Fridge Brilliance
- The various mutants are even more grotesque than in previous games, given that it's only been 25 years since the bombs dropped, it's more than likely that a form of natural selection took place and by the time of the other fallout games the creatures that have deformities that impede their survival have died off while the mutant animals that have more benign or even beneficial mutations lived to reproduce.
- The fact that there's an abundance of plantlife is likely the reason that there is so many animals in West Virginia as its ecosystem can support a larger population.
- The abundance of plantlife also makes sense; in the real world, West Virgina is relatively sparsely populated (it's the 38th most densely populated state of the USA) and has fairly little strategic value (there are military installations, but they're few and far between; the majority of facilities in the regional are civilian and scientific research). So, relatively few nukes would have been aimed here - as opposed to the neighboring Washington region, which was heavily saturation bombed due to housing the center of the US Government. With few direct hits to scorch the land, most of the dense Pre-War forests would have survived relatively intact, and thusly just had to cope with the fallout.
- The Mistress of Mysteries questline is dripping with Death by Irony and Hoist by Their Own Petard; Shannon Rivers refused to take boys into her Order of Mysteries. She "mothered" lots of random girls, but alienated her own daughter Olivia, who also felt the Order's efforts were ultimately futile (though her primary motivation was one part her hatred of her mother, one part her rage at Shannon's refusal to engage in nepotism, and one part her own wounded pride). Olivia contacted the raiders through one of the rejected boys she knew before the bombs dropped, who had became a raider. She leaked information to the raiders that let them ambush the Order and whittle down their numbers, and planned to take over the raiders for herself once the Order was finishednote . Olivia eventually fights her mother and fatally wounds her, then Olivia's contact shoots her, because the raiders had never trusted her in the first place, they were the ones who had planned to betray her, and they had actually considered the Order a serious threat, which meant Olivia was wrong in almost every way. And Shannon's last act is to take her sad, misguided daughter in her arms; if she had been more of a mother and less of a leader in the first place, the whole Shakespearean tragedy might've been avoided.
- Speaking of the Order of Mysteries, why did Shannon take in only girls? Well, there's a couple of reasons for that:
- In the years after the apocalypse, orphan girls would have been especially vulnerable, since the landscape would be filled with psychopaths and rapists.
- When you're running an order full of teenaged female vigilantes, you don't want to present them with sexual temptation
- Finally, in the least sympathetic of reasons, Shannon was probably staying true to the Mistress of Mysteries; she was creating an order of heroines, not of heroes. Crazy, yes, but given the insane lengths she went to, far from implausible.
- The Resident devotes a lot of time to doing oddball chores like repairing water parks, playing musical instruments, and other oddball quests. However, they've been locked up in a Vault for 25 years. This is all new and exciting for them! They may also be prepping the Commonwealth for resettlement by making fun time for their friends that will come to live there.
- The Scorched Plague may be total science fiction, but its choice of carrier, the Scorchbeasts, is very scientifically accurate. The Scorchbeasts are giant mutated bats. Bats are important to the ecosystem because they're pollinators. The scorchbeasts are doing exactly what comes naturally to bats, except instead of spreading pollen, they're spreading the plague. Also, it's been proven recently that bats are carriers of a lot of viral diseases, put that with the Scorchbeasts and the the plague that it spreads...
- Speaking of Bats, given they can host a lot of diseases due to being able to mitigate their inflammatory processes it's pretty logical that they would be prime candidates for the plague. Similarly, Mole Rats are noted as highly resilient to it, and are also able to suppress inflammatory processes. Both animals could get infected and mitigate damage to their broader body while their immune systems fight the disease to the point of possible equilibrium.
- The Flatwoods Monster is a much stronger variant of the normal Zetans. Considering that its job is to catch humans personally, it makes sense that it possesses much better equipment than others. Furthermore, other Zetans were survivors of crashes or fought in their home base, where they wouldn't exactly be in full armor and armed to the teeth.
- The Free States Set up in Harpers Ferry, where John Brown made his Famous raid. The Connections to John Brown Don't end there. The Free States wanted to set up a new society in The Appalachian mountains, that was free from the Capitalistic slavery of the United States of the future. Similarly, as shown in the constitution for John Brown's Provisional Government in Real Life, John had plans for making a new government set in the Appalachian mountains of the state of Virginia, an area that would later become West Virginia! Similarly, John Brown wanted to make a society that was free of the slavery elements of the United States of the past, where any escaped slaves would be welcome, similar to how the Free States seemed to welcome anyone that was looking to escape from poverty.
Fridge Horror
- The premise is that you are the last guy out the door when 1000 highly educated but unarmed individuals are shoved out into the Wasteland with a backpack full of tools, GECK, or whatever else Vault-Tec equipped them for. However, you overslept due to a hangover and are 12 or 15 hours late. And there's no sign of the others. So, I take it we're to assume the Scorched got them? Alternatively, all of the Vault Residents are Action Survivor characters and meant to be the rest of the players but we encounter quite a few vaultsuit-wearing corpses.
- Since there is no mention of a major civilization in West Virginia in Fallout 3 and 4, it almost certainly means that Vault 76's mission to restore civilization is Doomed by Canon. Vault 76 is very likely to be the earliest advanced faction in the areas surrounding the Capital Wasteland, the lack of any mention of them should be a very big sign that something went horribly terribly wrong. Much of the east coast is still a barren warzone nearly two hundred years later, so it's almost certain that the vault 76 inhabitants couldn't manage to establish anything with the scale of the NCR. The best they can have accomplished is an isolated society like Vault City or the Institute.
- A good deal of the Vault 76 Overseer's story becomes this once you realize she's driven passionately by For the Greater Good and suffers a massive case of Wrong Genre Savvy as well as Horrible Judge of Character. She's a zealot in the service of Vault-Tec but believes that is because they genuinely have the greater good of the world in mind as well as being willing to Shoot the Dog to repair America. The fact they were an Always Chaotic Evil band of sadistic mad (social) scientists in the service of The Illuminati (The Enclave) who very probably did all of their experiments as much for Stanislaus Braun's pleasure as any real scientific data makes all of her sacrifices pointless.
- The lack of decay on the bodies and positioning of them indicates that it's very possible you missed saving these people by DAYS.
- Then again, it is possible that this is just technical limitation. General McGann's body is still fresh after 40 years in Fallout 4.
- The time this game takes place in can be frightening in its own right. Fallout takes place in 2161, over 80 years after the Great War. By that point, most of humanity would be Conditioned to Accept Horror. This game, on the other hand, takes place only a scant 25 years after the War. Many people who entered the Vault may still have vivid memories of the world before the bombs fell, and emerging to see your hometown of Charleston or Point Pleasant in ruins and overrun with mutated beasts and Scorched victims, can be a very hard pill to swallow. Some of the Overseer's personal holotape logs highlight this, in particular, as she discusses her childhood memories at various locations in West Virginia, locations that have been forever scarred by war...
- In the patriotism training course at Camp Mclintlock, you are too learn how to find signs of collectivism, 'the gateway to communism'. The terminal for the actual subject has his 'signs' of 'collectivism' being; upset that his dad is suffering in the mines, he doesn't get breakfast regularly, and he cares about his fellow humans. Additionally, he is considered suspicious for having FDR, one of the most loved presidents, as his favorite. If having empathy and compassion was a 'sign' of being a communist, just how cutthroat was American daily life...
- Some aspects of the Scorched plague actually may make some horrifying sense. A notable aspect of the plague is that it is fungal-like in quality. If one looks around, one can discover the original biochemical agent used to mutate the bats that became the Scorchbeast is noted to be some form of radiation sensitive fungi found underground. This isn't that strange as fungi are notorious for their ability to break down resilient substances with some radiation as an aid for metabolizing other agents, as well as break down minerals like iron to release nutrients they can then uptake. The latter still results in byproducts that can be other minerals. This wouldn't be much of an issue if not for a key feature of the setting. A potential danger of fallout is the byproduct of Strontium. Which is a radioactive isotope that is so chemically similar to the calcium in your bones it can and will fully replace it functionally. It is however still radioactive, and considering its been a mere 25 years since the bombs fell, it's entirely likely that most living organisms around have undergone such an effect. Ultracite deposits notably originate in the same areas that gave rise to the Scorchbeast and appear to have spread into previously abandoned mining areas. Taking it all together, ultracite may be the byproduct of the fungi used as the biochemical substance for the Scorchbeast, and the scorch plague is essentially the fungi boring down into the host bones to make use of the strontium making them up. It even explains the petrification, as if the host doesn't keep active and eating to make more strontium the fungi continues to feed on what's available, to the point of Ultracite replacing the biological tissues of the host.
Fridge Logic
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