Movies & TVFallout 4Of course Fallout fans are thirsty for The Ghoul—this isn’t the first time everyone’s fallen for an irradiated guyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Movies & TVFallout 4Of course Fallout fans are thirsty for The Ghoul—this isn’t the first time everyone’s fallen for an irradiated guyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Amazon Studios)
Everyone thinks that The Ghoul in the new Fallout TV show is hot. Like unanimously. So much so that people areasking the cast if they agree. They pretty much all think so too, aside from Lucy’s actress Ella Purnell, who joked: “I mean he doesn’t have a nose. You can only fix so much.”
That really doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone but Purnell though—the internet is thirsty for The Ghoul. If you’ve been following the show, your social feeds, like mine, have likely been inundated with Ghoul posts, fanart, andrelentless fancam edits.
Let’s not kid ourselves. If we set aside his face for a second, The Ghoul is the prototypical hot guy of modern television: a bad man with a sad backstory who’s really good at what he does, even if (especially if?) what he does is remorselessly torture people. Folkslovea competent bad man. As far as ghouls of Fallout go, The Ghoul’s actually pretty intact, facially, enough so that I feel like other ghouls could nearly mistake him for a regular old smoothskin. Maybe blood splatter is moisturizing. Let’s all just admit that’s a conventionally attractive ghoul.
I was reticent to go all fandom on main, but I knew this was coming well before the show aired because this is not the first ghoul that Fallout fans have caught a bad case of rads for. If you happen to be new to the series, please allow me to tell you that this is something of a tradition.
The hat makes the ghoul.(Image credit: Bethesda Game Studios)
It feels like we’ve collectively arrived in our “I won’t fix him” era of just admitting that irredeemable evil is hot sometimes.
It feels like we’ve collectively arrived in our “I won’t fix him” era of just admitting that irredeemable evil is hot sometimes.
He was a hit, and it was no mistake that everyone took to Hancock like moths either. Though I imagine some will own up to being ghoul-lovers even earlier in the series, Fallout 4 was the first time that Bethesda had fleshed out a companion romance system in one of its flagship RPGs. You know the kind: Collect your crew of misfits, do their personal quests, get the tragic backstory and a sidequest to help them solve it, and then the kissing. Fallout 4’s companion romances didn’t hitquitelike the BioWare RPGs that I suspect inspired them, but it did manage to attract exactly the audience it was angling for (Sit down, Garrus-enjoyers, I know you still win the inhuman loving olympics). Hancock has his own rather devoted crew producing fan works to this day.
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(Image credit: Amazon Studios)
Lore InterludeThirst aside, Hancock also set up a bit of lore that The Ghoul (andmy favorite loser Thaddeus) is capitalizing on. Throughout season one, The Ghoul has to keep taking a mysterious drug that apparently prevents him going feral as we’ve seen happen to so many others. What is it though? We don’t know. It’s not a concept that was ever in the games, which also play pretty fast and loose with the rules of ghoulification.Hancock wasn’t always a ghoul, he’s quick to tell you when you meet him. He found some “experimental radiation drug,” and though he glosses over the details, it definitely turned him into a ghoul. We also saw Thaddeus take a drug to heal his smashed foot and it’s implied that it may in fact turn him into a ghoul also. Is the same drug behind all three cases?
Lore InterludeThirst aside, Hancock also set up a bit of lore that The Ghoul (andmy favorite loser Thaddeus) is capitalizing on. Throughout season one, The Ghoul has to keep taking a mysterious drug that apparently prevents him going feral as we’ve seen happen to so many others. What is it though? We don’t know. It’s not a concept that was ever in the games, which also play pretty fast and loose with the rules of ghoulification.Hancock wasn’t always a ghoul, he’s quick to tell you when you meet him. He found some “experimental radiation drug,” and though he glosses over the details, it definitely turned him into a ghoul. We also saw Thaddeus take a drug to heal his smashed foot and it’s implied that it may in fact turn him into a ghoul also. Is the same drug behind all three cases?
Lore InterludeThirst aside, Hancock also set up a bit of lore that The Ghoul (andmy favorite loser Thaddeus) is capitalizing on. Throughout season one, The Ghoul has to keep taking a mysterious drug that apparently prevents him going feral as we’ve seen happen to so many others. What is it though? We don’t know. It’s not a concept that was ever in the games, which also play pretty fast and loose with the rules of ghoulification.Hancock wasn’t always a ghoul, he’s quick to tell you when you meet him. He found some “experimental radiation drug,” and though he glosses over the details, it definitely turned him into a ghoul. We also saw Thaddeus take a drug to heal his smashed foot and it’s implied that it may in fact turn him into a ghoul also. Is the same drug behind all three cases?
Lore InterludeThirst aside, Hancock also set up a bit of lore that The Ghoul (andmy favorite loser Thaddeus) is capitalizing on. Throughout season one, The Ghoul has to keep taking a mysterious drug that apparently prevents him going feral as we’ve seen happen to so many others. What is it though? We don’t know. It’s not a concept that was ever in the games, which also play pretty fast and loose with the rules of ghoulification.Hancock wasn’t always a ghoul, he’s quick to tell you when you meet him. He found some “experimental radiation drug,” and though he glosses over the details, it definitely turned him into a ghoul. We also saw Thaddeus take a drug to heal his smashed foot and it’s implied that it may in fact turn him into a ghoul also. Is the same drug behind all three cases?
Lore InterludeThirst aside, Hancock also set up a bit of lore that The Ghoul (andmy favorite loser Thaddeus) is capitalizing on. Throughout season one, The Ghoul has to keep taking a mysterious drug that apparently prevents him going feral as we’ve seen happen to so many others. What is it though? We don’t know. It’s not a concept that was ever in the games, which also play pretty fast and loose with the rules of ghoulification.Hancock wasn’t always a ghoul, he’s quick to tell you when you meet him. He found some “experimental radiation drug,” and though he glosses over the details, it definitely turned him into a ghoul. We also saw Thaddeus take a drug to heal his smashed foot and it’s implied that it may in fact turn him into a ghoul also. Is the same drug behind all three cases?
Lore Interlude
Lore Interlude
Lore Interlude
Thirst aside, Hancock also set up a bit of lore that The Ghoul (andmy favorite loser Thaddeus) is capitalizing on. Throughout season one, The Ghoul has to keep taking a mysterious drug that apparently prevents him going feral as we’ve seen happen to so many others. What is it though? We don’t know. It’s not a concept that was ever in the games, which also play pretty fast and loose with the rules of ghoulification.
Hancock wasn’t always a ghoul, he’s quick to tell you when you meet him. He found some “experimental radiation drug,” and though he glosses over the details, it definitely turned him into a ghoul. We also saw Thaddeus take a drug to heal his smashed foot and it’s implied that it may in fact turn him into a ghoul also. Is the same drug behind all three cases?
(Image credit: Amazon Studios)
If Hancock set the mold in 2015, The Ghoul’s gone and broken it: Hancock hails from the “I can fix him” era of fandom love for bad dudes, but as of 2024 it feels like we’ve collectively arrived in our “Iwon’tfix him” era of just admitting that irredeemable evil is hot sometimes. Although we’ve gotten so much of Cooper’s humanizing pre-war backstory and his offer to team up with Lucy at the end of season one, so perhaps the inclination for redemption is no more securely buried than The Ghoul himself was. Maybe you can fix him, sweetheart.
With all this love for the TV show, it’s no surprise that people areflocking back to Fallout 4for their own wasteland adventures. We may not think of it as thebestof the series, butFallout 4 is the best to play today, in our opinion. In case you needed any more convincing, there’s the smoochable ghoul for your consideration.
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The Last of Us season 2 trailer is a brief look at a story you should probably just play yourself in AprilFallout season 2 filming delayed due to massive LA fires
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The Last of Us season 2 trailer is a brief look at a story you should probably just play yourself in April
Fallout season 2 filming delayed due to massive LA fires
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