Blah Blah I Love Nick Valentine Blah Blah Blah

old pics of an absolutely cursed, horrific looking & late-night Mr. House cosplay I did, to a friend's recommendation ☺️

PERSONAL RATING: ★★★★★ 5/5

Before the bombs fell, Red knew he was gay. He had never said it, even in his own head: I'm gay.

But he knew.

There was no point admitting it, because it didn't matter. He was married to Nora, he had an infant son.

Even if that hadn't been the case, there was no other option to pursue anyway. Whatever queer culture there was in the Commonwealth -- well. Surely it existed, but it was too far underground for Red to ever encounter.

He'd heard murmurs about gay culture in the military. The Navy, especially. He hadn't been permitted to choose his own branch, though; instead, he was sorted into the National Guard, assigned to defending the home front with the same bigoted hometown men he'd grown up around.

The date displayed on Red's Pip-boy when he exited the vaults told him two hundred years had passed. It didn't matter if it was twenty or two-hundred years, really; the old world was decisively gone, and everyone he had ever known was dead.

But it wasn't until he reached the remains of the Starlight Drive-In that he realized how the changes had affected this particular part of the culture.

On one hand, it feels too lackadaisy in terms of gameplay. There’s a dozen or so small warheads around the map that you have to detonate to progress or access special areas. I would like this if it felt more horrible to do. As is it feels somewhat detached from Fallout’s otherwise artful approach to the Bomb: satirical and reverent by turns but always with the tinge of horror to it. In the Divide, the warheads are just kind of themed progression mechanics without the satire or reverence to them.

On the other…

The Courier detonates a Bomb. I know you can apparently set off a warhead in the middle of a settled area in Fallout 3, but that’s an option for the heinous and evil that people generally don’t seriously take. In Lonesome Road, it’s an accident. An unavoidable accident. And it’s an oh shit moment.

You’re just going down that Lonesome Road, and you throw a switch to open a door, and suddenly there’s klaxons and screeching metal and the drone of a rocket erupting into life, and a missile rising into the air, and in seconds you’ve gone from trying to open a door to watching as your carelessness is crystalized into the most horrible weapon in the world and then there’s a boom and you’re left standing there wondering what you have just destroyed, what you have just killed, what horror of the Old World you have just awakened.

And then there’s the finale sequence. A whole bunker full of Old World fire, and you get to decide what happens to it.

Maybe you’re a Legionary. Maybe you’re with the NCR. You think that the best way to secure the future for your faction is to wield that Old World fire and scour the earth of the enemy. Maybe you just want the burn the damned world.

The game makes it clear that unleashing those missiles will forever alter the face of the West. If you let them loose, the world and humanity will face the consequences for generations to come. It even goes so far as to describe the events of that conclusion as a second apocalypse. And there’s no way to avoid it.

Unless you have compassion and loyalty enough to rescue ED-E.

The basic kindness of rescuing your companion is the key to the special ending the game initially denies you. You have to go through extra pains for somebody else to win the right to full choice, and you have to be willing to let that somebody make a choice, a sacrifice, for that choice to be followed through on.

The Neither option is objectively the best choice in terms of narrative: the story is so much better with the drama and heroics of ED-E sacrificing itself on the altar of the Old World in the name of peace and safety for humanity. And the Neither option requires another sacrifice: missing out on the content of the post-nuclear areas you’d otherwise unlock.

A narrative sacrifice and a mechanical sacrifice. You have to give things up to save the world.

Because that’s what you’re doing: you’re saving the world. With compassion and mercy and love and maybe just the pure pragmatism of not wanting to drop the Bomb again, you save the world.

I think that’s what the Wild Card ending is supposed to be. To reject the warring nature of both factions, to reject the doctrine that says a person has any right to shape history for millions of other lives. To say that the community of Freeside, the solidarity of the Followers, the autonomy of the Mojave, these are all worthy things, useful things, things powerful enough to override the un-overrideable. House, Gen. Oliver, Caesar, they all want to control the course of history through the force of their will, their intellect, their strength: but the Wild Card Courier has a radically different approach. The Wild Card Courier rejects the power of the Old World.