The degeneration of connective tissue leads to joint problems in ghouls (canonically, look it up). You know who deals with frequent excruciating joint pain? Me, fucking me.
I don’t want to look at him and see my fucking joint pain on a character I like.
Your tag says ‘fight me’ so, okay.
Changing the race of a character for aesthetic reasons is one thing, but now removing their canon disabilities because boo hoo I have joint pain and it makes me sad seeing a character with it too? lmao. Do you ever stop and consider that Other people with disabilities might look at him and think, oh! representation! a cool disabled character that I can relate too and is Okay despite being disabled! No?? Do you realise the discrimination ghouls face because of their race represents racism in real life and changing the race of any character because “he’s not cute enough for me” is SHITTY. Stop.
So what you’re saying is that my way of playing a fucking video game, my own copy, not my rewriting of canon, I don’t work for Bethesda, I have no desire to rewrite canon, I like him as he is, affects other people’s enjoyment of a piece of representation? If you like seeing him as representation, AWESOME, playing him differently on an individual level is very different from wanting to alter canonical representation.
Also there are no actual ghouls, and ghouls are not a race as it’s A: Not an inherited identity (they’re all sterile) and B: It’s something you become not something you’re born and you know I’m pretty sure it’s shitty to compare POC to ghouls, “ghouls represent people of color” I mean fuck that’s got so many shitty implications. Ghouls are a fantasy creature, it’s honestly very similar to saying “Oh you should never draw Spock as a human, it’s changing his race!” and actually that’d be closer, because being a Vulcan is an inherited identity conferred upon birth.
Also the comparison to POC is especially ugly because of the ferals, that’s like saying “and there’s this other justifiably loathed group we’re confusing them with” or “we’re freaking out over their potential for future violence” or “Well they do have the potential to become animalistic and uncivilized but we shouldn’t tar them all with that brush” all of which are kinda… well yikes, I mean those are horrible metaphors for racism
Besides, ghouls are a metaphor for the universal reality of death not a metaphor for racism (prejudice against “the other” sure, but racism specifically no, or based on the implications I sincerely hope not) Actually between the sterility and it being a non inherited identity it’s actually sort of closer to a shitty metaphor for homosexuality, especially the sort of seedy periphery we’ve often been confined to (Seedy/sleazy Goodneighbor vs. “wholesome” Diamond City) though even then you have the ferals who are… what? “Justifiably outcast for being too deviant” that’s fucked up. Pretty sure directly relating it to any actual axis of oppression results in something hideous and murdery and generally offensive, don’t do that. It can be an overall metaphor for fear of the other, but not directly linked to any one particular thing, because it’s not hyper literalist.
NOT TO MENTION that I see a fuck ton of artists drawing and writing him not as “human” per say but deghoulified enough to be “appealing” which I think is actually shittier and more intellectually dishonest, sanitizing his ghoulness, making it “pretty”, taking away the visceral sense of decay is to undermine what his entire character is about.
Drawing or playing him as pre-ghoulification in fact only serves to highlight the memento mori message of his character. Human Hancock juxtaposed with ghoul Hancock is a reminder that life is impermanent, that everything changes, that we do decay. Giving him eternal preservation, removing the liminality of ghouldom COMPLETELY FUCKS THE POINT. His characterization is SO intensely about memento mori, SO SO SO SO SO SO intensely. His devil may care attitude, his drug use, his “let’s dance while we’ve still got feet”, all of that is about the transience of life. HE LOOKS LIKE A DEATH’S HEAD FOR A REASON and when you sanitize death, when you remove the rot, when you make him clean and neat and eternal that’s when you fuck up his character. He is about permanent impermanence and his reference to Medieval memento mori makes SO much sense in the world of Fallout, which is actually a lot like the Medieval period (filth, decimated population, disease, chaos on the ruins of a once great civilization)
Here I wrote a really long post about it:
http://thepeacockangel.tumblr.com/post/135087958029/okay-but-also-lets-talk-about-how-yall-are
Also I don’t always play Hancock as human, I switch between the two for fun (though I do tend to prefer to play him as human when my joints are flaring up because I don’t like being reminded that my fucking knees hurt)
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 