https://www.themarysue.com/fallout-seas ... the-kings/
On Thursday, Prime Video released the first trailer for the upcoming second season of Fallout, previewing what fans can expect from their return to the Wasteland.
The footage showcases the ongoing tension between Ella Purnell’s Lucy and Walton Goggins’ The Ghoul, new characters played by Kumail Nanjiani and Macaulay Culkin (as a Righteous Gemstones fan, I need Culkin and Goggins’ characters to cross paths this season), and plenty of allusions and Easter eggs to Fallout: New Vegas. But one particular detail already has fans (understandably) asking questions, not only about the lore from the games, but about Elvis Presley.
Yes, you read that right. Sprinkled throughout the footage is the first look at The Kings, a gang of characters who play a memorable role in New Vegas. As their name suggests, they model themselves after Elvis’ look and iconography, poking fun at the decades-long ties Vegas has had to Elvis and Elvis impersonators. But, as some have been quick to point out, their context in Fallout the show seems to be very different from Fallout the game series.
In the world of the game, The Kings started after The King’s School of Impersonation, a building that held classes for Elvis impersonators, was discovered by survivors in Fallout‘s post-apocalyptic rubble. The building still had holotapes and other resources about how to emulate “The King” — his voice, his wardrobe, and his personal tastes — which the survivors mistook for religious paraphernalia. As a result, they started to worship Elvis as a sort of deity, without any real context for his life or his career.
Viva New Vegas!
It’s important to state here that, in New Vegas, the gang members of The Kings are just a group of humans, which is part of what makes their decades-removed worship of Elvis so ironic. But in the trailer for Fallout Season 2, every member of The Kings that we see are Ghouls. This does make them visually funny monsters to kill (which is saying something, given some of the other weird creatures in this trailer), but it also could completely recontexualize their relationship to Elvis.
If The Kings are just Ghouls… did they exist before the war? Are they just Elvis impersonators who happened to stick together as Ghouls? Or did a truncated version of their history in the games happen here, only for them to get turned into Ghouls anyway?
As someone who isn’t a Fallout superfan, but does have a soft spot for Elvis, this conundrum is funny to me either way. I grew up around Elvis’ music as a kid, thanks to a combination of friends, family, and how often Lilo & Stitch was rewatched in our household. But I began to really go down the rabbit hole once Baz Luhrmann’s gloriously maximalist biopic Elvis arrived in 2022, not only giving me a whole new appreciation for his work, but for his reputation as a piece of American folklore. Being a modern Elvis fan is a unique journey of discovery, whether in uncovering certain B-sides or recordings, learning weird fun facts, or working your way through his filmography of goofy comedies in the ’60s.
With that knowledge, I can see the argument for not making The Kings human characters in the Fallout show. As fun as their bizarre backstory is, it might’ve been a weird tonal shift to suddenly have multiple actors speaking in Elvis’ unique cadence. (After all, we just got done with the jokes about Elvis star Austin Butler’s years-long relationship with the accent.) But either way, the idea of getting a weird microcosm of Elvis’ cultural impact through The Kings suddenly has me a lot more hyped for Fallout Season 2.
Season 2 of Fallout will premiere on Prime Video on Wednesday, December 17th.
