#mytalk

I think the situation in Vault 4 is a clear case of poor communication skills, a theme that runs pretty rampant in the show, especially in season one. It's what slowly turns Cooper against Barb and spy on her, the thing that dooms Tidus and eventually leads to Thaddeus undergoing his transformation, and in a way causes the NCR massacre at the season finale. No one knows how to talk to one another after this war, sheesh! (This even extends to season two to a degree, with the Ghoul refusing to tell Lucy what these "tunic people" are and the Legion itself unable to stop being warmongers for a second to settle an ultimately pointless civil war)

The tragedy of Vault 4 is that the whole situation could have been avoided had any party been willing to talk before acting. Lucy immediately thinking the Shady Sands cult and Moldaver reverence is tied to the vault's secret is what gets her harming an innocent and kicked from the vault; Maximus thinking Lucy is in actual danger when really they're just explaining and sending her on her way ends up ruining a really nice care package they could have taken with them; yes, this includes the Vault 4 overseers not actually telling Lucy what's going on with either the weird mutations or the NCR cult, which directly leads to one of their own getting injured and having to expel her (and almost losing their one source of power, mind you!)

Listen, I get it. The experiments the scientist leaders of Vault 4 performed were cruel and terrible; the fact the gulper we see was not only an actual person but was Ben's relative is horrible. That being said...you live in a community where people have additional body parts that they don't seem really keen on hiding. An extra ear on their head, an extra nose on their forehead, hell your leader has ONE eye (which may or may not cause him to read names wrong). Of course, if someone is being insensitive or cruel about it all, they don't deserve to know, but Lucy was neither of these until, as far as she felt, push came to shove.

And let's not act like the Vault 4 dwellers are good lil gumdrops, either. These people are callously cruel to the Shady Sands refugees, constantly making poor taste jokes at their expense and calling them "surfies" (I wouldn't say that's a slur, but it's def meant to be derogatory). Seriously, remember how blasé Ben was being, man was more bothered that they had a problem with his horrid jokes than anything. You could claim he doesn't know any better since he doesn't seem to be doing it out of malice, but I'm sorry ignorance is not an excuse for this! Sure, they are providing them a home with no strings attached, but imagine the only sanctuary you had had people regularly laughing at the tragedy that uprooted your life and probably killed some people you knew; remember, Shady Sands was NUKED (and it's implied that Vault 4 natives make these jokes REGULARLY)! I would say an eye for an eye is in order here, reveal just how bad this is if it was his condition being ridiculed, but he does only have the one eye and I'd hate to blind him. SEE!?!

It also feels like they were working under the implication that Lucy knew about the truth of Vault-Tec and their experiments, when she didn't. She still thought vaults were the greatest thing ever, mainly cause her vault's experiment was so subtle it took one of the three connected vaults being overtaken for even ONE person to start noticing things were up! Operating under this assumption is what caused all this ruckus to happen in the first place; if anything, you'd expect their typical reaction to meeting a dweller from another vault is to see if they've been made aware of the shit Vault-Tec has pulled on their own vault and others. Like they know other vaults were dealt shitty experiments just like theres, and they didn't even think to CHECK with Lucy that she knew??? They only bother telling her the truth after she's already made the discovery, when the whole thing could have been avoided had they just opened with it in the first place! The only reason they even found out about this was cause the experiment in Vault 4 went wrong in such a precise way that it, in a sick way, ultimately benefitted them. And they don't bother to use this information for the betterment of dwellers from other vaults!! Yet another example of poor communication skills!!!

This is also why I think Lucy would have done more or less the same thing had she visited Vault 4 first before doin anything else in the show. Vault 33 being a more "normal" vault compared to Vault 4 is the key thing here; it's basically like if she entered an episode of The Twilight Zone. If anything, she may have even been worse in this scenario since the trauma caused by Moldaver was fresher in her mind, so seeing that woman be idolized might have pushed her even further off the edge. Not a guarantee since she wasn't as, I'll admit, quick to violence at the start of the show, but I could see her causing a verbal or social ruckus if anything.

This works because Lucy is meant to be partially a static character, which isn't a bad thing. Static just means they don't change over a story, and that's kinda the point with Lucy; despite everything the Wasteland throws at her, especially via the Ghoul as well as the truth about her father, she retains her idealism, her hope, her optimism, her kindness. She never loses these traits because that's The Point of the show, to test her and see how much she believes in these ideas in a world that has given up on all of them; her losing any of these traits would just prove the Ghoul right, which is not the point of the show. That said, she does have dynamic elements, like shedding her need to be completely pacifist to defend herself, shedding her naiveté to not be done over by the con artists of the wastes. She does change, but she doesn't change who she is. To quote the ever relevant Undertale, "Despite everything, it's still you." Is she the same woman at the end of season two as she was when she left Vault 33? Debatably, no. But she's still Lucy MacLean, which I think is more important.