Fallout’s bloody wedding is just the latest red wedding in fiction. We run through a brief history, from Game of Thrones and the Bible to Kill Bill and the Odyssey.
The Fallout TV show isn’t particularly beautiful – at least, not like a bride is supposed to be. Its characters spend most of their time trudging through the irradiated grime of derelict California, avoiding pools of who-knows-what and drinking animal piss if they really need to. It’s a tough reality to witness, but that’s what makes the Prime Video game adaptation’s violent first episode so critical; its bloodbath wedding welcomes viewers to Fallout’s no-nonsense approach to love and desperation. To do it effectively, Fallout mines the ancient trope for every last perversion.
The concept of a bloody wedding (or Red Wedding, as Game of Thrones popularized in 2013) goes back as far as humans were capable of idiotic passion — so, kind of forever. Jesus tells a parable in Matthew 22 in which heaven is a king throwing a wedding banquet, but those invited decide to kill the king’s servants instead. Even earlier, the Odyssey describes how Odysseus instigated a grisly massacre after a team of suitors attempted to marry the queen of Ithaca, his wife Penelope. “And therewith the head of the arrow through his tender neck thrust out, […] The thick gush of the man’s-blood, […] And the bread and the roasted flesh were defiled,” writes poet William Morris in his 1887 translation.
It was only natural for red weddings to make their way into contemporary media. Some of the most recognizable instances are in TV and film, including the aforementioned Game of Thrones, the 2003 revenge drama Kill Bill, Bella’s nightmare in Breaking Dawn, and the 2019 wedding slasher Ready or Not. But whether the cataclysmic wedding occurs in classic literature, a video game like Bloodborne, or famous art like Marc Chagall’s 1950 painting of red-soaked La Mariée, it challenges your expectations for the blushing bride. Fallout protagonist Lucy is at least prepared for this test — she’s spent her whole life learning how to be useful in crisis.
Before her doomed wedding, Lucy establishes herself as a toned and peppy Vault Dweller: the ideal post-apocalyptic woman. She has repair skills, she says, speech skills, gymnastic ability, and has no issue handling a rifle — she’s demure about it, too, disclaiming that she’s “not very good” at shooting despite impaling her Vault Boy target repeatedly in the heart. All that’s missing from Lucy’s life as a resourceful Miss America is a healthy Mr. Reproductive System, and so her Vault 33 council approves her application to breed with a Vault 32 tribute.
33 will provide the purportedly famished 32 with seeds in exchange for a husband, Monty (Cameron Cowperthwaite), at the Triennial Trade; Lucy prepares with red lipstick, pearl drop earrings, and an Audrey Hepburn wedding gown cut below the knees. She nearly perfectly follows Leola Coombs Kelley’s guide on “How to Conduct a Perfect Wedding” from 1957, which instructs a bride to wear satin white, but warns that “the formal wedding gown should just clear the toes to prevent tripping […] Anything shorter is ugly.
