A Bloody Mess - Analysis of the ending of Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game
(Though Fallout 2 and the Fallout Bible (lol) expand on the lore of Vault 13, Fallout was written as a stand-alone story without any anticipation of a sequel, and this analysis focuses on the information presented in the original Fallout. This is merely a persuasive essay based on my understanding of the game and its themes, and responses are welcome. Major Fallout 1 spoilers ahead. CW: This post contains graphic in-game depictions of gore and death.)
“The details are trivial and pointless. The reasons, as always, purely human ones.” - Ron Perlman, Fallout 2 intro
The main quest of Fallout has only two endings (though there is an “alternate” game-ending cutscene in which the player is captured by the super mutants, it isn’t relevant here). However, uniquely for a sandbox RPG, these endings are not dependent on a climactic decision at the end of the story–or even the player’s actions throughout the course of the game. Believe it or not, the ending of Fallout is decided on the character sheet before the game begins.
In the “normal” ending, the player returns to their home, Vault 13, with the water chip that will save their people from certain extinction. The vault overseer, who personally saw you off in the game’s opening scene (and is available to talk with throughout the game), comes out of the vault to meet you and accept the chip.
After he congratulates you and thanks you profusely for enduring against overwhelming odds and saving your people (going as far to speculate that you may have even saved the human race, for all they know), he sadly explains that he believes your triumphant return will inspire the smartest and fittest of the vault’s youth to leave the vault in search of glory, knowledge, or adventure.
He apologizes to you and commends you as a hero, but tells you that he can not permit you inside.
He turns away from you. He opens the vault door, enters, and closes it behind him.
The Vault Dweller walks off into the wasteland, their head hung low, as the Ink Spots song “Maybe” plays solemnly in the background. The game ends.
There is only one factor that can change this scene, a single trait on the character sheet. A trait called Bloody Mess.
Unlike later games, Bloody Mess is a trait chosen before the game begins, not a perk acquired later. Bloody Mess replaces all death animations with longer and much gorier ones with unique sound effects.
Upon completing the main quest with Bloody Mess, Overseer Jacoren comes out to meet you and retrieve the water chip, as normal.
He thanks you and explains why he has decided to exile you, as normal. He apologizes and commends you as a hero, as normal. He turns to leave and steps towards the vault door, as normal.
Then, the player produces a small gun, and shoots him in the back.
The left half of Jacoren’s body is horribly mutilated (The narrator describes his body as “shattered”). The player stares down at their leader as he uses his remaining limbs to crawl to the vault door in desperation, trailing blood and intestinal tract behind him. Though he manages to pull himself to the cold, flat metal of the vault entrance, he obviously cannot open it in his condition. Overseer Jacoren convulses violently before falling still, a second powerful gush of blood signifying his expiration, as well as the certain death of your people.
The Vault Dweller walks off into the wasteland, their head hung low, as the Ink Spots song “Maybe” plays solemnly in the background. The game ends.
The point of the Bloody Mess ending, and arguably, the entire game, is to demonstrate how the desire to see one’s enemies suffer can become an obsession that clouds judgment, twists morality, and drives people to commit violent atrocities in the name of nothing but their own runaway emotions.
The Bloody Mess ending renders the journey of the Vault Dweller ultimately pointless. Sure, you killed Richard Grey along the way and that’s a big fucking deal, but that wasn’t the point of your odyssey. You set out to save your people, and you came extremely close, but you failed for no other reason than your own sadism and selfishness. Your impulsive urge to punish Jacoren for robbing you of your reward was, in the moment, greater than your desire to save hundreds of men, women and children, your friends and family, your way of life, and your home from a slow, meaningless death.
Why does a player choose the bloody mess trait on their first playthrough? Sure, to make the game more visually exciting, but on a deeper level, it’s motivated by a need to see all those who oppose you die in humiliating and extremely painful ways.
The Bloody!Vault Dweller is mentally unwell by the time the game ends. They have seen everyone and everything who ever stood in their way horrifically killed and reduced to nothing, not even a corpse worth burying. To feel such power and see such vivid, consistent affirmation of their violent urges caused them to make this genocidal decision. When Jacoren is murdered by your character without your control, you are, for the first time in the game, disturbed by the way your character stands unmoving and emotionless as your opponent dies a messy, panicked death at your feet, even though he shared this fate with dozens of others.
So overwhelming was the Vault Dweller’s rage at the perceived injustice of being denied their reward, that they rendered their entire journey meaningless and doomed everyone they had ever known. All for the satisfaction of seeing an opponent– a mentor and leader who has known the vault dweller their whole life, acting to preserve the very society you worked so hard to save, but an opponent nonetheless–utterly ruined and destroyed. The Bloody!Vault Dweller was so drunk on rage and hatred that they wanted to stand over Jacoren as he spent his final moments in unimaginable agony, desperately crawling through his own gore, both to escape the maniacal traitor who had doomed his people, but also in a futile attempt to deliver the water chip and save his people. Your people.
This isn’t to say Jacoren was right. Only that whatever justice can be found in his death does not outweigh the lives of hundreds of people and the survival of your culture. But because of the trauma you put the Vault Dweller through, for a few pivotal seconds, they were in such an extreme mental state of bloodlust and self-idolization that they couldn’t see this.
This ties into Fallout’s central themes of nuclear holocaust and eternal war. In Fallout, the world ends because people got used to living in hedonistic excess and fought each-other for the right to do so, quarreling for many decades, culminating with every nuclear-armed country deciding that they have been so wronged by other nations that a complete genocide is somehow justifiable.
Online discussion of the Bloody Mess ending often amounts to people simply saying Jacoren deserved to die, or treating it as a funny easter egg (because this is Fallout, and gore is funny, right?). People who respond this way do not understand the game they played. Make no mistake, the Bloody Mess ending is the most important scene in Fallout, and the whole game is nothing short of an explicit, somber condemnation of self-righteous violence.
The way that later games (even including Fallout 2) simply treat Bloody Mess as a wacky gore-toggle and an expected feature of the series is ironic and bittersweet. It makes sense to include it–”how could you not?”–but its inclusion without any commentary or thematic relevance is very demonstrative of a central theme of the game: Humans crave, romanticize and celebrate violence, and too often seek to justify it with emotional appeals. Consider, for comparison, the how the Rambo franchise was quickly twisted from a novel depicting a traumatized, violent, frustrated man whose quest for vengeance goes on to have innocent victims, to a film series idolizing a “justified” mass-murdering hero. Bloody Mess was supposed to be a sobering slap in the face of players who wanted to get lost in power fantasy and have desensitized themselves to violence.
But people didn’t remember the message, they remembered the gore, and they wanted more.
Now the series is driven by shallow “black comedy” and justified acts of mass murder. Why does “war never change”? No longer because of conflicting emotions and ideologies, but because of pointless orcish hordes and convenient “bad guys”. These are not human reasons, they are inhuman ones.
Every modern Fallout game has ended with a lengthy scene of slaughter, in which the player is intended to participate, and find satisfaction, glory, and delight. The Bloody Mess perk is now picked by almost every player, for the damage boost it now grants and the cinematic spectacles of gore that come with it.
When you choose to begin Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game with Bloody Mess as one of the two traits you are allowed, you are telling the game, “I really want to see people suffer.” And at the end of your adventure, the game solemnly replies, “Okay.”
