bluiex - Tumblr blog

bluiex · 10 hours

Text

Thoughts on The Ghoul

So I think all the characters in the Fallout show are spectacular, but I had some thoughts on The Ghoul/Cooper Howard in particular that I just wanted to put down. Owing to his 200+ years of history, he's a downright fascinating, dynamic character, and I can't wait to see what they do with him next.

Anyway, here's my thoughts/character analysis of The Ghoul:

One of the things I found most interesting on my second watch-through of the show was how everything The Ghoul does is motivated by ruthless pragmatism, not cruelty. It can appear like cruelty--sometimes it tips over into cruelty--but cruelty is not the point. The point is always survival. He must survive to find his family. That is his goal and his one guiding tenet. Nothing else matters, everything else is fluid. Whatever it takes to survive.

Getting rid of the three bounty hunters who dug him up? Survival. Two of those guys were already one twitch away from killing him on the spot for being a ghoul, and the other threatened to harm him if he didn't show enough gratitude. Coupled with some of the other things he was saying, it seemed possible he would double-cross or kill The Ghoul the moment it suited him. No doubt The Ghoul has worked with the type before, and knew trouble when he saw it.

In Filly, he only shot people who were shooting at him. Cooper loves dogs, but he stabbed CX-404 because she was actively trying to kill him. On the surface, he healed her for equally pragmatic reasons: she could lead him to Wilzig. But he also seemed to respect, too, that she clung to life despite her debilitating wound. She's not his dog Roosevelt, so he tries to maintain a cold detachment from her (at first), but he has a soft spot for dogs.

He was willing to shoot Lucy in Filly, but he hesitated--which is more than he did for any of the other people threatening his life. Possibly he wouldn't have killed her (she was armed with a non-lethal weapon) until Maximus showed up on the scene and changed the calculus (dispatch the girl and deal with the newer, bigger threat without having to worry about her finding a lethal weapon and killing him with it). He didn't kill Maximus when he had the chance, either. He didn't need to. Maximus had already shown himself to be incompetent with the power armor. It was simple enough to damage the power armor and watch him tuck tail and run.

When he meets Lucy again, he uses her with the same casual, indifferent efficiency as he would any other tool. The point of dunking her in the water was to lure the gulper. It had the unfortunate side effect of also being torturous for Lucy, but the cruelty wasn't the point. Getting the head back was. The head=caps, caps=meds, meds=survival, survival=eventually find family.

We don't know what The Ghoul would have done if they had retrieved the head from the gulper and his medicine hadn't been destroyed. Probably it would have depended on what Lucy did. If she seemed likely to come after him and the head, he probably would have killed her or incapacitated her and left her for dead. If she had explained she needed to trade it with Moldaver for her dad, Hank MacLean, hoooo boy, he would have beelined for Moldaver's with Lucy in tow. Whether Lucy came along as his partner or his captive/extra bargaining chip would also probably depend on Lucy's behavior.

But they lose the head and The Ghoul's medicine is destroyed. The math changes. He can come back for the head, but he needs meds now, which means he needs caps now, and the only thing of value he has on hand is this pampered girl from a fucking vault who seems patently unwilling to do the things that need to be done to survive in the Wasteland anyway, so if she's gonna die, he might as well profit from it. He needs meds to survive. He needs caps for meds. It's simple, brutal math.

While he's hauling her to the Super Duper Mart, though, he does several interesting things that are degrading for Lucy, yes, but are simultaneously teaching her how to survive the Wasteland, testing to see if she'll adapt. First, he mercy kills Roger and butchers him. It's important to note that The Ghoul didn't have to take a detour from his all-important mission to obtain medicine--he could hear it was Roger, he could tell Roger was going feral and didn't have any meds-- but he went anyway to help ease an old friend's passing. And he made sure Roger's last thoughts were pleasant, too.

Then, because this is the Wasteland and the one law is survival, he wastes no time switching gears. There's no waste in the Wasteland, and a fresh dead body presents an opportunity for those willing to seize it. The Ghoul, mind you, has had 200 years to learn that he can't be picky. Ghouls are unwelcome in most "civilized" parts of the Wasteland, barred from the simple comforts and safeties and securities that other people can enjoy if they reach those scattered, precious oases. The Ghoul has had to eat people. It sucks, but it's that or die.

But Lucy doesn't understand that. She arguably doesn't understand what a ghoul even is because nobody's taken the time to tell her. She doesn't know what the last 200 years have been like. She's appalled--and then she has the audacity to voice her disgust. The Ghoul hands her the knife to keep butchering Roger in part to humble her, to drag her down into the dirt with the rest of them, but he's also teaching her a stark reality of the Wasteland. It was a lesson and a skill that he had to learn the hard way. (Interestingly, while nearly everyone in the Wasteland is disgusted by cannibalism, it's also a known thing that happens all the time. The Ghoul and Lucy are in the interesting position of being some of the only people in the Wasteland who were raised in societies where cannibalism truly was unthinkable).

On the walk to the Super Duper Mart, he refuses to give her water. On a pragmatic level, there's no reason to waste water on the equivalent of a dead woman walking--he's leading her to get her organs harvested, after all. (He is pretty petty when he pours out the last drops instead of giving them to her, though). But also, whether he is actively intending to or not, he is teaching her to adapt to Wasteland conditions. The water in his canteen, in fact, was just as irradiated and gross as the standing water from which Lucy ultimately drinks; he refills his canteen from the same rusted-out vessel Lucy drinks from, and likely drew the previous canteen's worth of water from a similarly unpalatable source. This is water in the Wasteland. Drink it or die.

When she runs away shortly after, he lassos her (and, sidenote: can I just add how fucking cool it is that they actually carry through his lasso skills? Like, that is actually an extremely useful skill and the writers utilized it!), which leads to that pivotal scene where she bites his finger off and he takes hers.

This is interesting for multiple reasons. The Ghoul calls her a "little killer" and seems satisfied to see her finally fighting with the same savagery as a Wastelander. This could be either because a) he believes all people have a killer lurking beneath the facade of civility ("I'm you, sweetie. Just give it a little time...") and she's finally found that steely will to survive no matter what it takes, and/or b) he believes she's been faking her doe-eyed, good girl persona. He's the one who first finds Wilzig's body, after all. To him, it looks like Lucy lured the doctor off and ruthlessly chopped off his head before running off with it. Maybe she's just a really good actress, and in biting his finger off, she's let that mask slip.

Either way, he introduces her to another law of the Wasteland: don't dish it if you can't take it. She takes his finger, he takes hers. He doesn't kill her for it, in part because that would be disproportionate, in part because that would be a waste (he probably needs he alive to exchange her for caps). But also, from a practical standpoint, she just bit off his shooting finger. Unbeknownst to her, ghouls can reattach body parts, even ones that are not their own. He's harvesting his replacement from her. If he wanted to be cruel, he had ample opportunity to be cruel here. He could have taken more fingers. He could have hurt her in ways that wouldn't have affected her value to organ harvesters. He could have degraded her and called her all kinds of nasty names. But he doesn't. He's efficient. If anything, he seems almost proud of her for abandoning her hoity-toity principles and fighting back.

He still needs caps. He's feeling the effects of not having his medication. He's still committed to delivering her to the organ harvesters. In his mind, he has no choice. This is about survival. He has to survive to find his family. This is the option he has available to him. This is how he lives to see another day. He brings her to the Super Duper Mart and, drawing deep from that actor's well, he maintains the tough-guy routine long enough to intimidate her inside, then he succumbs.

He's still down when Lucy re-emerges, victorious, and he knows, he knows that he's dead. He tried to kill her, now she'll kill him. It's the smart thing to do, the practical thing to do. Another law of the Wasteland...

But she doesn't do it. She has all the power here, she knows he's a dangerous element, that she would probably be safer if she left him for dead or killed him herself. But she breaks all the rules. She gives him, freely, generously, with supreme dignity and a selfless kindness he had long forgot, an abundance of the thing he needs to survive, the thing he was willing to sell another human being for no questions asked. Just like that.

There's also something to be said here about how resource scarcity (and the removal of that scarcity) affects people. As soon as The Ghoul gains a cache of at least 2 months worth of medicine, it frees him from the basic math of mere survival. He has room to breathe and think long-term (at least by Wasteland standards). He can reflect on the momentous thing that just happened to him, too. As he watches himself on the TV in the Super Duper Mart, watches the man he once was unwillingly (and unwittingly) take the first step onto the path to what he has become, he remembers what it was like being Cooper Howard. Why he, Cooper Howard, hated the "feo, fuerte, y formal" scene so deeply.

Cooper Howard was a kind, moral, and dignified man who seldom said an unkind word. He was a loving husband who deeply respected his wife and absolutely adored his daughter. Though his naivety, privilege, and ignorance blinded him to the ugly realities of the pre-apocalypse world around him, he valued justice, freedom, and equality. He wanted the characters he played in the movies to reflect that belief in the power of the law and respect the innate humanity of all people, even the villains. And, when he began to see the cracks in the perfect picture of his charmed life, he is driven to know the truth behind the facade. His deep, defining belief in justice and truth would not let him leave it alone.

Cooper Howard learned the truth that Vault-Tec (and by extension, his wife) were willing to drive the world off a cliff, and it destroyed his marriage and deeply affected him. Even then, demoralized and hurt as he was, he found it in himself to be thoughtful and kind to his daughter and the people, both adults and children, at the birthday party he worked the day the bombs dropped. Fundamentally, he was still a kind, moral man. And that kind, moral man found himself in the middle of the most horrific nightmare anyone could ever imagine experiencing: the death of the planet under a rain of atomic bombs. Then he lived through it and had to contend with the harsh realities of surviving on the annihilated landscape left behind. Fortunately for him, he already had several handy skills to carry him through: having formerly been a real cowboy, he knew a thing or two about surviving in tough conditions; having formerly been a soldier, he knew what it took to kill a man and had the experience and fortitude to do it; and finally, having formerly been an actor, he had a built-in psychological coping mechanism to insulate him from the horrors of the things he needed to do to survive.

Cooper Howard used to put on and take off personas for a living. Sure, he played white hats, but he had an intuitive understanding of character and narrative tropes. He played opposite some of the best bad guys in 21st century Hollywood! It wouldn't be hard for him to pull the cloak of acting around himself to do what he initially needed to do to survive. But somewhere along the way, the tough, ruthless persona he adopted stopped being an act and he became his character. He embodied the answer to the question posed by The Man from Deadhorse: what happens when a good man is driven too far?

Cooper Howard adapted to survive. His actions reflect the realities of being a ghoul (again, a people generally reviled by everyone and cast out of safe havens because they are deemed threats). Pragmatic and efficient violence are necessities if a ghoul wants to live long, stay sane, and stay out from under the thumb of would-be enslavers. Still, beneath it all, Cooper Howard is still there, buried deep down beneath the character-persona of The Ghoul.

The Ghoul is drawn to Lucy (platonically, romantically, or some secret third thing), to her goodness and old-world manners just as much as he is disgusted/irritated by them. She's an echo of himself, of Cooper Howard, of who he used to be, and he knows EXACTLY where that gets a person. She's going to get herself killed if she doesn't wise up. With those high-and-mighty, anachronistic principles, that black-and-white worldview, her totally naive misunderstanding of the realities of the Wasteland, she won't last long. And initially he sees her as a pawn, like he was, only good for moving him one step closer to his goal. But then she shows him she can adapt and survive. Not only that, she can be true to her core principles in the process. She can conduct herself with dignity. Lucy reminds him what it was like being the white hat, and shows him that yes, even in this hellscape, there can be heroes. Over 200 yeas, his pragmatism and need to survive sanded away the nuance between Good and Bad. But Lucy makes him reconsider whether maybe there is right and wrong after all, and maybe it actually does matter.

Thus begins his transformation, but the change is not immediate, and this is still the Wasteland. He escapes from The Govermint and goes after Lucy. To do that, he needs to find Moldaver. He tracks down someone who might know where to find her, kills him and accidentally blows a hole through the letter with the key bit of information he needs to find Moldaver. So, he goes to that guy's family to find the man's younger brother, Tommy. When he gets the information he needs, he kills Tommy. He gives Tommy the opportunity to back down, but The Ghoul has a lot of experience and reads Tommy like a book. Tommy is not the kind of kid to let something like this go, and The Ghoul has clearly been burned by leaving vengeful people alive before. Tommy reaches for a gun to shoot The Ghoul, and The Ghoul doesn't hesitate. He blows a hole in the kid. It sucks, but again, this is a decision born from sheer practicality, not love of carnage.

Later, he comes across CX-404 trapped in a Nuka-Cola machine (left there by Thaddeus). The head is lost to both of them now; the dog cannot help The Ghoul with finding it. But he saves her anyway and dubs her Dogmeat. He lets sentimentality get to him for the first time in who knows how long and allows himself to bond with another living being. When he does reach The Observatory (where Moldaver, Lucy, and her dad are), he clearly stashes Dogmeat somewhere to keep her out of harm's way and goes in after Lucy.

After fighting his way through the Brotherhood of Steel, we come to that pivotal scene where Lucy finds out about her father's history. Cooper hangs back to observe and learns that his niggling, hare-brained hunch about Lucy and her last name was correct: she was the daughter of Henry MacLean, a man-out-of-time who presents the first real step in 200 years toward Cooper's ultimate goal: finding his family. (I think it's important to note, however, that he isn't 100% sure of her connection to Hank when follows her to Moldaver's--his reasons for going to the Observatory are either to get information from Moldaver or simply to back Lucy up, should she need help). He lets Hank get away so that he can follow him, and he's willing to follow him alone. But now there's Lucy, who is as wrapped up in this shit as Cooper is (even if she doesn't understand it yet), and he figures they both deserve answers. She's shown that she can adapt to survive, she just needs a teacher. In their first exchange since she left him at the Super Duper Mart, he treats her with new respect and offers her the opportunity to come with him, learn from him, and find out about who she really is and the legacy that has produced her. But perhaps he also knows deep down that he needs to learn from her too. He needs to remember what it was like to be good, to be human. He needs it so he can be it for his daughter when he finds her.

So, yeah, I don't know, it's just interesting how Cooper Howard became essentially lost in method acting a villain to survive the fucking awful conditions he found himself in, but even then he isn't cruel. Like, there are a lot worse things he could have done to Lucy. A LOT WORSE. As far as I can tell, he never looks at or touches her in a creepy, predatory way. Yeah, he drags her around on a leash and cuts her finger off when she bites his off, but that's pretty damn tame for the Wasteland. He secures her with rope, but otherwise is pretty hands off with her. If he objectifies her, it's in an extremely non-sexual way. More of a taking-the-cow-to-market kinda way. Which still sucks, but again, it's not needlessly cruel or wantonly violent, which is pretty impressive given general Wasteland behavior.

He's a damn interesting character, and I'm super stoked to see how he develops--and how he interacts with Lucy going forward.

#BLESS YOU FOR WRITING ALL THIS #i could never articulate any of this about Cooper “the ghoul” howard #as much as i wanted too and rave about his character #this is IT. THIS IS IT. PERFECT. [applause]

27 notes · View notes