mswyrr

[mswyrr]

i find stories with long-term romantic relationships fascinating - especially marriage. and what i see in barb and cooper is that... she despairs first and stops caring what happens to other people, because the only thing she thinks she can do succesfully is protect the ones she loves. (and, given how bad things had gotten, can we say for sure she's wrong? can we really say if she had tried to fight Vault-Tec she wouldn't have ended up a ~mysteriously dead~ whistleblower? do we imagine nobody in the company tried to get the truth out?? did the majority of people in the America of 2077 even want to hear the truth? side note they didn't give barb the iconic "war... war never changes" line for her to be 100% evil - we will learn more and see dimensions of what went down in the past imo) and then cooper becomes lost to despair and stops caring about others too. they mirror each other - or, he follows her down the same despairing path.

there's also the level on which what barb loved about cooper--his sweetness, his loving, romantic nature--was ultimately the thing that she came to believe was good reason to treat him like their child and make major decisions for both her husband and their little girl without consulting him. their separation while he was at war and then the way he understood things radically different from her when he came back (how wilfully blind and naive he must have seemed) probably played heavily into this.

but i see both insight into how a couple can lead each other astray - down the path of despair - and how a major way to do that is to start thinking negatively of the very traits that drew you to someone instead of continuing to engage with those and let that person cooperate with you to shape your shared path forward in life.

(barb started seeing the sweet heart that had drawn her to cooper as a liability rather than an assert, to use corporate speak lol)

i'm genuinely excited for what more we'll learn about how this romance went tragic and in seeing barb and janey in the present storyline. i'm a multishipper and there's a lot neat to explore and all of that is valid - but i think, speaking in terms of what the narrative is doing with the canon ships, those are neat in the sense that we've got a tragic romance in the past that symbolically represents the world being broken -- and then a present day romance that's about two young people trying to make something better than the cruel hand they've been dealt

#😭😭😭 #god they break my heart #well said #the actors do such a beautiful job communicating how deep the love was #which makes it all hit so much harder... #in a better world they would have loved each other for the rest of their lives #barb howard #cooper howard #fallout tv #fallout 2024 #fallout meta

[mswyrr]

Why must Lucy and Cooper be Joel and Ellie and not, for example, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp? (I'm thinking of them in the 1993 neo western classic "Tombstone" but their overall mythology as well). The decent cowboy with grit who inspires the fierce loyalty of a lovable rogue (who is only a rogue because of personal tragedy). Lucy has a little growing to do, but she can pull off steely decency that motivates the loyalty of a rogue already she just needs practice and to expand her experience of the Wasteland. If you don't arbitrarily limit her to female roles there's tons of options.

They're letting her draw on all kinds of stories as a protagonist like the John McClane references. Her story is so far about trying to be like a Wyatt earp - both gritty and decent. Golden rule, motherfucker. Why, in all of Westerns, are people saying she's a little girl?

A little girl who isn't (in season 1/game one of tlou) even the protagonist. Lucy MacLean is the lead protagonist? She's not a child sidekick to Cooper like Ellie is to Joel?? Even if Cooper tries to shove her into a daughter role to make sense of things, there's zero evidence in canon that she wants a father figure.

Ellie campaigned hard to be Joel's daughter because that's what she wanted. She'd never had a parent and she desperately wanted one. A father isn't what Lucy wants. She told herself she was leaving the vault to find her dad and she does love her family --and now she does want answers re: all that -- but she wanted to get tf out of there too imo. She's curious and wants more from life. She's still figuring herself out, but wherever she comes to, it won't be to wanting a simple return to the metaphorical "womb" of the vault she left and/or be a parent's child again - it's to grow up. Forge her own path, make her own mistakes. Figure out who she is. She already has a father; Ellie never did. She's an adult; Ellie is a child. She's the lead protagonist of an ensemble where the male characters are, respectively, her echo (Max) with a similar arc and her shadow (Cooper); Ellie was a sidekick to a protagonist in game 1/season 1.

It's amusing to me to think of Cooper trying to be like a dad to her -- but precisely because that isn't what Lucy wants and it would be hilarious if he tried in his super awkward, broken way to express admiration and respect like that. But for fandom to just automatically slot her into the role of sunshine sidekick child when she has her own story and it isn't that is weird to me. I don't see any justification for it narratively.

Do I think they're going to get together in canon? No, I think they're supposed to have the intense "good guy"/rogue dynamics with subtextual eroticism that are common between men in Westerns (like, say, Boyd and Raylan from Justified - Boyd being one of Walton Goggins' most celebrated roles; could they have chosen him because they wanted that kind of vibe for Lucy's lead?) only Lucy is a female lead (shrug) and like in those Westerns the canon love interests are already set BUT it will be fun to watch their "....how are two people so intimate and not fucking???" stuff go down and non-canon shipping will be fun -- and the canon relationships are well written (a show with two well written canon romances! one tragic and the other hopeful - delightful tbqh) so it can be enjoyable on multiple levels.

#lucy maclean #fallout tv #fallout 2024 #my meta #fallout meta

[mswyrr]

I know Westworld fell apart, but the same folks doing Fallout also did Person of Interest, which had one of the strongest conclusions I've seen from a TV show. So there's a mixed track record involved but reason for hope they stick the landing here.

#fallout 2024 #fallout tv

[mswyrr]

Getting overly wrapped up in shipping wars or on people shipping the "wrong" thing is silly, reducing all of your enjoyment with a TV show to shipping is silly... but so is acting like caring about a character's relationships and how they play out and if they play out in ways that are true to their characterization can't ever be a part of "legitimate" character analysis lol. That's a part of character writing! That's a thing that writers of TV, books, movies, video games, etc. spend a lot of time thinking about, planning out, wanting to make convincing. It's not a wholly separable thing. A big part of how "characterization" is defined is through characters' relationships with other characters, and that includes romantic and sexual relationships.

If people are doing the last activity from the first sentence there, and you're dismissing it as "just caring about shipping," then you are the one who is being silly and shallow in that situation.

#romance #canon romance writing and fandom shipping are both about love stories #but serve very different goals! #even when they overlap they serve different goals

[mswyrr]

I killed a lot of people, Eve.

I know.

#killing eve #villaneve #wlw art

[mswyrr]

Giving her his back was acknowledging she had the right to kill him if she wanted.

That's why he made her walk out ahead with her back to him when he was being an asshole.

He reversed it by letting her have his back and the choice of what to do with him.

#vaultghoul #fallout meta #cooper howard #lucy maclean #fallout 2024 #fallout tv

[mswyrr]

I was re-watching fallout (as you do) and in the beginning when Lucy is introducing herself, she says she loves taking walks and watching movies with her dad - who we now know is a biiiig fan of Westerns, and a certain actor in particular. It cuts to the TV:

Now wait a minute. That looks kinda familiar 🧐 ... Coop, is that you?

Then in episode 3 we get this:

can confirm what we all were thinking is true: Lucy watched Cooper Howard movies with her dad 😂

I can't wait until she finds out lol

#omggg #lucy maclean #cooper howard #fallout 2024 #fallout tv

[mswyrr]

lucy gray baird

#the ballad of songbirds and snakes #lucy gray baird #fanart

[mswyrr]

there’s so much pathologizing over why enemies to lovers is a popular trope (something something the normalization of abuse something something) when the simplest and less moronic answer is that narratives thrive on irony and reversals, and there’s no greater irony than characters going from hating each other’s guts to loving each other unconditionally. raw thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

#enemies to lovers #it's about the Drama and transformation

[mswyrr]

Here's the full glory of the "I'm not like other ghoulfuckers" post

"Hotter ghouls with better morals" 😂 this is comedy gold

#some anti bullshit

[mswyrr]

"Hotter ghouls with better morals" 😂 this is comedy gold

#some anti bullshit

[mswyrr]

obsessed with their failmarriage

#fallout 2024 #cooper howard #barb howard #fallout tv #fanart

[mswyrr]

They don't mean Barb to be an unsympathetic figure but rather a tragic one - that was my interpretation of the season and esp of them giving her the first "war never changes" line (which Cooper then echoes) and this explanation of that choice supports that for me

And then having Cooper echo it 200 years later - she despaired first and then he did too

#barb howard #cooper howard #fallout 2024 #fallout tv #fallout meta

[mswyrr]

#katniss everdeen #the hunger games

[mswyrr]

The video games to prestige TV pipeline has now given me not one but two sad girl dad cowboys with a talent in the arts

#joel miller #cooper howard #fallout tv #fallout 2024 #the last of us hbo #I bet you Cooper can sing too - the type of goody-goody cowboy his character is based on #like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers #always sang

[mswyrr]

FALLOUT 1x02

#fallout tv #fallout 2024 #maximus fallout

[mswyrr]

The Fallout show was brilliant for ensuring that each member of its primary trio experienced their own personal "End of The World." For Cooper it was the great war, for Lucy it was her marriage day turning into a bloodbath, and for Maximus it was his hometown being destroyed.

Each of these characters come from different "worlds" but all were made into something new by their own apocalypse.

#fallout meta #fallout 2024 #fallout tv #maximus fallout #cooper howard #lucy maclean