoonishly dickish way that doesn't fit anything other than a "I'm picking all the worse options hehe" meta playthrough. Bethesda is never good at writing anything other than good or sarcastic good (this is not a new observation I think I'm paraphrasing Hbomberguy) but it's most blatant in that scene.

Obsidian really fumbled on this DLC, the caricature of indigenous people in the npcs (broken English and the mockery of a wardrobe and names the devs gave them); the Christian/white-savior complex from Joshua and Daniel has left a permanent sour taste in my mouth. The only positive aspect of the DLC is the environment. Zion National park is one of my favorite places, but seeing it as the setting for that dumpster fire of a DLC sucks.