So what do people think of the characters?

CT Phipps

CT Phipps

Carbon Dated and Proud
Screw the worldbuilding.

What do people think of the protagonists?

Villains?

And cultures depicted?
 
Good question but I think the problem of character is how closely those characters are tied to context. Accept the various problems in the context of the show, and the many places the show screwed up the Fallout context, I am rather contented with the three central characters- Maximus, Lucy and the Ghoul but not really what is done with them. In many ways both Lucy and Maximus are characters that introduce the world to us. The Ghoul offers us a view into the past. I think the issue of trust between Lucy and Maximus is fine, and I don't mind Lucy being, in some ways, being a return to the Vault Dweller of Fallout 1. But overall, the problem lies in the many places the story of the show breaks with the Fallout games 1,2 and New Vegas, not with the nature of three characters- a idealistic vault dweller new to the wasteland, a BOS aspirant who is having problems fitting in to the organization, and a ghoul deeply connected to the past.
 
Yeah, basically this was an attempt at discussing something other than continuity for a change.

Dalek Emperor: THOSE WORDS ARE BLASPHEMY.
 
I think that they went a little heavy handed with having every character be morally gray and ambiguous; almost as if it was a policy for the script writers.
 
Lucy is a pretty trite character, nothing that goes on with her is particularly interesting. Not a bad character, decently well-executed "Disillusion of a Virtuous Naive," decently well-performed, but nothing that good. Fine to have as your stock protagonist, but you need other characters to carry the weight. Her relationship with her mother and father is a nothingburger, too.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I do actually find Maximus a somewhat interesting character. In truth, overall, he's just poorly written and performed, quite badly in fact. But there is an interesting kernel in both of these aspects: He's not written stupidly just because he's poorly written, but because he is genuinely quite stupid. He keeps making poor decisions like fragging his superior and not concocting any plan and story because... well he's a really stupid guy. And he's stupid for an interesting reason - his development was arrested by a fucking nuclear bomb destroying his life and then as a child immediately being recruited into a paramilitary that didn't care about him or his development. His upbringing in the Brotherhood seemed to have been almost wholly negative, just a cruel place where he was completely outcast and regularly beat up, and he just couldn't rise to his occasion. The only thing keeping him going was a desire for power, both presumably to revenge whoever destroyed his life, and to those who were cruel to him in the Brotherhood, a kind of school shooter mentality. But the real tragedy of it is - once he gets that power by sheer luck, he has no idea what to do with it, because he just ain't that bright.

This lens can't fully redeem his character, a lot of it is just poorly written, but it makes him one o the more interesting characters to watch for me, and I think there actually are interesting places to go with him.

Cooper - What a disappointment. Few complaints to be had about Goggins' performance of course, great work as always and he really does have the face (if not the hairline) to be believed as a star movie cowboy. And conceptually, the character is interesting. Putting aside the quality of the whole Vault-Tec plotline, the basic idea of a sort of air-headed actor coming to a dizzying realization about the society he lives in and his personal role within it is an interesting enough premise. And the idea of a movie cowboy having to become a real cowboy, indeed an evil character, has a lot of potential. The idea that everything he's doing post-war is some self referential performance is cool, I think there are a lot of interesting avenues to take that. But the show fails in its execution: The bubble-shattering pre-War narrative fails just because what's outside the bubble is fairly retarded for how the show presents it, and in the case of the cowboy I feel as though the show leans too much into him actually being the cowboy, and doesn't play with the contrast between the movie character and the real guy in an interesting way. He does feel like a very purely 'epic' character.
 
Gizmojunk said:
I think that they went a little heavy handed with having every character be morally gray and ambiguous; almost as if it was a policy for the script writers.
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what are you talking about? Cooper is a psychopath and a serial killer who sells people for their organs.

The biggest problem with the show is that it tries too much to shoehorn in game stuff. Like, Lucy and Maximus are very obviously stand-ins for player character archetypes, one for being the goody two-shoes hero types and one for the braindead exploration types who just want to play in the trash. That's a problem because it makes Lucy a hopeless naif who can't learn from her mistakes before the season finale, while Maximus is a drooling moron who doesn't even understand the world he grew up in. Meanwhile Cooper is one of the best characters in Fallout period, and has all the makings of an incredible Fallout story - but he's wasted on the vision of showrunners who think "cousin stuff" is the height of comedy.

Ultimately the best characters are the vault dwellers, especially Norm and Chet - because they actually feel like they are a part of the world they grew up in and don't just act weird for the sake of being weird.
 
Bradylama said:
That's a problem because it makes Lucy a hopeless naif who can't learn from her mistakes before the season finale, while Maximus is a drooling moron who doesn't even understand the world he grew up in.
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I initially wanted to say "naif" in my post too but I think that's wrong since 1) strictly speaking naif is masculine and naive is feminine and 2) apparently naive can also be used as a noun just the same as naif (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/naive#Noun)
 
Bradylama said:
what are you talking about? Cooper is a psychopath and a serial killer who sells people for their organs.
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Cooper is temporally split between post and pre-war; a man of two extremes, and foreshadowed by Wilzig's comment about still being/wanting the same after adapting to the new state of the world; becoming entirely different. Everyone else has a good and a nasty side to them.
 
Gizmojunk said:
Cooper is temporally split between post and pre-war; a man of two extremes, and foreshadowed by Wilzig's comment about still being/wanting the same after adapting to the new state of the world; becoming entirely different. Everyone else has a good and a nasty side to them.
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I'd argue that little about Cooper has actually changed, and that his self as the "Ghoul" is an unmasking of the facade he lived in pre-war America. He's not a morally complex character, he's a narcissistic chauvinist who is constantly indulging his base desires at the expense of other peoples' lives. He cares only about the things that concern himself personally, and has left a two hundred year wake of carnage behind him in the single-minded pursuit of an ancient vendetta. These are all rich character traits, but they're not morally grey or ambiguous.

A big problem with the show is that we don't get ENOUGH of Cooper being evil.

Hardboiled Android said:
I initially wanted to say "naif" in my post too but I think that's wrong since 1) strictly speaking naif is masculine and naive is feminine and 2) apparently naive can also be used as a noun just the same as naif (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/naive#Noun)
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Using "naive" as a noun just doesn't sound right to me stylistically.
 
Lucy was annoying but cute.

Ghoul was annoying.

Maximus was infuriatingly stupid but fun.

Characters were walking plot armors the whole way through.
 
Maximus also chooses the most violent option at every turn. A lot of that can be chalked up to him being raised in the Brotherhood, but he also acts inconsistently with someone who grew up in the brotherhood. It hints at the beginning that Maximus is a fanatic but it turns out he's not even familiar with the Brotherhood's tenets. He drops a line about "Eden" during his interrogation like that's something the Brotherhood believes, and the show never explains to the audience what the Brotherhood believes either. He doesn't know about sex and masturbation even thought the Brotherhood has a mixed sex recruitment pool and long lines of lineal descent, so they would have sexual education. It's just bad writing for the sake of bad jokes.

All the audience knows is that the Brotherhood is trying to hoard technology to save the future, but all the mysticism and ritual is pure costume. The show isn't interested at all in investigating what the Brotherhood is actually about.
 
1. My take on Cooper is the fact that he's playing a role. He's no more the Ghoul than he is any other theatrical character but because he's lost his wife, child, and the world has been ruined then he's not really got any reason not to play up the psychopathic gunslinger role until someone kills him. As we see in his first disfigured appearance Post-War, he's not actually interested in the caps or any sort of reward. He's just killing people and causing mayhem because it's something to do.

He only develops a new motivation once he sees Lee Moldaver and realizes that he might have a chance to regain what he's lost or perhaps even get revenge on his wife.

But he tried to be a good man and stand up against vault-Tec and it accomplished jack and shit.

2. I think people treat Maximus' rambling on about sex way too seriously and miss the context of him being high off his gourd on Med-X (or whatever they gave him) plus whatever damage he'd been suffering from a rotted tooth infection wound. He's meant to be book dumb as he doesn't know anything about technology and his idea of what a Brother of Steel is supposed to be are informed by "Cool Armor, Heroic Guys who rescued me." He's basically a guy who has not bothered to ever learn what was going on and just went along to get along.

(And he knows what the BOS do as he explains it to Lucy)

3. I think people are overly harsh on Lucy as she actually fucks up by changing too rapidly. She's already assuming the Vault 4 people are secretly evil and burns a guys face like Harvey Dent after, what, a week on the surface? If she'd actually kept her trusting and kind nature throughout that she wouldn't have done it.
 
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I'm saying we don't get enough of Cooper post-war. The best scenes are when Walton Goggins gets to play a Justified villain.
 
CT Phipps said:
You think so?

I mean, Titus had it coming.
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Maximus shows nearly no emotion for many episodes unless it's when he realises he can abuse someone, either raiders or Bo from Superstore.
The character itself is bland, but what really irks me is that the actor is terrible. Maybe he gets good at some point, but when you're being filmed Iron Man style and have nothing but your face to act with, you need some facial expressions.

Cooper was a cool guy, but all the pre-war scenes with him established very little about his motivations and really mostly served as a background for Vault-Tec. It's not shown how he ended up split from his wife, it's not shown what happened to his daughter or his wife, and we don't know how he came to be a ghoul and a bounty hunter. Lots of wasted time there. The pre-war scenes should have looped, with the one from the last episode leading directly into the one from the first.

Lucy is your typical fish out of water character. Nothing really to say, she's wholesome and naive and grows a little from that. Nothing to write home about.

Bo from Superstore is Bo from Superstore.

Hank and Lee are barely characters as they have so little screentime. So Hank is big bad evil and nuked Shady Sands to ensure Vault-Tec wins capitalism, and Lee Moldaver made McGuffin research and just kinda survived for 200 years.

15 going 50 Norm is... I vaguely remember him. And the other people in their Vault.
 
Yeah, since Jonathan Nolan did Westworld, I assume the pitch for this show will be endless amounts of flashbacks across the seasons and revealing more and more of the backstories.

Even though Moldaver is dead, I wouldn't be surprised if she remains a major character.

Though I believe we can figure out that Cooper leaves his wife after she's revealed to be a psychopath and gets branded a communist as a result/blacklisted.
 
I wouldn't buy that Moldaver is dead at all. Yeah that's the impression the show gives you but Moldaver is also running a parallel plot we know practically nothing about, she tells half-truths to manipulate people into doing what she wants, and has no sentimentality for her own comrades. Nothing about Moldaver adds up, and while that's fine if you're planning on this being a long running mystery character, if you're planning on a fakeout and it turns out Moldaver isn't dead after all then that's just bad writing. It's a big fat cliche that anyone paying close attention can see coming from a mile away.
 
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