you've got... Sin!

fallout blog (mostly) - genderqueer - they/he - 30 - your friendly local TH hater - minors dni - terfs & racists fuck off

[vault-heck]

Vault-Heck works Table of Contents

OC information Carrd

Longfics:

Wildfire - Explicit, Preston Garvey/Male Sole Survivor

playlist

Noah O'Neill is the awkwardest smooth talker you've ever met. Upon exiting Vault 111 cryostasis, he embarks on a journey to find his kidnapped son, prepared for the worst. As he struggles with the question of what kind of man he will become, he discovers unexpected hope in the new world around him.

I am currently rewriting wildfire, but will keep this version up and labeled 'legacy'.

The Birds Work for the Bourgeoisie - Mature

Set in the same timeline as What God Doesn't Give You, from the perspective of a non-SS OC. Contains spoilers for Wildfire.

Omen is the Railroad's best agent focused on counter-intelligence. Their penchant for befriending wildlife, entirely organic and otherwise, makes them uniquely equipped to observe those who take their privacy for granted. However, their methods are not without challenges.

What Makes a Man - Mature, pre-relationship Preston Garvey / Sole Survivor

This is the first segment of my Wildfire series re-write.

Nora Driscoll was a wife, and her husband is dead; a mother, and now her son is missing. She was an attorney, and the law is all but gone. Nora was a woman of God, and now, there's a crumbling church at the end of the street.

One Shots:

Her Hypothesis - Explicit, Curie/Female Sole Survivor

Evelyn agrees to help Curie test out one of her biomechanical side projects.

For Glad and Golden Hours - Teen, Multiple relationships, Gen

A Christmas story set in the Wildfire universe.

Respect for the Sport - Explicit, Preston Garvey/Male Sole Survivor

A fluff and smut one shot set in the Wildfire universe.

Tags unique(ish) to my work:

what god doesn't give you

noah o'neill

noah x preston

my ocs

my fics

my art

[yourocdoeswhat]

Does your character use a legendary or iconic weapon? What is it? How reliant is your character on it?

[leona-florianova]

Regis - Papa Khan’s advisor and right-hand man

[wildwildwasteland]

fnv mod that makes you play a round of caravan against a companion every time you use the wait menu 🃏

[wildwildwasteland]

i simply don't think learning caravan should be optional and also i think we need to demand more minigames in our rpgs

[corsairesix]

Mod where JE Sawyer looks disapprovingly at you through your computer each time you lose at Caravan

[mangonetics]

I think the reason there's an infinite number of unnamed bandits attacking you all the time in bethesda games is because that's genuinely what the late-middle-aged libertarians working at bethesda think the world is like outside their gated communities

[rantaanen]

Watching baseball

[frogblast-the-ventcore]

[palant1r]

one of arcade gannons core character traits that i love is that he is literally, canonically, incapable of shutting the fuck up to save his life. and its not like he revels in being a yapper. he wants so badly, so fervently, to be the kind of person who Shuts the Fuck Up. but he shrimply isn't. he's going around the mojave with the constant internal monologue of "dont reveal the fascism backstory" and then it gets thrown out the window the instant he sees something cool that even remotely reminds him of his past. hes so incapable of shutting the fuck up that in one ending it gets his ass crucified. you know, that shit they did to jesus. and it happens to arcade gannon for being a talkative smartass. man of all time

[boowomp]

lest we forget the unspoken tragedy that the one person who actually wants to yap with arcade happens to be the worst person on the planet.

[bokatan]

and another oc photo dump since i remembered how to use my enb

[lost-in-interwebs]

have you ever noticed how Bethesda loves to imply that raiders don't want to work hard to survive, they'd rather take someone else's hard work when like..... there has to be a more nuanced reason than they're lazy, violent thugs. But it brings up a serious question, why do raiders raid? What is stopping them from settling down? Is it that prime land is taken up? Terrible soil? Lack of education? Unable to form alliance when settlements are shoot on sight? Why?

[adifferenttime]

Most real-world societies that conducted frequent or semi-frequent raids were pastoralists who used raiding as a way to replenish livestock, grow their population, etc., and societies that rely on raiding as their sole livelihood are rare because it's just not very practical. Every raid represents a cost in manpower and resources that you have to recoup in the raid itself, and you also have to worry about gaining enough surplus to support your society and prepare for future raids. On top of that, raiding is only particularly attractive in the first place when your neighbors are both richer and less militarily competent than you are. Societies that raided usually relied on it as a supplementary rather than primary way to sustain themselves, and raiders of the kind that show up here didn't exist on a large scale because the scenario that's necessary to create them - weak but very wealthy neighbors, lucre so substantial you can live off it entirely, no incentives to switch to a less dangerous means of survival - is implausible. Any society that can ONLY survive via raiding would die out rapidly, while any society that's able to raid consistently would have an alternative means to provide for themselves.

I also think the fact that raiders are presented so negatively - "lazy, violent thugs," like you said - is pretty interesting considering which real-world civilizations are best-known for raiding and the way they've been portrayed in the histories of their enemies. The idea that raiding in particular is a sign of barbarism or militarism while a sedentary society that engages in large-scale warfare is more "civilized" and "noble" (despite killing about as many or more people in the pursuit of land and resources) is a common feature of propaganda the world over; the colonial States leveraged this idea, as did the British Empire and China. It's been used to denigrate (not exhaustively) Indigenous Americans, the Irish, Mongolians, MENA peoples, Central Asians, tribal African societies, the Maori, and numerous other populations who were later conquered or colonized by sedentary societies. In-game, "soldier" is a word with occasional contextually-determinant negative connotations, while "raider" is used as shorthand for "immoral, illiterate, brutish, and violent." Raiding factions - not just the designated cannon fodder of the Bethesda games, but the Khans, White Legs, and other raiding factions from the Black Isle and Obsidian titles - are designed to be dehumanized, and in order to turn them into the kind of one-dimensional auto-villains the player is willing to shoot on sight, the devs turned to longstanding falsehoods about what kinds of violence are acceptable, what motivates them, and which sorts of people deserve to die.

[corsairesix]

I think that analyzing raiders through the lens of historical raiding societies is interesting but misses the whole picture. Raiders aren’t necessarily portrayed akin to, like, vikings, they’re criminals, as written by a team of upper-middle class marylanders. They don’t match raiding societies because they’re not, they’re the fear of muggers and homeless people and drug addicts made by a bunch of nimby tech guys

[452t2345y2t45245ty-deactivated2]

The Outer Worlds's Peril on Gorgon DLC has a pretty good and interesting explanation of raiders, but then again, Obsidian always had the narrative game on lock, unlike Bethesda...

[secretaryofdarkness]

There were four different raider factions in New Vegas (an Obsidian game) and only one got actual lore, and the lore was that they were convicts from a literal prison who escaped and decided that ambushing caravans with explosives was their new life.

Actually if we wanna get specific, a second group did get lore; the fiends are a group of drug-addicted rapists who kill people for fun and/or because they're insane. They have drug connections to the Kahns, they don't farm or raise livestock outside of One little camp where a psycho rapist keeps three brahmin, and they're totally hostile to the player no matter what. Also, I am not using 'insane' and 'psycho' out of turn here. The game calls them that in every conversation you get to have about these people and there is never any suggestion you shouldn't take that at face value.

The Jackals, Scorpions, Powder Gangers, and Fiends are there for you to shoot and kill them to gain karma. You don't gain positive karma for killing Legion though outside of like two named officers, so I'm inclined to think that first response about what kinds of violence are acceptable is in fact relevant here. Don't get me wrong, the game does say the legion is evil, but it's very telling that the legion is given an ideology to unpick while the raiders are given a 'shoot first, ask questions never' position in the game's view of violence.

I love Obsidian but let's not be revisionist here. They also fucking suck at writing some aspects of worldbuilding, and I don't think it's responsible to brush over how they portray drug addiction and crime. And that's not even touching the fetishism of indigenous aesthetic (but my pet theory is that's mostly John Gonzalez, because he also wrote Horizon: Zero Dawn and uh...)

[lifegraduate]

[feeshies]

Me before law school: I don't get why Fallout 4 made the female Sole Survivor's pre-war job a lawyer. You expect me to believe that a lawyer would start fighting people and eating corpses after being in the post-apocalyptic wasteland for one day?

Me after one year of law school: Nora, I'm sorry I doubted you

[daddyfuckinlonglegs]

I've been on a bit of a mission recently, because one of the things that I really love about the Fallout fandom is the huge, huge variety of OCs that people populate this setting with. I still love a lot of the canon characters, and the stories that go with them, but I'm so interested in the lives and relationships of the other characters we make to fit into that world. I realise I've spent five years building up lore and stories about my own oc that I've just never shared here, and I wonder how many other people feel like they desperately want to talk about the cool guy they made up, but... Don't? For whatever reason?

So if you're seeing this post, reblog it with your OC and something about them. Or send me a message and gush about them. If I reblog some art or fic etc. of your character, that is an invitation to DM me or go off in the comments about them - please, because the joy of this setting, for me, is the depth and variety of human existence. This is especially true for characters of colour, characters with mixed heritage, characters with disabilities. And characters who are outside the mold of the game protagonists too, even if they started out that way.

The setting is so full of opportunities, and that's why I have stuck around so long and still feel so strongly about it. I would genuinely love to hear from anyone who wants to share their thoughts.

[calder]

im a real fallout fan. i only like realistic lore, like the gunner faction. because when you think about it, in this fucked up fallout world, they really would use guns. maybe that’s too “edgy” for some of you, but i looked it up, and they had guns in classic fallout! by the way, you ever noticed how the prewar food should have gone bad by now? that’s really unrealistic. you say it’s a joke about preservatives but realistically they don’t last that long so it doesn’t work. even still, to me, fallout 4 is good, even though there’s an unrealistic part (the food should be expired). tunnel snakes rule

[earwig5]

it’s kind of crazy that both fallout new Vegas and fallout 4 have the same driving force for the first half of the narrative (find the guy who wronged you and make him pay) but Benny is so much more memorable and narratively interesting than Kellogg.

It’s a matter of a strong character foil versus a weak one, in my opinion.

Benny and the courier are very much alike. They are both ambitious people who are willing to do anything possible to stack the odds in their favour. Honestly, Benny and the courier are the same card, reversed.

The Sole Survivor and Kellogg are also intended to be character foils. The game tries to convince us of this with the scenes in Kellogg’s mind, where we see that he ‘isn’t so different’ from our protagonist after all. But we don’t know anything about Kellogg other than his backstory. How can he parallel the protagonist if we don’t know which traits he has? Which traits the two of them share?

(As a side note, I wish Fallout 4 had touched way more on the ‘Man/Woman Out of Time’ thing. The protagonist being frozen in the past + Kellogg being functionally immortal would’ve been really cool to explore! Especially in the context of grief!)

In the end, I think the reason Benny is a more powerful character foil is that he doesn’t disappear from the world when you kill him. The chairmen can mourn him, House will comment on it, and even NPCs across the Mojave will talk about Benny’s death!

In Kellogg’s case, the protagonist is basically the only person who knows he even existed! Once he’s dead HE’s DEAD! He disappears completely from the narrative! As soon as you leave fort Hagen, the game doesn’t bother looking back.

that’s why Benny is a more haunting force for new Vegas; particularly an independent courier. You are Benny’s legacy because you are what he leaves behind whether he likes it or not. People remember him as the couriers victim. Meanwhile, nobody remembers Kellogg at all. The memory of who Kellogg was dies with you, and you can choose to forget him.

[radiofreemagica]

To be clear, it doesn't actually matter if FNV got "retconned" by the show or not.

I'm already seeing people on social media post screenshots of Emil Pagliarulo's tweets where he confirms that FNV is canon to the show, but that was never what I was upset about. In fact, I didn't even notice until just now that the year that the "Fall of Shady Sands" happened the same year as the First Battle of Hoover Dam.

The thing is, even in the most generous interpretation: that FNV did happen, the writers just can't keep track of the year when it happened (an embarrassing mistake by itself) is still terrible, because that means that NCR and New Vegas got offscreened, and the events of FNV ended up not mattering worth a fuck. The way the writers handled this still speaks of immense disrespect towards Obsidian's work on the game.

[anexperimentallife]

[wildorcaaviation]

*giggles uncontrollibly*