trilllizard420:

kronecker-delta:

trilllizard420:

kadara-skies:

I feel like Fallout has become one of those pieces of media that has gone/ is going the Fight Club way, where it is starting to attract the type of people who support the thing it originally critiqued, in this case, Authoritarian capitalist regimes.

Like, the terror that drives fallout isn’t its gritty post-apocalyptic aesthetic, it’s the atrocities of the culture that led to the war in the first place. All those personal stories you find buried in the pieces of lore you stumble across. It’s the blind nationalism and xenophobia, the internment camps, the mcarthyism, the bloated military industrial complex, the systematic dismantling of corporate regulations to the point where companies could perform psychological and chemical experiments on the public consequence free, etc etc etc.

I wish you had the option, when prompted, to talk about this shit as the Sosu, considering you were alive to experience it. You should be able to counter Piper, for example, when she asks you to compare Diamond city to the life you knew, asks you to essentially say the world is a shadow of its former self. Because it isn’t, not really. It’s just the stepford-smile artifice is finally gone.

to add onto this, this is also why the NCR and Mr House in New Vegas are morally gray instead of morally white as options

NCR tries but they get into a lot of the same issues as the American democracy (that was barely a democracy) that they emulate

High taxes are making people discontent while the NCR can barely even protect themselves, nevermind the frontier towns, they’re stomping on a lot of people displeased with them and a lot of their rights, and places like former Nevada and various small factions see them as a corrosive, invading force. Hell, you have outright insurrectionists like Samuel Cooke and you’ve got Caesar pointing out that the longest running president ran unopposed for literal decades and won the presidency after her father. “Does that sound like an actual democracy, or an inherited kingdom?”

Meanwhile, Mr House is purely corporate. Impartial, protective…..of New Vegas…..and uncaring. He cares about high ideals and concepts, not about the common salt of the earth man and woman. He wants humanity to get into space and find new worlds, and he doesn’t care what he has to do to make that possible.

the recurring refrain of the series “War never changes” has that meaning of how a lot of times humanity seems doomed to keep condemning itself to bowing to the bleak altar of war, though at least Lonesome Road gives us a corollary.

“War never changes….but men do, through the roads they walk.”

you could argue that Fallout’s main point is that humanity will change and must change, or it will perish and yet one of the central conflicts is how humanity repeats it’s own grim history. War is still fought for slaves, resources, power, and fanaticism, like Ron Perlman intones as the reasons war was fought before The Great War of the setting, the final mutually assured destruction nuclear exchange.

It also gets briefly into the concept of the titular Old World Blues. thinking about times gone by, of nostalgia over something that came before that might not have ever even existed. Ulysses’ obsession with history. Misremembered/distorted historical events of Bethesda Fallout games, like with Abraham Washington’s imperfect museum or the false history of “The Swatter”. NCR’s emulation of pre war US governance, down to the same titles. the Legion being based on Imperial Rome. The Brotherhood of Steel’s obsession with pre war technology. The Kings’ entire existence, however benevolent they are by comparison to most.

Fallout asks, at the very core when it at it’s best….

Can humanity change enough to ensure it survives? How will it change? Will we even be recognizable as human after the radical changes we’ve undergone? Or will we remain stagnant, murdering each other over land, lust, money, and power indefinitely?

Generally I don’t like superficial “Like Fight Club is misunderstood” because it comes with the assumption that most people aren’t as smart as the person speaking. But in the case of Fallout it’s more like the people still making media in the franchise don’t entirely know what the thematic point was supposed to be.

Which is a tad different than just complaining about the fans not getting it right. As now their are fans making canon material that either don’t get it or don’t care. Which is giving people who primarily enter the series from Fallout 4 a warped view on what the games were about before. Nostalgia for the ‘Old World’ and the good times of American hegemony teetering on the blade of nuclear Armageddon wasn’t part of that, but as the first post states you’re never really given the chance to express contempt for the way the world was in Fallout 4.

It’s rather disappointing considering the deep potential for characterization through dialogue and quest resolution in New Vegas.

Regardless this is some spot on analysis and mirrors my own feelings well.

“more like the people still making media in the franchise don’t entirely know what the thematic point was supposed to be”

you can say Bethesda

it’s okay, friend.

Todd Howard can’t hurt us here.