F.ALLOUT VERSE - FACTION OPINIONS
Caleb doesn’t feel anything strongly for or against the Brotherhood of Steel at first encounter. He barely knows anything about them or their history.
Over time he comes to have mostly negative feelings about the Brotherhood. He feels that despite their presentation as a military organization, most of them aren’t real soldiers so much as…people who think they want to play soldier.
But then again, that honestly applied to a lot of real pre-war soldiers, too. (He…also probably doesn’t know the Brotherhood was originally founded by veterans of the U.S. military.)
He becomes a little bit combative against some Brotherhood chapters’ doctrine of distrusting and wanting to rid the wasteland of “abominations” (Ghouls & Synths, mainly). Particularly if the abominations in question are just minding their business and not really hurting anything.
Caleb becomes a lot more guarded around most Brotherhood affiliates at any point after he learns that he is a synth, due to the obvious.
Absolutely fucking despises the football team rejects on principle. It doesn’t take long to figure out what their deal is and none of it is good.
The Legion is founded on slavery, tortures their enemies via crucifixion and other cruelty. They rape women and exclude them from being anything other than mothers and caretakers by penalty of death, and use children in war. All of these are things that would make Caleb want to burn down the entire camp without a second thought.
Evil. Psycho Fucks. No way would Caleb ever want to help them.
It’s for the best that Caleb doesn’t know anything. I promise.
FOLLOWERS OF THE APOCALYPSE
Thought this faction was bad news when he first heard the name…he imagined a doomsday cult that worships an undetonated nuclear warhead, but on further investigation he figured out the Followers are made of decent people. Maybe even what he considers the best in the Wasteland.
The Followers are mostly former military or paramilitary turned pacifists who generally realized that violence and war wouldn’t solve their problems and instead now want to bring peace to the world through sharing basic resources (food/water/medicine) and education.
Serving a good cause in Caleb’s eyes. He thinks it’s noble and hopeful that there is still someone out there willing to help others for little to no profit to themselves.
Tends to feel more than a little conflicted about these guys.
On one hand…the NCR has been responsible for making a lot of progress in rebuilding civilization, reintroducing democracy and rule of law, as well as a market economy based on brahmin trade. They have a decent healthcare system although it does have its shortcomings, civil rights & anti-discrimination protections for ghouls and other mutants, and bans on slavery, most of which are good things and give Caleb a sense of hope just as the Followers do.
On the other hand…he can’t help but wonder if maybe the NCR’s market economy allowing for Brahmin barons to carry the strongest influence over NCR government officials might be a mistake…kind of like railroad robber barons when it came to the Wild West. Or something like that.
Trying to restore a political system similar to pre-war U.S. government by way of free-market capitalism also just seems like it might not be such a good idea. Can't quite put his finger on why he feels this way. (It couldn’t be related to the notion that it was exactly that type of system that gave somebody somewhere in the world enough power to end the world in order to serve their own interests, could it?)
The NCR’s military proves to struggle big time with corruption, spies and security breaches, poor management practices, and other undesirable elements their officers seem particularly ineffective at addressing, making Caleb reluctant to trust them. He maybe even considers the NCR Army a little less competent than the BoS in regard to these matters, and that's saying something.
Caleb knows that House essentially owned Las Vegas pre-war and was founder of RobCo Industries, but…that’s about the extent of it.
In Caleb’s perspective, it was rich assholes like House (even if House himself is not directly culpable) who were responsible for sending people like him and his old buddies off to die in various conflicts under the Resource Wars. He does carry some degree of bitterness and resentment over this. It is not helped by the knowledge that House was/is still running the show in Vegas over 200 years later.
What Caleb doesn’t know…is that it’s because of a deal between Robert House and Charlotte Hale that he’s still around at all. In a nutshell, the Enclave was interested in acquiring the full research project that Vault Tec had ordered Delos to cease development on when they bought out the company, and Charlotte was looking to smuggle data out of the park as a failsafe. She had intended to send the data package to Engerraund Serac, the same as in Westworld canon, but in this universe, the upload was intercepted by House and diverted to his server instead.
Charlotte tried to barter the data back from House so that she could give it to Serac as planned, but the newly crowned Host!Charlotte-Dolores murdered her human counterpart, took her place, and then confronted/bargained with House in the aftermath, essentially telling him to keep the data packages, but in exchange she wanted blueprints to build a cryogenic chamber. Even if House didn’t possess the designs himself, she knew that he would know where to find them, since there were multiple Vault Tec experiments planned to use that same cryo technology (i.e. Vault 111, Vault 31, Tower Vault, etc…)
That’s right, taking the lore into my own hands yet again to say that San Francisco still mainly belongs to the Shi (from Fallout 2) and their descendants as of 2288 and beyond. Would the TV show or future games follow this? No idea but given that they keep portraying previously featured populated locations as deserted hellholes (Los Angeles/Boneyard, Shady Sands, Novac, Camp Golf, The Strip…) I…would imagine not.
Caleb doesn’t know much of anything about the Shi. He only even learns there are people living in San Francisco after reaching a smaller settlement to the south, near the town of Pacifica. He emerges from a hidden access tunnel to the Delos research facility onto Baker Beach in the Northwest corner of SF, while Shi-town is based in the Northeast corner around Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf.
Caleb thinks most non-feral ghouls are just regular people who have been dealt a shitty hand and are generally just trying to live their lives.
Ferals he thinks have effectively lost their humanity/consciousness/soul and are too far gone to save, but he still feels bad about having to kill them, when/if necessary, and tries to leave them with the dignity of a quick and painless end. They were human once too, right?
Depends quite a bit on the type of robot. He does have a slight distrust due to residual memories of human Caleb being one of the workers affected during the automaton riots, and remembers the government and businesses promising that automating everything with robot workers would make life easier for humans, which makes him feel a touch resentful because that was certainly not the reality of what happened at all. He’s generally nice and civil around them anyways.
Securitrons… Victor, Jane, Marilyn (from cut content?), and Yes Man are generally considered cool, if not just a little bit intimidating to loiter around for too long. Since they all have unique personalities that make them feel more human than not, the only thing that prevents Caleb from fully trusting Victor, Jane, and Marilyn is that they would be direct employees of House. Yes Man is a weirder one to figure out.
All the rest of the securitron army make Caleb very uneasy as they are nameless, default personalities programmed to act as a militarized police force for either House or Yes Man.
ED-E is cool. Caleb would be really amused by the western showdown music ED-E plays when fighting enemies the first couple times he heard the thing and then he’d quickly be like “…does he do that every time?”
Protectrons...Primm Slim, if he's still just the greeter at the Vikki & Vance, is fine. But if Slim has been reprogrammed as Primm’s new sheriff, Caleb feels a little nervous about getting too close in proximity, concerned Primm Slim might be able to detect that he has engaged in criminal activity before and may make an attempt to arrest him. He doesn’t feel the same level of anxiety if Sheriff Meyers or Sergeant McGee is in charge of the town instead, so his worry has something to do with Slim’s programming, more so than his distaste for authority figures. (probably because Meyers and McGee don’t have any sort of access to pre-war criminal records and aren’t obligated to uphold the law on centuries-old crimes, but it’s possible Slim could be. But I don’t think Caleb knows that Primm Slim doesn’t have any weapons or attack protocols installed in the first place.)
FISTO seems fine. He’s definitely not going to ask questions out loud, but he does have some.
Most of them are hostile and unintelligent, making it difficult to want to trust them as a species.
But…it’s at least pretty easy to sort out which super mutants are friendly vs. hostile because friendly ones typically don’t shoot on sight.
Likely the first friendly super mutant Caleb encounters is Mean Sonofabitch (introduced as “Mahsofabish”) when he travels to Westside for trading. His thoughts basically boil down to “What’s with the big green guy?” / “okay I barely understand a word he’s saying, but he seems alright.”
Keeping fairly consistent with Westworld Canon — can’t really tell much difference between human and synth anyways at face value (with the exception of the Institute’s Gen 1 & Gen 2 models which look more outwardly mechanical). Delos First Gen hosts are a more primitive design with a carbon-alloy jointed endoskeleton and a synthetic skin covering, but the average person still shouldn’t really be able to discern host from human unless they’re dissecting them bit by bit.
Institute Gen 3 Synths and Delos Newer Model Hosts are more like clones, assembled through the 3D printing of biosynthetic bones, organs, tissues, and fluids to look and feel as human-like as possible.
Caleb treats synths about the same as regular, normal humans regardless. Some are good, some are bad, some are both, some are neither.
Maybe because he already is a synth and even if he’s not consciously aware of it yet, like kind might be programmed to recognize like kind. Or maybe because synths do look more human than other types of machines, and this makes it easier for the human component to empathize with them.
