Sexuality in Fallout: New Vegas - an NPC love story (Patreon)

Fallout New Vegas starts with your character - the POV character - being literally shot in the head, and then dying, and then being resurrected by the futuristic medical technology of the wasteland. As far as game openers go, I give Fallout New Vegas a 10/10. Its Adam Driver Creator (also known as the character designer to the laypeople) is a little disappointing compared to Fallout 4, but it’s storytelling is just… [Chef's kiss] mweeih!

As with all Fallout games, there is a variety of freedom of choice open to the player, but the main storyline of the game starts with your quest to find the guys who killed you and get revenge. Playing this storyline will bring you to Novac, a small settlement where you find Manny Vargas.

If you talk to Manny you can hear about his problems in the town. He’s one of two town guards, and the other one, Boone, hates Manny. He thinks that Manny sold his wife to Caesar’s Legion as a slave, because Manny and Boone’s wife were always arguing, and then the slavers took her away, but nobody else from the town.

You’ll also find out that Manny has the information you need about the guys you’re looking for.

However, Manny won’t tell you his information unless you help the settlement - they need the RepConn facility to scavenge trash from, but a group of Ghouls have moved into it.
As you head to the facility you have to fight off Feral Ghouls. Some of them will become corpses, some of them will disintegrate if you're using an energy weapon - however, as you approach you realise there's more going on here. There are ghoul corpses already, and piles of ash you didn't put there. Someone's already attacked this place. Someone who uses energy weapons. Holy shit, the Brotherhood of Steel have been here. I can't wait to see them! but you don't see them. This game is just really well written, really good at planting and payoff and nuance and holy shit okay I'm getting off track.

You get inside the building and there are Feral Ghouls all over. A voice on the intercom tells you to come to the top floor. You ask who the voice is and it says "It doesn't matter who I am, smoothskin." Smoothskin? The voice on the intercom is a ghoul?! Suddenly you aren't so sure about going upstairs but once you do the plot thickens even more.

The voice on the intercom was Chris Haversam. Chris is not a ghoul, he's a human, but he thinks he is one. Why? You'll have to talk to him, and to his friends, and go miles out of your way before you properly understand why.

Chris is part of a cult of Ghouls who want to use the old rockets at RepConn to leave the misery of planet Earth behind. Great! you can help with their plan and they'll leave! No reason to kill anybody! but they won't leave until the invisible demons in the basement are gone, and the invisible demons in the basement, who turn out to be Super Mutants, won't leave until they can find the stockpile of invisibility drugs. They can't check the last room for the stockpile because one ghoul is stuck in there and he won't leave until you confirm his suspicions that the mutants killed his friend.

So, find the ghoul's friend, find out what happened to the stockpile and get everybody cleared out! Now you can get Chris' Ghoul cult onto their rockets and outta here. By now you probably will have tried to convince Chris that he's human but he just isn't having it. He tells you how in the Vault he grew up in he liked machines more than shooting stuff, so he was ostracised and made to work on the reactor, which was constantly faulty, which is how he knows he must be a Ghoul.

Because he wouldn't survive the journey, Chris' friends have to leave him behind, and he is heartbroken. But at this point I realised I could just go to Chris' vault and get someone he knows - he'll trust them if they say he's not a ghoul! So you make the journey to Chris' vault, where you find… a bunch of Ghouls.

Chris' faulty reactor leaked and turned everyone into rabid ghouls. He knows he must be one too because if not, the guilt of doing that to everyone he knew but surviving himself would be too much to bear. Fallout New Vegas doesn't even say this explicitly, and it’s not the consensus among fans on what happened here, but to me the only thing that makes sense is that Chris fled when he feared being irradiated, returned later and found everyone he knew turned into Ghouls, and had his suspicions erroneously confirmed.

At the end of this quest I fast travelled back to Manny, to get my information. I did, and then I turned around and Chris was right behind me. I assumed this was a bug, because Chris shouldn't be all the way over here in Novac, and he definitely shouldn't be in Manny's room - but I was wrong, because after the rockets launch, Chris moves to Novac and starts living with Manny.

These two characters are gay, and it isn't even mentioned. These two characters, each with their own backstories, and motivations, and hopes and dreams and Manny with his maybe horrible thing he did to Boone's wife -- and that's when you realise why Manny was always fighting with Boone's wife: He was in love with Boone.

It’s this kind of careful, organic writing that makes Fallout New Vegas so beloved - but more than that, it makes the representation of gay characters in this game totally exceptional. There’s a confluence of these well-rounded characters having a variety of sexualities, and these characters not having their sexuality pointed out or shown off in a tokenistic way - and that together is more than the sum of its parts.

So let’s talk about Sexuality in Fallout: New Vegas. 

Section 2: Start a nuclear war (at the gay bar)

In many pieces of media that show post apocalyptic societies, the assumption is that sexuality in a post-crisis society will function mostly the same as it does our society. There are a few changes that are pretty common sense or come down to lazy trope-ridden writing, since these are works of fiction. For example: Everything is generally more grim and people often can’t be with the person they would prefer and have to make do; there are fewer old people; money is usually taken out as a factor; relationships are not infrequently portrayed as obeying the laws of “alphas” and “betas” with stronger more powerful individuals having their choice of partners.

Some of the tropes occurring most frequently in these works, relating to sexuality and relationships, are as follows. Woman in the refrigerator - a trope in which a male character’s female love interest is killed or otherwise harmed mainly as a way of attacking the male character. Bury your gays/bury your lesbians - in which gay and lesbian couples never get to have a happily ever after ending, and instead one of them tragically dies. First girl wins - in which the protagonist, usually male, winds up together with the first person they encounter in the dangerous environment of the post-apocalypse.

A prime example of this structure is The Walking Dead. In The Walking Dead, the main protagonist group functions mostly by the rules of modern society, with similar values and sensibilities, sometimes being tested by difficult decisions. In terms of sexuality and relationships, the characters are mostly free to do as they please in the main protagonist group and there are some homosexual relationships throughout the series.
The main protagonist group encounters other groups of survivors, usually with different power structures or values to their own. When they encounter other survivors who function similarly to them they typically assimilate them or are assimilated by them. The driving conflict of the series is almost always between the main protagonist in-group, and some out-group with whom they do not see eye-to-eye. As is the case in many stories about clashes between groups in this way, the group of “bad guys” are bad because of the way that they treat their people, including having heavily patriarchal structures or using rape as a weapon.

The Walking Dead shows an example of a post-apocalyptic world from the point of view of people who uphold the values and structure of our real-world society, at least in terms of sexuality and relationships. The assumption of this projection is that after the apocalypse, eventually we would rebuild society as it is now.

Another famous piece of post-apocalyptic fiction, which was actually an inspiration for the aesthetics of Fallout 3, is Mad Max. The Mad Max series is a useful example for comparison here as it not only mostly revolves around the individual, but most groups of people in the Mad Max universe are gangs rather than large societies. These gangs may together form communities but there is a strong sense of territory and insularity, and the world appears mostly anarchistic.

To be clear, when I say anarchistic, I am referring to a power structure with little or no hierarchy. There is some misconception over what an anarchist is, mostly arising historically from the US political purges of anarchists in the 19th and 20th centuries. For our purposes, an anarchistic structure is one with no central power system, containing many groups or individuals.

Another reason to raise Mad Max when discussing sexuality in a post-apocalypse setting, it would be remiss to ignore the franchise in which gangs of men and women rove around doing as they please in leather BDSM gear 24/7.
That said, looking at Mad Max online I found a lot of people straight-up denying that there is anything gay whatsoever in Mad Max. There is apparently much debate over whether the Golden Youth, for example, is Wez’ sexual partner, even though George Miller has said that this character was originally female, and was made male deliberately, to show that gender roles and sexuality are a free-for-all in the wasteland. This not only demonstrates an incredible skill-level at outright denial, but to me serves as an example of why more representation is so important. If people can look at Lord Humongous and tell themselves nope, nothing gay about that, we’re just going to have to keep writing gay characters until people can accept that being gay is normal and not a big deal and if a character seems gay that’s really fine.

In Fury Road, although the authorial intent is notably feminist - again, I have seen some people claim that there is nothing Feminist in Mad Max: Fury Road - the society as Max finds it is incredibly patriarchal, worshipping masculinity and obeying the laws set down by a much smaller, almost entirely male, higher stratum. This society is larger and more hierarchical than others seen in the series so far, although there are other large societies that seem to once again be using the BDSM-gear anything-goes model. The anthropological message here could be interpreted as that as societies get larger and more hierarchical, they can go any way but have a tendency to form harmful systems.

The world of Mad Max is an example of how in a post-apocalyptic future the societal limitations and expectations of sexuality could be thrown out entirely in favour of a sexually uninhibited culture. Fury Road however seems to warn that as larger power structures grow, starting in such a dire place, the sexual free-for-all may become a sexual free-for-some, unless fair treatment is protected.

In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, now a popular television series, the United States has become a totalitarian regime following a catastrophic world event of an uncertain nature. It seems quite likely that it was a nuclear war, as there are irradiated “colonies”, and one of the knock-on effects of what has happened is that fertility and birth-rates have plummeted. As a response to this population crisis, the far-right traditionalist government has enslaved all fertile women and given them to powerful couples as “handmaids”, to then become surrogate mothers.

The purpose of the book is really twofold: first off it serves as allegory for the way that men and women are complicit in the oppression of themselves and each other in a patriarchal system; secondly, it uses the heightened fictional example to show that modern society commodifies reproduction and the sexuality of women. The way that the allegory works, as in many works of fiction, is that it creates a more extreme version of the existing society, and lets the audience examine the consequences of choices in this extreme society and compare them to their own lives. In the story anyone you talk to could be a spy for the government, in reality anyone you talk to may judge you and people may push you away for behaviour that goes against societal norms. In the story the wives of the powerful men are jealous of the handmaids for their privilege of bearing children while the handmaids are jealous of the wives for their generally objectively better lives, in reality everyone under an oppressive system thinks that everybody else has it better in some way because they all suffer differently. In the story men are assumed by the women to be having carefree lives because their system was created for their benefit but of course men are miserable in their own ways too, in reality the patriarchal society we live in puts pressures on men as well as women while men are assumed by some to have simply better lives, even if the system we have wasn’t consciously designed for this purpose.

This is of course a big part of the reason for the “meninist” reaction to feminism, where men see women talking primarily about their own suffering and feel the need to tell everyone how men suffer, while not acknowledging that women’s complaints are legitimate, and also not understanding that feminism is aiming to defeat the system that makes both groups suffer.

However, that second purpose of The Handmaid’s Tale is the important one for our comparison. The conveyance of this second message works in the same way - a heightened version of the real system serves as a metaphor for the reality. The story wants us to understand that in reality, our society treats women’s sexuality as a resource, and to demonstrate this, we are shown a situation in which population is in crisis and therefore that resource is required by the state. In Handmaid’s Tale, the state of Gilead has seized the resource of women’s wombs in the same way that a state in a time of famine might subsidise farms and then seize surpluses of food. 

It is fascinating and also really scary that this metaphor actually predicted the rhetoric and ideas of the far-right movements in America today. The rhetoric of the alt-right has been using a supposed population crisis to talk about birth rates and fertility in white western women, and then like clockwork it has progressed on, to talking about incels and state assigned girlfriends. Of course, there is no population crisis in America - racist political commentators have just abused and misused statistics, and used illogical data comparisons to fearmonger about “the great replacement” and “white genocide”.

Personal sexuality in Handmaid’s Tale is also strictly policed. Only heterosexuality is allowed by law, and anyone practicing any other sexuality is branded a “gender traitor” and executed - either by hanging or being worked to death in a concentration camp. In the case of one fertile woman who is discovered to be gay, Gilead allows her to live, but executes her infertile partner and performs a clitoridectomy on her.

Overall, Handmaid’s Tale projects an upsetting and fascist vision of sexuality in a post-apocalyptic society. However, the book has a message that it is trying to get across and the method of conveyance is a metaphor by extremis - using an exaggerated version of reality to draw parallels to our society. Therefore, it is not necessarily meant as a prediction, and so the total prevalence of this policed regime as seen in the story is unlikely.

To recap - there are different projections in media of how a post-apocalyptic society may function sexually and romantically. Some show societies where the status quo as it is is upheld in an attempt to rebuild normality. Some show an anarchistic world in which sexuality is more free than it currently is, because the apocalypse has thrown out the bad societal structures along with the good. Others show a fascist control over sexuality, usually as an attempt to exercise control over birth rates and reproduction.

So how does Fallout as a series fit into this? Well, in general, the wasteland is accepting of different sexualities, but in the earlier games actual representation of this was few and far between. Since Fallout 1, female player characters have been able to engage in same-sex pairings, but no gay NPC couples were present and male player characters could not be gay. Actually in Fallout 1 the player character will be able to flirt with a brotherhood of steel guard, although he will be uninterested regardless of your gender - and if that isn’t real equality, what is? In Fallout 2, 1998, the player character can have sex with either Davin or Miria in the town of Modoc, regardless of gender. Choosing to do either however will result in their father, Grisham forcing the player character to marry his child. Although it is not correct to say that this is the first example of a same-sex marriage in a video game, it is probably one of the first dozen, and the fact that people seem to think it is, is an indicator of its general renown and therefore influence culturally. Fallout 3 features yet again the ability for player characters to hire female sex workers regardless of gender, but for the player character that about wraps it up. There are, however, two gay couples in the game, and most people read Anthony Ling as gay as well - which, as he’s a game character, is an example of gay coding which is also literally gay coding.
The Fallout series as a whole seems to follow the Mad Max route when it comes to sexuality. The inhabitants of the wasteland are a merrily mixed bunch, but in more militaristic factions such as the NCR or the Brotherhood of Steel, there is a little more implied homophobia.

But how does New Vegas specifically fit in? Well, buckle in my gay friends and gay-adjacent spectators, because New Vegas is about to take you for a ride.

Being set in Vegas, the game was always going to feature an abundance of sex workers, but there aren’t simply more than in other games, there are key differences to them too. This is the first in the series to feature male sex-workers, and even features a protectron robot that can be reprogrammed as a robotic prostitute as part of a quest. The robot is called Fisto (Fully Integrated Security Technotronic Officer).

However in New Vegas, the player character’s options for engaging romantically or sexually aren’t simply limited to sex workers. Fallout has always had perks for player characters which allow flirting - Lady Killer and Black Widow - but New Vegas is the only game in the series to introduce gay perks. Confirmed Bachelor is a perk available to male player characters, named after the euphemism from the 1950s meaning a gay man. Cherchez La Femme is a perk available to female player characters, named after the french expression which means “when there’s a problem, look for the woman behind it”. These perks allow same-sex flirting that in some cases lead to romance, but also, due to the wealth of gay NPC backstories in New Vegas, afford the player the opportunities at multiple points to show sympathy and connect with gay NPCs. Confirmed Bachelor even allows a player to tell Cass that they aren’t interested in her romantically when she flirts with them. At that point the game is allowing players to opt-out of heteronormativity. It is hard to articulate what a big deal that is, but here is my best attempt without screaming: if you had never played a game before that would let you flirt with the people you were interested in, but instead the media around constantly pumped stories at you that didn’t properly fit your real-life experience, this moment alone might well just kill you, resurrect you, send you to the moon and then blow your tiny mind.

On top of that, with Confirmed Bachelor, male players can flirt with Major Knight, a soldier in the NCR, and ask if he wants to be “friends”. Major Knight reacts positively to this, but he says that “friendships” are not approved of in the NCR. Without this interaction, we wouldn’t have this information about the NCR, which no matter how you feel about it, you have to agree, is a good measure of their character.

Confirmed Bachelor will also let male players flirt with Jack at the Nellis Air Base, only to have him completely miss the point and talk about a girl he likes - possibly the most relatable gay experience the game could have included.

Additionally, there is a companion that will only join male players who have Confirmed Bachelor, and only if you can flirt with him and impress him just right. That’s right, he’s your in-game boyfriend. He’s a medical researcher with the NCR, his name is Arcade Gannon, and… he’s kind of a jerk? At the very least, he’s a bit of a hot mess - he has this quite big-headed need to do something that will make big waves for the whole of society, but at the same time he’s very insecure, self deprecating, and constantly worried that his father wouldn’t approve of the things he’s doing. Having had to hide his sexuality from his colleagues, he’s gotten used to being very impersonal with everyone. Once again, this kind of rounded, three-dimensional character writing for a gay character feels so rare, if not unprecedented, in a video game.

Gay women don’t really get the same representation as gay men do in New Vegas, and pretty much no opportunity for romance, but there is a storyline involving a lesbian character that really kind of blows me away. Corporal Betsy of the NCR at Camp McCarran is gay, but she was sexually assaulted by a man, and since then she has been aggressively flirting with any women she encounters, and if the player is female they can experience Betsy’s cringeworthy and frankly creepy attempts at seduction firsthand. Although I hadn’t thought about it before encountering this story, it makes sense that victims of sexual assault might feel the need to aggressively assert their sexuality in response, and a quest available to the player will include the option to persuade Betsy to talk to someone and seek help.

All this is to say that Fallout New Vegas has a wealth of gay representation, and that in each case, the sexuality of a character is either incidental to their personality or an important point to understand and explore an issue. It isn’t ever tokenistic nor is it the butt of a joke. I would say that with the caveat that there are, however, no trans characters anywhere in there, which is a shame.

Returning to our earlier question however, here’s how New Vegas fits in with other portrayals of sexuality in apocalyptic-fiction: New Vegas has a fittingly complex and well considered depiction of societal attitudes towards sexuality - different groups have different levels of tolerance and acceptance. The NCR, as we have learned, doesn’t view homosexual relationships in the military kindly, but also doesn’t appear to be outright homophobic in its treatment of its citizens. The Brotherhood of Steel, a more dogmatic institution, focused on tradition and being quite insular, is less accepting than the NCR. Veronica Santangelo, a Brotherhood Scribe, will reveal to interested players that she used to be in love with another woman in the Brotherhood, but the woman’s parents, also Brotherhood members, were insistent that she should only be in “procreative relationships” and so she left. New Vegas, by contrast, is a sexual free-for-all. In Vegas the typical wasteland approach - or Mad Max approach - that sexuality and gender roles are defunct in this society and people should do what they want, seems to be the prevalent attitude. 

Caesar’s Legion by contrast, the fascist imperial faction of Neo-Romans from the East, seem to be comparable to The Handmaid’s Tale, or to put it another way, they take Ayn Rand’s approach to sexuality: people should be able to do as they please, but also women aren’t technically people.

Actually, Caesar’s Legion have such an interesting branch of backwards fascism that they’re going to need their own separate section in this essay.

Section 3: Do As The Romans Do

But what do the Romans do?

This is a tricky question for a few reasons. Firstly, there are differing reports on the attitudes towards sexuality in Caesar’s Legion, and even the reasons behind those different reports are ambiguous. Second, what is said and what is done are not always the same, especially as representation of different sexualities in media often comes down to just what is implied. Thirdly, Caesar’s Legion don’t necessarily actually do as the romans do, or did, and fourth, even if they did, some of the same problems plague our understanding of Roman sexuality anyway.

So let’s untangle those points in no particular order.

Representation and implication:

I would hope that this is fairly self-explanatory - when it comes to representation of sexuality in media, implication is sometimes the best it’s going to get, so you need to be prepared to infer the hell out of some gay relationships.

This does mean though, that the official stance on sexuality in the Legion is hard to glean, since as long as Caesar doesn’t state not only his decreed law but the general consensus at some point in the game, we can’t expect to either see an abundance of gay relationships in the Legion, nor definitively not see them. That said I don’t know how you can definitively not see all the Romans being gay.

The different hot-takes on homosexuality in Caesar’s Legion: 

Major Knight, when telling you that the NCR military won’t view a “friendship” very kindly, also says that “friendships” are more generally accepted in Caesar’s Legion. The problem with this is, how does he know? Knight has probably heard about this through other NCR soldiers, who he himself is saying, in the same sentence, are fairly homophobic, and as the Legion are their enemies, who’s to say NCR aren’t saying that to belittle them?

However, Cass would agree with Major Knight on this. You remember Cass from earlier - she’s the lady the player can refuse to flirt with thanks to the Confirmed Bachelor perk. Anyway, when you do so, she’ll say “Guess you have a Legion outlook on things.”

Additionally, Veronica Santangelo, the lesbian Brotherhood Scribe says the Legion “mount each other as much as they mount their women, so maybe they did keep a little something from the Empire”, going on to say “No such privilege for the women, though. Figures. So... to answer your question... they're a bunch of hypocritical jerkwads”

A big problem however, is that someone a lot closer to the issue says the exact opposite.

Jimmy, a male sex worker, used to be in a relationship with a Centurion in the Legion, and tells you that in the Legion homosexuality is punishable by death.

One reason you might suggest for why these accounts are contradictory is: what if the developers changed their position on this issue part way and didn’t update all the characters. In response to this I will deploy my lazy-media-critic parachute and scream “death of the author” as loud as I can until you go away.

Another solution is that as Caesar’s Legion is a growing power covering a large area and governing many people, and the attitudes inside it might vary from person to person and place to place quite a lot. This was undoubtedly true in the actual Roman empire, as it is in all large societies.

The outsiders to the Legion may also be making up their minds based on what is known about the actual Roman empire, and not on Caesar’s Legion directly.

The actual Roman empire:

In the actual Roman empire, male homosexual relationships were generally accepted, although there was a strict societal expectation of a power dynamic. Therefore, men who had sex with men of lower status were seen as dominant and their perceived masculinity was not impacted. Generally, if a man took the submissive role in a gay relationship he was considered lesser. There are however, notable examples of this being contradicted, including the marriage of emperor Nero, in which Nero took the role of the bride.

The key to understanding this system was that Roman society was heavily patriarchal and masculinity was a value held in very high esteem. Masculinity of course though, is just a fairly arbitrary set of characteristics that have nothing to do with men or women inherently, and if you were, say, the emperor, you could feel pretty comfortable being the submissive partner in your relationship. Who cares what masculinity even is, if you try to say this dude isn’t right he’ll just have you executed. Nero, ancient champion of LGBT rights.

When I say that we have similar problems understanding Roman sexuality as we do sexuality in the Legion, partly what I mean is that similarly, there is an issue of having their image painted by their enemies. For a long time, the Romans were thought of as simply dropping trou - or toga I guess - for anyone and everyone all day every day, but this comes from the reports of Roman society and sexuality given by Christians, who weren’t keen on Romans for a long time.

Female homosexual relationships were less acceptable to ancient Romans as female sexuality and thereby reproduction were considered essential to the stability of their society. Ovid even called lesbianism “freakish” and “a desire known to no one”. Feel free to think of Ovid as a massive wanker, you’ll be in good company.

(Trivia for those interested: one of the Roman words for a lesbian was fricatrix, meaning “she who rubs”.)

All of this is to say that the Roman idea of sexuality was more linked to gender than to heterosexuality vs homosexuality. It was more to do with an individual’s masculinity or femininity, since masculinity was such a critical component in Roman society. In this way, the society of the Legion is probably similar to the Romans, since their religion is the cult of Mars, the god of war.

Caesar's Legion aren't the Romans

Well of course they aren't, but the ways in which they are different are quite interesting, and particularly for our examination.

Let’s start with how they are similar. There’s the aesthetic, the latin, the slavery. Dale Barton, a trader who supplies Caesar’s Legion says that he can move freely without guards inside Legion territory due to their total control, which was true in the Roman empire too. Caesar claims to be the son of the god Mars, which… yeah that’s an on-brand thing for a Caesar to do - if anything it’s less egotistical than the claims lots of ancient Caesars made. Dale Barton also says that the Legion requires less tax than the NCR, which was apparently true for Roman citizens too, in both cases, again, due to the slavery. 

Both societies suffer from a sequel - that is to say second emperor - problem. Although Caesar has expanded the Legion from nothing into the empire it is currently, it is generally agreed that Lanius, the second in command, taking over after Caesar, could be the end of the Legion due to infighting. Possibly the biggest weakness of empires is the line of succession - just because one emperor has been prosperous does not mean that his son won’t be a total lunatic who literally sets the capital on fire, or sleeps with both his sisters and starts a brothel in the royal palace. It would be simplistic to say this is exactly true for Rome and its first emperor Augustus, as his successor Tiberius wasn’t too bad. However, Augustus was very successful in his 40 year reign, and some of the Caesars after Tiberius were total horror shows.

Both societies are focused far more on conquering their neighbours than befriending them - the Romans actually had the same word, hostis, for both enemy and foreigner.

The reason for this attitude however is the start of the deviation between them. It is fairly well-known that the Romans justified their military strategy as defence - attack those guys before they attack us. Caesar’s Legion, however, are more classic supervillain types, bent on world domination because they want to be the biggest and the toughest.

To clarify, the Romans also just wanted to be the biggest and the toughest, but they had to justify that to their populace. The structure from the republic until the time of Caracalla had the senate at the top making the decisions, and the populace, who weren’t even necessarily citizens, carrying out or living by those decisions. The flip-side of this hierarchy was that the senate had to be accountable, and if they made unpopular decisions they could face disobedience or even a rebellion. Where Caesar gets away with having no accountability is that his army of slaves have all been heavily conditioned to fight and die for him alone.

That difference makes up an ideological disconnect between them. The Romans were real people in a society who all had accountability of some sort to each other, whereas Caesar can do with the Legion as he pleases, and his accountability to people with free will and their own opinions is limited to the few citizens of the Legion, in other words his military commanders. The Legion is not actually a governing force, just an army, and the people who live inside the Legion territory are neither citizens with full rights nor slaves, but they cannot rebel or Caesar’s slave army will wipe them out.

Another key difference is the treatment of women - women in the Roman Empire could not be full citizens with full rights, and could not hold elected office, but were generally held in high regard. Important men in Rome were expected to have wives who could entertain guests and parties, and maintain the household, and women could sometimes be politically powerful through private negotiations. This gave rise to the accounts by some misogynist critics of Rome that Rome was secretly run by women.

Population growth as a strength of the empire was a concern for Augustus, who gave special privileges to women for having children. If a citizen woman had three kids, or a freedwoman had four, she could inherit money and essentially run her own shit if she needed to. Her husband would also be exempt from some community commitments, which suggests that Augustus at the very least expected fathers to be somewhat involved in the raising of children. 

Caesar’s Legion on the other hand, as an army first and a society second, views women as sub-human. Although similarly invested in population growth, rather than rewarding families for having children, Caesar seems to be punishing anyone found to not be involved in sufficient baby-making. Caesar’s Legions approach seems most similar to the state of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale - women are seen as a resource and to meet their goals, the state has seized control of that resource.

The important thing to remember about the Legion is that they totally suck. They enslave and crucify people, they have the motivations of a moustache twirling villain, they treat women as sub-human. The design of the Legion, I feel, is even done to make sure you understand that they’re just lame assholes. The praetorian guard for example have this regal Roman armour, but almost always have a punk haircut or tinted sunglasses, and while some of them have spears or swords, most of them carry guns, which just makes them look lame.
People who cosplay as powerful armies from the past are sad nerds, and Fallout: New Vegas wants us to know that. Where I live, Generation Identity has been increasingly active among the groups of racist right-wing idiots, and they are regularly seen with round shields, displaying the symbol Lambda. This is supposed to represent the Spartans who fought at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BCE. Of course, where Generation Identity and their 4chan friends most likely know Thermopylae from is Zack Snyder’s movie 300, in which an angry scottish man leads a bunch of ripped bros to their death against effeminate girly-man persians. 

There is so much wrong with the film 300, ranging from the weird homophobic-racist overtones, to the fact that Snyder just co-opted a part of history to try to push his Libertarian agenda, and in the process turned all of the facts backwards, to the fact that most of our ideas about the Spartans being super manly-men were perpetuated, exaggerated and sometimes created by literally Hitler.

At the Battle of Thermopylae, between 4000 and 8000 Greeks, yes a mixture of Greeks not just Spartans, held off tens of thousands of invading Persians for 7 days before almost all dying because, well, because there were fucking tonnes of Persians. At the same time as this, an alliance of Greeks met the Persians at sea winning a series of much more important battles that ultimately stopped the invasion.

The myths of how nobly and strongly the Spartans fought spread and grew wilder and wilder. They became part of the hyper-macho mythos around the Spartans and were picked up 2500 years later by this chap who told all his friends how this was because the Spartans were racially purer.

70-odd years after that our pal Zack makes a film about them, playing up as much as possible the idea that the Spartans were the only ones who would stand up to the sweeping Persian empire which was going to assimilate their western culture, and even though he definitely only meant it to inspire individualist free-thinkers like him, he ends up throwing petrol on the already raging dumpster-fire of online Neo-Nazism. Oops.

Maybe fewer racists would like his film so much if he’d included the bit where 60 years later the Spartans allied with the Persians to try to win a squabble with Athens.

All this is to say that Generation Identity, Neo-Nazis and Caesar’s Legion are birds of a feather - they’re appealing to the cultural memory of a historic power to try to give themselves more legitimacy. The reason I’m making this point is that for the purposes of understanding the Legions attitude towards sexuality, it is important to understand how much they actually understand and resemble the original Romans. After all, some number of the brainwashed members of the Legion think that Caesar received all his ideas about their way of life from his father, the god Mars. 

So back to our question: Caesar’s Legion - Who do they fuck? Do they fuck dudes? Let’s find out!

I think it’s pretty likely that, given the multiple accounts of male homosexuality in Caesar’s Legion, it is probably socially acceptable, but at the same time legally prohibited. In other words, the Legion probably turns a blind eye to gay relationships as long as their goal of population growth isn’t impeded. Additionally, there are probably members of the Legion using it as a point of attack on other Legionaries - if someone is in their way and they want to have them executed, they could report them for their relationships. 

Most fascist states function in this way, with political figures hypocritically engaging in the things that they condemn. Once again, in The Handmaid’s Tale, the man in charge of the protagonist’s household takes her to a secret club he attends regularly where various kinds of sexual deviance is practiced - exactly the same kinds that would have other, less powerful people executed by him and his cronies.

To recap, Caesar’s Legion are the bad guys of Fallout New Vegas. Even in an open world franchise promoting free-will as much as possible, they objectively suck. They enslave people, they treat women like animals, but maybe worst of all, they’re sad lame nerds. Just like the Romans, they are worshipping some sort of masculine ideal, but in their worship of it they have become the peak of toxic masculinity, aspiring to be something they neither can ever reach nor fully understand.

I killed Caesar the first time I saw him on my first play through of the game because he’s just a bad fucking dude who needs to get turned into soup. Does that make me a hero?

Yes.

Section 4: The Nuclear Family vs The Nuclear Apocalypse

I’ve watched north of 20 hours of youtube videos in which people argue about which is the better game out of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. The best of these videos by a ways is Fallout 3 Is Garbage and Here’s Why, by Hbomberguy. The second best is Fallout 3 Is Better Than You Think, by Many A True Nerd. As it turns out, Fallout 3 is garbage… but it’s better than I thought.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that in this section I’d like to talk about representations of families in Fallout, and I’m saying Fallout because New Vegas specifically is actually devoid of families. There are a few children running around in Vegas with apparently no parents, and various couples throughout, but no families.

In Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, families and children are all over the place. There are many quests that involve children - finding missing children, finding children’s missing parents, giving a child a gun so he’ll accidentally murder his father with it -  and one of the notable controversies around Fallout was the ability in those first games to kill children. Versions of Fallout 1 sold outside the US had the child sprites cut from the game due to this, and when Fallout 3 was under development, caught between the rock and hard place of letting players do whatever they want and letting players murder children, Bethesda decided to make children invincible.

Don’t worry, I’m really just noting this as a thing that happened, I’m not about to launch into a diatribe about how child-murder is an unalienable right of game-players everywhere. 

In Fallout 2, as I mentioned before, there are some quite complex interactions you can have with the character Grisham and his family. If your charisma is high enough, regardless of player gender, you can have sex with either Grisham’s son or daughter. However, Grisham will burst in mid-coitus and, then depending on the intelligence level of the player character, he can either be convinced you were just performing a doctor’s exam, or he will force you into a shotgun wedding with his child. The deliberate indifference to the gender of the player is very much on brand for Fallout - the shotgun wedding is a bit of dark humour juxtaposing a progressive view on sexuality with a very old-fashioned idea of monogamy.

There’s also the Bishops, an organised crime family in Fallout 2. John Bishop, the head of the family, promises the player their choice of partners, male or female, if they join the family. Leslie-Anne, John’s wife, is frequently unfaithful, and the player character can sleep with her regardless of gender. Their daughter Angela can also be seduced, but she’s strictly heterosexual - I mean, I guess somebody had to be.

These families both demonstrate a positive attitude, or at least indifference towards non-heterosexuality, which is nice considering how often queer folk are framed as the ultimate enemy of the nuclear family. There are also lots of orphans or possibly neglected children running around in these games, which is something Fallout 3 tackles pretty effectively.

In Fallout 3, there is a town called Little Lamplight, a settlement made up entirely of children. The original town, situated inside Lamplight Caverns, was founded by a group of schoolchildren who survived by being deep inside the caves during the nuclear strike, but 200 years later the population is most likely made up of runaways and orphans, as the children kick out any residents over the age of 16. 

This is kind of an interesting thing to see, as it suggests an awareness of shifting family dynamics, and potentially of the fact that some communities would have to raise children as a group. Additionally, the lesbian couple in Fallout 3 have an adopted son.

There is an unfulfilled potential in Fallout games, to explore the different ways that families could be structured and children could be raised. Fallout: New Vegas was developed in only 18 months, and I think that the lack of children and families may have something to do with that. I think that Fallout: New Vegas, with the amount of development time of Fallout 3, or Fallout 3, with the writers of New Vegas, would have shown more of this. Little Lamplight demonstrates the necessity for different social structures to look after children in a world where parents are frequently murdered or neglectful, and New Vegas as a whole shows a world where societal pressure is lifted off of non-heterosexual people.

Maybe a Fallout game could have explored communal parenting, or very, very widespread adoption systems, or something else we can’t quite picture. Instead, Bethesda hints at these possibilities and does nothing with them, and New Vegas didn’t have the time to write more than a dozen children into the whole game. This is quite a shame to me, but unless another Fallout game is developed by Obsidian, I don’t think we’ll really see anything like this.

It might seem odd that I’ve just given examples of Bethesda representing unusual families and Obsidian not, and yet I’m claiming the potential to be with Obsidian, so I should explain. 

Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 are centered around families. In Fallout 3, finding your character’s single father is the driving force of the plot. In Fallout 4, finding your character’s son is the driving force of the plot. However, although your character’s mother in Fallout 3 was going to be a black woman, which probably would have made some waves socially, instead she was entirely cut out and not shown. She was always intended to die in childbirth though, so what Bethesda decided to remove was only visuals showing her there, and although I can’t know for sure, that feels like a decision to hide her in order not to upset people who would have been upset by her presence. 

In Fallout 4, your character is in a heterosexual marriage and has a child as part of the premise, and although you can have same-sex romances with companions, and even multiple partners, it doesn’t feel fleshed out, or carefully written. Fallout 4 removed the Confirmed Bachelor and Cherchez La Femme perks, and even the people I’ve seen praising the relationships with companions have suggested that it is due to developer oversight rather than conscious, careful writing. If the game lets you have multiple partners but none of them acknowledge each other, and neither does the game - the game isn’t allowing polyamory, it’s allowing infidelity. If the game lets you have same-sex relationships but doesn’t have the thoughtful acknowledgement of gayness that New Vegas does, it isn’t representing gay people, it just doesn’t give a shit.

Bethesda keep rushing out open world games without the care and attention they deserve. They pile their efforts into a technical system like Fallout 3’s VATS gore, or Fallout 4’s companions, and they skimp on the writing. The reason I say that we won’t get a good exploration of these dynamics with Bethesda could be summed up like this: Fallout 3 might be Better Than I Thought, but It’s still Garbage.

Of course I’m happy to be proven wrong, so now I’ll do the thing I learned to do from the hours of my life spent watching Fallout fans argue on Youtube - Talk directly to Bethesda as if they care what I think. Bethesda, If you’re reading this, please prove me wrong.

Section 5: Conclusion

Before we go I’d like to talk about a Fallout wiki fan thread I found researching this. It was posted back in 2010, and it’s called “What’s with all the homosexuality”, but sadly it isn’t a Seinfeld bit. The OP writes quite insensitively and with lots of quite clunky slang, which means they’re probably either a 13 year old boy or a total shithead. The main post goes pretty much how you’d expect, talking about homosexuals and chicks and wrapping everything up with a classic now I don’t have anything against homosexuality statement at the end.

When I found this thread I felt quite let down, and reading the main post and the first replies was a real chore. Here we go, unnecessary representation this and pandering that. There’s actually someone who says that this doesn’t feel like “proper representation” which kind of makes me chuckle, because honestly if this isn’t proper representation, then what is? Obviously this commenter just wants to use an impossibly high hypothetical standard to shut down any attempts to be inclusive at all.

However, as I continued into the thread I saw a few things that filled me with hope. 

Firstly, the majority of commenters on this thread were saying that they actually loved all the homosexuality. The community really took this dude to task here, and I love that. The responses were great and they ranged from listen up shitbird to really thoughtful informative comments that did their best to help this person understand why they were wrong. There’s even one or two people who start out with some iamverysmart comments but wrap up by saying, for example “I like it though. The Fallout world isn't our world, and to me, this is just another way it has diverged. It makes the game more interesting to me.” I love it! The Fallout world is just gayer. I mean, they’re super wrong but, great!

One Commenter wrote:
“I think when nuclear war has obliterated almost all infrastructure in the world, it's obvious that 'teh gayz' aren't your real enemies. As a gay man myself, it's nice to play a game where our existence isn't completely denied. Because of society's attitude to non-heterosexuality, people notice when a character is LGBT - it's still a bit of a surprise and it sticks out like a sore thumb, not only in video games but in other forms of media. But inversely, imagine playing a game intended for adults with male and female characters and no reference to any sort of sexual interaction at all. Wouldn't it feel a bit lacking, a bit like you as a player were being ignored? Well that's what it feels like for LGBT people all the time. You aren't forced as a player to explore the LGBT issues in FNV, and that's fair enough, but it's nice for them to be there. A lack of characters of different ethnicities or of women would seem very odd, especially in our current day and age in which equal representation is expected of any forward-thinking game developer like Obsidian who know their audience, young people, who are always the vanguard of social liberalisation. Moreover, I think that representing the personality traits that make characters distinct, 'the spice of life' if you will, fleshes out both the individual characters and the wasteland as a whole. ”

The second thing that made me hopeful, slightly counterintuitively, was one of the straight commenters complaining. They were complaining that there weren’t enough heterosexual options for romance in New Vegas. On the face of it, this is a pretty annoying complaint, for hopefully obvious reasons. However, there’s another side to this.

This commenter isn’t just moaning that the gays have something he doesn’t have, he’s seeing how well written and engaging those stories are, and he’s saying he wants that too. First off, this means that he’s actually experiencing first hand what that other commenter suggested hypothetically - he’s experiencing in this game what gay people experience in most media, and maybe that will make him understand eventually.

More than that, once he does come around, and he will, what he’s doing here is looking at the representation in New Vegas - he isn’t calling it tokenistic or fake or pandering - he’s acknowledging how well written it is, and he’s saying he wants more content like this.

Fallout is about people - it’s about characters that you can laugh at, or fear, or hate, but that you never stop to question whether they’re people, because they’re so real, and because they’re so real, no matter how else you feel about them you also love them. When you interact with the NPCs in a Fallout game, they don’t just say things that feel real, they say things that stick with you. I’ll let you know when I see a line in any media, not just a video game, better than “I don’t think I can continue to have done the things that I have done in the name of progress and healing.”

Fallout is about NPCs that you love, and that’s why I’ve titled this essay “An NPC love story”. As I said earlier, the things New Vegas has done are more than the sum of their parts. By writing these gay characters, and including these perks, and giving the player these options, the game is letting queer players know they’re loved back.