Bethesda Director Makes Fallout 4 Protagonist a War Criminal

As Fallout's hype train continues full steam ahead, Bethesda's Design Director Emil Pagliarulo, the lead writer for Fallout 76 and Starfield and the living personification of the "live long enough to become the villain" quote from The Dark Knight, has taken to Twitter to retroactively label Nate, the protagonist of Fallout 4, as a war criminal.

In a move to link Fallout 4 to the original Fallout game, Pagliarulo claimed that one of the power-armored US soldiers depicted in Fallout's iconic intro is, in fact, the male player character from Fallout 4. The catch is, the intro scene in question shows two soldiers executing a captured POW and then laughing and waving to the camera. Even though, as mentioned by Pagliarulo, Nate didn't personally commit the act, his involvement would theoretically make him complicit, thus branding him a war criminal under the Geneva Convention.

Unsurprisingly, this brand-new lore drop didn't sit right with the community, with Pagliarulo and Bethesda as a whole receiving widespread criticism for attempting to retcon such significant and impactful detail as the player character's status as a war criminal within the universe:

A Nexus user by the name of Chuck Seed and Feed took it up a notch and created a hilarious mod for Fallout 4 that dubs raiders and ghouls, the foes players have to eliminate en masse, as "Canadians", describing this change as "lore-friendly".

The social media backlash prompted Pagliarulo to retract his statement and emphasize that not everything he says is automatically considered canon. "Internally, it was a cool nod to OG Fallout and a way to fictionally frame the character. It wasn't shared with the player because it was never meant to be who you think Nate is. For a player, Nate's soldier past is whatever you think it is. That is canon," the director wrote.

Over the years, Bethesda has gained a certain reputation among many Fallout fans for frequently distorting the established rules and lore of the original games, often through retcons. From the true creator of Jet to the survival of the Enclave, from a ghoul spending centuries in a fridge to the power armor's reliance on fusion cores – the list of inconsistencies introduced by Bethesda seems endless.

Now, with a character as important as the protagonist of a mainline Fallout game being branded a war criminal, only to have that status revoked on a whim, the community's complaints regarding Bethesda's handling of Fallout's lore have only intensified. Coupled with the lore-related inconsistencies of Amazon's new Fallout TV series, which Todd Howard himself claims to be canon, the question arises: What can we still consider Fallout canon at this point?

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