37: Neo-medievalism, Americana, and the Post-Apocalypse: Honest Hearts, Ancestral Puebloans, and the Sorrows

Thomas Lecaque, @tlecaque, Grand View University, Des Moines

Fallout: New Vegas takes the player to the post-apocalyptic wastelands surrounding New Vegas—the desert, the hills, the neon lights guarded by robot sentinels, the forces of the NCR stretched on Hoover Dam, and the looming menace of the fascist Caesar’s Legion. Fallout games truck in neo-medievalism & Americana—retrofuturistic 1950s sci-fi Americana crumbling under the radiation, and the knights of the Brotherhood of Steel, in their plate man, paladins armed with laser gatlings, reminding us of the core fantasies of genre. The DLC “Honest Hearts,” though, takes the player out of the New Vegas Wasteland into Zion National Park, inhabited by a number of groups that the Fallout Universe describes as “tribals,” at term as problematic as you can imagine, and which features extensive rock art.

The “native”—so problematic, this has been acknowledged and discussed by the director at length— group living in Zion in the game are the “Sorrows,” a group descended from children who wandered in shortly after the apocalypse, protected by the "Father of the Caves". The Sorrows make rock art, found throughout Zion—and that rock art is in itself a neomedieval bit of Americana, replicating the “medieval” art of the region itself, products of the ancestral Puebloan peoples, the Fremont, and others, like this from Zion National Park. The term “medieval” is of course problematic to use outside of Afro-Eurasia but as a shorthand for a period,60 it is useful to remind students and players that there is a world outside of Europe in that period. The American Southwest is filled with incredible artwork from numerous groups—for example, the richness of Chaco Canyon’s artworkor the so-called “Hunter Panel” in Nine Mile Canyon, Utah from the Fremont culture.61 Honest Hearts uses a different style, but still places rock art throughout the map of Zion. The images are a combination of “medieval” examples with modern ideas—tall human figures, hand prints, an assault rifle and the number 22, all relevant to the Sorrows' history. Tall human figures are found throughout the region, for example in Horseshoe Canyon, Utah. Handprint rock art is common, like the one from Fish Canyon, Utah. Rock art motifs are used, and manipulated, for the game.62

This is, essentially, neo-medievalism. In the same way that the Brotherhood of Steel’s plate mail and “knights” give a refracted vision of the past in the game, so too does the rock art, create an image/identity for the Sorrows of the “medieval” American Southwest. This is neo-medievalism in games, a flavor of the past divorced from context to sell contemporary narratives—and we are good at identifying it when it is medieval European imagery, but we need to remember this is also true with examples from the “global Middle Ages” . Honest Hearts is fun, but it reinforces stereotypes about Natives in the same vein as Fallout’s repeated problematic use of “tribals,” and even its art is using problematic neomedieval tropes to build identities and rhetoric. We need to study and teach “medieval” America more, in history alongside anthropology and archaeology, in medieval history

60 For more, see Alex West’s piece at: https://indomedieval.medium.com/the-hemispheric-middle-ages-part-i-173779f237f6 61 See http://read.upcolorado.com/read/the-greater-chaco-landscape-f2cad13b-68f1-4d50-bc019f755e62eed4/section/386b1b65-bf43-46df-8cb2-63939ac8afbb 62 See: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-analysis-suggests-utahs-famous-rock-art-surprisingly-recent180952482/ and https://capitolreef.org/blog/the-horseshoe-canyon-petroglyphs-utahs-underrated-tourist-guide/ 90

surveys, so games like this are not the only place students, gamers, readers, and the public encounter Native history pre-occupation.

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