Fallout: The Amazon Series

Fallout doesn't seem to be "in the mood" to address "Prosaic Racism" for the most part. I will say that there's legitimate reasons for this, though. It'd require them to tread carefully.

I will say it does create a lack of verisimilitude, but whatever.

With regard to The PRC in Fallout:

• I'll say in fairness, I don't think Fallout portrays the PRC at all positively. It's pretty easy to assume they were pretty similar to Pre-War USA.

• In fact, a darkly amusing thought is that if the PRC is Dengist, then the two superpowers probably have more or less the same economic policy of Corporatism.

• Having said that, I do think there should be unambiguous examples of the PRC contributing to how the world got the way it was. Having it all be Vault-Tec makes it one-sided. It's not the worst thing ever, though

• I'll say that it does make a bit of sense, since Vault-Tec is ultimately more relevant to the setting, we don't see too much of the PRC. Though I do think an interesting villain would be a remnant of PRC soldiers trying to continue their invasion, that'll probably not happen though.

4 has a character like that but hes not really a villain.

I think they actually do a bit of that with the references to Cooper fighting in Alaska and the conflict driving the government into debt. That's not how things actually work in a modern economy, but it's there.

That's actually a good point, the invasion of Anchorage and such.

That said, there's also a news broadcast in the first episode that expressly indicates that there were active attempts at negotiation to end the conflict which the US specifically was stalling due to the President disappearing from the public eye in the last six months before the bombs (established lore, he fucked off to the Enclave's offshore base to ride out what he at that point rightly assumed to be the inevitable), which does a lot to shift blame off of the PRC.

Wouldn't be surprised if in light of the confirmation that Vault-Tec was behind the war, they establish this instead as part of that plan. As I've said before, I always preferred that the bombs were more a result of the US oligarchs being too hubristic and self-deluded to see the writing on the wall except for a select few like the Enclave and House, and those few simply simply having been prepared to ride it out rather than having actively made it happen for their own (extremely questionable) benefit.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Apr 16th 2024 at 3:41:43 AM

I think this is pretty unfair to Maximus. He starts as a bullied new guy in the Brotherhood, but just misses the cut-off to be squire (as he gets the chance when his friend injures themself to avoid the duty). He performs those duties well, despite being put in danger by Titus. He saves Titus's life from the Yao-Gui, killing it. He refuses to save Titus after Titus repeatedly threatens to kill him, but then proceeds with the mission. Where he saves Lucy from Coop, allowing her and the scientist to get away. He fails to stop Coop, but doesn't die to him either. He manages to get his power armor repaired, then reclaims it from four men trying to steal it, defeating them. Yes, he's a dick to Thaddeus at the start, as Thaddeus had been to him, but when given the choice, he doesn't order Thaddeus into danger, but rather takes that role himself. Then he does, in fact, recover the head. Yes, he still tries to kill Thaddeus, because he believes Thaddeus is threatening to betray him to his death. He manages to talk his way out of being killed for taking Titus's armor and he saves Thaddeus's life from the Brotherhood (oh, and attempts to cover for Lucy, so she can rescue her father, which is the only reason any of the back half of the plot happens, otherwise the Brotherhood just get the head and the story ends there). The only time he gets credit for something he didn't actually do is early on when he's referred to as a knight and at the end when he gets credit for Moldaver.

Frankly, I think the key flaw in the analysis being given is that basically everyone is an asshole, a coward, an idiot, or evil (or all four!). Maximus, Lucy, and maybe Norman are the closest to escaping that, but they've all got their major issues. The problem isn't that the Black characters are not nice people, it's that almost no one is a nice person.

ETA: Oh, yeah, I forgot he also saves Lucy's life, when she's going to die of radiation poisoning, and thereby demonstrates that there are people on the surface who can be trusted, despite Lucy's growing cynicism.

Edited by ECD on Apr 16th 2024 at 6:17:57 AM

It was just pointed out to me elsewhere, but you know that corporate meeting in the last episode? Not only was it filled to the brim with easter eggs from all over the games, but it also went and made Point Lookout the single most important dlc in the franchise.

Yeah, "The Great Game" between Calvert and Desmond? That's actually the driving force behind the series.

That's an incredible deep dive on the lore.

Edited by Spirit on Apr 16th 2024 at 6:48:19 AM

Honestly, Maximus accidentally threatening an innocent man to save a guy who wasn't innocent reminds me a little of New Vegas.

In the game there is an event near Nipton, where you will see a young Woman and a young man fighting.

If you decide to intervene, there's a good chance you'll save the wrong one.

Edited by Luisdalas on Apr 16th 2024 at 3:58:16 AM

In a change from complaining about the lore decisions and debatable Unfortunate Implications, I'd like to present a fun theory I came up with for explaining how V31/32/33 didn't get raided by the Master despite their close proximity to his HQ, which I think has a solid chance of being accurate and a part of Norm's continuing arc of discovering and exposing the Vault's secrets in the next season.

To put it simply: he didn't need to raid them.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Apr 16th 2024 at 7:50:05 AM

Something like that just makes me wish that they simply adapted the first game into a series instead. It's not as well known to modern Fallout fans and seeing The Master with modern special effects could have been grotesquely cool.

Honestly, I've always secretly wanted a serialized TV adaptation of Fallout 1 too. Alas

Eh, fun idea, but I don't think any of that is necessary and it's quite clear that as far as anyone else knows no one from the vaults has ever gone topside. Given that they didn't even notice Vault 32 had fallen for two years I really doubt they'd have noticed the Master's goons. Nor, given that they've got nukes, would they need to wait for the protagonist to handle it. If it got that far, they'd put a tracker on the first person they handed over, then nuke the base once they got taken to it.

Edited by ECD on Apr 16th 2024 at 7:53:45 AM

I always wanted to see an adaptation of 2, just finding some way to include a revamped Eden as the head of the Enclave instead of Johnson.

... that actually raises a major headscratcher, now that I think about it. If 32 was in full revolt, wouldn't the overseer have contacted Bud to say the situation was out of hand? If rioters severed communication and the overseer went dark, wouldn't Bud get suspicious? In either case, wouldn't he thaw someone out to check in, or have 33 do so? In hindsight it really doesn't make that much sense that the Vault was just empty and dead for that long without anyone who's in on the conspiracy noticing or taking action...

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:00:16 AM

Also, didn't they say there was a triannual trade with Vault 32? To my knowledge, that word means three times a year. But the vault was destroyed like two years prior to the events of the show. Or does triannual mean "once every three years"

I think triannual means once every 3 years.

Actually, apparently I'm wrong, it's 3 times a year.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:07:40 AM

Triannual means three times a year.

However, they clearly meant once every three years. But that's not triannual, that's triennial.

I imagine they just didn't know the difference.

Webster's is saying that "triannual" indeed means "three times a year", so yeah, these trades were happening more often than just the day that Moldaver launched her attack, even after Vault 32 fell. My guess is that either she had been at this for a while and had been biding her time, installing loyalists to undermine and sabotage Vault 33 from within and getting rid of particularly troublesome Vault 33 dwellers via the trades in preparation for the attack; or else Bud had been sending in more of the Human Popsicles from Vault 31 to cover up the fall of Vault 32.

Or that.

Do we have a map of the places in the show, and compared to the locales from the games?

As for how the Master didn't find it, eh. It's a plot point that he doesn't know the location of the Vaults, to the point that him learning it is the bad ending.

Depending on where the tri-Vaults are it's possible he just never stumbled on them. California is a big place.

As far as the topic of race in Fallout... I think this is more of a Doyalist issue with video games more than it is a Watsonian one. Video Games as a medium (and, let's be real, mass appeal media as a whole) are not quite sure how to discuss topics of racism, ESPECIALLY if racism isn't the core theme of the narrative and merely an aspect of the setting or world. Video Games probably more so because it's a medium in it's infancy by comparison to others and one that I also think hit a number of developmental snags that put it's language development.

Even then, most of the times I hear people talk about race in gaming, it's more external representation rather than internal to the game's narrative. You'll have a black protagonist or an interracial marriage, but the uniqueness of that is reflected upon by the audience viewing it, not really to the characters in context of the narrative. A rather... a-racial or color-blind portrayal.

And I meant those terms neutrally. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with having a Black or Asian protagonist where nothing of their character is defined or driven by their racial identity. Just as there is also nothing wrong with characters to whom their racial identity is a major core value. There are plenty of POC who want narratives that discuss racial topics as well as want narratives where they are the hero and the topic of race never ever comes up. Both are valid.

Getting back to Fallout, while I can't speak to personal experience with the older games, I always got the impression that racism existed within the lore and worldbuilding, but also that, by apocalyptic times, it's culturally dated. Less so out of progressive values, but also because discrimination isn't particularly, for lack of a better phrasing here, beneficial to a very tight and inter-dependent survivalist society. The racialized elements usually fell to "Fantastic Racism" examples of Ghouls or Super-Mutants/Nightkin which I don't particularly find relevant to the conversation we're having here as neither are metaphorical or otherwise to real world situations.

And it's narratively convenient for the RPG mechanics- We can have a male or female lead of any race and it'll never have or at least only minor value on the story.

But as we got on in the series... By F3, it became harder to engage with some elements. The franchise direction clearly wanted to engage with pre-war elements more and more (i.e. Operation: Anchorage) which meant... actually engaging with some of the racism or... retcon'ing or providing convenient reasons why we're not seeing or engaging with it. But, that comes with issues- now it's not just a text set in a book shelf of a dungeon suggesting something shitty that we can move on from- depicting something, even if as small as a casual remark of dialogue, is a different matter.

I am not trying to praise New Vegas endlessly, but I do feel New Vegas was more willing than other games in the franchise to engage on the these topics and try to do something with it. The Great Khans, even if more related to the Monghols MC (who were Latino as the Hell's Angels were purely white at the time) irl, I believe is engaging with some more racialized elements. I don't want to comment on quality because I'd want to actually play those sections again as it's been awhile, but we're clearly engaging the topic a little more.

Or, alternatively, we have the Sorrows from the Honest Hearts DLC. While they are not a 1-1 of a real world group... Honest Hearts is playing with the concept of a White Savior Narrative here and the Sorrows, Dead Horses, and White Legs are a Native American analogues in this case with figures like Daniel, Joshua, Randall Clark, and Caesar's Legion acting as the... influencers, shall we say. There's a lot to criticize to this DLC to it's failures and successes (some of which seems to be explained by very poor tech limitations and some seem to be out of someone making an un-authorized change during development- There's a statement on the wiki you ought to look at), but again, we're seeing an engagement to the topic a bit.

(I am trying desperately to not talk on my final college paper which was 35~ pages on Fallout)

And then we get to F4... F4 was in a Morton's Fork that it forged for itself really.

With the start in "50s Wet Dream Sanctuary Hills", having ANY LEVEL of engagement with racism dramatically shifts a lot of what the narrative is trying to utilize for that beat. What? If I pick a white family, it's all business as usual, but if we pick a racial minority family, we need to engage the topic of race in our tone setting introduction and then never ever comment on the topic ever ever again? Do we need to now justify why a Chinese family can live in an upper-middle class neighborhood with 50s-era aesthetics and (semi-real/semi-in-game) politics?

Or do we... just not engage the topic at all and just bullrush through it? Race? Doesn't matter. At all. Despite the extreme in-world xenophobia that falls along racialized lines and exists at the time? Like, seriously, you're telling me an Asian family could enter the vaults just as the bombs dropped and not face discrimination and hostility???

Like, I already had enough goddamn issues with the start of F4 and the heteronormativity of it all without even getting into the glorification of 1950s aesthetics that the series has otherwise more or less made some comment on. The consistent answer to this problem would have been "Don't", but that's a bigger and different topic.

I think Fallout probably works the best, narratively or otherwise, when the Pre-War world is a distant memory and we're having to pull the pieces together from whatever "lights" were flung into the future. It's all shadows on the wall and what's important is less what we figure out to be true or accurate or not and more what we determine to be true or accurate from it. We're picking up the pieces after. Some will want to re-assemble the pieces to original shape. Some will fail to make any of the pieces fit and never realize it. Some will toss them in the trash and start clean; for better or for worse. I think that's far more fascinating and I think race can and should play a role in that.

One aspect I've considered about Fallout is the larger world- I like to wonder if there are survivor societies out in China that are similarly combing the ruins and picking up pieces of a bygone era they don't fully understand... And I never ever ever want to actually go to that larger world. The audience consideration holds more value than the concrete narrative development of it.

But the more and more you viscerally portray the 1950s Pre-War World and decide to not have any goddamn teeth about what that would look like- warts and all... the harder it actually becomes to engage that topic in any manner besides just...

This character over here is racist. Is it built out of a system of inequality or history of oppression or anything? Not really, he's just a shitty person because racist shitty people exist IRL and that's the only way we know how to write the topic of race and racism within our narratives apparently.

Fallout is a criticism and condemnation of 1950s culture and politics. I don't know how you can do that without ever discussing race ever. You know what this gets us? This gets us a lot of people who genuinely believe the "Era of Greatness" 1950s media and aesthetics portray and never question it because we aren't engaging the uncomfortable elements.

To finally circle this winded post back to the tv show... Because Fallout in the modern era does not at all want to remotely be about race, we cannot engage the topic of race in the narrative at all. So you get these weird dissonant moments where the setting has 1950 aesthetics... but not the bad parts of the 1950s... well maybe some of them... But not the ones that mean we have to potentially talk about race.

I think there's value in, as a writer, going "I have neither the talent, deftness, or vision to handle this topic" and not engaging it. It's still a problem, but one I can respect.

If I had a pitch for how to engage this... Y'know what, let's put all those 1950s issues on full horrific display in our Pre-War scenes. Race, Nationality, Gender, Sexuality- the whole thing. When we show pre-war, slurs are dropped without a second thought. Not with a dramatic look at the camera or a music cue, but with the banal casualty of that culture. There is weight to who is in the room and who is talking and who is not.

So when we cut back to the post-war characters discussing the "True America" or anything to the pre-war world, we can have a really REALLY nasty and cruel dramatic irony as to these topics. A character's hopefully vision for America coming back might be completely genuine and innocent and free of the actual values of the era... and might have a horrific tragic element knowing the world he imagines existed never ever deserved the words he's saying. That he also... doesn't know what he's talking about, genuine and impassioned as he is.

There's like 5 other points I'd want to spin-off into, but I think I've rambled for long enough on a post I don't know how many will actually read.

Edited by InkDagger on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:22:11 AM

Yeah, the Master knew the location of some vaults owing to his occupation of the LA prototype Vault, but not all of them.

Well, I read the whole thing, if it means anything And I largely agree with your assessments! Not much more to add, heh.

Anyway, back on the topic I'd shifted to RE: the Master, yeah, he didn't know where every Vault was, but he was certainly raiding the ones he could find, and being effectively right next to his base of operations with a big, very visible public entrance right by a major landmark would make it pretty impossible to miss.

33's entrance, at the very least, is right by Santa Monica Pier and fully visible from the surface with like, no attempts to disguise or conceal it. The Cathedral was located in some unspecified part of Los Angeles. The Boneyard is dense but it's not quite the same level of difficulty as searching for a Vault hidden in a random cave in the Sierra Nevadas, or under a nondescript shack in the middle of Death Valley.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:35:41 AM

Perhaps the entrance to Vault 33 had been concealed by rubble or something back in the Master's time, and the way was only cleared sometime after he died?

33 definitely had a conspicuous entrance area outside it. Those pillars or whatever they call them right outside them could not have been an accident.

So either they were a very fancy way to direct attention to the Vault and the Master just got really unlucky with his scouts, or there were in fact a structure covering up the entrance but got removed in the 140~ years since the Master's defeat.

Very nice essay and I enjoyed it.

I've mentioned a few of my own opinions on the subject which is the question of whether representing racism is like war movies. Just depicting it is often something that has the tendency of feeding it as we've seen so much of the culture war consisting of creating "enemies" for Youtubers to attack or presenting X work as something that attempts to rebuttal wokeness or whatever the Hell. As mentioned both Star Wars and Bioshock: Infinite have had to struggle with Alt-Right fandoms.

There's also the fact that the Pre-War Alternate History isn't the 1950s but it is a 1950s that never ended culturally. Basically, the Sixties never happened and thus the Counter Culture never emerged and went on sort of like Watchmen from what I presume was Nixon to Reagan (or their analogs) on. Still, the show makes it ambiguous whether its racial stance exists or not.

1. Cooper is married to a black woman and has a biracial child with no one commenting.

2. There's Does This Remind You of Anything? when the father of the boy punches out his black neighbor when he attempts to get in the shelter with them.

3. Cooper's Native American friend makes it abundantly clear Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans in the 2070s is as racist as always.

4. Vault-Tec's selected bloodlines are ethnically mixed.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 17th 2024 at 12:43:32 PM