I imagine its his singular goal of finding his family that has truly kept him alive. Anyone else might have gone insane or depressed over 200 years and stopped taking the meds (or have just committed suicide).
Or cyberpsychosis in cyberpunk, you keep yourself grounded and take care of yourself and you keep your humanity mostly intact, the more you rely on it the more it takes away from you
I think there's a terminal (bagged) in Fallout 3 where ghoul from Underworld theories that "going feral" is directly tied to if the ghoul in question is unsocialized or not.
The more people around you, the less chances of you "going feral".
He even says as much when he and Lucy visit the Vault with the mind control stuff. He is hoping to find out what happened, if they’re alive or dead or “something worse.”
There’s a whole vault of VaultTec people, not entirely unreasonable to think the person running the show might’ve got the same deal. Plus all the people Kyle McLaughlin is brain bursting.
Because he knows things we don't, and we have seen many different versions of people surviving since the war, most of which being directly related to vault tech, where his wife just happened to be kind of a big shot there.
She was cryoed like the rest of them. Given her resourcefulness and intellect, She probably had her own bunker and cryo set up after learning what VT was planning in the hopes that if all else fails she could stop them in the future.
My assumption about her is that she somehow managed to get into the 30s cryo-vault to try and chase Hank. And that's how she knew to go there later after Lucy's mom escaped too. Or she escaped with them.
His wife was a Vault Tec VIP. And we’ve already seen how, at least in the vault Lucy is from, the VIPs were freezing themselves to repopulate the world in the future. So I think he has good reason to think something like that happened with his wife, and maybe the daughter too.
We don't know what vault Barb and Janey ended up in or how Cooper was separated from Janey when the bombs fell. There's a bunch of different ways people have lived to be over 200 in the Fallout universe, it's entirely possible their vault had some sort of life-extending measures in place and Cooper knew (or at least suspected) about them.
The fact that he still says 'my family' also feels a little strange, considering he and Barb were divorced, and they did not part ways on good terms. You would think he'd just say 'my daughter.' Maybe he's not talking about Janey herself, but her descendants? They'd still be his family, I can see Cooper clinging to that once a century or so has passed and he knows Janey would have died of old age by now.
Or he could also just be clinging to a delusion because it's the only thing keeping him alive at this point. That would be extremely fitting for his character.
That's a theme that carries through with a lot of other ghouls.
The vault tech ghoul in fallout 4 kept going as a vault tech rep despite being shut out and for all intents and purposes fired 200 years earlier.
The people from the slog keep going because community and spite against diamond city keeps them going, the same goes for good neighbour.
The ghoul kid in the fridge doesn't turn feral because he's waiting to see his family again.
There's one in a settlement close to the far harbour that keeps his mind by trying to unferal his family
I can't remember the timeline for Hancock and when he ghoulified but pleasure seeking is what keeps him ticking, and then afterwards it's the lone wanderer
Basically an aristocrat existing with full intellect (allegedly), yet somehow reduced in physical form to skin stretched across maybe 3-4 feet, and elevated by at least a foot, by mobility machines. Relies on attendants to constantly spritz her, or she desiccates. It's been a long time but I think it was shown, and it's NOT pretty.
She's got the brain in a jar already, like Bud and the Robobrains that were probably based on his "final form." Not a far stretch (HAHAHA) to have a skin-being like that in our favorite franchise.
I think it's a gradual process. Like that BoS guy from season 1 who got ghoulified with a syringe. He still looked human, just immortal and self-healing.
I don't know if it's canon to the games, but in the show he didn't start getting his fucked up skin until after he pulled out the arrow and it healed over looking like that. So at least in the show it looks like the skin condition is what happens to healed ghoul flesh.
During his military service, yeah? Weird that they opted not to give him any sort of signs of burn scarring in the flashbacks. I guess they could fix his looks but not the genetic damage?
It either happens afterword, or it’s like real life, a lack of Vitamin C will cause your body to unravel, every scar you’ve ever had will start to open up.
But if he was burned that badly, on his face?
He wouldn’t still have ears.
I just want another flashback to the immediate aftermath of the war. What Cooper was doing in the first days or weeks as he got his bearings. Maybe where Barb was when the bombs dropped, eventually when she becomes relevant again.
We have several pre-war scenes now, but only the birthday party scene and Fallout 4’s intro to show the immediate effects of the war. Correct me if I’m wrong and I’ve missed something.
People say Cooper is really two characters, but we’re fully missing his in-between phase, and that’s what I’m most curious about.
Not even main character, just high paying actor syndrome. As much as I want to be an elitist and say make him look like a zombie, I also know trying to get subtle facial acting through mutiple layers of make up is fucking impossible, especially for a show. So I can see why they decided to tone his down compared to one note Ghouls like Ass Jerky
Yeah, like I said it’s a massive undertaking for a show especially where instead of a two hour movie he’s filming in all those prosthetics for god knows how long making 2 season of 8 episodes
Though I will say the fact he’s now getting tight casted as “realist guys who’s faces melted off” I think he should just bite the bullet and do it already
He also does look semi-Hancocked up in close-ups lol, it isn’t like his skin is perfectly smooth, and his entire nose is gone. Definitely smoother than most ghouls but still not a ‘smoothskin’
What I honestly think is the biggest thing that throws people off is the eyes. He still has human eyes. Put those black eyeballs from Hancock’s head into Cooper’s, and he would look a lot more like a game-ghoul
Probably because those don't need makeup that still lets them speak and emote, or appear throughout the whole show to the point where it needs to be applied in a reasonable amount of time to shoot.
His skin looks like burn scars to me. So smooth and shiny. I wonder if that is a possibility for him. It he survived being burned at some point it’s possible his skin is one big scar
I mean, Hancock recently was turned a ghoul through chems, and The Ghoul is constantly taking chems to reduce his ghoulish symptoms. There are other ghouls in both Fallout 4 and the show that look much worse than them.
There are other ghouls in both Fallout 4 and the show that look much worse than them.
Don't all the other non-feral ghouls in 4 pretty much use the same face model?
Edit: for the people downvoting this, can you provide an example of a non-feral ghoul in Fallout 4 that looks much worse than Hancock? I feel like I'm going crazy when objectively they do all look like that.
No, but they looked more like wizened corpses, so less distinct from 3 and NV, where they had hair, more facial features, and even flesh wounds and weirdly colored lesions to make them distinct.
I'll always prefer the talking heads from the first two games. The fact that they were scanned from physical clay models that weren't constrained by game engine limitations gave them so much character.
They got a lot more depth to them because of that -- while I think FO3's are a pretty good compromise it's clear that they were perhaps limited due to tech to make them look like classic Fallout ghouls. The textures look flat -- which is to be expected from an old game.
FO4 they could've pursued an actual decent style for the ghouls along with the rest of the game instead of the terrible inconsistent feeling one they went with -- they probably would've if Adam Adamowicz didn't pass away before then iirc.
I like the fallout 3 era aesthetic the best and I wish fallout 4 got a bit closer to that I hope one day there's a total conversation of f4 to make it look more like f3 to me f4 looks a bit generic
If they stuck with FO3's design I'd be cool with it tbh. Fallout 4 just doesn't look like a Fallout game to me -- it's far too colourful and, like you said, has this generic feeling to it. I have a lot of issues with Fallout 3 but they honestly did an overall pretty good job art-wise to make it feel like a sequel to classic Fallout.
I would've been fine with f4s skyscrapers if they were unique but we find them in fallout 76 I know that came after but it makes f4 feel even less unique along with a lot of seemingly meaningless details like the nuka cola vending machines, the differences in robots, etc makes it feel like a soft reboot or different series loosely based on fallout
Harold might not technically be a ghoul (though the definition of what a "ghoul" is changes so much between games that's hard to pin down), but he is at least explicitly stated to look like a ghoul. Between him and Set, I think we get a good picture of what their appearance is.
Most of the ghouls in the show look in between FO4 and NV ghouls. Cooper is a special case because you need to be able to see his performance through the makeup.
I actually think the show "justifies" the hate against them more by making it seem like any ghoul can just become farel rather than just be ugly. Hating for looks is bad, but being scared or hating because of the safety concern is another.
I mean yeah, definitely a concern, although it seems like the ghoul you know going suddenly feral without any signs building up to it is less likely than your wasteland human neighbor deciding to just kill you for your stuff.
Discrimination isn't really rational though, of course.
I think in the game though it's portrayed as bigoted stereotype rather than a reality. It was used as a way to drive out the ghouls rather than being based on fact. McDonough was a synth plant meant to create hysteria
When you see the Ghouls that are being held hostage at the raider drug store or even the scene where we meet the ass jerky donator. It’s clear that the ghouls with little to no means can’t afford their anti-ghoulification drugs and it causes their symptoms to run rampant. The Ghoul (Goggins) has been pumped with such drugs from himself and even still while he was buried in the graveyard. Thus, he’s still gooey.
Well I'll be honest comparing the DC ghouls with others is unfair. DC was blasted pretty hard. But so was L.A. since it was called the "Boneyard'.
Salt Lake City was apparently also glassed if I remember correctly, lived in Utah for a while so remember those jokes.
But I think resources is probably a big factor in keep your looks. If you lived off scraps and barely kept your self from going feral, I bet your condition wouldn't look good either. But if you've done well, even a pre-war ghoul would have skin that could fool a smooth skin, and be an envy of any other ghoul.
Really hope if they end up returning to the west coast for the next fallout game they lean into the classic aesthetic and make the ghouls look terrifying again, or maybe add more variety and the terrifying looking ones are a variant of them
It would be cool if they leaned into levels of Ghoulification. Minor ones like the Soda Plant Manager (from the show, forget the guys name), medium ones like Cooper and Fallout 4 style, major like Fallout 3/NV, then Feral and how ever many tiers of abomination they want to go lol
Personally I'd like to see a new setting. There's no much of America that hasn't been touched. No reason to tread over old grounds just yet. Personally I think a east Texas/ Louisiana Fallout game would be sweet!imagine all the creepy stuff hiding in the Bayou
In all seriousness, you gotta respect the effort Goggins puts in to play the Ghoul. Not many actors would cut off their own nose for a role. Maybe Daniel Day Lewis.
Fallout 1/2 to 3 can be excused by Graphical upgrades, Fallout 4 on the other hand is... clearly different, both for ferals and for normals, as for Cooper.. nose aside, he just looks really gaunt and a bit sunburnt, but that's likely more due to practicality than anything - it's a TV show, not a movie, you can't expect someone to cake on quite as many layers of restrictive, uncomfortable makeup and prosthetics.
Older designs look cooler, but the less-fucked-up versions kinda make more sense. Makes it seem like ghoulification stabilizes at a certain point. The older ones look about ready to disintegrate but then act closer fully to functioning people.
I miss my necrotic gonorrhea rotten looking ghouls. Ghouls are just starting to look like plastic surgery gone wrong with “I’ve been on this job site for 40 years” leathery looking.
The civilized ghouls from 3 and New Vegas are my favorites. They look like they're actively rotting, flaking, and otherwise falling apart in patches all around their bodies. Plus the dried-out, faded cloudiness in their eyes looks good. They genuinely resemble walking, radiation-poisoned corpses that refused to die.
The ones from 4, 76, and the show look good, I'll give them that, but they don't really look like they're actively rotting. They just look like dried-out burn victims. Plus, I hate how many of them have intact heads of hair.
When it comes to ferals, though? The ones from 4 look much better than the ones from 3 and New Vegas. They're horrific, degenerated, and pitiful -- and as dangerous as they are creepy. The way they lunge at you is so good.
It's pretty much just the old movie/TV adaptation trope of "this character has a horrible disfigurement, how terrifying/ugly! Conventionally attractive actor with small facial scar".
Like, I think in lore ghouls are really supposed to be nasty. Like they both look and smell like corpses in late stage decay, and that's why they're hated and feared, and the accepted slur for them is "zombie". They're something that would be legitimately horrifying to see in real life.
But then actually capturing that visually can be difficult: I don't blame Amazon for not using effects to the same standard as something like Return of the Living Dead, because that's usually how it goes with movies Vs. TV/streaming. Nonetheless, that's probably closer to how ghouls are supposed to be. It's probably also to do with it being harder to have a legitimately ugly protagonist that you're supposed to relate to, which unfortunately is something that's hardwired into the human psyche even if we are consciously less shallow (which is also why many villains in media are disfigured or disabled).
Idk, I'd like to see de-yassified, legit zombie-looking ghouls in the games one day: the ferals in 4 are probably the closest we'll get, though.
Ghouls in 1/2 were still under a more cartoony, exaggerated art style, so they could more easily get away with huge patches of missing skin, exposed eye sockets, etc. With 3 and NV, and their more realistic presentation, I feel like the ghoul designs went too far. That doesn’t look like a person who could walk around and make conversation. That looks like someone in constant, agonizing pain. Huge patches of exposed muscle and rotting flesh. They’ve got the same characteristics, but the overall art design gives them very different vibes. Compare a zombie from, say, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, and a zombie from The Walking Dead.
I think 4/76 struck a good middle ground. Warped, tight flesh and missing noses. They don’t look great, but they also don’t look like they’re about to collapse in a pile of organs
yeah it makes more sense for bos to see all ghouls as abominations because imagine seeing what looks like a rotting corpse talking to you and is still alive somehow. and also a vast majority of them end up as mindless zombies
I imagine there’s some makeup/prosthetic process practicalities in play. Uglier ghouls are a lot further from Goggins’ actual appearance and a lot harder to recreate exactly the same every time. More detail, more deformity = more time in the chair and less time to shoot per working day. An hour more a day is going to add up quick, especially with a main character who’s part of a high percentage of scenes.
Yeh really wasn't a fan of how the ghouls started looking in fallout 4. Too rubbery. In 3 and NV they look way more like they're actually deteriorating.
THe one thing I dislike a lot from 4 is that Ferals and non ferals look so different. You shouldn't be able to tell if a ghoul is feral or not from far away unless you watch how they move. Else why would people be worried about going feral if it causes physical deformations that are glaring obvious? I'm glad the TV show just has ferals as regular ghouls
I hate that you can tell he’s just wearing a mask everytime he turns his head. You see the mask folds as he moves. The first episode got him good then went with mask in later episodes
They did it with everything in fallout. Fallout 1 was so bleak and morally questionable. Fallout 3 did a good job of the ghouls but they made them more appealing so they can be companions
It’s like a really really really slow recovery process. I imagine that the day the bombs fell they had absolutely no skin and it took 200 years just to look like Deadpool.
you have different iterations of the game engine. For example power armor looks bigger and works differently in 4&76 than it does in 3 and NV. That’s just a graphical and engine upgrade. Same with the ghouls to a degree. 4 has some pretty gnarly looking ones too. It does seem to also affect some people differently and may have stages that are entirely dependent on the individual ghoul. There are elderly pre war ghouls still around 220 years after the bombs dropped but some ghouls turn feral instantly. We don’t fully understand why some people go feral faster than others.
Idk, I'd the world of Fallout all of these can be cannon. A ghoul is a living corpse and dead body's in the real world decompose in different wildly different ways.
My head canon for why Cooper looks so good for a 200 year old ghoul is because he was exposed to some form of FEV. That combined with ghoulification made him look like that.
F4 needed more variations for Ghouls, just one fave type for everyone is bad. There should have been Ghouls that look like ferals, and unic ghoulish hair styles which shouldnt have lots of hair.
In TV show Cooper just looks very good compared to others even from the show. Thadeus got turned into Ghoul/Suoermutant recently and he still looks worse than Cooper.
The ghouls only look like that because every injury they get just becomes scar tissue. If a ghoul doesn't have any injuries they will look pretty normal. I don't know why it's a right of passage for each one to cut off their noses but whatever
To be fair, ferals in FTV look pretty wild as well. It's Cooper, who looks more human like, probably due to meds.
Mf is doing everything in his power to avoid going full ghoul.
Can we really blame him though ??? Like who would willingly allow themselves to go full ghoul if there was a way to prevent it???
I imagine its his singular goal of finding his family that has truly kept him alive. Anyone else might have gone insane or depressed over 200 years and stopped taking the meds (or have just committed suicide).
It’s my own personal theory that going feral is like going hollow in dark souls.
agreed. it seems like it's more likely to not go feral if you still have a sense of purpose.
But... it's fairly common for ghouls who have obsessions or repetitive jobs to develop, hence their tendency to maintain their addictions.
That's what I headcanon as well and going hollow is a great analogy for it.
Or cyberpsychosis in cyberpunk, you keep yourself grounded and take care of yourself and you keep your humanity mostly intact, the more you rely on it the more it takes away from you
I think there's a terminal (bagged) in Fallout 3 where ghoul from Underworld theories that "going feral" is directly tied to if the ghoul in question is unsocialized or not.
The more people around you, the less chances of you "going feral".
I was just going to say this same thing. Its the motivation to keep going. To somehow not lose yourself.
Don't you dare go feral
What makes him think his family is still alive after 200 years? Does he assume they are cryo frozen?
I think its.more finding out what happened, with the chance, that just maybe theyre alive
He even says as much when he and Lucy visit the Vault with the mind control stuff. He is hoping to find out what happened, if they’re alive or dead or “something worse.”
I think he himself believes ghoulification is “something worse”.
Imagine looking for Gavin but it takes 200 years
[deleted]
There’s a whole vault of VaultTec people, not entirely unreasonable to think the person running the show might’ve got the same deal. Plus all the people Kyle McLaughlin is brain bursting.
Maybe he has some great-great-great-grandchildren running around,
Because he knows things we don't, and we have seen many different versions of people surviving since the war, most of which being directly related to vault tech, where his wife just happened to be kind of a big shot there.
I mean, Moldaver somehow also survived 200 years without becoming a ghoul, so clearly there is some tech out there that can keep you alive and normal
She was cryoed like the rest of them. Given her resourcefulness and intellect, She probably had her own bunker and cryo set up after learning what VT was planning in the hopes that if all else fails she could stop them in the future.
My assumption about her is that she somehow managed to get into the 30s cryo-vault to try and chase Hank. And that's how she knew to go there later after Lucy's mom escaped too. Or she escaped with them.
His wife was a Vault Tec VIP. And we’ve already seen how, at least in the vault Lucy is from, the VIPs were freezing themselves to repopulate the world in the future. So I think he has good reason to think something like that happened with his wife, and maybe the daughter too.
We don't know what vault Barb and Janey ended up in or how Cooper was separated from Janey when the bombs fell. There's a bunch of different ways people have lived to be over 200 in the Fallout universe, it's entirely possible their vault had some sort of life-extending measures in place and Cooper knew (or at least suspected) about them.
The fact that he still says 'my family' also feels a little strange, considering he and Barb were divorced, and they did not part ways on good terms. You would think he'd just say 'my daughter.' Maybe he's not talking about Janey herself, but her descendants? They'd still be his family, I can see Cooper clinging to that once a century or so has passed and he knows Janey would have died of old age by now.
Or he could also just be clinging to a delusion because it's the only thing keeping him alive at this point. That would be extremely fitting for his character.
That's a theme that carries through with a lot of other ghouls.
The vault tech ghoul in fallout 4 kept going as a vault tech rep despite being shut out and for all intents and purposes fired 200 years earlier.
The people from the slog keep going because community and spite against diamond city keeps them going, the same goes for good neighbour.
The ghoul kid in the fridge doesn't turn feral because he's waiting to see his family again.
There's one in a settlement close to the far harbour that keeps his mind by trying to unferal his family
I can't remember the timeline for Hancock and when he ghoulified but pleasure seeking is what keeps him ticking, and then afterwards it's the lone wanderer
"Be safe, friend. Don't you dare go Hollow."
Yeah, you never go full ghoul.
He moisturizes.
Maybe it’s Maybelline
"Maybe it's Med-X!"
“Maybe he’s born with it” “maybe it’s crack cocaine.” 🎶
Moisturise me
Get bent, Lady Cassandra
For the non-Whovians
Basically an aristocrat existing with full intellect (allegedly), yet somehow reduced in physical form to skin stretched across maybe 3-4 feet, and elevated by at least a foot, by mobility machines. Relies on attendants to constantly spritz her, or she desiccates. It's been a long time but I think it was shown, and it's NOT pretty.
Honestly, Lady Cassandra is the type of absurdity that would fit right into Fallout
She's got the brain in a jar already, like Bud and the Robobrains that were probably based on his "final form." Not a far stretch (HAHAHA) to have a skin-being like that in our favorite franchise.
He bathes in the blood of his enemies, it's working wonders for him.
Not sure if it is the blood or the chems in said blood, but you can't argue with the results!
Ooooh maybe its nightstalker squeezins. That would be a hilarious moisturizer.
Most likely he was exposed to the minimal amount of radiation required to be ghoulified
I think it's a gradual process. Like that BoS guy from season 1 who got ghoulified with a syringe. He still looked human, just immortal and self-healing.
Decades of scarring are what he's missing to look like Cooper
I don't know if it's canon to the games, but in the show he didn't start getting his fucked up skin until after he pulled out the arrow and it healed over looking like that. So at least in the show it looks like the skin condition is what happens to healed ghoul flesh.
So he’s like Deadpool I guess. Can heal himself but looks like… that
due to *burns. They've mentioned he sustained serious burn injuries, that forever changes the genetic makeup of the cells.
During his military service, yeah? Weird that they opted not to give him any sort of signs of burn scarring in the flashbacks. I guess they could fix his looks but not the genetic damage?
It could be his body that sustained burns. I don’t think we ever see him in short sleeves or shorts in flashbacks
He's sitting in a hottub in season 1
I stand corrected, I forgort
It either happens afterword, or it’s like real life, a lack of Vitamin C will cause your body to unravel, every scar you’ve ever had will start to open up. But if he was burned that badly, on his face? He wouldn’t still have ears.
I assumed when the bombs dropped he was close to something with high heat or right near an explosion that burned him when he turned into a ghoul
I just want another flashback to the immediate aftermath of the war. What Cooper was doing in the first days or weeks as he got his bearings. Maybe where Barb was when the bombs dropped, eventually when she becomes relevant again.
We have several pre-war scenes now, but only the birthday party scene and Fallout 4’s intro to show the immediate effects of the war. Correct me if I’m wrong and I’ve missed something.
People say Cooper is really two characters, but we’re fully missing his in-between phase, and that’s what I’m most curious about.
Edit: sorry for the random yap sesh
I'm sure we'll see it eventually
when was that? i totally missed it smh
Like the Marked men from Lonesome Road
Also main character syndrome
Not even main character, just high paying actor syndrome. As much as I want to be an elitist and say make him look like a zombie, I also know trying to get subtle facial acting through mutiple layers of make up is fucking impossible, especially for a show. So I can see why they decided to tone his down compared to one note Ghouls like Ass Jerky
He's also going to be in that make-up a lot more than any of the other actors or extras, so there's also just the concern of basic safety and comfort.
Yeah, like I said it’s a massive undertaking for a show especially where instead of a two hour movie he’s filming in all those prosthetics for god knows how long making 2 season of 8 episodes
Like holy hell that sounds like torture
Even as little modification as what the hobbits went through for lord of the rings takes hours, and that was just feet, clothes and a wig.
Is he really a great actor if he isn't willing to go full method acting and melt his face off for the role?
Well he can't, seeing as he has to also act the pre-war scenes. Maybe if we get another actor we can get him to melt his face off
He could just melt his face off halfway through production, after the pre-war scenes were wrapped?
Honestly, he's being pretty unreasonable about this.
Thats a question for another day
Though I will say the fact he’s now getting tight casted as “realist guys who’s faces melted off” I think he should just bite the bullet and do it already
RIP Ass Jerky, your death did not go to waste
Ass Jerky. Good one.
You gotta admit, that guy looked like a fallout 3 ghoul. Dude killed it.
He also does look semi-Hancocked up in close-ups lol, it isn’t like his skin is perfectly smooth, and his entire nose is gone. Definitely smoother than most ghouls but still not a ‘smoothskin’
What I honestly think is the biggest thing that throws people off is the eyes. He still has human eyes. Put those black eyeballs from Hancock’s head into Cooper’s, and he would look a lot more like a game-ghoul
I wish they'd gone that route with the eyes. We get enough of his face in the flashbacks, we could've hid him a bit more in the ghoul
just one eye, to break symmetry.
He looks like if a ghoul had botox injections
You can leave the Silver Screen, but the Silver Screen never leaves you
Probably because those don't need makeup that still lets them speak and emote, or appear throughout the whole show to the point where it needs to be applied in a reasonable amount of time to shoot.
I mean he was a Hollywood actor and some of them don't age....being Walton Goggins helps too lol
“Do More Drugs.”
Yes Sir!
I mean, he was an actor before the bombs.
His skin looks like burn scars to me. So smooth and shiny. I wonder if that is a possibility for him. It he survived being burned at some point it’s possible his skin is one big scar
I suspect it's more due to main character syndrome
I think it was just not wanting to force a main character to wear that much makeup for that long
I mean, Hancock recently was turned a ghoul through chems, and The Ghoul is constantly taking chems to reduce his ghoulish symptoms. There are other ghouls in both Fallout 4 and the show that look much worse than them.
The ghouls in the super duper mart in the tv show looked pretty gnarly, too
They had full heads of hair still?
And some living people are completely bald. Don't kink shame.
Wouldnt be the first time a Ghoul wore a wig
Every non-feral ghoul in Fallout 4 has the same face.
Yeah, and I noticed the King had an F4 face unlike the others
Tbf like most the game has same face syndrome. There's like 10 face models and most people look like one of em.
Harold also isn’t even a ghoul lol
I'm pretty sure he's only considered a ghoul because he doesn't really fit into any other specific categories than just FEV mutant.
Don't all the other non-feral ghouls in 4 pretty much use the same face model?
Edit: for the people downvoting this, can you provide an example of a non-feral ghoul in Fallout 4 that looks much worse than Hancock? I feel like I'm going crazy when objectively they do all look like that.
No, but they looked more like wizened corpses, so less distinct from 3 and NV, where they had hair, more facial features, and even flesh wounds and weirdly colored lesions to make them distinct.
I can't imagine why your being downvoted, they all look the same lol
They at least changed Zao a little bit since he is Chinese lol.
I love the classic ghouls tbh, Set just looks iconic
Set is the only ghoul with a talking head in the classic games though.
Don't forget my man Harold
He's not a ghoul though. He fell in a fev vat, while exploring with a certian doctor.
Ah my bad, thanks for the correction, been a while since i played Fallout 1, it's really damn good once you get used to the gameplay
Reminds me of the mutants from Krush Kill N Destroy 2 .
F3 ghouls were the best
I'll always prefer the talking heads from the first two games. The fact that they were scanned from physical clay models that weren't constrained by game engine limitations gave them so much character.
They got a lot more depth to them because of that -- while I think FO3's are a pretty good compromise it's clear that they were perhaps limited due to tech to make them look like classic Fallout ghouls. The textures look flat -- which is to be expected from an old game.
FO4 they could've pursued an actual decent style for the ghouls along with the rest of the game instead of the terrible inconsistent feeling one they went with -- they probably would've if Adam Adamowicz didn't pass away before then iirc.
I like the fallout 3 era aesthetic the best and I wish fallout 4 got a bit closer to that I hope one day there's a total conversation of f4 to make it look more like f3 to me f4 looks a bit generic
If they stuck with FO3's design I'd be cool with it tbh. Fallout 4 just doesn't look like a Fallout game to me -- it's far too colourful and, like you said, has this generic feeling to it. I have a lot of issues with Fallout 3 but they honestly did an overall pretty good job art-wise to make it feel like a sequel to classic Fallout.
I would've been fine with f4s skyscrapers if they were unique but we find them in fallout 76 I know that came after but it makes f4 feel even less unique along with a lot of seemingly meaningless details like the nuka cola vending machines, the differences in robots, etc makes it feel like a soft reboot or different series loosely based on fallout
Isn't set the only goul talking head, Harold if you're being generous
Harold might not technically be a ghoul (though the definition of what a "ghoul" is changes so much between games that's hard to pin down), but he is at least explicitly stated to look like a ghoul. Between him and Set, I think we get a good picture of what their appearance is.
I forget how scary 3 was.. This remake can't come quickly enough for me.
Most of the ghouls in the show look in between FO4 and NV ghouls. Cooper is a special case because you need to be able to see his performance through the makeup.
The character also talks many times about the multitude of drugs he’s on to not go full ghoul. It makes sense he looks less ghoulish.
It does kinda take away from the pervasive discrimination against ghouls in the games when they just start looking like wrinkly people without a nose.
Not that humans need a "good" reason to discriminate against others, but it was more understandable when the ghouls were much more monstrous.
I actually think the show "justifies" the hate against them more by making it seem like any ghoul can just become farel rather than just be ugly. Hating for looks is bad, but being scared or hating because of the safety concern is another.
I mean yeah, definitely a concern, although it seems like the ghoul you know going suddenly feral without any signs building up to it is less likely than your wasteland human neighbor deciding to just kill you for your stuff.
Discrimination isn't really rational though, of course.
There's a ghoul settlement in F4 where their leader makes this argument verbatim. Ghouls are great, such an interesting aspect of the setting
Any ghoul being able to go feral is the reason ghouls aren’t allowed in Diamond City in fo4
I think in the game though it's portrayed as bigoted stereotype rather than a reality. It was used as a way to drive out the ghouls rather than being based on fact. McDonough was a synth plant meant to create hysteria
F3 and New Vegas Ghouls are the best
I mean I think the show has a good story for it.
SPOILERS
When you see the Ghouls that are being held hostage at the raider drug store or even the scene where we meet the ass jerky donator. It’s clear that the ghouls with little to no means can’t afford their anti-ghoulification drugs and it causes their symptoms to run rampant. The Ghoul (Goggins) has been pumped with such drugs from himself and even still while he was buried in the graveyard. Thus, he’s still gooey.
My headcanon is they all exist simultaneously and there are varying variety of ghouls. Some are more lucky than others.
Well I'll be honest comparing the DC ghouls with others is unfair. DC was blasted pretty hard. But so was L.A. since it was called the "Boneyard'.
Salt Lake City was apparently also glassed if I remember correctly, lived in Utah for a while so remember those jokes.
But I think resources is probably a big factor in keep your looks. If you lived off scraps and barely kept your self from going feral, I bet your condition wouldn't look good either. But if you've done well, even a pre-war ghoul would have skin that could fool a smooth skin, and be an envy of any other ghoul.
I hate that the ghouls seem to be using Hancock as a blueprint because he's a young ghoul. He only got ghoulified a few years back.
My take is that Coop uses lots of drugs as a countermeasure for going feral, same for Hancock. Rest is just going along with the inevitable.
Really hope if they end up returning to the west coast for the next fallout game they lean into the classic aesthetic and make the ghouls look terrifying again, or maybe add more variety and the terrifying looking ones are a variant of them
It would be cool if they leaned into levels of Ghoulification. Minor ones like the Soda Plant Manager (from the show, forget the guys name), medium ones like Cooper and Fallout 4 style, major like Fallout 3/NV, then Feral and how ever many tiers of abomination they want to go lol
The show guy is Thaddeus
I think Thaddeus hasn’t fully rotted away yet
Yes, of course, the more contact you have with the bombs, the more you become
Personally I'd like to see a new setting. There's no much of America that hasn't been touched. No reason to tread over old grounds just yet. Personally I think a east Texas/ Louisiana Fallout game would be sweet!imagine all the creepy stuff hiding in the Bayou
New orleans would be incredible
In all seriousness, you gotta respect the effort Goggins puts in to play the Ghoul. Not many actors would cut off their own nose for a role. Maybe Daniel Day Lewis.
Fallout 1/2 to 3 can be excused by Graphical upgrades, Fallout 4 on the other hand is... clearly different, both for ferals and for normals, as for Cooper.. nose aside, he just looks really gaunt and a bit sunburnt, but that's likely more due to practicality than anything - it's a TV show, not a movie, you can't expect someone to cake on quite as many layers of restrictive, uncomfortable makeup and prosthetics.
Older designs look cooler, but the less-fucked-up versions kinda make more sense. Makes it seem like ghoulification stabilizes at a certain point. The older ones look about ready to disintegrate but then act closer fully to functioning people.
Abominations!
Someone did not watch the newest episode
Do More Drugs to keep your skin nice and moisturized.
The fresh ghoulified kids this season look more fucked up than the ghoul that’s been around for over 200 years,
TRUE make them absolutely revolting again please! I want to struggle to look at them
I miss my necrotic gonorrhea rotten looking ghouls. Ghouls are just starting to look like plastic surgery gone wrong with “I’ve been on this job site for 40 years” leathery looking.
The civilized ghouls from 3 and New Vegas are my favorites. They look like they're actively rotting, flaking, and otherwise falling apart in patches all around their bodies. Plus the dried-out, faded cloudiness in their eyes looks good. They genuinely resemble walking, radiation-poisoned corpses that refused to die.
The ones from 4, 76, and the show look good, I'll give them that, but they don't really look like they're actively rotting. They just look like dried-out burn victims. Plus, I hate how many of them have intact heads of hair.
When it comes to ferals, though? The ones from 4 look much better than the ones from 3 and New Vegas. They're horrific, degenerated, and pitiful -- and as dangerous as they are creepy. The way they lunge at you is so good.
I feel like they can all coexist as various stages of ghoulification.
It's pretty much just the old movie/TV adaptation trope of "this character has a horrible disfigurement, how terrifying/ugly! Conventionally attractive actor with small facial scar".
Like, I think in lore ghouls are really supposed to be nasty. Like they both look and smell like corpses in late stage decay, and that's why they're hated and feared, and the accepted slur for them is "zombie". They're something that would be legitimately horrifying to see in real life.
But then actually capturing that visually can be difficult: I don't blame Amazon for not using effects to the same standard as something like Return of the Living Dead, because that's usually how it goes with movies Vs. TV/streaming. Nonetheless, that's probably closer to how ghouls are supposed to be. It's probably also to do with it being harder to have a legitimately ugly protagonist that you're supposed to relate to, which unfortunately is something that's hardwired into the human psyche even if we are consciously less shallow (which is also why many villains in media are disfigured or disabled).
Idk, I'd like to see de-yassified, legit zombie-looking ghouls in the games one day: the ferals in 4 are probably the closest we'll get, though.
oldschool ghouls were so iconic, i wish they would bring back the mutants calling humans "normies"
is it just me or do feral ghouls seem to always end up looking like the ghoulifed people from the game before?
Ghouls in 1/2 were still under a more cartoony, exaggerated art style, so they could more easily get away with huge patches of missing skin, exposed eye sockets, etc. With 3 and NV, and their more realistic presentation, I feel like the ghoul designs went too far. That doesn’t look like a person who could walk around and make conversation. That looks like someone in constant, agonizing pain. Huge patches of exposed muscle and rotting flesh. They’ve got the same characteristics, but the overall art design gives them very different vibes. Compare a zombie from, say, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, and a zombie from The Walking Dead.
I think 4/76 struck a good middle ground. Warped, tight flesh and missing noses. They don’t look great, but they also don’t look like they’re about to collapse in a pile of organs
Imagine if they made Cooper look like Set or Roy Phillips, etc. It would just look comical on a main character.
And imagine how much time it would take Walton Goggins to get all the make-up and prosthetics
The older a ghoul survives the more their body heals and adapts to the damage
Maybe as more time goes on gouls look less fucked because less radiation or sum like that? Idk
yeah it makes more sense for bos to see all ghouls as abominations because imagine seeing what looks like a rotting corpse talking to you and is still alive somehow. and also a vast majority of them end up as mindless zombies
Funny as fuck
My biggest complaint with the show is the ghouls, I think they look terrible,
I really do wish they kept the ghouls looking just absolutely disgusting
I miss when ghouls were barely comparable to humans
Does anyone else think Cooper Howard is a marked man, not a standard ghoul? It might explain the way he looks
He still looks gross as hell to me.
Stupid Sexy Ghouls
r/FalloutMemes
I Completely agree.
Fo3 had the best ghoul faces tbh. Just fucking disgusting
"Some of these kids are ghouls!"*
No, they just lost their fucking noses, calm down.
Hancock is a lot younger than the rest and he never left humid ass Massachusetts
To be fair Hancock isn't a normal ghoul. He just got too high and took something he shouldn't.
He's Frank Reynolds' good twin.
I imagine there’s some makeup/prosthetic process practicalities in play. Uglier ghouls are a lot further from Goggins’ actual appearance and a lot harder to recreate exactly the same every time. More detail, more deformity = more time in the chair and less time to shoot per working day. An hour more a day is going to add up quick, especially with a main character who’s part of a high percentage of scenes.
Chris haversam was peak ghoul yassifaction
Calamity is so fiiiine I stg
I think the only thing that was missing in the TV show was the eyes. If they gave Walton some gray contacts he probably would look cooler.
They tonned down the body horror of ghouls over the years, kinda sad because it's what made them ghouls and not dudes with minor skin disease
Yeh really wasn't a fan of how the ghouls started looking in fallout 4. Too rubbery. In 3 and NV they look way more like they're actually deteriorating.
Those f3 ghouls actually got a gut reaction out of me compared to the ones from f4.
THe one thing I dislike a lot from 4 is that Ferals and non ferals look so different. You shouldn't be able to tell if a ghoul is feral or not from far away unless you watch how they move. Else why would people be worried about going feral if it causes physical deformations that are glaring obvious? I'm glad the TV show just has ferals as regular ghouls
I hate that you can tell he’s just wearing a mask everytime he turns his head. You see the mask folds as he moves. The first episode got him good then went with mask in later episodes
I literally can't play Fo4 without a mod that changes the ghouls to look uglier and have more distinct colors and head shapes. They look so weird
They looked best in 3/new Vegas. But I honestly gotta give it to 3 for having a few that look particularly hideous
I agree
They did it with everything in fallout. Fallout 1 was so bleak and morally questionable. Fallout 3 did a good job of the ghouls but they made them more appealing so they can be companions
If they would have kept everything the same in each game, it would be extremely boring.
“Would-ification”… people be getting “wouldies”
It’s like a really really really slow recovery process. I imagine that the day the bombs fell they had absolutely no skin and it took 200 years just to look like Deadpool.
Who’s that guy in the last pic? I have similar features and I might bring it to my barber
Australian model Mitchell Wick
Man sorry to hear you don’t have a nose.
It sure seems like, for most of us here, the ghoul model you like the most is dependent almost entirely upon which game was your first Fallout.
Willow was fit as hell.
you have different iterations of the game engine. For example power armor looks bigger and works differently in 4&76 than it does in 3 and NV. That’s just a graphical and engine upgrade. Same with the ghouls to a degree. 4 has some pretty gnarly looking ones too. It does seem to also affect some people differently and may have stages that are entirely dependent on the individual ghoul. There are elderly pre war ghouls still around 220 years after the bombs dropped but some ghouls turn feral instantly. We don’t fully understand why some people go feral faster than others.
Idk, I'd the world of Fallout all of these can be cannon. A ghoul is a living corpse and dead body's in the real world decompose in different wildly different ways.
Cooper is on that ghoul + subscription
His connections and knowledge pre-war probably means he had access to means to slow the mutation
If anyone could have done it, it's him
My head canon for why Cooper looks so good for a 200 year old ghoul is because he was exposed to some form of FEV. That combined with ghoulification made him look like that.
Actually in the original Fallout they were all exposed to FEV.
Well! After more than 200 years, the condition of the ghouls must have improved, don't you think? And perhaps that's why they look less grotesque.
The last photo made me laugh XD
Fallout 3 style is my favorite 2d was great but how could something like that even still function
F4 needed more variations for Ghouls, just one fave type for everyone is bad. There should have been Ghouls that look like ferals, and unic ghoulish hair styles which shouldnt have lots of hair.
In TV show Cooper just looks very good compared to others even from the show. Thadeus got turned into Ghoul/Suoermutant recently and he still looks worse than Cooper.
The ghouls only look like that because every injury they get just becomes scar tissue. If a ghoul doesn't have any injuries they will look pretty normal. I don't know why it's a right of passage for each one to cut off their noses but whatever
It would be cool to run into Hancock
In exactly which way FO3 ghoul is less ugly than Harold? FO3 ghouls are way more terrifying than those from classics.
To be fair other than cooper the rest of the ghouls in the show are pretty freaky looking
It depends on your perspective. My mother said it was ugly lol