A Bloody Mess - Analysis of the ending of Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game
(Major Fallout 1 spoilers ahead. 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. (EDIT: When I wrote this I hadn’t considered that there’s a chance the water chip could be salvaged by the vault in the alternate ending, this entire post is written under the baseless assumption that it’s not. That being said, this detail does not affect the main point I’m communicating, and this is my interpretation of the ending.) 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. 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.
Outside of playing the game as a rampant serial killer of good-aligned characters or multiple children (which makes the game extremely difficult to complete), the only way to trigger the alternate ending is a trait taken at the beginning of the game. 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 makes the game always use the goriest possible death animation for all weapon/victim combinations. While these death scenes are in the base game, they trigger very rarely and it’s unlikely you’d see them all in a non-Bloody Mess run.
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 was also motivated by the direct threat they posed to your vault, and killing him 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, more powerful 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 other ways of triggering the ending involve killing children or swaths of good-aligned characters, which are also decisions that would traumatize your character and are motivated by the player’s desire to see people suffer unnecessarily.
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 anger and hatred that they
wanted nothing more than to stand over Jacoren as he spent his final moments in
unimaginable agony, desperately crawling through his own gore in a futile effort to escape you.
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 have desensitized themselves to violence and
wanted to play the game as a power fantasy.
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” (contrast with the organized and ideology-driven super mutant army of the Master in Fallout 1). 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.”
First day of life up until 6th grade 
Jumped all the way to Freshman year of High School
Then I cut my hair Junior year, why did I do that
Slowly it started growing back and then….
I finally felt comfortable to express myself (the picture on the left was my debut)
