Fallout’s bloody wedding continues one of fiction’s longest-running tropes

The Fallout TV show isn’t particularly beautiful – at least not in the way a bride should be. The characters spend most of their time trudging through the irradiated grime of deserted California, avoiding pools of who-knows-what and drinking animal piss when absolutely necessary. It’s a harsh reality to watch, but that’s what makes the violent first episode of the Prime Video game adaptation so pivotal; the massacre wedding welcomes viewers Fallouts no-nonsense approach to love and despair. To do this effectively, Fallout mines the old trope for every last perversion.

The concept of a bloody wedding (or Red Wedding, as Game of Thrones popularized in 2013) goes back as far as humans were capable of idiotic passion – so forever. Jesus tells a parable in Matthew 22 in which Heaven features a king hosting a wedding banquet, but the guests decide to kill the king’s servants instead. Even earlier, the Odyssey describes how Odysseus instigated a grisly massacre after a team of suitors attempted to marry the queen of Ithaca, his wife Penelope. “And with that the point of the arrow thrust out through his tender neck, (…) The thick stream of the man’s blood, (…) And the bread and the roasted meat were defiled,” writes poet William Morris in his 1887 translation.

It was only natural that red weddings found their way into today’s media. Some of the most recognizable examples can be found in TV and film, including those mentioned above Game of Thronesthe 2003 revenge drama Kill BillInto Bella’s nightmare Dawnand the wedding slasher of 2019 Ready or not. But whether the cataclysmic wedding appears in classic literature, a video game like it Bloodborneor famous art such as Marc Chagall’s 1950 painting drenched in red La Mariee, it challenges your expectations for the blushing bride. Fallout main character Lucy is at least prepared for this test: she has learned all her life how to be useful in crises.

Before her doomed wedding, Lucy establishes herself as a muscular and energetic Vault Dweller: the ideal post-apocalyptic woman. She has repair skills, she says, speech skills, gymnastics skills, and has no problem handling a gun – she is also demure about it, claiming she is “not very good” at shooting, despite having her Vault Boy repeatedly impaled target in the heart. The only thing missing from Lucy’s life as a resourceful Miss America is a healthy Mr. Reproductive System, and so her Vault 33 council approves her request to breed with a Vault 32 tribute.

33 will provide the apparently starving 32 with seeds in exchange for a husband, Monty (Cameron Cowperthwaite), during the Triennial Trade; Lucy gets ready with red lipstick, pearl earrings and a Audrey Hepburn wedding dress cut below the knees. She almost perfectly follows Leola Coombs Kelley’s 1957 guide to “How to Conduct a Perfect Wedding,” which instructs a bride to wear satin white, but warns that “the formal wedding dress should just leave the toes clear to avoid tripping (. ..) Anything shorter is ugly.” Oh yeah; after a nuclear apocalypse, things are different.

Most massacre weddings are not presented as flawless. Kill BillIt is bleak black and white opening shot is already ruined from the bride’s (Uma Thurman) big day, her dress stained with blood that glues her tulle veil to the floorboards. The first boss fight in the 2023 gory zombie game Death Island 2 is with Becki the Bridewhose mutations have turned her form-fitting wedding dress into a grim sausage casing.

Image: Primevideo

But Vault-Tec became so powerful by luring its subjects with false promises of security; it convinced people that they would rather eat nuclear-resistant green beans forever than risk the uncertainty of the real world. Fallout’The first episode of the first episode deftly copies this deception by showing us a bit of Lucy’s wedding ceremony, which seems as beautiful and interchangeable as any other: the bride and groom kiss under a wedding arch tied with sunflowers, and soon it is it’s time to enjoy the reception and chat. sperm count. “I mean, cum does very important in the perpetuation of America,” says Lucy during dinner. But the problems start after she consummates her marriage.

Monty and the rest of Vault 32 are actually surface dwellers who plan to take Lucy’s father, Supervisor Hank, hostage for reasons she doesn’t yet understand. At this point, she can only accept the power of her instincts. She does not stand idly by as history recommends her, a silent “bride of Hades,” as the ancient Greeks described unmarried female virgins. Luckily for Lucy, she’s not even a virgin. So when her new husband starts to strangle her, she kicks him in the stomach. When he plunges a carving knife into her already bruised stomach, she uses a cracked blender to scoop out his throat.

A healing stimpak and a tranquilizer gun help her stay alive once she finally leaves her loved one behind to hopefully die alone on the ground. With bullets all over her chest and dark blood blooming around her stomach, Lucy now looks like: Ready or not‘s Last Bride Grace – Goodbye, Audrey Hepburn. Lucy abandons the stereotypical elegance of a bride because she has no other choice.

Image: Primevideo

Image: Primevideo

But with all her Vault 33 training, she manages to retain some of it. Even disheveled and beaten, Lucy does better than her wedding party. Fallout protects her with a sense of specialness, her inherent belief in justice and the determination to pursue it. This is again unusual for the massacre wedding trope. Although Roslin survives her infamous Red Wedding Game of Thrones, two other women, Catelyn Stark and Joyeuse Frey, are unceremonious victims of the battle. They cannot replace their status as ‘woman’ with a complex personality, as Lucy does. The calculation of their deaths is simple: Catelyn slits Joyeuse’s pale throat to punish the woman’s husband, and then her own throat is slit and the blood pours out like wine.

Yet Vault 33 sees similar carnage, and worse. The inhabitants are no match for the surface dwellers’ unrestrained brutality, and in excruciating, VATS-like slow motion combat, we spend the next few minutes watching them get crushed into powder. An infiltrator puts a handful of wedding cake in his mouth before someone else starts shooting, and a man’s blood sprays into the air like peaking ocean waves. Another man is kicked across the cornfield of 33 as if he were a football. You only have a moment to feel his skeletal pain before a surface dweller shoves an assault rifle into someone else’s mouth. After destroying the back of his skull, the offender destroys a small mob and an innocent jelly mold with brain-stained bullets.

“Remember that there is danger in overdoing (wedding celebrations),” warns Good Housekeeping in the 1957 Complete Wedding Guide. “Merriment and fun (can turn) into tense nerves and exhaustion.”

Image: Primevideo

But Lucy is the daughter of the Overseer – a leader and then a woman – before she is a wife. The rules for her are slightly different. She cannot fully become Agamemnon’s antihero Clytemnestra, who slaughters her husband after he sacrifices their daughter to a god. “How should a woman work to the utmost,” says Clytemnestra, in the face of an admonishing refrain: “My husband, dead by my right hand, a blow / Struck by a righteous craftsman.”

Fallout does not want Lucy to move completely into traditionally masculine territory, as Clytemnestra does. Lucy staggers around it instead (she has a gun, but it’s not lethal; she’s dirty, but she also wears pure white). She never completely abandons her 1950s values, which encourage her to be consistently respectful of her father. So there’s panic in her big doe eyes as she joins the fray, staring at the spilled blood and destruction, barely reacting to the sparks and bullets flying right over her head. But she rallies herself when her family is in danger and puts a tranquilizer in a woman’s eye before she can cut up Norm (Moises Arias), Lucy’s brother, with a machete.

Image: Primevideo

For this small moment, Lucy becomes an avenging angel, loosely foreshadowing the hardened morals she will later grow into. Fallout. But for now, Lucy lives in a haze Romeo and Juliet world, which is so similar to the world they experienced afterwards their ruined wedding: “All things we have ordained for celebration / Turn from their office to a black funeral,” Lord Capulet notes, “Our bridal flowers are for a buried corpse.”

Lucy seems to be sleepwalking towards the same fate. Her disfigured husband approaches her with parts of his face open like a jacket, but then her father, Hank, smashes the back of his head. Barefoot, Lucy watches quietly as Hank drowns Monty in a barrel, and the last thing she sees on her wedding night is a bomb destroying the already sparse remains of Vault 33.

And there goes another cursed wedding. Fallout making it look as dirty as centuries of poets, bards, and Quentin Tarantino have made it necessarily. But the show also manages to extract new information from it: Lucy’s wedding marks the beginning of her tarnishing innocence as well as that of the audience, and it forces her to demonstrate her competence. Always the survivor, never the bride.

Fallout is streaming on Prime Video.