#fallout tv critical

[artemis-pendragon]

I remember hoping the Fallout show wouldn't reveal who dropped the first bomb because that's not the point. Instead they made it a handful of corporate elites (masterminded by a Black woman, which is fucked up for reasons other people have articulated better than I can as a white girl) whose goal was nuclear armageddon.

For me, Fallout's message was always that there are no winners in war, and that long after the governments who dropped the bombs fell to their own warmongering hubris, 200 years of future generations are still paying for their crimes. But in the show, there are winners. The corporations get exactly what they want. It's not the tragic consequence of failing political systems reliant on militarism, it's an intentional move by an elite cabal who planned it all along.

Having the people who ruined the world still alive in the future takes away the idea that there was no justice after the bombs fell. The specter of nuclear war brought on by military posturing and arms racing gone too far is a much more sinister and devastating antagonist to me than Some Guys who wanted to make money and take over the world. You can punish Some Guy, but you can't punish long-dead governments who destroyed their own people for nothing. To me, who started the war and why was never the point. It was ambiguous because war never changes; this war was just like any other but with more permanent consequences.

I know everyone has their own opinions and interpretations, and that not everyone sees this the way I do, but to me shifting the blame for the apocalypse onto an elite secret organization of corporate heads looking to create a "new world order" sounds like something my drunk alt-right great uncle would say at Thanksgiving to divert the conversation away from the deeper systemic issues plaguing the world's nuclear superpowers.

Anyway, feel free to ignore me but I just had to write this out so people can see where I'm coming from. Much love to all my Fallout homies! ❤️

[cxsmic-reactions]

Fallout TV Show Headcannons (pt.1)

•Being a big time star Cooper or “The Ghoul” secretly collects old time movies where there’s a cool main character and a dog side kick. Bonus points if the dog looks like is old pal Roosevelt.

•Before he turned into the harder man he is today, “The Ghoul” would try to tame wild mongrals as best as he could but more often that not he would always have to put him down.

•“The ghoul” keeps extra “jerky” in his pockets just in case he runs into a hungry dog, wondering through the wasteland.

•Occasionally “The Ghoul” will take on bounties and refuse to accept caps or any other payment. Especially if it evolves kids and animals.

•When on the road together Lucy will often try to leave supply stash’s for struggling survivors on the road. And more often than not “The Ghoul” will try to talk her out of it and tell her how they need to keep the supplies but she more often than not gets her way.

A/N: just some headcannons i can up with while watching the new tv show. i haven’t seen any so i wanted to put some out there! let me know if you guys want more :))

[kristylae]

The NCR was falling apart in New Vegas.

NO IT FUCKING WASN'T. The Mojave campaign was unpopular. That's why it wasn't getting the support it needed. Oliver was a horrible general and focused too much on Hoover Dam and the possibility of a second Legion attack on it. Hence why the army was in a bad way. People even mention veterans being transfered to the mojave from other areas of the republic. It was in a good shape at the time. Just being a bit too aggressive.

If it was falling apart House wouldn't have been doing what he was because there wouldn't be a chance for continued buisness with the NCR.

And Shady Sands was still around it was just renamed to NCR. Hence why the question was "what was the original name of the NCR capital?"

[silverose365]

How come Maximus's power armor core lasted more than 10 minutes? He ain't that lucky, if he is I'm getting gyped!!!

[kyngsnake]

More on Fallout tv thoughts, my husband and I had a discussion while we were watching the show about the new lore they implemented with ghouls & the implications therein. Talking about ableism, negligent writing choices etc

Imo, switching the process of ghoulification from a possibility to an inevitability and making it so ghouls have no choice but to have a chemical dependency or else they’ll turn feral feels like a very poor allegory for addiction. Remain reliant on x substance or become a subhuman monster is what the new ghoul lore boiled down to. It’s not a pretty look. I’m honestly very surprised I haven’t seen more people talking about it— it felt like such a glaring issue to me.

My understanding of ghoulification, as somebody who’s played every game from 1 through 76, was that it’s effectively determined by genetics. Contingent on whether a person does or does not possess a certain gene, when someone contracts radiation poisoning and does not treat it soon enough, they either die or their body rapidly mutates to metabolize radiation— they ghoulify. It’s not something a person can opt into, it’s not something you can reliably force upon a person. Any ghoul hypothetically could go feral but it’s never a guarantee, more importantly it wasn’t some inevitability any given ghoul could only hope to stave off.

In a lot of ways I’ve always understood ghouls to be allegorical for disabled folks, thus the whole “all ghouls will inevitably become monsters if they’re not taking x substance” thing looks even worse. It’s just frustrating. It feels like the Fallout tv show threw an ableism brick through a window and everybody up and went “Hey, that brick is a pretty cool piece of home decor!”

The writers drawing a direct connection between the often shunned fictional race and addiction looks to me like lazy writing and negligence.

If any of my ghoul lore here is missing bits and pieces bear in mind I know ghouls have a lot of compiled lore throughout the games and I am paraphrasing in some places.

[deacons-wig]

I'd prefer if we never got to see the origin of Vault Boy and Vault Tec's branding in the same way I'd rather not get a canon answer of who started the War or how. That's the point of War Never Changes.

Vault Boy is a sinister figure in his cheerful embrace of Armageddon. Giving the Vault Tec brand a face and a name and a backstory feels so unimportant to what is actually interesting about Fallout. What's important to me is the big picture pre war, and the details of what comes after.

What is interesting to me is exploring how propaganda is designed to convince people how close they are to annihilation--or homelessness, unemployment, obscurity, or being The Other and therefore destined to suffer--in hell, in oppressions, being ostracized. Honestly insert any sort of marginalization or suffering here. Crony capitalism uses propaganda to market products designed to manipulate people into buying distance between themselves and that annihilation. Putting themselves "behind the thumb" of Vault Boy, so to speak. Buying a lifestyle. Vault Boy does it with a wink and a smile, inviting those who can afford it to buy their way to safety while using capital and fear to perpetuate the cycle. I don't need the specifics to understand this.

Some ghoulnaysis below the cut:

I'll admit, my initial reaction to pre-war Ghoulgins being the inspiration for Vault Boy was funny! Mr. Cooper Howard, washed up actor experiencing an existential crisis being shoehorned into corporate propaganda that then haunts him for the next 200+ years? Selling manifest destiny, racism, the Rugged Individual, the revisionist history that cowboys were a) white and b) more than a brief footnote in the history of the colonization of North America's west. The commodification of entertainers/creatives/public figures. Selling identities to be packaged into a product that will outlive them? Only to have that person live alongside that role they regret (?) playing... kinda tasty, if we have to give Vault Boy a backstory, though I didn't get a clear sense of his actual feelings about being used as a propaganda guy which I think is a failure of the show to commit to the narrative they set up, which happens with a lot of the show's (lack of) engagement with Fallout's larger themes anyway.

But The Ghoul (stupid name!!! weird and boring choice!!!) is just such an uncompelling and repellent character to me. I love a good bad guy or even anti-hero, but honestly he lacks any interiority. He's an evil karma character (eats people, waterboards and mutilates people, sells people to organ harvesters...like? that literally makes you evil in the games...) but the narrative pushes him as an antihero or someone with gray morality because he what..."likes" dogs? And isn't as decayed or unsettling looking as other ghouls (implying handsome=good or interesting). People aren't afraid of him because he is a ghoul, they're afraid of him because he's evil and will hurt them! Sometimes for no reason! I see the callback to the director telling him to shoot his co-star and Cooper saying he's "the good guy," but is that why he becomes so fucking evil post war? Really?

I don't know why he does what he does other than...the world sucked before and sucks now so he might as well represent the basest of human behavior? That seems to be the thesis of the show--unless kindness and community is engendered (by the vaults, by Management, by a civic government, by corporations) people will descend into chaos.

So why have this poorly executed anti-hero be the origin of Vault Boy? What are the narrative choices being made here? Is it just Rule of Cool?

Personally I would like a pathetic, rotting wet cat of a ghoul, some sort of carved out husk of a washed up movie star either trying to relive his glory days, or avoid them--having given up hope of finding his family after 200 years--being dragged into Lucy's orbit and being constantly reminded of his Vault Boy fame, that she is a walking Vault Girl with her Okey Dokey's and Golden Rule. He'd be a joke, a footnote of the old world. He'd be mean and snarky, even unpredictable and uncooperative--have a public persona of friendly curiosity and a private, cynical one.

Pathetic Ghoulgins would remind audiences of the cost of capitalism and imperialism without resorting to the thesis that war never changes means that people are inherently cruel and will resort to violence, rather than existent corporate and political power structures intentionally create the conditions in which people accept perpetual cycles of exploitation and harm for the sake of their own safety and comfort, despite knowing the cost of maintaining the status quo, and not seeing or believing that distance between the status quo and total annihilation is measured by the smiling thumbs up of a cartoon mascot.

I'm sure there are other ways The Ghoul could have been a successful character as well but.... That's satire. That's interesting. That's Fallout.

[describe-things]

new meme format.

[ID: A chart labeled, "Fragility scale", with three colums down the side. The first is labeled "Fragile" in yellow, and reads, "Glass". Next is "Very Fragile" in orange, for "The tail of a Batavian tear". Last is "The most fragile thing in the world" in red, for "Fandom when you criticize racism, misogyny, ableism, and other bigotry in media.". End ID.]

Download the HD template from the internet archive here. The image description should be copied and pasted whenever you use the meme, just edit whichever parts you're changing. No credit is necessary as long as you make your post accessible.

[copdog1234]

I think some Fandoms kinda have a bias against black and brown characters unfortunately, it’s disappointing. There always seems to be less attention paid to the black and brown characters

Yeah... I know that's exactly the reason why, even if some are unaware of it themselves. I mean, I've seen how people in the bg3 fandom treat Wyll. But both him and my boy Maximus deserve all the love, damn it!

[benthesoldiersjeanshorts]

[emmettkane]

Fallout New Vegas represented a subtle evolution from FO1 and 2, from a world where people did whatever they needed to do to survive, to one where they tried to rebuild according to their resources and needs. It explored how, under the gun, people would hold onto their traditions, how the old ways that destroyed the world would attempt to insidiously weave their way into the new one.

It also explored how, despite that insidious instinct, things would change for the better, or that, at the very least, they could change for the better. New traditions would arise, new practices, and eventually, the old ways would either fade or mutate into something unrecognizably different.

The fallout show chose to erase those ideas, set things back to zero, undo the growth that had already happened and replace it with a civilization that was neither stuck in their traditions nor willing to advance, a hopeless tale justified by a shadow-government of hyper-competent, hyper-intelligent billionaires who cannot be reasoned with or overcome, and who apparently do not make meaningful mistakes.

---

The intense narrative regression that takes place between Fallout: New Vegas and the show is frustrating, but what's even more frustrating are the people who so gladly embrace it.

In a recent interview, Todd Howard asserted that Fallout games would never be set outside of America, and noted that "It’s okay to leave mystery or questions..." and that 'Americana naivete' was core to the identity of the game franchise.

I'll try to ignore the fact that they felt the need to 'answer the mystery' of 'who dropped the bombs' in the show, a mystery that, given the miserable, myopic answer (evil billionaires oh nooooooo) would have been better left unanswered.

The more egregious idea is that Americana has a deep relevance to the themes of any of the official stories in the setting. Even in Bethesda produced titles, it is, at most an aesthetic element.

Anticommunism, consumer culture, American exceptionalism, rugged individualism, western chauvinism, and other ideas that could be explored through the lenses of retrofuturism and Americana are roundly ignored in Bethesda titles, where those lenses are used entirely to generate advertising and nostalgia-bating appeal instead.

In earlier titles, those subjects are expressed, but are either not the main focus of the games or are simplified. The intro cinematic to the original Fallout includes a shot of an American soldier executing a soldier of annexed Canadian and then waving to the camera, followed by a power-armored head placed proudly before an American flag. The opinion here is not clarified further because it doesn't need to be: American imperialism is bad, and was likely a contributing factor to the apocalypse.

---

Some people think that Liberty Prime from fallout 3 and 4 constitutes a commentary on something, or espouses some value or philosophical ideal.

If it does, and if you agree with it, congratulations, you are the commentary.

[bellonathedragonborn]

Bethesda fallout fanboys are weird. The moment you point out that the NCR has rebuilt to be close to Pre War they get bent out of shape.

Like people are allowed to be critical of the Fallout TV show. From what we’ve seen they aren’t acknowledging the fact the NCR is rebuilding. The Boneyard is even rubble still when it’s not supposed to be.

The devs of the Interplay/Obsidian Fallout games even stated as much. So why are people triggered?

[kristylae]

The spoilers for the fallout tv show just have me depressed. Why they were allowed to do that to the west coast? Why must everything that bethesda does with the series just prop up the brotherhood of steel. I like the brotherhood but at this point it's just ridiculous Everything that was great about Veronica's quest is gone now.

And then there's everything about Vault tec staring the great war and the think tank and House apparently helping.

And like none of this would ever be done to any of the east coast stuff. Because that's Todd's baby.

At this point I'm just done with official fallout stuff. And sticking to 1,2, New Vegas, and the Old World Blues mod.

[woundedearth]

people are so quick to laugh at other people for taking extremely loaded and upsetting representation in media ~too seriously~, but also conflate the words of some of the most powerless marginalized people with censorship by the FUCKING US GOVERNMENT. it’s so disingenuous it’s so silencing it’s so fucking shitty

it also very much feels like the cultural moment we’re in right now, where bringing up issues rooted in deep irl power structures is automatically written off as oversensitive and reactionary. it’s just media, until it’s an example from real life—then it’s just not that serious, or it’s childish to draw those connections, or it’s censorship to bring it up in the first place. allusions to irl violence are chump change but irl violence is always an isolated incident. and no one cares that this attitude magically seems to exclusively benefit the extremely conservative worldview that holds power

like lmfao no i don’t think it’s your right or anyone’s right to cover your eyes to obviously shitty offensive media writing laden with cultural baggage…. so that you can ~just enjoy it~! does this say nothing about you when you jump to silence the critiques of folks who noticed the harmful shit that went over your head? hot take… media is actually made and consumed by human beings who live in a society

[oldworldwidgets]

alright nvm im done talking about the reception of the fallout show 💀 i love seeing thoughts ab the show itself especially from mutuals but once we get into criticizing people who are criticizing people for criticizing the show i just. thats not something i want any part of tbh

do whatever u want of course but just know u dont have to worry about seeing any more of that here on my blog 💛

[deacons-wig]

Todd Howard, possessed by the spirit of Vault Boy: You know boys, I think what would really make this story pop is giving the cartoon mascot of disaster capitalism a backstory

[stah-l]

i’m about to become the joker