The Silver Shroud falls somewhere on a spectrum between genuinely really conceptually interesting and borderline meanspirited to me. As I’ve mentioned briefly before, the paradox of superheroes in the Fallout universe is that they aren’t a fundamentally weirder class of person than any of the other 1950s genre pastiche archetypes that we’re expected to take seriously, but the flip side is that superheroes would match with the rest of the Fallout idiom so perfectly, and are so modular in terms of what other genre elements they can incorporate into their own genre, that they could easily become the most overbearing element of the Fallout setting if steps aren’t taken to keep them siloed. Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 share a throughline in that they both silo superheroism by portraying it as the product of arrested development.

Kent Connolly is a sad, sad guy, with good reason. He’s been trying to keep his hobby alive for centuries- terminals in Fallout 76 reveal that he’s been adjacent to attempts to make superheroes a real thing for over 200 years, and it has never, ever worked over the long haul, and yet he keeps on trucking, trying to make everyone else see what he sees in these characters. The Shroud is a significantly different archetype of pulp hero from the ones who show up in Fallout 3- rather than a pastiche of the bloodless, stakeless four-color capes of the golden age, he’s a more directly a pastiche of The Shadow- the 1930s radio-show proto-superhero who was significantly more willing to use gun violence as a conflict resolution tool than his successors would be. This dovetails with the gameplay loop- In Fallout 3, the entire point of the superheroes is that they’re engaging in a significantly more limited playfight compared to what the Lone Wanderer gets up to on a typical Tuesday, but the Sole Survivor, when adopting the Silver Shroud persona, doesn’t really have to change their MO at all in order to embody the (admittedly somewhat exaggerated and retroactively attributed by later writers and audiences) retributive ultraviolence of the Shadow’s pulp archetype. They’re doing their normal thing in a funny voice. And the extent to which you’re just doing your normal thing is what really puts the screws to the idea that doing it in a costume is actually adding anything here. You are, at best, making a slight detour to slightly brighten a shut-ins day, and that adds a fundamental air of sadness to the entire outing. But at the end of the day, you do briefly embody the archetype. You do kick down the door and save the hostage from the gangsters. And as a result it does end up briefly straddling the line between deeply silly and deeply cool.

The other thing about The Silver Shroud is that in a roundabout way it re-enforces my standing theory that Fallout 3 was originally meant to take place within living memory of The Great War. Of the three Fallout games that directly feature living superheroes, two of them- 4 and 76- are associated with characters who were directly enmeshed in pre-war pop culture. The Mistress of Mystery and her cohort adopted the superheroic aesthetic because it would still be legible to a plurality of survivors; Kent Conolly’s rock to roll uphill forever is that he’s one of the only people left to whom any of this means anything. But in Fallout 3 the two superheroes just sort of….materialize, after 200 years, with their shticks fully formed. Furthermore, in the Hubris comics office in downtown DC you can find a pre war letter to the editor extolling the relatability of the fictional AntAgonizer, and doing so prior to starting The Superhuman Gambit gives you a unique option for talking down the real one. My strong suspicion is that in an earlier draft of the story, The AntAgonizer was written as a pre-war character who sent that letter to the editor herself as a teenager or young adult, and adopted the AntAgonizer persona after living through the war as a coping mechanism.

falls flat from the word go by virtue of the mass cloning thing allowing them to bypass any and all discussion of how fascism actually takes root in a populace. Compelling in its own right in an astronauts-on-the-moon-with-a-rock way.