kind of crazy that benny fallout new vegas would have the entire mojave under his thumb if he wasnt so obsessed with using his stupid little cuckboy 9mm
it’s kind of crazy that both fallout new Vegas and fallout 4 have the same driving force for the first half of the narrative (find the guy who wronged you and make him pay) but Benny is so much more memorable and narratively interesting than Kellogg.
It’s a matter of a strong character foil versus a weak one, in my opinion.
Benny and the courier are very much alike. They are both ambitious people who are willing to do anything possible to stack the odds in their favour. Honestly, Benny and the courier are the same card, reversed.
The Sole Survivor and Kellogg are also intended to be character foils. The game tries to convince us of this with the scenes in Kellogg’s mind, where we see that he ‘isn’t so different’ from our protagonist after all. But we don’t know anything about Kellogg other than his backstory. How can he parallel the protagonist if we don’t know which traits he has? Which traits the two of them share?
(As a side note, I wish Fallout 4 had touched way more on the ‘Man/Woman Out of Time’ thing. The protagonist being frozen in the past + Kellogg being functionally immortal would’ve been really cool to explore! Especially in the context of grief!)
In the end, I think the reason Benny is a more powerful character foil is that he doesn’t disappear from the world when you kill him. The chairmen can mourn him, House will comment on it, and even NPCs across the Mojave will talk about Benny’s death!
In Kellogg’s case, the protagonist is basically the only person who knows he even existed! Once he’s dead HE’s DEAD! He disappears completely from the narrative! As soon as you leave fort Hagen, the game doesn’t bother looking back.
that’s why Benny is a more haunting force for new Vegas; particularly an independent courier. You are Benny’s legacy because you are what he leaves behind whether he likes it or not. People remember him as the couriers victim. Meanwhile, nobody remembers Kellogg at all. The memory of who Kellogg was dies with you, and you can choose to forget him.
Benny new Vegas really is one of the characters ever
he’s a bastard. He’s kinda pathetic. He’ll kill you. He’ll sleep with you. He spent most of his life as a nomad. He’s so concerned about his hair-do that he’ll risk bodily harm for the sake of maintaining it. He’s a business owner. He’s an anarchist. He put together a Machiavellian plot to topple a power structure. He forgot to check if the person he shot was actually dead. He’s smart enough to know that a securitron would be useful. He’s dumb enough to double cross the person who reprogrammed said securitron.
he’s surprisingly smart yet dumb as shit and I love him for it
The two types of Benny Gecko freaks are people who got weirdly turned on when he shot the courier in the opening and people who got weirdly turned on by how he looks up at you while down on his knees with his wrists bound when you talk to him at Fortification Hill.