You’re writing them as desiccated or just burned looking, that’s fucking wrong and actually misses the fucking point about ghouls.

Ghouls are close to immortal, however they also strongly resemble memento mori skulls, their noseless, often lipless faces refer to the artistic and religious tradition of death’s heads.  They’re a reminder of death given eternal life.

Their skin is rotting and yes I do mean rotting, continually flaking off because their system has diverted energy from maintaining the integumentary system and most of the body’s connective tissue to maintaining the respiratory and pulmonary systems, their cells divide more slowly to help them resist and thrive in radioactive environments, their skin is in a state of perpetual decay.  They rot, they lose parts, they are eternally decaying (like a human during its life) but they show the decay of death (like a corpse).  

They’re not dried out mummies, they’re not preserved, they exist in the continual flux of rotting but never rotting away.  They are eternally in the process of decay but also regenerate continually.  A perpetual decay without ever fully dying, without ever fully becoming something else.  They are never completely reborn, they are perpetual decay.

So if you want ghoul Hancock done fucking right, don’t make him solid, don’t make his flesh incorruptible, don’t make him a desiccated husk.  He is memento mori, even his drug use suggests that a huge part of his character is that he exists in a liminal state between life and death and the fact that he is stuck in that state for what amounts for a human to eternity is part of what makes him cool, part of his devil may care attitude is because he’s already sort of dead.  It also mirrors the laughing dancing medieval images of death (which actually makes sense because medieval europe was a lot like the fallout universe, the world was undergoing a mini ice age, population had been dramatically reduced by famine, disease and the fall of the roman empire, it was sort of post apocalyptic, the world was dirty and dangerous and people were dying like flies) Other ghouls don’t keep that, ferals especially represent a form of spiritual death, but Hancock despite all his dirty jokes is oddly spiritual, in a way a sort of martyr, a messiah for the people of Goodneighbor, he sort of died and was sort of reborn as their mayor.  

He has lofty ideals and wants to change the world.  He is the triumph of the spirit over death and erasing the death bit destroys what’s great about him.  Removing the ickiness of death fucks the whole point up, the point is his body is rotting, the point is it is icky but he overcomes that and keeps having lofty ideals, he does drugs, nasty post apocalyptic drugs, but although his body decays in perpetuity (though never dissipates) his soul lives on.  He is a reminder of the transient unimportance of flesh.

Like Hancock as a ghoul is about death, physical death (his decay and his mistreatment of his body) and social death (his association with outsiders and the socially unacceptable and again the drug use) but not spiritual death (because he is good and kind).  Hancock is kindness living on through death.  Don’t play down the death bit because you think it’s icky or can’t fap to it if you want to do his ghouldom justice.

The design choice of the missing nose is a really obvious reference to the skull, I mean look at these medieval bits of art.

Do you not see some similarities to ghouls?  

Memento fuckin’ mori, you fucks.