A big element in Bethesda’s games is the notion of moral ambiguity. If there are people who can be objectively good or evil, they can still make choices that seem selfish or selfless, and learning why they do this defines them as three dimensional characters.
Similarly, we can learn that good and bad people can live alike in groups and factions like the Brotherhood of Steel and the Dragonborn. But the truth is, in Bethesda’s worlds, people are complicated. Players themselves like to talk about the ways they have morally compromised themselves, to make the game easier for them, or to gain some form of advantage. But there are lines they still won’t cross, which makes them very similar to the characters in the games themselves.
It’s really incredible that Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, and executive producer Jonathan Nolan found a way to recreate this in the Amazon Fallout TV show. In a new interview with IGN, Nolan was joined with Todd Howard, and they talked about how they pulled this off.
Nolan said:
“I think this is one of the things that’s always so exciting for me about the Fallout universe where, look, there’s lots of darkness in this world and there’s lots of satire that has a lot to say about our world, but amidst all the apocalyptic lore, there is also a sense of optimism.
I’ve spoken about that. There is a sense that out of the pieces of this world, there’s the possibility to craft a new future that might work a little better than the one that they left behind. And I think all these ideas of technology… I am what I would describe as a reluctant techno optimist.
I believe in human ingenuity. I’m hopeful that our future will get better and better and better, but you also have the double-edged sword of that. And I think that’s something that’s integral to the themes of the game series.”
The rest of this article gets into spoilers about the show. We won’t go into them in detail, but if you would rather watch the show first, you can stop here, bookmark us, binge it and get back.
They then talk about the moral positions the three main characters take. If Lucy represents good, and the Ghoul represents evil, then Maximus, the black man who joined the Brotherhood of Steel, comes out as the ‘neutral’ character. But these are broad stereotypes for what these characters really are, because Lucy does end up harming people, the Ghoul ends up helping, and Maximus does things that benefit himself, and others, and he’s the one who’s most like a playable character.
Here’s how Norton describes Lucy:
“I think Lucy is essentially such a likable character, in part because her idealism is kind of unchallenged when it starts. And then as the story continues, you see what are the things that in the crucible of the wasteland, what’s she going to discard and what’s she going to hold onto?
And her essential decency is something that I think, even when she’s tasked with making some very difficult choices, even when she’s tasked with taking a life, I think you still feel that decency underneath it.”
Nolan says a few very telling things about how they characterized Max:
“Max really represents my experience playing these games, where I’d like to think that I play through it with Lucy’s moral virtue, but the truth is there’s some moments where you just want the big gun and you just want the kick-ass armor, and you’re trying to figure out how much you’re willing to morally compromise yourself.”
And then he talks about how the Brotherhood of Steel, who was often portrayed as outwardly fascist in the video games, seems to be a more ambiguous party here, because of the actions of other factions, like the Vault-Dwellers:
“Look, you see it. You see this when the airship comes and they come walking out, it’s just like, it’s completely badass. There’s no other word to be like, “I want to be post-apocalyptic Iron Man tank. And then how compromised morally am I going to be? Who are they out for?”
… there’s so many great parts about the Brotherhood of Steel in terms of what the wasteland can mean. And so I think Max often is the player. “Would I have done that? Is he making the right choices?”
Finally, Nolan shares his take on the Ghoul, who is the closest connection the show has to the video games, and is the epitome of a tragicomic character:
“He’s seen the whole story and you so seldom get a chance to write a character with this kind of span where in flashbacks, you’re looking at someone who, I think from the first frame, you understand is decent. He makes some mistakes, he learns some things along the way, but I think we understand from his first interactions with his daughter, this inherently decent person, and then we see what the rack of time has done to him and it creates this chasm between who he was and who he is.
…by the time you get to the end of the season, you understand this is a person who’s capable of evil, capable of ruthlessness, has seen enough life come and go that life is truly cheap to him. But I think there is still a question of what drives this? What is driving this person, what has been driving this person for these hundreds of years?”
