#oh and as for shady sands and new vegas being nuked

[partyshadow]

BLOOD CURSE UPON BETHESDA AND AMAZON ONE MILLION YEARS

[apathmakerstale]

Fallout Show Spoilers

Oh I never posted again about the Fallout show.

I liked it, it was a pretty good show and despite some reservations I have about them in regards to things like nuking Shady Sands and reducing members of the NCR to a Raider gang- allying with a violent raider gang would have gotten all of them a bullet to the skull by my OC Kars with no explanation.

Plus there was the implication that Vault Tec started the war- which I do hope is never really revealed as I think it's very important to never reveal who actually did drop the first bomb. Nationalistic and Jingoistic fever leading to a massive war based purely off paranoia is an important part of Fallout and I hope they don't firmly state that this faction caused it.

Personally I like to think that every single individual capable of firing nukes hit the button at the exact same time across the world. Make it literally all their faults. It'd be funny too.

I also personally hope that the canon New Vegas route is Wildcard. It would make perfect sense why New Vegas looks kinda dilapidated, as despite loving that route I am in no way under and impression that it's the worst route to take for a stable and prosperous Vegas. House is obviously technically the best despite him being a over-controlling dick, NCR would lead to that same bureaucratic nonsense that results in bigotry and shit despite it going pretty well for most, and the Legion is the Legion.

Also it would be funny for Hank to arrive in Vegas- try to be the big bad, and immediately get shot by the Courier for interrupting their Caravan game or something. Same with the the rest of the cast, as we all know that the Player Character's are just Built Different™.

I don't really like the idea they keep shoving that the Brotherhood is the most stable influence in the Wasteland too- personally I don't like any of the West Coast Branches and in my own OC lore, Miles the Lone Wanderer left the East Coast after all the political bullshit got too much to bear. I liked Fallout 3's Brotherhood.

In my Fallout 4, the Sole Survivor, Railroad, and the Minutemen wiped out both the Institute and Brotherhood. So I don't like Fallout 4's version.

I like Fallout's post-post apocopyles, the idea that people of the Wasteland don't care about the Old World too much and want to build a new world without the shackles of the Old World tying them down. To keep reducing them to insane people cobbling stuff together out of scrap is kinda tiring. That said- there still should be people like that, the world is almost dead in places, a sense of despair should be there too. But to think that everyone that didn't come out of a Vault is incapable is dumb.

And the best scene in the entire show is the bombs dropping- I LOVE anytime they show it in the series. It's just always such a sense of despair and realization that the world is effectively lost for at least a couple dozens years.

[lhs3020b]

FoTV, and an interesting absence

I have now seen the last couple of episodes of the Fallout TV series, and I have a few thoughts.

SPOILERS in here, of course…

First of all, the last two episodes were basically one O.o moment after another.

Lucy's father being a genuine monster, the nuking of Shady Sands, Norm's discoveries in Vault 31, Barb was actually evil the whole time, the way the Brotherhood appear to be being their absolute worst selves here, the US government was actually in secret peace talks with China(!!), the whole 2070s energy crisis already had a solution (at least for consumer electricity), there's LOTS to unpack.

Oh yes, and also the fact that Vault Tec apparently cosplay as Pentex, so there's that too.

But, but, but … one thing's nagging me.

Specifically, it's one detail. It's from the pre-bombs meeting that was effectively chaired by Barb, where Vault Tec was setting up its corporate camarrilla. You see, there were a couple of interesting omissions from the attendance list. Pre-War corporate America was well-represented … but where were Poseidon Energy?

Seriously, where were they?

They were presumably one of the most important companies in the pre-War economy. Energy supply would be a key issue for any Vault, whether control or otherwise, and an energy crisis was the underlying economic crisis that was driving the War. You'd think they'd be heavily involved in any construction project. So, to my line of thinking, Poseidon's absence feels a little odd.

But perhaps, just perhaps, this is hinting at something.

Consider - we know from canon that the pre-bombs president's emergency base was on a Poseidon oil rig. We also know that Vault Tec and the US government were at least slightly at cross-purposes by the day the bombs actually fell. It's also interesting that later in the TV series timeline, the Enclave - the last remnant of the pre-War government - were apparently aware of and working on cold fusion technology.

There's also another mildly-odd detail about Poseidon Energy. We know from Fallout: New Vegas that they - them! of all people! - were doing some research into sustainable energy in the late 2070s. Helios One was one of their facilities; there's also (if I remember correctly) a derelict wind farm that you can find in the Mojave, which also was one of theirs. On the face of it, an oil company doing renewable energy seems incredibly-odd - but, that said, if anyone out there had a realistic sense of where the hydrocarbon-extraction economy was going, it would presumably be them!

And this brings us back to their absence from Vault Tec's camarilla. It's not quite clear where all of this is going, but it feels like something is going on here. The government must presumably have been aware of at least some of what Vault Tec was doing - VT were, after all, a monster very much of their own making. Were they trying to use Poseidon as a counter-balance to VT? Was Poseidon meant to independently re-discover cold fusion, possibly?

(This was a bit I'll admit I didn't quite buy … the narration in the show made it sound like VT had somehow copyright-locked the underlying physics of the cold fusion reaction, which makes no sense whatsoever. Physics just simply doesn't work like that - the whole point is that there is no privileged, mystically-esoteric initiatory knowledge, it does indeed [to borrow a phrase] "just work". I think we can rationalise this as VT doing a DRM-equivalent on whatever kind of power cell that was required to run the reaction, though. Presumably what Wilzig had figured out was at least a partial way around this, so that pre-existing power cells could be retrofitted for cold fusion utilisation.)

(Oh, uh, also the fact that apparently all the transmission links, substations and light bulbs in the ruins of LA have somehow surrounded not one but two rounds of nuclear bombing, and 200 years of wind, rain, looting and generalised entropy. I know Fallout is a scavenging world, and yes the visual spectacle was powerful, but this did feel a little silly to me!)

Now overall, I'm not quite sure where all the evidence here is pointing. But, that said, I wouldn't be surprised if we hear a bit more from Poseidon Energy in Season Two…

[crobones]

hank might be a monster for allegedly nuking a town, but coop is tearing people limb from limb in order to find his family. how he's gonna react to find barb (in whatever condition she may be in) is one thing, but I wouldn't put it past him blowing up New Vegas to find Janey.

What I'm saying is everyone is like "Hank is a monster" and "He's the big bad" and "He just left Lucy with Cooper! He didn't hesitate."

but like

the man isn't dumb. he figures chances are that Coop would use Lucy as leverage or a hostage for more information from Hank - and that's difficult to do if she's dead. And Hank has knowledge of the Commonwealth to an extent. He might realize being with the Ghoul is the safest place for her to be.

or maybe I'm giving him too much credit in his respect to Cooper bleeding over from pre-war times. maybe he was just a coward that ran away. but if that's the case, I wouldn't be surprised if he saw Lucy's reaction and thought "Oh she's going to shoot me." and so he figured it was best to not be flanked by two very pissed off individuals. You can fault him for running away, that's fair.

But the Shady Sands part. Sure, it was chilling to here him say she was no longer there mom once she brought their children to the surface. But in the ranking of parents, who does Cooper think is the biggest monster?

The man who was taught that the best solution is bug out with your family, followed swiftly by blowing up your problems? the man who was morphed into a folktale for the all of the killing he hath wrought upon the land, all in the name of finding his loved ones? or the woman who decided raining fire and brimstone upon the Earth and billions of living individuals was a good idea to make a buck - egged on only by the paranoia that she convinced herself she was saving her daughter from a threat that could've been avoided?

[jfk-blown-away-blog]

Eh, it was like a 6/10 for me. Not as bad as I was expecting, but still suffered from all the annoying Bethesda-isms. Like you're really gonna use the "finding a lost family member" plot again. The brotherhood of steel is just never being handled well. The lack of NCR until just about the end of season 1. I know nuking Shady Sands isn't technically breaking any lore, but it feels forced, and I honestly feel as though Bethesda knew it wouldn't fit the aesthetic of modern fallout with it being a just about fully developed city, so they nuked it to avoid showing it. Oh, and of course they over used the T-60 power armor instead of using the much more common place T-51, which was standard issue on the west coast. I'll still be interested in seeing season 2 just for New Vegas and hopefully to see some other iconic places.