Fallout 4: Context of Character

I want to start off by immediately calling out that this post is not about gender discrimination. I'm not going to be addressing any issue that may or may not be surrounding women and men in Fallout 4 (I haven't encountered any). Rather this post is all about the interesting, compelling, and unique way Fallout 4 handled gender choice and how it plays a part in the way in which I immerse myself in the narrative.

Minor Fallout 4 spoilers for the first 20 minutes of the game

Bethesda did something during character creation that I absolutely love. The first few minutes of any western RPG are usually spent sculpting the bridge of a nose, lengthening the jaw line, or just quickly grabbing a preset and getting to the action. I love taking my time with this process. A lot of people do. Seeing Nigel Thornberry created in every character creator in existence is a special kind of treat for me.

During my character creation for Fallout 4, I allowed my four-year-old daughter to make most of the major decisions for me. She decided I'd be playing a woman named Rainbow Star, who I promptly renamed to Eliza because what she can't know won't hurt her.

When I changed the gender, this miraculous thing happened.

The developers made the gender swap into a functional element of the story. When you choose to play as a woman, you aren't switching genders. You're switching characters. That was unexpected. It's not unprecedented though. Other games have done this before, but this is a first for Fallout. It's also a bit of a problem.

The intro of the game establishes that the man speaking is a war veteran. He's been through enough to know that war never changes. His words, not mine. So we know this dude knows his stuff. He is apparently giving a speech about war later in the evening we pick up the game. Good stuff.

But then we switch to his wife. This is a narrative device. We are no longer a war veteran. We are now the wife of a war veteran. She doesn't have the background we just received from the man. Maybe she was also a part of the war. It's possible, maybe even likely if you want to role play that way. But it's not called out.

The problem emerges when we think about the context of the story after the vault. When you escape from the vault, your character has a working knowledge of how to use a variety of weapons on a variety of very dangerous individuals. That makes total sense. Your dude is a veteran. He knows how to rock a rifle with the best of them. But if you're playing his wife, we don't have that context. In fact, I feel a little out of place being a badass out in the Commonwealth when my character had previously lead a pretty pedestrian life, as far as I know.

This isn't a big problem. I simply tell myself, "I bet they met during the war and they're both badass retired soldiers." But when the effort was placed to provide context for one of the characters, it seemed odd that it was not for the other. If they had been the same character with a simple gender swap, it would have made sense. But they are explicitly different people.

It's something to think about when drawing up your own story. How does your character fit into this world? Why can they do what they do? What makes them capable of being the hero? Sometimes the answer to that question is "nothing special." Most times it's not.