#roberthouse69

beloved violet, if you could change anything regarding house's storyline this season, what would it be? what direction would you like his story to take?

i feel like i kept forcing myself to like this rendition of house because the tin says house. but they changed the ingredients <\3

EEEE very fun question thank you!!! I KEPT TRYING TOO BUT HE'S JUST??? A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GUY! plot twist the real house got two body doubles for the love of the game but only one of them knew their part

i have two, one is petty and one is the thing we've both been irritated about so i'll yap about em both lol. rational one is of course the FUCKASS mind control device!! hell it could be in the show, bc it makes sense for HANK to fuck around with, but making it not only a robco invention, but something house himself decided to test in the most ooc way possible? hello???? are you kidding me???? and OUTSOURCING SOMETHING SO POWERFUL TO ANOTHER COMPANY???? my man would Never!!! them deciding robco was that deep in bed with vault-tec in general was a massive misstep imo; like yes, collaboration was a huge part of how the company ran, but that was an element of control. that was house throwing around his weight to show that the other big corps are cute, but ultimately lesser without his tech. even if house was the type of man to design a mind control device, that shit would be just as secret as his plans for vegas! come ON! there's also something to talk about re: the pre-war public's apparent obsession with collabs which extended into govt contracts but that's a total tangent lmao

A lady's virtue, once lost, can only be remedied by the greatest of sacrifices. Lady Wendy Shaw's lapse of judgement during the last Fugue Feast has placed her in the awkward position of having to face a disgruntled lover, a rash husband and the implaccable scrutiny of Dunwall's high society during a prestigious dinner party. Some sins are too grave to be so easily forgiven.

i love your prose and the way you craft your stories. ive always been curious to learn if there were any particular books or authors that you found to have inspired your writing. are there any you found to be influential?

hi Naomi!! 🧙‍♀️ thank you for the lovely question.

my number one inspiration will always be Ray Bradbury. these days I don't seek out any male authors not already known to and liked by me, so this is high praise coming from me. he writes in such a succinct way, low on metaphor but still high on symbolism and theme; I have definitely developed my own style with him as a guide.

two authors I discovered over the past few years who have styles similar to mine and who now inspire me are Eve Babitz and Margaret Millar. again, I favor straightforward styles regardless of genre (I wouldn't say he influences my style, but GRRM writes this way too) and they both write that way. Millar wrote noir and Babitz wrote autofiction and they couldn't be more different in general, but I find inspiration in both as to the stark concept of their prose. when the occasional Millar metaphor hits, it lands.

this doesn’t make much sense sorry lol but the tldr; i’d love to read your thoughts on these two bone heads and their parents 💗

Content Warning: discussion of cult tactics, abuse, neglect, infanticide and general harm unto infants, pregnancy complications, emotional inc*st and inappropriate age gaps. This is also just a complicated read with a lot of moving parts, so be prepared for that.

No need to apologize! That’s a very astute comparison. If there’s a deviation between Leopold & Loeb and Edward & Joshua in terms of their social background, it would probably be that the former (to my knowledge) grew up in similar environments, while Edward and Joshua were raised in ostensibly very different cultures which they coalesced into one far more monstrous entity.

“Ostensibly” is carrying a lot of weight there. The Followers don’t necessarily embody these qualities, but historically, academia in the west has represented a font of organized racism and misogyny, legitimizing and promoting ideas that we nowadays look back on as cruel and ridiculous, like phrenology and such. (I fully accepted the popular hc of Edward’s family being from the ruins of USC partly for this reason, on top of the Trojans reference.) The fact that Caesar sprung from the only organized academic body in the wasteland can be taken as a continuation of that ugly tradition, and the Mormon Church’s ties to colonialism and it’s status as a modern day cult speak for themselves. Honest Hearts doesn’t engage with Mormonism critically, so the way Joshua’s upbringing in such a setting impacted him has to be inserted by us the players.

There’s a few articles you can read about the practices that make the modern day Mormon church a cult, and the impact these practices have on children raised in this environments. But some core tenants that seem relevant to Joshua’s growth are the instillment of fear and uncertainty into every aspect of one’s life, especially family and community, the hyperfocus on “cleaning” (both physically, to ensure members are always busy, and mentally/spiritually, as an exercise in paralyzing self-doubt,) and of course a tremendous amount of restriction placed on gender and sexual expression from an early age.

And this is draconian institutional abuse, not responsibility or healthy self-reflection or what have you. It’s a small wonder Joshua has something of a martyr complex when we meet him in-game: having been brought up in an environment that encouraged close surveillance over all human impulses, no matter how natural or innocuous, and never experienced a version of accountability that wasn’t a smokescreen for torture and control, all his desires need to be neatly wrapped up in diversion and justification to avoid giving credence to the idea that he’s sullied, disgusting, subhuman, unworthy of love. These themes of being taught that the loss of autonomy is virtuous/necessary so that the sufferer begins to perpetuate it themselves, and of being perpetually denied stability in spite of a seemingly endless mandate of labor, are the ones that I try to carry over into his mother’s story.

Her name is Dinah Graham, née Gardner. I work on her characterization with @dustwhirlsandrainbows. She has five co-wives.

She was very close with her mother, whose name was Madeline Gardner (née Talmage.) She, along with the rest of the community, raised Dinah to idealize a version of motherhood that revolved around obedience, self-sacrifice and participation in the colonial machine. Dinah’s mother died as a result of pregnancy complications, (as many women and children do in Quiverfull-esc religious sects,) altering but not deconstructing the way her daughter engaged with the edicts of their community.

Like her mother, Dinah got married at a very young age. She named her firstborn daughter after her mother: Joshua was her second child. She was close with her husband’s second wife Abigail, who struggled with her fertility, but by the time the third Rebecca came along her husband was beginning to be less considerate towards her, which caused contention between them. The fourth abandoned New Canaan, to be subsequently treated like she’d never existed, and the fifth wed Mr. Graham when she was a teenager. He married the sixth soon after Joshua founded The Legion, which should tell you something about the way Mr. Graham related to his children.

Joshua bonded less with his father and more with his maternal Grandfather, Dinah’s dad and Madeline’s widower. He also becomes closer with his second-to-last stepmother Elizabeth after he returns from the burning: since he left New Canaan when her children were infants, they weren’t as affected by their relation to a war criminal as his other half/step siblings. She also had personal history which made her particularly sympathetic to his plight, but that’s another post. I usually use Laura Galán of “Piggy” as a fancast for her in her youth.

Ingrid Torelli of “Late Night With The Devil” is a good representation of how I imagine Dinah in her youth, especially with the off-putting, ragdollish body language. She’s playing a 13 year old here, but the actress is 18. Dinah was in that age range when she got married to Mr. Graham, who was a couple years older than her. Saint Olga of Kyiv bears a close resemblance to her in adulthood: fittingly, since she’s the patron saint of defiance, defense and vengeance.

Wives were offered to men in New Canaan as rewards for good service to the church, and conversely, to be married to an accomplished clergyman was considered an achievement for young girls. As such, Mr. Graham was generally inattentive to the welfare of his family, and put his myriad of children and step-children into the position of constantly competing for his attention and favor, which was connected to their social life external to the household by virtue of his own status. The vastness of their family is part of the reason why Joshua always references them in such nondescript terms: he had siblings, half siblings, aunts, uncles, stepmothers and step-grandparents, etc. His children suffered as a result of the infighting, resentment and awkwardness between their mothers, and some of them came into the family with pre-existing issues which caused them to lash out at the other kids.

(For example, during Rebecca’s previous marriage, her youngest child had been a victim of infanticide by a co-wife who was going through pregnancy induced psychosis. The incident caused her then-husband, Mr.Ballard, to abandon New Canaan, opening Rebecca up to be wed again. Her two surviving children, Jobe and Ethel, were left severely traumatized, and Jobe actually pressed Joshua’s hand to a hot pan when they were both still young. He’s become less aggressive by the time Joshua returns from the Legion, but his actions are re-contextualized by Joshua’s botched execution, so. There’s that.)

Here’s a good representation of Joshua’s relationship with his daddy.

It’s also an excellent segue into talking about Edward!

So there’s a theory that the breakdown of Joshua and him’s three decade long relationship was due in part to Edward’s personality changing from his untreated brain tumor. And while that idea makes the storyline more interesting, I think the game offers a more explicit example of a shift in Edward’s neurology within his stated backstory. The implication of Caesar’s mother taking him to The Boneyard after his father’s death is that whatever home they had been living in was destroyed in the same incident. Raiders don’t attack for no reason - maybe they were landholders. The loss of that kind of generational wealth would certainly contribute to that sense of aggrieved entitlement we see Edward display so aggressively in game. Growing up in the Boneyard, he wouldn’t have any direct connection to whatever rural culture they’d previously been apart of, except that which he would get through his mother. Maybe that’s where his need to assert himself as a supreme intellect comes from: insecurity about the fact that his people were (in his mind) uncultured and uneducated.

But the transition from one setting to another is less important than the circumstances in which that transition occurred. Having a parent killed and a home destroyed, then being taken on foot to another settlement by the remaining one, would represent an extreme disruption to the established patterns of safety in which infants are supposed to exist. “Neural development occurs most rapidly in early childhood and is shaped by experience,”and reactions to trauma in small children with limited expressive & defensive capacities are markedly similar to signs of cognitive impairment in adults: symptoms like the loss of previously established movement and language skills, detachment from & disinterest in their surroundings, appearing “frozen” or sustained periods of blank staring, sleeplessness and nightmares, etc.

The sleep one is sticking with me. Insomnia can cause brain damage even in adults subjects, and babies with undeveloped brains are far more vulnerable to serious consequences from such disruptions. Consistency and routine are also important to a young child’s ability to rest: not only having it disrupted by an incident of violence, but being uprooted and taken to a new place in the immediate aftermath, could’ve severely damaged his ability to cope with the stress of that situation as it was happening, let alone in the years afterwards.

And that’s why I think going through something that would’ve been taxing & traumatizing for a grown adult as a baby with an extremely delicate brain is much more likely to have had an adverse impact on Edward’s neuroanatomy - and subsequently changed his personality for the worse on a physiological level - than a tumor that popped up when he was well into manhood. It’s difficult to ascertain, since two year old children don’t have full personalities in the first place. He essentially lives his whole life in the aftermath of that event.

These two themes - of the psychological interplaying with the physiological, and of growing up in reaction to traumatic experiences that preceded all other sense of identity - are the ones that I try to carry over into my writing for his mother. There’s also comparison & contrast made between Edward’s family and Joshua’s, my attempt to explore how people in vastly different situations can end up in similar circumstances. A key difference is that the Grahams are much more thoroughly influenced by their community and extended family, while the Sallows are more self-contained.

I call Edward’s mother Clarice. I’ve put down a frankly obscene amount of plotting, backstory, and analysis for her (and her associates,) but very little actual writing, unfortunately. Her full name is Clarice Belinda Sallow. She was born to Earl Sallow and his then girlfriend Lola on a ranch not far from the dilapidated USC campus, on October 28th of 2189, the same year the NCR was founded. A charming but emotionally unstable philanderer, Earl had several other illegitimate children by various women, but he didn’t pay any of them half the attention he paid Clarice. Clarice was Earl’s only daughter, and as such he (subconsciously) saw her birth as an opportunity to mold a woman from scratch, suited to his needs and incapable of abandoning him. Lola fled the family when Clarice was a toddler on account of Earl’s habitual adultery and intense jealousy, leaving her to be raised exclusively by her father. She spent her childhood performing the duties of a wife, tending the ranch, cooking and cleaning, washing and mending, etc.

Though Earl never SA’d his daughter, his emotional attachment to her was wildly inappropriate. He leaned on her for support, barred her from an outside education, and kept her largely isolated from other children, especially boys. He also dictated the clothes she wore, her spending habits and personal interests, and kept her on her toes with guilt trips and episodes of rage. The most aggressive of these incidents was when Clarice got her first boyfriend at the age of fourteen. When her father found out, he threatened her in extremely graphic terms which I can’t repeat on tumblr, and assaulted the kid she’d been dating.

Earl died after a grueling battle with spinal cancer in 2209, when Clarice was twenty years old. The last year of his life was painful and lonely, and he had little contact with anyone but Clarice. (This sounds cathartic on paper, but the legacy of this period is just further damage to his daughter’s mental health, so. Don’t cheer too loud.) In the aftermath of her father’s passing, Clarice was severely distraught, lacking a tangible identity after spending her formative years so devoted to one man. She fell in with Earl’s friend and neighbor, a carpenter named Frank Abendroth (nicknamed “Roth”) who managed his affairs after his death. Roth ended up abandoning his own family and bringing Clarice with him to a settlement in the north. There, he took a second mistress, an east coast transplant named Vanessa.

Roth and other businessmen in the USC area had had a handshake agreement with the local NCR which allowed them to store raw materials like lumber off the books, so they couldn’t be taxed for importing them. Roth assumed that the authorities in the north operated on the same terms. They didn’t, and he was arrested for customs fraud and sent to prison when Clarice was about twenty one. She found out she was pregnant with his child soon before, but was spared having to tell him by his arrest, and Vanessa helped her get an abortion. Together, the two girls went in search of Clarice’s oldest brother Paul, who was living in a flophouse in a semi-urban mining town. They moved in with him and quickly became enmeshed with his friend group, which included a bounty hunter, his wife, and her longtime friend, a native of the Boneyard named Roy Tillman.

(Never thought I’d get the chance to post this incredibly niche meme, but here you go.)

Leaving out some major life events for brevity (and because I might end up changing them,) Clarice eventually married Roy, and they settled on her father’s ranch before it was burned down. Theirs was a common law marriage, since Roy had already legally married someone else when he was younger, though they’d long since separated. That, (and the fact that property ownership in the wasteland is easier to prove when you share the surname of the former owner,) is why Edward has his mom’s last name.

Roy was something of a slimeball, being influenced largely by the opportunistic bastard trope and a willingness to tacitly profit off of, if not participate in, unjust systems. He spent a long time working as a moonshiner, outselling his competitors by producing cheap rotgut liquor. He met Paul when the latter was a bouncer at a dogfighting ring where he liked to gamble. His first love, the bounty hunters wife, had been a victim of labor trafficking, and Clarice also had unusually low standards as a result of her past. But whatever else Roy was, he was also markedly less dangerous and unpleasant than his male peers, causing Clarice to see him through rose tinted glasses and feel as if she owed him something. She gave birth to Edward when she was thirty five, and died of cancer around the age of fifty seven.

On that note, fun fact about the USC area: they, as a community, consumed irradiated food in huge quantities. For some families, it was all they ever ate. This practice began before the NCR was around to incentivize widespread sharecropping and educate wastelanders on the specific dangers of an irradiated diet. USC was landlocked and ecologically devastated, with the remnants of pre-war urbanization making it difficult to institute sustainable livestock farming. So eating radioactive food with every meal started out as a matter of desperation, when the area was still widely impoverished. By the time Clarice was in her teens, the practice had evolved into more of a rural masculinity ritual, the sort of habit meant to affect that one was tough and down to earth, (like beer, whiskey and meat in the South.) Earl partook, and he taught Clarice to partake, and Edward came out of Clarice.

That’s why they all get cancer.

As other people have discussed, Edward’s father’s murder at the hands of raiders and the destruction of their pastoral, patriarchally inherited land makes for excellent propaganda, and he’s used to using those events as a rhetorical tool when trying to recruit people. On an emotional level, Edward tends to look on his father with ambivalence or active disgust. To be killed in a failed attempt to defend their home, leaving his son in the care of a woman who was significantly younger and weaker than him, is a massive blow to the image of the kind of man Edward would like to believe he came from.

His relationship with his mother started out stable if not healthy, but became more fraught as he entered his teens. From the start, Clarice was deeply afraid of recreating the pseudo-incestuous bond her father had with her, especially after Roy was killed and they were left a family of two, much like she and Earl had been. Lacking positive examples of what parenting should look like, she embraced an authoritarian style of motherhood with firmly delineated parent-child roles, and had periods of neglect and abusiveness, like breaking/hitting things in rage when he was around or giving him alcohol to put him to sleep. Though these behaviors cooled as Clarice got older, and her life become more anchored, Edward resented his mother’s growing inability to (in his mind) justify her misgivings as a domestic authority by remaining a strong, imposing figure worthy of obedience. Part of the reason he accepted the assignment to the Grand Canyon was because Clarice was nearing the end of her life, and he didn’t want to be around for her demise.

Clarice’s face is square, and like her son she has a hooked nose, broad shoulders, brown eyes and blonde hair - a combination which is very difficult to find representation for when hunting for fancasts. But Olga Mironova in “Come And See” looks similar to her, as well as Leah from TLOU2, Kirsten Dunst in “Melancholia,” and Tammy Barnes from Far Cry 5. The woman in the black and white photograph is Andrei Tarkovsky’s mother. (Final image is from this gif)

aaaaah naomi ty!!!

Mari:

🖊️ If there’s one thing Mari loves besides daud or art, it’s her wolfhound. daud doesn’t love it, but it just so happened that she bonded with it and now it would never leave- which, in the end, he accepts the creature bc it protects mari and keeps her company when he’s not around.

🖊️ She’s always wanted to be a mother, but her poor health doesn’t allow that. So as she gets older, the whalers are her children and against several suggestions, she treats them as such. however, they all love her and her presence commands only loyalty and respect from them.

🖊️ Mari used to be afraid of rats, but her years of living on the streets of dunwall have eased that fear to love. she doesn’t have the ability to command the rats- as much as she really wants to- but she feeds them and handles with absolute care (at least, before the rat plague).

Neri:

🖊️ I like to think that Neri managed to get Ketheric to surrender and she is able to put his soul at rest. Her travels have turned her soft as much as she hates to admit, but she felt deeply sorry for the old man, but never excuses his actions. Grief is a horrible thing and she believes he was so consumed by it that he couldn’t find his way back on his own. and i also like to think she visits his grave at least once.

🖊️ Walks around camp naked most of the time. at first everyone was annoyed but then it just became so normal - she didn’t make it weird in anyway and usually it was because she wanted to bathe or she had clothing she was mending.

I have so many of Holly and still quite a few of Buddy (rip my little man :( I miss him a lot, but not the beagle howls at 4am)