#The AntAgonizer

[artbyblastweave]

What's effective about The Superhuman Gambit, right, is that the AntAgonizer and the Mechanist are modelling a very 1950s superheroic paradigm basically to a T. The question of why you need a superhero around- the gag that superpeople do nothing but pointlessly fight each other for the sake of it- has been the number one criticism that basically every non-parodic piece of superhero media published after 1986 has attempted to pre-empt. Contemporary superheroes might encounter and defuse high-stakes crises at a completely unrealistic rate, but within the logic of their stories, contemporary superheroes pull their weight- by authorial fiat, their worlds would constantly be suffering mass casualty events if they weren't out there doing their thing. In the 1950s, though, all of this shit, by editorial mandate, was completely siloed from real stakes, even a lot of forms of real crime that were considered too risky to acknowledge as a thing in that political climate; it was all cops and robbers, themed heists, superdickery, nothing of substance, because the entire medium was declawed by the Wertham Scare.

A superhero isn't any more of an outlandish person to have in the Fallout Universe than the kinds of people that are the protagonists of these games. Moreover the actual powersets on display aren't even particularly stupid. Being able to control giant ants with your mind is the kind of thing that nets you feudal territorial holdings if you take it seriously, stupid costumes or no- ditto for being able to field an army of battle-ready robots. Canterbury Commons is very pointedly the site of the one group of people in the game who are trying to get, like, an actual economy going. They're the economic analogue to Project Purity. If either of these assholes threw their personal armies behind that project, the setting would look very very different by the time you climb out of the vault. But they aren't allowed to be the kind of superheroes who notice that, or apply themselves in that way, or really meaningfully engage with the world at all, because, again, they're specifically 1950s superheroes. And this all dovetails really well with my read that Fallout 3 is largely a game about people burying their heads in the sand, immersing themselves in a nostalgic past as a way to avoid thinking about the horrors of the present.

[stoat-party]

Fallout + Text Posts pt. 4: Minor Character Edition

Pt. 3 Pt. 5

[thefalloutwiki]

Fallout 3: Superhuman Signature

Were you previously aware that if the player is wearing The Mechanist's or The AntAgonizer's Costume after completing The Superhuman Gambit, a unique random encounter is unlocked?

A Child will approach the player and ask for an autograph!

After the encounter, the Child will run to Canterbury Commons and remain there for the rest of the game. You can check out the page for the Random Encounter here:

https://fallout.wiki/wiki/Gee_Mister,_You_Look_Super!

[gamingladies]

“So, Mechanist! You’ve come to throw yourself on the mercy of the Ant Queen?”

The AntAgonizer in Fallout 3

[3m-l0st]

She’s down bad…

[yasbeych]

he keeps trying to disrupt the peace treaty signing. he’s finally been caught

[ciil]

what makes us any different?

[twigsyy]

i watched through all of fim a little bit ago and my only wish is that they kept starlight a little evil, like comically

[pangur-and-grim]

alright, so Belphie's a bit of a shit

[artbyblastweave]

"If they put more superheroes in Fallout I'll talk about it more."

🔥 The Silver Shroud?

The Silver Shroud falls somewhere on a spectrum between genuinely really conceptually interesting and borderline meanspirited to me. As I've mentioned briefly before, the paradox of superheroes in the Fallout universe is that they aren't a fundamentally weirder class of person than any of the other 1950s genre pastiche archetypes that we're expected to take seriously, but the flip side is that superheroes would match with the rest of the Fallout idiom so perfectly, and are so modular in terms of what other genre elements they can incorporate into their own genre, that they could easily become the most overbearing element of the Fallout setting if steps aren't taken to keep them siloed. Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 share a throughline in that they both silo superheroism by portraying it as the product of arrested development.

Kent Connolly is a sad, sad guy, with good reason. He's been trying to keep his hobby alive for centuries- terminals in Fallout 76 reveal that he's been adjacent to attempts to make superheroes a real thing for over 200 years, and it has never, ever worked over the long haul, and yet he keeps on trucking, trying to make everyone else see what he sees in these characters. The Shroud is a significantly different archetype of pulp hero from the ones who show up in Fallout 3- rather than a pastiche of the bloodless, stakeless four-color capes of the golden age, he's a more directly a pastiche of The Shadow- the 1930s radio-show proto-superhero who was significantly more willing to use gun violence as a conflict resolution tool than his successors would be. This dovetails with the gameplay loop- In Fallout 3, the entire point of the superheroes is that they're engaging in a significantly more limited playfight compared to what the Lone Wanderer gets up to on a typical Tuesday, but the Sole Survivor, when adopting the Silver Shroud persona, doesn't really have to change their MO at all in order to embody the (admittedly somewhat exaggerated and retroactively attributed by later writers and audiences) retributive ultraviolence of the Shadow's pulp archetype. They're doing their normal thing in a funny voice. And the extent to which you're just doing your normal thing is what really puts the screws to the idea that doing it in a costume is actually adding anything here. You are, at best, making a slight detour to slightly brighten a shut-ins day, and that adds a fundamental air of sadness to the entire outing. But at the end of the day, you do briefly embody the archetype. You do kick down the door and save the hostage from the gangsters. And as a result it does end up briefly straddling the line between deeply silly and deeply cool. The other thing about The Silver Shroud is that in a roundabout way it re-enforces my standing theory that Fallout 3 was originally meant to take place within living memory of The Great War. Of the three Fallout games that directly feature living superheroes, two of them- 4 and 76- are associated with characters who were directly enmeshed in pre-war pop culture. The Mistress of Mystery and her cohort adopted the superheroic aesthetic because it would still be legible to a plurality of survivors; Kent Conolly's rock to roll uphill forever is that he's one of the only people left to whom any of this means anything. But in Fallout 3 the two superheroes just sort of....materialize, after 200 years, with their shticks fully formed. Furthermore, in the Hubris comics office in downtown DC you can find a pre war letter to the editor extolling the relatability of the fictional AntAgonizer, and doing so prior to starting The Superhuman Gambit gives you a unique option for talking down the real one. My strong suspicion is that in an earlier draft of the story, The AntAgonizer was written as a pre-war character who sent that letter to the editor herself as a teenager or young adult, and adopted the AntAgonizer persona after living through the war as a coping mechanism.

[raycatzdraws]

The true botw shrine experience. I don't think Four approves!

The full comic page and some colorful Fours can be found under the read more!

A meme redraw based on something I did in a playthrough lol. Out of arrows? Throw your sword!

I love Four so much aaAA

[somewhereincairparavel]

To the people saying "Jason wouldn't have jumped into tartarus for Piper, like Percy did for Annabeth" as a way to demean him. Jason, plunged into the sky from the grand canyon to catch Piper in the first few pages of the lost hero without even knowing who she was, and without the knowledge that he could fly. so he basically jumped to his death attempting to catch her. In the first few pages of his journey, he didn't mind dying to save Piper, and ironically, that's also what he did in the last few pages of his journey. Y'all just be making the most out of pocket claims abt jason fr

[thefalloutwiki]

Fallout 3: The AntAgonizer

“So, at last you've penetrated the court of the AntAgonizer, Queen of All Ants! Were you sent by that meddling Mechanist? He'll learn that no one can stand before my royal regiment of fighting ants!”

- The AntAgonizer, Fallout 3

You can read about The AntAgonizer, AKA Tanya Christoff, here:

https://fallout.wiki/wiki/The_AntAgonizer

[loveyourhate]

cat rat fight

[magicicephoenix]

They locked me in a room a rubber room

You don’t want to go in time out, do you?

(context)

[gayforcarstairsgirls]

I made this and put it in a reblog but I'm still chortling so I'm giving it its own post