jinglyjangly - Tumblr blog

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save me chinese stealth armor… chinese stealth armor save me…

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a bigger splash

fallout new vegas

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me an bathy's fallout ocs

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I think the fallout fandom needs to learn how to drop the word 'savage' when talking about wasteland communities just like... as a rule

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devastatingly true

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read your criticism and have a genuine question about your thoughts on the branding scene. i completely understand how max's branding is inherently tied to a racist history, and it always will be, but i dont feel like the scene itself was written with that bias/intent. thaddeus also gets branded in later episodes and it's implied to happen to every aspirant upon their promotion. at what point in writing are black characters morally barred from specific story points because of their similarities to a history that's not directly related? sort of similar with barb, at what point can black characters not do bad things at all, especially in a story where there are near a dozen non-black characters who do worse things? also considering it's implied (at least, i understood it as) she's sticking to vault-tec to protect her family?

I am not in the best position to comment on this, because I am not black. I will do my best to add what I can, but this is a space for others to chime in.

Barb is interesting because she's essentially become the person who did the most heinous crime in the entire setting- by far and away worse than anything anyone has ever done. There really aren't white characters who did worse things- because all the crimes of Caesar or the Enclave or whoever else pale in comparison to being the one who literally set into motion the total annihilation of all nations on Earth. (This is setting aside her willing participation in the inception of the vault experiments- which is an entirely separate also horrific crime.)

The issue is they've created a setting that is, as presented, colorblind. Race is invisible to the writers, who did not consider it meaningfully while producing the show- as is often the case with white creatives putting characters of color into their stories. Colorblindness does not always produce entirely racist results- and when done with tact and intentionality it can even be revolutionary. Look at the relative inclusivity of star trek as an example, and the radical depiction of Uhura in the original series.

The thing that makes Fallout different from Star Trek however is that it is not depicting its colorblind future with tact and intentionality. This is a show that is intensely concerned with depicting the specific brand of nationalistic American politics of the 1950s and the Cold War- and they've reproduced that system for the show but with a black woman at the head. That's where the issue comes up.

This was a system that had racism baked into it by design. It still does. American Nationalism and corporate violence are built on racism against black people and other minorities. And this show desperately wants to depict these things, but they've decided to put a black woman at the head of them. They're depicting systems that are, by their nature, violently racist- but they've decided to portray them as being run by a black housewife.

Fallout 3 does a similar thing with how it depicts every major slaver as a black person. Eulogy Jones, the slave buyer at Paradise Falls, the head slaver in the Abe Lincoln memorial, Ashur in The Pitt. Hell Mothership Zeta adds in a black woman from the wasteland and even SHE'S revealed to have been a slaver. This is something Bethesda consistently does- depicting ideologies and practices with a deep history of racialized violence- and then showing black people at the head of them, seemingly to try to avoid actually addressing any aspect of racism in their stories outside of hamfisted metaphors like synths and ghouls. (I use Fallout 3 as an example but Fallout 4 does many of these same things.)

Thaddeus does also get branded, and he does also get treated to the same demeaning servanthood as Maximus. The difference, quite frankly, is that Thaddeus is white. There are just some things that are straight up inappropriate to depict happening to black characters without appropriate thoughtfulness and context. Never before this series has the Brotherhood ever done brandings- and yet this show opens with it in the first episode and introduces this brand new jarring concept with the visceral image of a black man being branded by faceless fascist cultists.

It's also important to note that even if they didn't intend the scene as racist, it still is. Like I don't think the scriptwriter sat down and said "oh I'm gonna do a racism" cuz intent just doesn't matter here. The scene was intended as a way of showing the severity of the brotherhood- but it also thoughtlessly reproduces images of historic black violence.

@orange-coloredsky I know you've been talking about this stuff all day, and your initial posts about the antiblack racism in the series were what prompted me to write my thoughts today- which is what this ask is in response to. I was curious if you have any other input with all this.

I'd also be more than happy to have any additional input from people better suited to answer these questions.

[jinglyjangly]

It’s even funnier if you realize one of the previous expansions added The Pitt from fo3 where people are literally dying from toxic waste and psychopaths in a mad max wasteland hell but meanwhile in Atlantic City we’re learning about how the lion fish is an invasive species

fo76 newest update introduced an entirely functioning underwater public saltwater aquarium, and they did eventually add random npcs in labcoats working around it but like...

i wish they would go into more detail about these random marine biologist who are just...maintaining these massive ecosystems (since some of the fish are captive) for no real reason. There's even a ghoul but he's just an unamed npc with only unique ambient dialogue, no conversation. Like...why? how? people are paying caps to tour the aquarium?? is it payed with the taxes from the municipal government? why? are they educating people about marine biology? i need to know these things, i dont give a shit about your goofy ass fake mafia

[jinglyjangly]

fo76 newest update introduced an entirely functioning underwater public saltwater aquarium, and they did eventually add random npcs in labcoats working around it but like...

i wish they would go into more detail about these random marine biologist who are just...maintaining these massive ecosystems (since some of the fish are captive) for no real reason. There's even a ghoul but he's just an unamed npc with only unique ambient dialogue, no conversation. Like...why? how? people are paying caps to tour the aquarium?? is it payed with the taxes from the municipal government? why? are they educating people about marine biology? i need to know these things, i dont give a shit about your goofy ass fake mafia

[jinglyjangly]

Brahmin of Plenty

uhh this is some kind of concept of what holiday myths/folkore might exist in the wasteland

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bully rhys 

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WHY did you come up to the window like that

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various doodles of courier 6, & some friends

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This is the same man that massacred an entire army of raiders in one day.

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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.

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to me, JSaw is the most special and silly game dev director out there