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send me a “ 🔥 ” for an unpopular opinion.
if an independent courier can be marked as good or neutral on the karma scale (which is not perfect but nonetheless, it’s a canon mechanic so that’s our reference here) then so can benny, and he shouldn’t be marked down as evil. benny and an independent ending courier are quite literally the same—unaffiliated outsiders who take over an organization through violent means (yes, even a good karma courier has to do bad for the independent ending) + who kill for the sake of their goals. even killing is not automatically bad within the game, and many good characters kill. benny even says it: “ what i did to you was rotten, but if you think house, the ncr or caesar won’t kill to put vegas in their pocket, i really did blow out your brains. ”
therefore, unless all independent couriers are evil karma by default, benny isn’t evil. good? certainly not. i’d stick him somewhere on the neutral spectrum. but evil? let me list off some evil karma characters: vulpes inculta (a mass murdering member of the legion), phillipe (a cannibal abusive chef), mortimer (another cannibal), duke and cook-cook (fiend and a r*pist), etc etc. what does benny do? he reluctantly shoots a stranger in the head for the sake of his goals (something the courier does a thousand times over), plans to enact a scheme and get power from a capitalist (something the independent courier does), and……escapes the fort if you set him free instead of helping you fight what is potentially a hopeless fight. he also gives you his plan if you meet him at the fort and is perfectly ready to die for his actions, which implies an awareness of bad and good. i’m not counting his side comic in this analysis because that would go on too long.
that said, benny does bad karma things too—so he’s not qualifying for any morality awards any time soon and is definitely a stinky rat of a person. but i think his perception by fandom has been skewed by what i call main-character-itis—where if an npc does something to the player character, they are judged much more harshly than if the player character had done it to them. hell, even the game lets you know hey, this guy was just a pseudo-villain who’s a bit useless, the real villain is this political plot you’ve been suckered into by house. again this is all working off the karma system, not real morality which is much more elaborate and less flawed, but even within the game mechanic, slamming benny into an evil category is just … a real disservice to a character that mirrors the player quite accurately.
tl;dr: benny isn’t the villain of new vegas, he’s judged way too harshly by fandom bc of player vanity, and marking him with evil karma is just so you don’t feel too bad about killing him. if house + the ncr get away with grey morality, then benny absolutely does too.
