Summary

Controversially,Fallout 4makes it a little harder to build your own character. If you play as a woman, you were a lawyer before the bombs dropped. If you’re a guy, you were part of the US military, fighting in the war against China. Either way, your charactergot married and had a sonbefore the events of the game, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.

Now, it turns out that there’s even more to the male lead’s backstory: he’s a war criminal. That’s at least according to a tweet from Fallout 4’s lead writer, Emil Pagliarulo, who said that the male protagonist - often referred to by his default name, Nate - is actually the same soldier we see at the start of the firstFalloutgame. Y’know, the guy who’s cackling away as his buddy executes a Canadian citizen.

For reference, I’ll drop the original Fallout intro below. The part with the soldier in question appears around the 0:45 mark.

However, Pagliarulo walked back on thisveryquickly after many fans, understandably, took this to mean that they’d been playing as a war criminal the entire time.

Oof. I wanted to share what I thought was a cool Fallout tidbit without realizing how divisive it might be […] Not every bit of Fallout info I share is automatically canon. Nate is NOT a war criminal!

He goes on to argue that this was actually headcanon all along, and just something that he kept in his mind while writing the game. Since it wasn’t shared with the player, he doesn’t consider it part of Nate’s canon backstory. But this means that there’s nothing stopping you from roleplaying a war criminal if you want to. Don’t let Nate’s calm demeanour at the start of Fallout 4 stop you from playing as an absolute monster.

Pagliarulo may have walked back his claims now, but the story has taken on a life of its own. Already, someone’smade a modfor Fallout 4 called, “Lore Friendly Annexation of Canada PTSD overhaul”. This gives some enemies names like “Canadian Scum”, to better fit Nate’s apparent worldview.

On the whole, fans are having a lot of fun with this, with many ready to accept this as part of Fallout’s lore. Heck, it even has itsown section on the Fallout Wiki now. Sorry,Bethesda, you can’t walk back on this one.