ok hot take: I’m not sure if this is a dude but its a sentiment I see from dudes playing fallout 4 a lot and I think Preston Garvey lives in the meltdown of toxic masculinity and the quest system, how these two things defeat the game’s power fantasy for many men.
In Fallout 4, nothing at all progresses in the world until it asks you for help and you follow directions. And having to follow directions, to many men, means you are subordinated. But tutorials about how mechanics works are primarily conveyed by following directions, radiant quests are following directions, the meat of how Fallout 4 asks you to play it at all is following directions. It is assumed that the directions are the game’s framework to get you to have experiences that are fun, it is assumed that you want to build settlements because it’s fun to build stuff, you want to go to dungeons and clear them because shooting up enemies is fun, you want to be the General of the Minutemen because being considered the superior figure in an organization is fun.
But bosses in our society do not do all the leg work. subordinates do. Even if you’re a subordinate who got a fancy title or vital responsibilities, you’re still a subordinate. Women experience this phenomenon all the time, being promoted or given a ‘special task’ at work but then just being expected to do more legwork tasks rather than actually being a boss. But in this case, the ‘legwork task’ is… playing the game and having fun.
So dudes melt down at Preston Garvey. He may be irreconcilable to some of them, even before you get into the fact he’s a black man. These players want to be important, but don’t want to be told to do all the things they could find fun as ‘work’ because that means being told, which means they aren’t the important bosses. It means to them Preston is ‘selfish’ for wanting you to do the work, but on the other hand they’d feel deeply uncomfortable and even rejected by him if he didn’t rely on you to be the hero like every other person in the game. To them, Preston is behaving like he’s their boss, but holding none of the responsibility of being the boss, or otherwise opting out of the legwork that he, a subordinate of yours, ‘ought’ to be doing.
But like, when we pull back into the real world where people help each other and not everybody is suited to be a leader or trapped into this hierarchical hell matrix of who is the boss of who and who takes advantage of who and who is the screw-er and who is being screwed, this all seems bananas. Preston is just a guy you meet at a critical time who asks for your help and whose early quests teach you basic mechanics of the game. His later radiant quests are just the game’s way of giving you something to do with the big but hollow overworld they made. With normal person vision, and not toxic masculinity vision, nobody’s ‘the boss’ except the quest system. Fallout 4 is a power fantasy simulator where you have no power to influence other people beyond obediently following their directions and Preston unfortunately bears the burden of breaking the news to the player.
