The Fallout TV series will include a Vault Boy origin story for some reason
We got our first look at the Fallout TV series last week with a trailer on Saturday preceded by a behind-the-scenes report from Vanity Fair, which included looks at the show's main characters and surprisingly bright and colorful post-nuclear world, and of course some words from Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard. The report also included a small and frankly baffling detail for fans to look forward to: Vault Boy, the real-world mascot of the series and in-game avatar of fictional megacorp Vault-Tec, is going to get his very own origin story.
Details weren't shared, naturally, but Howard seems to think it's a good idea: «That was something that they came up with that's just really smart,» he said in the Vanity Fair article.
Origin stories are a staple of cinematic retellings—how many times have we borne witness to the radioactive spider bite, the murder of the Wayne folks, or the kid from Krypton?—but… Vault Boy? Really? It feels not only entirely unnecessary to me, but also painfully obvious: Vault-Tec needed a fun, family-friendly mascot to help sell its otherwise apocalyptic products to the public at large, so it rounded up a few underpaid ad guys (or maybe hired an external consulting firm) and stuck them in a conference room to kick around ideas until they came up with something.
Making the whole thing even stranger is its redundancy, because the TV series origin story will almost inevitably reflect how the actual Vault Boy came into being: People workshopping ideas for a memorable character to help them sell a product. According to the Fallout Wiki, original Fallout art director Leonard Boyarsky sketched what he referred to as «Skill Guy» to help illustrate some ideas he was trying to explain; it then went to
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