Cait

Everyone loves who they love for a reason. There are a millions different things someone looks for, and any number of them might show up in a person. You don't necessarily choose what traits make you love someone, at least not consciously, and you don't necessarily choose whether or not you love someone.

Curie, Piper, and yes even Cait all have a bunch of reasons for someone to love them. Two people might love the same person but for completely different reasons, so I'll start with the pretty universal reasons and then go into the more personal reasons after.

As with most (most) cases of eros, there is a physical attraction element. This is pretty straightforward, and also pretty subjective so there isn't much to say. I love her messy red hair, I love her green eyes, I love that she's strong and tough, and I think she's beautiful.

Past the straightforward elements of eros, we get to the good stuff. The reasons people love each other that are more than physical. In Cait's case, the two of you really bond quickly over her quest. Most of the companion quests are emotional and life changing and bring you closer as friends or more, and Cait's is no exception. I work with some substance abuse patients irl and so this quest was important to me, even if it was a magical scifi representation of the recovery process. Supporting Cait in her recovery feels good for me and that feeling is better than all the money in the world. It's even a bit deeper than that, and when she talks about being suicidal and never having a friend and being backstabbed at every part of her life and being betrayed by even her parents, I really want to be a true friend for her and give her what's been missing her entire life. This is not just eros, a true friend is what she wants and that doesn't necessarily have any trappings of romance.

Those two reasons lots of people can relate with, so now for some autism.

Some of the complaints about Cait are that she's mean, selfish, sometimes even cruel. These are all true. She's known nothing but betrayal her whole life and she was raised by mean people and then by raiders and it's clear where these traits came from. But it's honestly a marvel that she isn't just like them. She's spending her time at the combat zone being suicidal instead of off being a real raider, when she actually has as much or more reason to be a raider than the other people in the room. A reasonable portion of raiders are just weak willed lazy people who want the easy road in life, and weren't actually in some dire situation. Mags is a good example of this. She was from the upper stands in Diamond City, and her first "raider" act was killing her mom over revoking her (sizeable) inheritance. Some dumb selfish reason over money. Now we can go into her mother being a little crazy and perhaps Mags was abused in some way too but the point was that she turned to raiderhood instead of something else available to an upper-stands citizen. This idea also applies to lots of the regular raiders running around. Every person in the commonwealth can simply go and plant a tato instead of shooting someone for their tato. But the raiders don't want to invest the time in making their own life, so they leech off others. Anyway, we're going off into why people become raiders instead of Cait, and all this was just to illustrate that she could have been a big shot raider, but didn't. Instead she is in a constant state of despondency because of her life circumstance. Back to the original point, it's no mystery where these traits came from. What matters is how you proceed. She's helping some vault dweller build settlements instead of off destroying them. She's here making comments about looking at her butt instead of being mad at the world and taking it out on people. Even with stuff like laughing at killing Ashes or always wanting to extort some more caps, it's honestly a marvel she's as well-adjusted as she is, considering her background. Lots of people become raiders with less impetus.

I'm not a fan of some of the things she likes, but with any healthy relationship, there is an element of compromise. Her self-serving goals mesh well with me being a moralfag, because I would be off dying in some quest or giving all my food and caps away and constantly trying to get proverbial cats out of trees. But she's there, looking out for us, and making sure we get some caps or making sure we keep some supplies and making sure I don't get taken advantage of and all those sorts of practical and realistic concerns. It would be pretty easy to lie to me or take advantage of my generosity, and having someone who is very suspicious of others, and very concerned with getting paid and all that around balances the party out. So while stuff like killing Ashes is obviously outside of what I like, the self-serving attitude she learned in life is appropriate in dealing with me. If left on our own, we both might take things a little too far in our respective directions, but together we make a pretty good pair, and every time she rolls her eyes at my next altruistic act, I might not take things too far.

Her liking some of the mean things she likes, such as killing Ashes or killing the Hubologists or destroying any faction, are all things that she doesn't do. She doesn't run off and kill the hubologists. She doesn't say "hold on a second" and run ahead and slaughter Ashes as soon as you enter the area (like some people actually do in Divinity Original Sin 2, and some quests are started or ended by your companions). The "Find Ashes" quest isn't un-completable if you're with Cait. She is well adjusted enough to keep it to herself, and she might go off on her own if you make her disappointed enough but the point is that she likes when the player theoretically does these things, it's not like these are things she did that she tells you about.

More about killing Ashes, we have some examples of Cait going against her usual selfish behavior when children are involved. She likes risking her/your personal safety to stop AJ selling to kids, and she likes turning down caps in order to protect Billy from Bullet. Turning down caps and risking herself are two things Cait normally doesn't like, but a child is involved, and so it's different.
So we can see that she's actually protective of children.
Killing Ashes I think does go with the second half of what you said though. Erin asks you for help to get her cat back, and Cait thinks this is not a wise thing to do. Erin shouldn't approach people for help, she should be self-sufficient. Erin shouldn't have tons of emotional investment in material things or pets, because those can be taken from her. These are things Cait had to learn as a kid, and she would have literally died had she not lived by these two rules. So it makes sense that Cait wants to """""help"""" Erin by demonstrating these same lessons Cait had to learn, except in this controlled environment where it's just a pet and no one is trying to rape her like when Cait had to learn her lessons.
It's still not the correct choice of action, since Erin is in a vault and these lessons aren't as immediately relevant to her, because of her safe lifestyle. So I don't kill Ashes. I literally didn't even know Cait approved of doing it until someone else in the thread told me.

It's true though, that she approves of some terrible things. This is the most difficult thing about being with her, but I know why she has those inclinations and I'm ok with her not approving of everything I do. I don't handle things the way she might have if she were in my shoes in a given situation, but that's ok. She is conditioned to be selfish and occasionally cruel, but the safe and comfortable and supportive relationship she has now will perhaps make it clear to her that she doesn't need these traits anymore. They served her well in the raider world, where they were taught and reinforced, but she just doesn't need all that anymore. This isn't to say that I'm out to change her and make her how I like, that isn't really the case since she has to be her own person, but specifically those traits she picked up from the raider world to help her survive those conditions, she just doesn't need to hold on to anymore.

Another way to word this:
"Despite all these evil things people always point out about Cait, there is one very important thing she chose to do at a crossroads in her life. People like to say she's just evil and worthless, but there' one thing they're forgetting.
When she was roughly 22 or so years old, after she was a slave but before we meet her, for those handful of years she was at the combat zone doing drugs and fighting in a ring. She chose to do this as part of her suicidal tendencies, and she drowned herself in drugs and alcohol to dull her memory and perceptions so she could just be a fighter and hopefully die in the ring. This is all discussed in-game, no reaching or headcanon so far.
The meaningful thing here is that she chose to do all this instead of becoming an actual raider. Every raider who became a raider does so because they're too weak or evil or too dumb or too lazy to do anything else. But we know Cait isn't dumb because she survived raider slavery while collecting caps to buy herself, we know she isn't weak or lazy because she's the combat zone champion. And thus, because she's not dumb and not weak, we must logically conclude, through the process of elimination, that she doesn't become a raider because she doesn't want to. She doesn't want to be a raider. If someone chooses to not be a raider, when they are canonically strong and smart/clever, that individual must have some internal reason for choosing not to be a raider. They must have a conscience.
So Cait is not all evil and not worthless. She obviously struggled and chose not to just fall in with the crowd around her become a raider, or even a raider boss like she could. She made that choice to not become a raider, despite being in a position to do so and potentially benefiting from doing so. But she didn't. This is very important to her characterization."

Moving on, one common complaint about Cait is that she's a druggie. There are two problems with this. The first is that she's not an entertainment druggie, or a "boredom" druggie. Lots of people who are just bored turn to drugs. In Cait's case, she doped up due to despondency. Someone being a druggie and someone gaining an acute addiction from trying to drown their perceptions are different things, and I'm much more sympathetic to the second. It is revealed in her dialogue that she despises drugs, and only turned to them while she was suicidal and wanted to drown her perceptions. She hates drugs, and risks her life to cure herself. It's important to remember a couple things about her personal quest. The first is that she bases her quest on rumors. Traders who swung by the combat zone had rumors, and she bought the rumors and based her quest on those. She doesn't even have concrete evidence for it, but she wants to do it and makes plans nevertheless. The second thing to remember, going along with the first, is that she risks her life to do it. People in-universe aren't the player. For an npc in the game, gunners and assaultrons are scary, and Cait goes anyway. She gladly risks getting shot by some experienced (high level) gunner or lasered by some assaultron in order to get off the drugs. So saying she's a druggie is a gross misnomer. She gladly signs up to maybe die for the chance to be rid of the drugs.

Another common complaint about Cait is that she has had sex a lot. Nobody is making any leaps in logic when they guess that a beautiful young girl who is a raider slave for like 2-4 years had terrible things done to her. She lived with her parents until she was 18, and we meet her while she's in her mid to late 20's. Accounting for the recent time she's been free and doing Combat zone stuff, that leaves a handful of years where she was between those two portions of her life, which is when she was a slave. So we ask ourselves, do we hold it against her that she was essentially raped? Does her time living under degenerate people who abuse her something we judge her for? Does an act of violence committed against her change how we feel about her? There are probably a variety of answers to this, but for me, the answer is no. I would much rather give her something she's never had before, which is intimacy. Sex and intimacy are very different things, and no one in her life cared about her. Her parents sound like they were distant up until the sold her, raiders are raiders, then the combat zone was the combat zone. She's never had someone who cared about her, regardless of sex. I don't blame her for what was done to her and I think it's unfair to do that. I think providing a supportive and loving relationship for her is a beautiful thing, because it would be the first time she's ever had that, and I want to be a reliable and trustworthy and dedicated friend for her because she's never had that, and that makes it extra special.

One last thing to consider is that Cait's morality is self-taught.
You and I have the benefit of thousands of years of our predecessors talking to each other about morality. We can just open a book and read Kant or Jung or whoever, but wastelanders can't do that. Wastelanders have to spread morality through contact teaching. In person. No internet, books are destroyed, and liberal arts institutions are nonexistent anymore.
When Piper was growing up, she had a dad that sounded like a good man. It sounded like her town had a police force to enforce that culture's morality. She received an education in morality when she was young. Her father was the police chief, so presumably he talked about justice and order and all that, and from a young age, she had idealism exposed to her.
But not Cait. Cait was never exposed to idealism. She never had a positive role model. in fact, she had a negative role model.
Cait put 2 and 2 together to get where she is, morally. She recognized that her parent's behavior made her unhappy, and she didn't copy them. Do you realize, from a developmental psychological standpoint, how significant it is for a child to manifest morality that contradicts the morality of their parents, with no third party outside influence, and for that morality to actually be superior? For the child to just decide "I don't like that" and live differently, and live better? If anything, it's unrealistic. If I were to criticize Cait's character, it would be that she's unrealistic.
Cait is a marvel of self taught theoretical morality. She has no test process, she has no one to bounce ideas off of. It's all theoretical. She just came up with it and ran with it. and it's superior to her parents, it's superior to her peers, and it's superior to half the npc's on the map.
She miraculously didn't become a raider despite having reason to. She miraculously climbed out of the combat zone not being one of them.
Her theft and selfishness and such are bad, but even so, she's miraculous.

So there, there is my autism wall of text on why I feel eros, storge, agape, and phileo for Cait. Everyone loves who they love for a reason, and those are mine.


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You know what's cute, and one of the specific things I really like about Cait?

When she gets corny. When she says those hella dorky lines about love and treasure and all that. It's almost like she heard them from TV or something. It's not really how people talk, but it's how someone on TV or a book might talk. It's almost as if she was a kid and heard those sorts of lines on TV or in a schlocky romance novel, and now has a chance to say them herself. But, since her parents were assholes, the raiders were assholes, the combat zone were assholes, etc, she hasn't ever seen a normal romance. Everyone is being assholes to each other and the romances she's likely seen didn't feature many words.

So she's aware that *some* people talk that way, but she doesn't know that normal people don't talk that way because she's never gotten to observe normal people in romance. So when she is dating someone, her mind says "say the lines!" and they come out as these hella dorky romance lines.

It's really cute.

But! it gets even better. This entire situation is also one of Cait's defining character traits. Cait was never taught proper morality. Her parents were horrible and then of course she was with raiders. Any moral compass she has is either natural law revealed through intuition or it's from TV/books she read on her own as a kid. So she never really got to observe how to act from normal people, because she was never around normal people, so she had to either come up with it herself or learn secondhand from media. So much like the corny romance lines, she just has these theoretical ways to act that she only gets to bust out once she's in normal company. It's very interesting and pretty deep relative to a lot of fictional characters. Assuming this was all on purpose.