Fallout: The Amazon Series

As impressive as the Master's efforts were, I'd also suggest that it's entirely possible that he flat out couldn't get in. The vaults are designed to withstand nuclear war. When they get destroyed by external groups like the Fiends, Enclave (Fallout 2's opening), or when he invades vault 13 then it's because they let them open.

The only vault we know that got raided by the Master was Vault 17.

To the credit of the Overseer of Vault 101, the Enclave flat out couldn't do shit when he simply said, "No."

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 17th 2024 at 12:48:54 PM

True, but that's also where we get into 1) we're necessitating suspension of disbelief to perpetuate the plot - The 1960s cannot happen to end the 1950s aesthetic... but at the same time, I'd point out that a lot of the 1960s counter culture movement were minority lead- It's the Civil Rights era. So... did Civil Rights happen earlier for some reason? Where does that put WW 2? Or did Civil Rights not happen and the show is taking liberties in the adaptation here for the sake of Doyalist - We're not here for that plotline so we're not talking about it.

I don't usually like "Medieval Stasis" as a means of perpetuating certain narrative or setting expectations infinitely, but there are some who put way more thought into justifying it. And this is why you narratively can run into some issues if you put too much weight onto the Pre-War... I now have a lot more to work from to scrutinize...

Like, we have two sexist vaults that are canon far as I remember- one vault with one man and all women and the inverse- all men and one woman. You're going to tell me Vault Tec, stupid evil experiments inc., isn't going to do a racially based Vault Experiment?

2) You're also now fucking with the audience's ability to apply that 1950s lens onto the media you're portraying. Take our Mr. Cowboy in the opening shots. There is SO MUCH racist baggage not just with "The American Cowboy" in the context of not 'The Wild West', but also the 1950s with our "good ol boys" like piece of shit John Wayne. To what extent am I supposed to be applying that context here or not? If everything is aesthetics and face value... what actual comment are we really making to the 1950s here?

I watched the first episode. I did catch on that he's a cowboy with a biracial daughter. The... alimony comment felt weird to me? And the daughter's reaction? Unless we get this guy appearing in future episodes and this wasn't just a tone setter, it's an odd detail? If he doesn't come up again, I would honestly not be surprised if there's a draft out there where the comment was racially motivated and it was changed later because, again, the show doesn't seem to want to talk about it.

It took me until now to realize the Ghoul is the cowboy. I'm an idiot and/or missed a line. My b. But I want to keep what I said for posterity.

Personally, I probably would have changed the opening scene to a wedding instead- Contrast the Pre-War Wedding against Lucy's wedding in the Vault. Build from one into the other.

I actually got F3 vibes from both starting with a Birthday party and followed by My dad left/was taken to the Wastelands and I have to follow him while the Vault I was in descends into a power struggle.

Odd thought I had- I realize we're obviously 5-seconds from when The Reveal happens, but Lucy's reaction to her new husband stripping down... I couldn't tell if this was "deeply inappropriate and Lucy is rolling with it anyway out of desperation to be happy with the situation" or "this is completely culturally norm and Lucy is rambling out of nerves". With the earlier comments on... incestuous stuff, there's sexual mores here that I'm not quite entirely sure I know how to read. Like... is this actually a hint of "something is wrong" or is this normal for their world and thus worldbuilding?

Ok... so are the incest and sex things that get brought up actually intended as jokes??? They're spoken so matter of factly and the editing pacing... doesn't make them feel like jokes to me? Like, I didn't find myself laughing and, if I did, it would have been out of discomfort, not because of a genuine joke. They... honestly felt more like "Yeah, everyone is stuck in a vault for 200+ years... concerns of incest are actually normalized and we have some awkward-to-the-viewers things going on here". The guy masturbating in the Bo S camp also seemed less like a "joke" and more like a comment on military culture and the sheer lack of privacy in the setting... What joke is there to "Guy jerks off and no one reacts"? "Hahaha. Penis"?

I will say... I adore the production values and design to the Vault. Fucking brilliant. I always got frustrated in games to the presumed space compression and cast compression of the Vaults. I understand why it occurs but it always bothered me. The show corrected that brilliantly and I loved the film projection thing. I love when a production design comes together.

Yeah but the bad ending to 1 showed the Vault door blown off. The Enclave might not be able to force their way in but the Master really wants those pure humans.

I did laugh a bit from Lucy having to turn her cousin down gently because that sort of thing is just kid stuff, but I think the main purpose was to show the realities of an insular society as well as how sexually permissive they are. While they are pretty old-fashioned there's no room for Puritan values regarding sex cuz they gotta maintain a healthy population and keep growing!

Similar deal for the panning over the guy jerking off in his bunk, that's military life with no privacy for you. It's either that or finding a portajohn haha. Slightly humorous, mainly world building.

editing to ask if you've posted that long fallout essay anywhere, I would like to read it ^^

Edited by PhoenixSoul on Apr 17th 2024 at 8:54:14 AM

The thing is, I think we are meant to apply some level of context about the 50s to our understanding of Pre-War society. Like you said, there are moments where racism is touched upon. The white father punching his black neighbour and refusing to share his bunker. The weird alimony comment. The conversation between Cooper and Charlie reflecting on the Noble Savage portrayals Charlie had in their movies together. I'd say Charlie being the voice of reason friend to Cooper who wants him to join up with Moldaver's camp while Sebastian is a Vault-Tec shill is somewhat important as well. But then you have moments where we instead get hints of a very racially progressive society, such as the Vault-Tec commercial showing an interracial couple (which gets weird when canonically, we know Chinese Americans were being interred), Barbara occupying a major position at Vault-Tec (and Moldaver too being a clearly well-educated scientist), and no one besides one guy really commenting on Janey's presence. It leaves me wishing they'd pick a side, either to not engage with the question of racism at all or address and engage with it seriously and show it warts and all (with my preference being the latter).

The incest stuff is Fridge Brilliance when you think about it. Part of why the Vault 33 people are so dopey is because apart from the lucky few families who get to have some genetic diversity (and presumably the Overseers' families get preferential treatment in this area since they make the selection), they're succumbing to inbreeding. They also can't afford to be puritanical when they think they're meant to repopulate the Wasteland in a few generations. Honestly it's weird we don't see a bunch of children running around the Vault.

Man, thinking about it more, the Vault 31 crew get to engage in Wife Husbandry to an extent... They have their former coworkers choosing and grooming the ideal husbands/wives for them.

Edited by PhiSat on Apr 17th 2024 at 10:23:08 AM

Todd Howard confirmed that Shady Sands was nuked just after the events of FNV, so the game is still 100% canon.

Now I find myself wondering if Lonesome Road was involved.

Edited by amitakartok on Apr 17th 2024 at 6:28:23 PM

Makes sense. Whether NCR won the battle or lost, it'd be the perfect time to knock them off their high horse or kick them when they're down.

It's attempting to treat it as more than a writing mistake but I suspect we can assume that racial progress happened in the Pre-War era but at a gradually reduced and slower pace with the fact it resembles the 1950s in many places fifty years from NOW being a sign that the counterculture movements didn't grow as extensively as they could have (Moldaver dressing like a Beatnik aside) being a bad thing.

And the portrayal of the Chinese in Fallout is...questionable.

Frankly, whenever we see the PRC show up in the games, they are....I'll just be honest, come off as REALLY RACIST cariactures. At least Operation: Anchorage has the benefit of having been deliberately thrown to the wolves realims wise.

Operation Anchorage is explicitly a piece of in-universe propaganda by a fascist lunatic who commanded the battle in question, so that at least clears, but yeah there's few particularly positive depictions of Chinese forces in the series other than the Shi, who are... heavily stereotyped, as you said.

Fallout 76 at least has Agent Mochou, a Chinese spy who abandoned her mission when the bombs dropped, is open about her past to anyone who asks, and acts as a stalwart ally to the burgeoning settlement of Foundation, so there's a little something there... but the game also has you recruit her by going up against her old unit who are a bunch of fanatical loons still trying to fight the war, so :P

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Apr 17th 2024 at 11:45:39 AM

I feel like the Fallout 4 Chinese Naval officer should have been part of the main quest instead of a side quest because of the importance of it. Because he's a character that not only is a Chinese officer involved in the nuclear war....he very much is the guy who destroyed your home.

And indirectly killed your wife/husband.

With Fallout and the 50's:

Admittedly, I'm pretty sure Word of God josses this, but part of me suspects that the retrofuturistic aesthetic is at least partially reactionary propaganda in-universe. They're trying to harken back to an era people are nostalgic about to get them to think everything's ok.

But in any event, with Fallout, I think their examination of the 50's era hinges mostly on these aspects in particular:

• This is an era when America was at its most conformist/collectivist. Just like how there was mass-produced ISO-standard housing, there was a standardized American lifestyle.

• In addition, there's a weird disconnect of surface-level optimism and the bleak possibility of nuclear war. Cheerful old-timey cartoons telling children what to do in the event of nuclear war.

The era was bigoted, but in fairness that wasn't the only thing going on in the era, nor was it universal.

It is odd that an ultranationalist group ruling America doesn't seem to have any interest in racism, however.

With Post-Apocalyptic Racism, I'd say we have a few good examples of "Tribal Racism", in the sense of pseudo-racist attitudes towards human groups that emerged in the apocalypse. This is technically not Fantastic Racism as it's still regarding "race" in a similar sense as we mean IRL. However, post-war racial hierarchies in Fallout are not necessarily our hierarchies, it's more like they "reinvented racism".

A great example of this would be The Legion, which is essentially a Neo-Fascist Militia trying to become a full-blown Fourth Reich by conquering New Vegas. They often exterminate "profligate" and "degenerate" tribes, and have a silly Rome Larp going on to boot.

Also in Fallout you see bigotry against people who are exposed to radiation generally, the most extreme case being The Enclave in Fallout 3. This probably counts as some manner of racism, or is at least eugenicist on some level.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Apr 17th 2024 at 8:45:56 AM

Re: Moldaver

I think we're meant to assume she was crazy in the end since, well, she was keeping her ex/Rose/Lucy's mom was a kind of pet. She also mentions hypocrisy and I'm of the mind that her experiences drove her nuts. While she was probably frozen, I wouldn't be surprised if she was immortal through another means. Mostly because I'd like her to show up in Season Two.

From the TV series, a conversation between main character and main character.

Well, Fallout 1 did try to avert that Golden Rule by adding a timer on both the Water Chip quest and killing The Master. Later Fallout games didn't so you instead get pestered by Hakunin sending a vision to pester you to finish the main quest in Fallout 2 while in 4 you get Preston.

I'd be utterly shocked if she didn't show up in season 2 at least in flashbacks. We're obviously not done with Coop's backstory. He's still married and a movie star, not the divorced guy working birthday parties we see and he's only had one brief encounter with Moldaver, wherein she was eventually proved exactly right. It seem extremely likely that he goes back to her, which is what's going to get him blacklisted and divorced.

Granted, Fallout 2 did still have an actual time limit, but that was the result of technical limitations (if I had to guess, I'd say it had to do with being built on the bones of the original Fallout, which did have a story-related time limit, and the bugs that altering the game's code to remove it entirely would have introduced) rather than anything story-related, and you're probably never going to hit it anyway unless you've been modding the crap out of the game, since it automatically kicks you into a "The End" screen after 13 in-game years (while you're probably going to accomplish everything the game has to offer in the span of about 2 to 3 in-game years).

I suspect Moldaver being involved with the bounty was a bigger motivation for Cooper than people are giving it credit for. The Ghoul seemed apathetic about the bounty until her name came up, at which point he became much more serious.

Super true, her being at the core really drove him to go after the head with everything he had.

Personally I didn't see Moldaver as being portrayed as obviously insane, more like Super Unable to Let Go: Championship Edition. Once it became clear that the random ghoul she had was Rose then it became clear to me that she had loved her and didn't want to accept that she was gone. I wondered if that was partially because she was also a ghoul (albeit very well-preserved), but her dying from a simple wound counteracts that when all the other significant ghouls in the show have been very hardy.

The twitter account confirmed that there will be a Season 2.

Eight days after release. Thats not bad.

I would be more excited but I thought they'd renewed it before it had even aired.

I think we underestimate the role the Brotherhood of Steel may have played in the destruction of NCR. The NCR-Brotherhood War never ended officially and they were still fighting as of New Vegas, even if a single chapter was never going to win against the entirety of the NCR Military. The destruction of their gold reserves did massive economic devastation and it's probable that they were the people blamed for Hank nuking the shit out of the city.

After all, they were on site after the nukes.

Which I suspect were to finish off any survivors who weren't children.

You know I just realized that Lucy must have mods on. That backpack she wears.

Maybe? I thought they were going there with Maximus's speech about how he joined the Brotherhood to hurt the people who hurt him. I thought it was leading up to a reveal that he thought (correctly or not) that the Brotherhood was behind the destruction of his home and so he'd joined up to sabotage them. That seems less likely now, but not yet impossible.

x4 They effectively renewed it but there was no official announcement and the contract may not have been properly signed yet. There were announcements of them applying for tax credits re: future filming locations for the show is all