as a biologist by training, with way too many classes on reproduction, i found myself wondering the answer to this question.
we have only a few lines to work off of to establish these theories. firstly, lucy saying she can't wait for "the real deal" on her wedding day. then, later, she asks maximus directly if he'd like to have sex. not really much, i know. but, i have a few ideas despite this.
also my sources on this include autism that made me rewatch the show five billion times, and a degree in biology + animal science. a lot of research at my school is on reproduction. i almost worked with sperm. a good friend of mine did a study on sex.
i enjoy making video essay-type posts on things since i do research lmao. so, let's dive into some procreation!
in short:
vaults 32 and 33 have a very comprehensive sexual education curriculum, and sexual intimacy is very casual and common.
however, penetrative + procreative sex is reserved for married couples, and-
non-procreative sex is allowed for all. this includes hands, mouths,... other parts. anything that doesn't make a baby.
socially, these rules are kept in line, since no one wants to be the one to have a kid that overloads the food supply or water chip, especially not in a meritocracy.
there may or may not be contraception. i say only married couples get it, since there's likely a limit on number of children they can have.
on the first point, it was clear that lucy knew a good amount about sex. (sex, here, is used generally to mean all acts of intimacy, including nonpenetrative). lucy knew what to do when with monty. lucy offered sex after maximus said she smelt good, and was casual/knowledgeable in what he meant about ejaculation. this could be because of her 'experience' with chet (i don't like discussing this much), but also it's reasonable to extrapolate that she was just taught about all of this in school. they likely sat people down and were like, hey, this is how to make a baby. this is how to pleasure a partner. etc etc etc.
it'd make sense for them to be taught all of this, since 32/33 are explicitly a breeding program. so, it's good to teach them how to procreate effectively. however, they are a breeding program.
the goal, overall, is to make super managers. and i'd like to think bud knows a lil bit about science and selective breeding. so, controlling who people reproduce with is step 1 of making this work. the best way to selectively breed for a trait is to select individuals who exhibit these traits, then put them together. bam, you are one step closer to a super manager. so, you'd make sure marriages are between favorable people, bada bing bada boom.
it's like dog breeding, if you want a less human-centric example. it's also literally eugenics, but bud would definitely dislike that descriptor. it's his own words, he wants a super manager, and 32/33 are breeding pools. so, he's gotta ensure that his breeding program continues without a hitch.
it makes sense, then, for only married couples to perform procreative sex. only married couples can actually reproduce, as they have been approved by the council (and whomever else may be peeking in, like bud). and i think that the stigma associated with a child out of wedlock, as well as education on what makes a baby, how a baby affects the parents and the community, etc., are all ways to keep people from reproducing willy-nilly. the vault clearly prides itself on good deeds, so spinning it as a bad deed that must never happen probably is pretty effective in preventing it. it's not guaranteed, but it just might work.
(plus, you can let them do other things,,, which i touch on later.)
i know i'd hate to be the one to have a kid that throws the entire delicately-balanced vault ecosystem out of balance. one more body may prove too much for the water chip, or the crops! and coming out of the famine (which. may or may not have happened), the idea of keeping the population in-check would be more prevalent within the dwellers.
although, they probably had a mini baby-boom afterwards to get the population back up, because there's a notable lack of 20-30 year olds. imo there's a lot of kids, and a lot of older people. then, mostly young adults died in the famine.
either way, having too many kids would cause problems, especially to have a kid (gasp) without being married. educate them on how to avoid this, and give them alternatives.
i doubt, though, that they'd shun people for having a kid out of wedlock. they'd help and support them, but definitely make them marry to preserve the order.
plus, the way lucy says she needs a suitable marriage partner, to me, moreso seems like marriage is the sole track to procreation, and likely the main psychological method to keep babies from popping up all over. let only the married ones create babies, both to prevent overpopulation AND to control the experiment as a whole.
also, though, it's clear that they don't demonize sex before marriage. and, there's no surefire way to actually prevent people from doing things outside of marriage. religions have tried for millennia to control the whims of human sexual desires. so, callback to my teaser, i think that unmarried individuals can do anything but penis in vagina sex. no making babies, so do anything else. literally anything else.
to frame it with what's been said, they have good sex education. they want to keep reproduction in check, and banning all sex outside of marriage does absolutely nothing to help with that. so, then, why not allow unmarried individuals to be intimate in other ways? handjobs, oral, grinding, heavy petting, there are so many options to allow for people to still scratch the itch whilst not actively posing the risk of making a baby. educate them on how to do these other acts, show them how to be healthy and relieve their urges, but insist, simultaneously, that babies are to be avoided.
it'd also present the idea of freedom, and let dwellers 'socialize', even if their reproduction is heavily controlled. plus, it's good for you! yay! go fuck your neighbor! relieve yourself!
i do want to comment on contraceptives, since i do think there's a chance they exist. i feel like they'd be highly prevalent in in-game vaults if they were something that was available, especially since other vaults have a much lower capacity of people. not every vault has a high-tech atrium growing a bunch of crops. 32 and 33 are also comparatively huge, but that may just be a limit of the game systems (since we can't enter a lot of rooms and dwellings in vaults). even still, you'd want to make sure people didn't get knocked up and overpopulate the vault, causing the mouse utopia that bud mentions.
vault 32/33 may then be an exception, and might have condoms to allow for penetrative intercourse. but imo there's no implication that what chet and lucy did even included that. 'messing around' and marriage being 'the real deal', to me, sounds like lucy hadn't gone that far, so to speak, prior to monty. we also don't know what specifically she was offering with maximus, since 'sex' can refer to any combination of intimate acts. there's many, MANY ways for this all to be interpreted, and ways to achieve the same goal of 'no babies unless said babies would get us closer to or will themselves be super managers'.
i also think the vaults have a limit on how many kids people can have, to help curb overpopulation. married couples may have access to these contraceptives, and i doubt they'd have their tubes tied, since remarriage/making new pairings is a thing. so, only 2 babies per household. no more. stop it.
the vaults likely just have a low rate of fertilization overall, helping with the whole overpopulation thing. be it from the toxic chemicals in their environments, the literal nuclear-fueled devices they wear on their wrists, or the generally poor diet they seem to have (it is better than the wasteland at least), there's likely a lower chance of fertilization and successfully carrying a child to term. the latter is less plausible since i KNOW they'd have good obstetrics to both keep the mother alive, and gain a new life for the vault.
steph's what i mainly base this on because it seems like she was married to bert since the last triennial trade, but only now had her first child. if fertilization was top-notch, they'd definitely be on baby number 2 by now. she also seems incredibly enthusiastic about this whole baby thing, but that could fully be a ruse. regardless, she signed up knowing that she'd be sent into the other vaults to have babies, since i assume she knows exactly what's going on in the experiment. and she doesn't seem to hate the idea of having kids, since she's happy to raise her kids with lucy. so, it took her an awfully long time to have that first baby. i say this is likely from low fertilization rates, but it's also possible that she likes the having kids thing far less than she puts on.
the final tldr (my abstract, perhaps?):
vaults 32 and 33 are a breeding experiment to make super managers. to keep this goal in-sight, reproduction within these vaults has to be finely-tuned and controlled. only married couples, which have been approved, are allowed to procreate. to therefore try and curb babies born out of wedlock, 32/33 allow for sexual acts that don't make a baby (i.e. handjobs, oral sex, etc.). social stigma also helps prevent procreation, especially when looking at the limited resources and space within the vaults themselves. it's uncertain if contraceptives exist within the vaults, and fertilization rates may or may not be low as well. regardless, preventing the experiment from going off-the-rails is necessary, so a social + rules-based system was likely put in place to ensure its success.
to end, i also want to note that this shit is fucked up lmao. i'm not like "yay vault tec control people", it's just like. mmm how strange and convoluted can vault-tec be. what other ways can they implement to make humans into guinea pigs for their fucked up experiments.
anyways. thanks 4 reading this far. as always, please feel free to comment your thoughts. i probably won't budge on a lot since this is the backbone for my own lore/stories, but i still like to hear what other people think!
thing abt my interpretation of hank and norm (with a dash of lucy)
plz feel free to comment on it if you want, but this is usually how i think of it when i'm writing their dynamic. i'm gonna kinda go step by step through ep 1 + beyond commenting on things i noticed.
it's all under the cut bc i yapped too much lmaooo. i love dissecting family dynamics, but also plz feel free to comment on this if u want.
i think like, yes, they don't fully get along. and norm is often seen as lesser compared to his sister. and hank does likely compare norm to lucy all the time, leading to some resentment within norm. norm clearly does love his dad, though, since he's staring at the photo of him on that balcony. norm misses hank, even if he does get mad whenever he's compared to lucy.
but, i still think hank loves him, which is important!! he teases norm during the wedding dance scene, and he hugs him tightly when they're dancing. it's one of my favorite gifs (it's funny as fuck to me) because hank ruffles his hair and norm puts it back. norm could easily walk away, but he stays because it's his dad, and they do care about each other. or at the very least put up with each other.
there is an argument to be had that norm sticks around hank for appearance sake. but norm doesn't seem like the type to go along with things he doesn't really want to do. so i'm not sure about that.
norm's willingly being a bit of a prick in episode one too. he's not helping set up, he's trying to tease lucy (and probably stress her out) like siblings do. hank is stern during this, yes, because norm is being stubborn. they're both being shits tbh. norm moreso. and i don't blame hank for being like. son please stop stressing out your sister who is getting married today.
i love norm being a little shit. i think he deserves to be a little shit more. he keeps this trait up when he antagonizes chet for being a coward and i fucking love him for it. my baby boy you are such an asshole when you're upset i love you.
they're all playful with each other, at least a little bit. but i think a key thing is that norm willingly is a little shit to his family (possibly for attention? possibly because it's against the grain and he enjoys it?). he comes to regret it in later episodes, since i think he sincerely misses his family and wishes that his last interactions with them weren't traumatic, for one, as well as annoyed. because he was ANNOYING THEM!!
imo, hank says that lucy's the future (i forget the exact line at the wedding...) because lucy's getting married! i too was like. wow why no norm. but norm's not getting married and isn't about to reproduce. at my aunt's wedding my grandfather didn't mention my mom, or her sisters. just my aunt! maybe it differs depending on people, but i mean. it is lucy's wedding. so i don't really see much there.
lucy putting norm into the storage box thing because she loves him and knows he isn't a fighter. knows he's traumatized by almost being killed. so she keeps him safe. ugh. i love their dynamic a lot. anyways-
i think the "you're my world" line is interesting... like, what about norm? but, before then, when hank and lucy run towards the door, we don't know what they're saying. i am going to choose to believe that hank cares about his son enough to ask lucy where he is. hank doesn't have to be like "you and norm are my world" because norm's not there, and he knows norm is safe already. he cares about norm, but it was lucy's wedding and lucy's there with him and moldaver. (and she's also the main character...) it is weird that lucy never mentions him outside of the vault setting but tbh the writers had a VERY limited timeframe/number of episodes to get their story across so i don't really pay it much mind.
hank in the vault tries to be as kind as possible . the vault values good deeds. if he treated norm super poorly, i don't think people would keep electing him as overseer. they'd elect betty, probably, since hank is now a big red flag. i don't think norm would be the type to hide if he was being affected severely by his dad. and there's only like 100 ish people in the vault anyways, someone would catch on.
there is the argument that the rest of the vault doesn't care if norm's being lectured by hank, or if hank is being stern on him to get him to comply, because the rest of the vault doesn't really care about norm as a person. i think people do care about norm and what norm says. the vault values good deeds, as wilzig said, and so i think inherently they are all caring people. if they had empathy for the raiders who killed some of their own, they'll have empathy for norm!!! so i don't really think hank is super hard on norm, at least not until after season 1.
i could imagine hank in his current state yelling at norm. saying he's a failure, and just wanted him to go along with what everyone else does. that he wanted norm to comply. that he wasn't supposed to break all those rules. but i don't think that'd really happen pre-season 1. norm was a little weird, but hank still cared about him. however i do want to see their current iterations interact it'd be angsty as fuck.
he's strict on norm, yea, because he has a super rigid worldview of how norm can act. norm must get a good job in the vault, and norm must love it. norm must find a woman and have children and continue the legacy of the macleans. norm's the one who would keep the surname. norm is the heir to the maclean name. so, norm does need to eventually step up and at least procreate. he'll probably get "randomly selected" for the triennial trade.
but i don't think hank hates him. hank is disappointed in him, but he LOVES HIM.
i think hank could be a little neglectful. he's a busy man, running a whole vault. but also, lucy seems very self motivated at all times. i feel like she'd latch onto the things she was taught in school and comply. norm never really did that, maybe the loss of his mother jaded him from the start. maybe he does remember the surface, just a little bit, and doesn't feel like he fits in. or, he's just naturally stubborn and doesn't want to follow what everyone else does.
whenever i'm writing them, i try to keep this all in mind. hank still cares about him, he cares about him significantly. they have personalities that just don't mesh. hank is interesting to me because he presents himself so... pathetically? like he can't hurt a fly? simultaneously, he's a strong leader that guides the vault well. and the people go crazy for it, the vault falls apart without him. but, ithink it could be a facade to make sure no one becomes suspicious of the things he's done. but he also believes he did the right thing!!! bringing norm and lucy back, to him, was the right thing, even if he had to kill his own wife. she wasn't his wife when she stole the kids. she was going to get them killed (in his mind).
and, i think he keeps this facade up in 33. he'd try to be the best dad possible so that people have the confidence that he's the best overseer possible. if his son wants to do nothing, then so be it! he's also got this rockstar daughter who likely gets more attention. he'd definitely try to push norm to a job he'll enjoy, and maybe do the cringe dad thing of trying to set norm up. he'd try to mold him into a gold dweller, but it's not like norm is devoid of good deeds. he's still liked in the community, so hank would consider it a win.
i don't think norm would mind that too much. he doesn't really get along with them too much anyways, they're too jovial for his liking. but they all love each other regardless! they let him sit at book club and play holotape games. they don't have to do the same things, but they at least can exist in the same space.
imo, norm's main mental conflicts are: 1. he wishes he wasn't mean/a coward to his family the last time he saw them 2. he wishes hank wasn't trying to mold him into a good vault dweller (i.e. getting a constant job and stuff).
i'm up for commentary on this because i know there are different perspectives but i just. idk. as someone with a rough relationship with my dad, i relate to norm but i can tell that there's still familial love there yknow?
really want more norm and lucy interactions in season 2, or maybe more norm and hank interactions? this could all be proven wrong the next time they interact but i just rly enjoy dissecting family dynamics.
ALSO i'm not a hank apologist 😭😭😭 he's an evil man but i think there's a lot of nuance to his character, especially when i'm writing him in the vault setting.
was asked one of the questions from the fallout oc prompt list in a discord, and it prompted a whole new line of thought in me-
the question was: what do they think about religion, and do they follow any?
now, at first, i was like. elodie would think religion is silly. why would there be some deity in the sky that controls everything, if he let the world turn to this? there's no way this was a god's doing, there's too much death and chaos. if there was a god that allowed this, elodie reckoned, she didn't want to give them any attention. they didn't deserve it.
and then i thought a bit deeper, and realized that the people of vaults 32 and 33 treat vault boy as their god. and so, by extension, vault-tec itself is their god.
oo did i hook you to hit read more. sorry. i wanted to dramatically lead to this.
anyways! so! we do have the basics of vault-tec religion shown in the show. for one, we have the literal priest in vault-tec inspired vestiments. bro is literally in a vault-tec stole. he doesn't have the full priest drip, but in the interest of one dweller not being too different from the others, he's still got a stole. for two, we have the multiple times lucy looks to vault-boy for guidance, in a way that reminds me of people looking to their god for guidance.
now, from here, a lot of it is my headcanon/interpretation. as someone who was raised roman catholic, a lot of that slips in. and a lot of this is also how my oc experiences it, since that's how i frame a lot of stuff. so. yes. sorry about the elodie.
elodie herself is fairly entrenched in this whole vault-boy worship. i'd imagine it's taught from a young age, something that's instilled in them via random quips from older dwellers. make sure you follow the rules, vault boy is always watching. he knows what's best, y'know!
then it seeps into their sex-ed, entwined with the beliefs of the vault itself. don't have a kid outside of marriage, that'll ruin reclamation day. ah, yes, reclamation day, don't you want your children and the other dwellers to be happy? make sure you marry someone nice, and have kids for us, okay? definitely not subliminally pushing the message of "you have one person you can marry" either, given the whole breeding experiment thing in 33. sorry that's just the best way to call it. the 33 dwellers are being selectively bred.
in the same vein, i think they'd also push the 'don't be gay' part. because like, how would that reach the goal of reclamation day? that does not support the next generation. if you must, do it in private and keep it secret.
i think the religious aspect also bolsters the meritocracy. meritocracies often conflict with religion, at least in the traditional sense. but to me they play very hand-in-hand. you get to heaven by doing good deeds.
to me, meritocracy is already 100% in this religious codex. do the best you can for others around you! be a good citizen! or else you'll be judged just a little bit, we'll treat you as a black sheep because you dared push a little too hard on the boundaries. we see it with norm. even though he's liked, he's clearly not fitting in. he doesn't seem to be in consideration for the repopulation of the surface, unlike his sister.
essentially, you get to play a role in reclamation day by doing good deeds. you follow a set of rules, you do them well, and you're rewarded. vault-tec thanks you. you saved humanity by doing everything we said, just right.
i think that vault boy is held up as this pseudo-religious figure, and the main 'icon' of the whole thing. the vault-tec logo works perfectly as a cross. it adorns the vault door. it protects them from everything, the rads, the outside world. the gear is similar. but no, vault-boy has a face, and that provides an emotional power. no one will literally call him god, but they'll say things like "vault-tec gave us this home." and no one is chanting prayers to vault-tec, nor are they actively realizing this is a god-and-follower-like relationship. in a way, though, it'd shift the blame from leadership, and onto this ruleset that vault-tec set.
because, like, if you really think about it... what is a priest if not a middle manager?
wish that was the ending. it sounds kinda sick. anyways, to end it off, i really don't see it as an actual religion. its more cult-like reverence instead, and a way that elodie interprets the rules and carries them out. she must do her tasks, for reclamation day. for vault-tec. just like how people did the crusades, for god.
it makes sense, then, for elodie to cling to vault-tec on the surface. she was meant to bring the light of hope to the surface. instead, elodie carries around her vault-boy bobblehead, the science version. she won it for her excelled science grades in class, and she treats it as a sacred object. it reminds her of her potential, what she's capable of. it reminds her of home. and it reminds her that she has a purpose. she can look to the bobblehead, like lucy, and ask what to do. what would vault boy do?
if only she knew that her god caused this destruction.
do we think vault 33 has alcohol. i headcanon that they brew beer and wine and stuff for "special occasions" but everyone's allowed one single glass and you have to be over 21. (because 'murica)
i don't think the opening scene shows any specific alcohol or drink, so they might just chug water and nuka cola lmao
