#grave is something you gotta experience firsthand imo. not see it in the fnv tags

[yucca-moth]

I'm doing a new playthrough and it's getting me thinking about stuff. I find it incredibly harrowing that Victor basically has a dead guy's brain copied into him and has to do whatever House tells him to do.

Trudy is telling me how 'it's' hiding something, and doesn't trust Victor at all. Easy Pete telling me how he's harmless and "a broken down relic with no place to be."

Got me thinking again about how Victor's just been rolling around every so often in Goodsprings (while I'm assuming every so often switching consciousness to another robot). Why? Why keep watch over Goodsprings? It's not like it's instrumental to the strip or House at all to hang around there for 10 years.

Which leads me to the deeper questions like how much humanity remains in him? How much of the person he's based on remains specifically? Does he still think like a human, or are all the processes now... hmm filtered through machine like reasoning?

What got me thinking about Victor in this way again was suddenlyremembering how I asked him to help us defend Goodsprings in my first playthrough, and he didn't show up. Feeling disappointed. Then I think I used science skill when I next saw him to determine 'someone' (obv House in retrospect) had shut him down to prevent him showing up to help.

Incredibly horrifying to think that someone who owns you could shut you down like that, no matter their relationship when he was human. If House can shut him down, and gets him to do things like follow me around but not get involved, then how much free will does he have over his actions? Has Victor changed in the last 200 years? Or is he stuck exactly as he was when his brain was scanned, except that he has no choice in what he does now if House doesn't like it. Does he get to die if he wants to? Or is he too useful to House to be allowed that? Can House mess around with his artificial brain or just simply manipulate him into doing what he wants the old fashioned way? Is his compliance with House out of habit from when he was human, choice because he still agrees with House's ideas, or is there no choice for him?

I vaguely remember the explanations he gave me in the Lucky 38 in a previous playthrough making me sad. I can't even remember what he said exactly about himself, but I remember lots of questions feeling left unanswered. Which is part of the fnv experience of course... But, in this case I just couldn't even look at Victor standing outside the Lucky 38 without feeling bad. And now seeing him rolling around Goodsprings it's bringing back some of the sadness

I know part of the fun of FNV is creating your own ideas, roleplaying, deciding how to take situations where it isn't fully fleshed out or the constraints of the game are showing. So idk, I hope maybe I'm thinking about it all in a certain way, and maybe I come across or reason out another way to think about these Victor questions in my current playthrough. But for now he's a bunch of unanswered questions to me.