#nickposting

let's talk a little about nick and memory!

the fundamental tragedy of nick valentine is that, even as a separate person with his own wants, thoughts, feelings, memories and opinions, he's so enmeshed with the 'nick valentine' personality imprinted onto him that the two can't ever be separated because there is no nick valentine without the skeleton of that initial personality

and it causes him enough grief that he's tried to remove it! you kill eddie winter and nick decides that at least he can own the good thing he did in taking winter out of the picture. it's not a moment of triumph so much as it is resignation. an uneasy truce with his own nature, the closest thing to resolution you can reach when your existence as a person is fundamentally unresolvable. wrap up the game, good times are had by all

... far harbor throws a really interesting spanner into the works that I think you can dig a lot into.

so it's important to establish that nick valentine, the cop who got the brain scan, and nick valentine, the synth you meet, are fundamentally two very different people even if the initial framework is the same. your life is shaped by experiences and I think 'waking up as a robot in the irradiated future' counts as an adverse one. then he goes on to find diamond city, become a detective, so on, you know the backstory. far harbor begins and you're contacted by kenji nakano, who's turning to nick for help after assisting nick with a case years ago

... that nick can't remember.

this throws up some interesting possibilities! this isn't just forgetting DiMA, which could come down to institute failsafes, damage, so on, this is a part of nick's later life that falls victim to his extremely limited memory. if you compare DiMA's body to nick's the sheer scope of the changes imply that you need an incredible amount of alterations just to have a chance of retaining your memories over a century. the lived experience, part of what makes the nick you meet nick, is likely to be overwritten and with the nature of machine memory he doesn't notice. nick is physiologically incapable of growth in the same way a human being is despite having a human 'mind'. even after his business is resolved the nucleus of nick valentine, the initial personality and pre-war memories that make up synth nick's personality, are always going to supersede nick's lived experience because he simply doesn't have enough room for them. places, people, experiences and cases run the risk of being forcibly overwritten to make room for more but the flashes, the life of another man, are so enmeshed with who he is fundamentally as a person that they can't ever be untangled without completely destroying nick.