#fallout reimagining

[falloutcaldera]

Approaching fallout with even a relative layman levels of actual anthropological knowledge makes this more egregious, and is why we developed the framework of 'postwar neocultural groups', common parlance 'Clan', fo refer to what fallout calls 'Tribes' - and broke down how 'postwar paleocultural groups' or 'Tenants', those living in prewar ruins and reinforcing the remnants of prewar culture, are mainly a difference in pioneer population priorities directly postwar.

The diagnosis notes for our fallout 2 reimagining actually covers this - 80 years not being that long to develop a totally divorced culture, combined with the fact the 'Village Elder' is literally the Vault Dweller & Pats DAUGHTER led is to conclude it was in fact an artificially constructed Neoculture born from the Vault Dwellers traumas & controversial exile.

Breaking it down as such, things begin to make sense:

they constructed an elaborate 'trials' system as a family in order to avoid the situation the VD experienced of being forced into the wastes without proper training in self defense

by going with the low end in the potential canon-ages, the VD was 16, emphasizing the traumatic nature of fallout 1 & having the founding of the Arroyo Clan as a response to that.

albert, natalia, & max all have reasons to reject vault society & want to make their own as well

we had the vault dweller both dislike the bos & internalize some of their ideas about the dangers of prewar artifacts - especially poignant to combine it with their discussion with the master leading to the spark of 'what if we created a new, more unified society'

[vault dweller voice] quit your vault job. join me and my friends socialist commune.

so the vault dwellers legacy here is rejection of the old world due to trauma (thus mirroring the master)

Which in turn makes the Chosen One's path synthesis of that legacy with their own lessons.

It's extremely easy to make Fallout 2 is about coming to terms with generational trauma and coming out with hope & solidarity in the face of it. Your companions include super mutants, you can embrace technology, you lead the vault to your town & let them join.

The Enclave is glorification of the past, like what the Vault Dweller learned to fear - ut the chosen one rejects both paths in favor of fusing ideas of harm and ideas of help to forge a new one for a new world.

Or, from the village elders perspective:

the men who kicked your family out after traversing hell to save them came, and then you were taken to a metal hell like the ones your parent described battling the Master Of Unities in, stories that gave you nightmares of pulsating flesh screaming in your ears for decades.

now they speak of that dreaded fev, that horrific glowing goo that haunted your parents dreams and then yours. a horror that twists, breaks, amalgamates, flesh to bone to wire to flesh to pulsing screaming halls echoing.

but your child. your beloved child, chosen one, who you sent on a journey you couldn't make, battered from years of fighting the wastes to keep your safe haven home from all your inherited nightmares -

they've come here, across land and perils, clad in ancient armors and wielding weapons you've only ever heard of in stories, flying in on those damnable machines with a mutant, to fight side by side - as friends, against these mockeries of all the old world horrors your parent warned you about.

I’ve been rereading some of your Fallout posts lately and something in particular caught my eye. In a post from October 2023 you said that Fallout 1 and 2’s timeframe didn’t really work for the vibe they were going for, especially with regards to Arroyo. Is there any chance you could elaborate a bit on that? I’m interested to know where in the timeline you think the games might fit better.

My thinking at the time that I wrote that post-and, to some extent, my thinking to this day- is that Arroyo and The Brotherhood of Steel are depicting a level of cultural change and mutation that doesn't necessarily align with the time frame on which they're claiming it happened. What's depicted isn't strictly impossible, but the specific aesthetics they're using are usually used to indicate way more time has passed.

With the Brotherhood, the primary referent for their regression to neomedieval monasticism is A Canticle For Leibowitz, a novel from the 50s about a post nuclear monastery that's dedicated, half-successfully, to preserving technical and cultural knowledge in the new dark age; the book opens when they've been at this for about 600 years, with the attendant levels of ritualization, information decay, and historical misinformation about the old world that would imply. Fallout frames the Brotherhood as having ended up in a similar spot, structurally and culturally, after only 80 years, and under the leadership of the grandson of the guy who started the thing. It's not impossible, you can make it work, but ultimately they're using aesthetics that gesture at it having been a longer time.

Arroyo is the other big example of this; 80 years after fallout 1, they've developed a "tribal culture," complete with ancient traditions and mythologization of historical events, despite the fact that the whole settlement was founded within living memory by a person who isn't even confirmed to be dead when the game starts. It's only been three generations! Tandi is still alive and running the NCR! This one's even more egregious than the brotherhood, given the existence of that gigantic fuck-off stonework temple complex ripped out of Indiana Jones. Where did that come from?

Some of this might be is that the nature of 90s graphics prevents you from seeing what Arroyo culture looks like "on the ground" in higher fidelity , which would make the cultural continuity between "exiled vault 13 dwellers" and "sustenance farmers" more obvious. Part of it is that my understanding is that Fallout 2 had a much more disjointed production than Fallout 1, so it's possible different teams were operating under different ideas about the chronology at play. And some of it is that Fallout 2 is a game that, to it's frequent detriment, leaned way harder into 90s pop culture wackiness and, to be blunt, outright racial caricature, than Fallout 1 did. It's possible that having the descendants of Vault dwellers re-organized as a stereotypical "tribe" as envisioned in 50s pulp sci fi is just an extension of the same unfortunate impulse that resulted in the game's depiction of San Francisco as Kung Fu Movie Town-The franchise's use of "Tribal" as a category is already pretty fraught in ways I'm not the best equipped to tackle, but Arroyo's depiction might be wrapped up in that.

Either way, thematically Arroyo functions fine- it creates a fish-out-of-water from an isolated agrarian community who goes on a hero's journey that ultimately brings them into conflict with their aesthetic opposites- a mob of deranged, Americana-draped technofascists. Holds together perfectly well on that level- just don't look at the numbers too closely...

[nopenototdaysatan]

I want to post my drawing or poem about "Gary the Poe." But that involves editing. But posting Gary. But nap time. But Gaaaaaaaaaaaaary. Gary.

[the-unspeakable-tsar]

Chapters: 64/? Fandom: Dracula - Bram Stoker (Novel 1897), Fallout (Video Games), Makt Myrkranna | Powers of Darkness - Valdimar Ásmundsson, Anno Dracula Series - Kim Newman, Dracula & Related Fandoms, Dracula (1931), The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death Relationships: Mina Murray Harker/Lucy Westenra, Jonathan Harker/Mina Murray Harker, Arthur Holmwood/Quincey Morris/John Seward/Lucy Westenra, Kate Reed/Lucy Westenra, Brides of Dracula/Dracula, Brides of Dracula/Jonathan Harker Characters: Dracula, Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray Harker, Lucy Westenra (Dracula), Kate Reed, The Countess, The Countess (Makt Myrkranna), Brides of Dracula, John Seward, Quincey Morris, Arthur Holmwood, R.M. Renfield, Captain of the Demeter (Dracula) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Fallout (Video Games) Setting, NCR | New California Republic, Inspired by Dracula - Bram Stoker (Novel 1897), Vampires, Ghouls, Feral Ghouls (Fallout), Bad Spanish, Deathclaws (Fallout), Super Mutant (Fallout), California, Mexican Food, Chinese Food, Blood Drinking, Vampire Hunters, Catholicism, Inaccurate Catholicism, Vampire Bites, Vampire Turning, Retelling, Retelling of Dracula, Nuka Cola (Fallout), Child Death, Character Death Summary:

A complete rewrite of the classic novel, but set in the fallout universe.

Jonathan Harker, a solicitor working out of Angel's Boneyard, NCR, has been tasked with visiting Count Dracula, a mysterious chieftain living in the northern part of California with purchasing a home in Angel's Boneyard. Harker uncovers more elaborate and horrifying things surrounding his client as things heighten.

[avelera]

Bizarre to me to see a Twitter hot-take that Viktor and Jayce would be against AI.

Like, I get the impulse to have your favorite character have the same politics and beliefs as you, but there’s fanon and then there’s headcanon that literally directly contradicts canon.

Because Viktor literally invents magical Hextech AI. He speaks reverently of the Hexcore as Hextech that thinks and adapts, aka literally machine learning, the other name for AI.

To be sure, post-evil future Jayce and post-Sky’s death Viktor and/or Mage Viktor can absolutely be styled as anti-AI but that would be from the standpoint of the end of their arcs, after they’ve seen its ultimate fallout.

Like, literally, Viktor’s entire arc is a magical, reimagined Evil AI cautionary tale. Bro isn’t against AI when he creates the Hexcore, he literally invents it within the world of Arcane and is excited about its creation.

In our world, he’d absolutely be one of those early machine learning/AI pioneers waxing poetic about the potential the technology has for improving people’s lives.

“But Viktor wants to help people, he’d never support AI!” YEAH, the people who invented AI wanted to help people too! That’s the point! That’s the cautionary tale! Viktor and other AI creators made this new technology, often in reality and very often in fiction, hoping to help people only to see their invention turned to evil uses. That’s the proverbial naïveté of the scientist. We see it over and over again in fiction. It’s a really common stock trope. Indeed, I often find the trope rather tiresome and Luddite and often used to make anti-scientific stories but the point stands that it can be used too to talk about real-life scientific cautionary tales.

Viktor is only anti-AI in the sense that he’s the original AI tech bro of Runeterra. And Jayce is right there supporting him! Viktor invents it, pioneers it, promotes it, and only after it kills someone in front of him does he turn against it and even then, he is then transformed against his will into the literal tool of a literal Evil AI. It is a stock trope. It is a stock cautionary tale.

Without Sky’s death, he’d probably be right there with Jayce still promoting Hextech Artificial Intelligence (or standing just behind him in the shadows, beaming).

[dailyadventureprompts]

Monsters Reimagined: Bandits

As a game of heroic fantasy that centers so primarily on combat, D&D  is more often than not a game about righteous violence, which is why I spend so much time thinking about the targets of that violence. Every piece of media made by humans is a thing created from conscious or unconscious design, it’s saying something whether or not its creators intended it to do so. 

Tolkien made his characters peaceloving and pastoral, and coded his embodiment of evil as powerhungry, warlike, and industrial. When d&d directly cribbed from Tolkien's work it purposely changed those enemies to be primitive tribespeople who were resentful of the riches the “civilized” races possessed. Was this intentional? None can say, but as a text d&d says something decidedly different than Tolkien. 

That's why today I want to talk about bandits, the historical concept of being an “outlaw”, and how media uses crime to “un-person” certain classes of people in order to give heroes a target to beat up. 

Tldr: despite presenting bandits as a generic threat, most d&d scenarios never go into detail about what causes bandits to exist, merely presuming the existence of outlaws up to no good that the heroes should feel no qualms about slaughtering. If your story is going to stand up to the scrutiny of your players however, you need to be aware of WHY these individuals have been driven to banditry, rather than defaulting to “they broke the law so they deserve what’s coming to them.”

I got to thinking about writing this post when playing a modded version of fallout 4, an npc offhndedly mentioned to me that raiders (the postapoc bandit rebrand) were too lazy to do any farming and it was good that I’d offed them by the dozens so that they wouldn’t make trouble for those that did. 

That gave me pause, fallout takes place in an irradiated wasteland where folks struggle to survive but this mod was specifically about rebuilding infrastructure like farms and ensuring people had enough to get by. Lack of resources to go around was a specific justification for why raiders existed in the first place, but as the setting became more arable the mod-author had to create an excuse why the bandit’s didn’t give up their violent ways and start a nice little coop, settling on them being inherently lazy , dumb, and psychopathic.   

This is exactly how d&d has historically painted most of its “monstrous humanoid” enemies. Because the game is ostensibly about combat the authors need to give you reasons why a peaceful solution is impossible, why the orcs, goblins, gnolls (and yes, bandits), can’t just integrate with the local town or find a nice stretch of wilderness to build their own settlement on and manage in accordance with their needs. They go so far in this justification that they end up (accidently or not) recreating a lot of IRL arguments for persecution and genocide.

Bandits are interesting because much like cultists, it’s a descriptor that’s used to unperson groups of characters who would traditionally be inside the “not ontologically evil” bubble that’s applied to d&d’s protagonists.   Break the law or worship the wrong god says d&d and you’re just as worth killing as the mindless minions of darkness, your only purpose to serve as a target of the protagonist’s righteous violence.  

The way we get around this self-justification pitfall and get back to our cool fantasy action game is to relentlessly question authority, not only inside the game but the authors too. We have to interrogate anyone who'd show us evil and direct our outrage a certain way because if we don't we end up with crusades, pogroms, and Qanon.

With that ethical pill out of the way, I thought I’d dive into a listing of different historical groups that we might call “Bandits” at one time or another and what worldbuilding conceits their existence necessitates. 

Brigands: By and large the most common sort of “bandit” you’re going to see are former soldiers left over from wars, often with a social gap between them and the people they’re raiding that prevents reintegration ( IE: They’re from a foreign land and can’t speak the local tongue, their side lost and now they’re considered outlaws, they’re mercenaries who have been stiffed on their contract).  Justifying why brigands are out brigading is as easy as asking yourself “What were the most recent conflicts in this region and who was fighting them?”. There’s also something to say about how a life of trauma and violence can be hard to leave even after the battle is over, which is why you historically tend to see lots of gangs and paramilitary groups pop up in the wake of conflict. 

Raiders:  fundamentally the thing that has caused cultures to raid eachother since the dawn of time is sacristy. When the threat of starvation looms it’s far easier to justify potentially throwing your life away if it means securing enough food to last you and those close to you through the next year/season/day. Raider cultures develop in biomes that don’t support steady agriculture, or in times where famine, war, climate change, or disease make the harvests unreliable. They tend to target neighboring cultures that DO have reliable harvests which is why you frequently see raiders emerging from “the barbaric frontier” to raid “civilization” that just so happens to occupy the space of a reliably fertile river valley. When thinking about including raiders in your story, consider what environmental forces have caused this most recent and previous raids, as well as consider how frequent raiding has shaped the targeted society. Frequent attacks by raiders is how we get walled palaces and warrior classes after all, so this shit is important. 

Slavers: Just like raiding, most cultures have engaged in slavery at one point or another, which is a matter I get into here. While raiders taking captives is not uncommon, actively attacking people for slaves is something that starts occurring once you have a built up slave market, necessitating the existence of at least one or more hierarchical societies that need more disposable workers than then their lower class is capable of providing. The roman legion and its constant campaigns was the apparatus by which the imperium fed its insatiable need for cheap slave labor. Subsistence raiders generally don’t take slaves en masse unless they know somewhere to sell them, because if you’re having trouble feeding your own people you’re not going to capture more ( this is what d&d gets wrong about monstrous humanoids most of the time). 

Tax Farmers: special mention to this underused classic, where gangs of toughs would bid to see who could collect money for government officials, and then proceed to ransack the realm looking to squeeze as much money out of the people as possible. This tends to happen in areas where the state apparatus is stretched too thin or is too lighthanded to have established enduring means of funding.  Tax farmers are a great one-two punch for campaigns where you want your party to be set up against a corrupt authority: our heroes defeat the marauding bandits and then oh-no, turns out they were not only sanctioned by the government but backed by an influential political figure who you’ve just punched in the coinpurse.  If tax farming exists it means the government is strong enough to need a yearly budget but not so established (at least in the local region) that it’s developed a reliably peaceful method of maintaining it.  

Robber Baron: Though the term is now synonymous with ruthless industrialists, it originated from the practice of shortmidned petty gentry (barons and knights and counts and the like) going out to extort and even rob THEIR OWN LANDS out of a desire for personal enrichment/boredom. Schemes can range from using their troops to shake down those who pass through their domain to outright murdering their own peasants for sport because you haven’t gotten to fight in a war for a while.  Just as any greed or violence minded noble can be a robber baron so it doesn’t take that much of a storytelling leap but I encourage you to channel all your landlord hate into this one. 

Rebels: More than just simple outlaws, rebels have a particular cause they’re a part of (just or otherwise) that puts them at odds with the reigning authority. They could violently support a disfavoured political faction, be acting out against a law they think is unjust, or hoping to break away from the authority entirely. Though attacks against those figures of authority are to be expected, it’s all too common for rebels to go onto praying on common folk for the sake of the cause.  To make a group of rebels worth having in your campaign pinpoint an issue that two groups of people with their own distinct interests could disagree on, and then ratchet up the tension. Rebels have to be able to beleive in a cause, so they have to have an argument that supports them.

Remnants: Like a hybrid of brigands, rebels, and taxfarmers, Remnants represent a previously legitimate system of authority that has since been replaced but not yet fully disappeared. This can happen either because the local authority has been replaced by something new (feudal nobles left out after a monarchy toppling revolution) or because it has faded entirely ( Colonial forces of an empire left to their own devices after the empire collapses). Remnants often sat at the top of social structures that had endured for generations and so still hold onto the ghost of power ( and the violence it can command) and the traditions that support it.  Think about big changes that have happened in your world of late, are the remnants looking to overturn it? Win new privilege for themselves? Go overlooked by their new overlords?

Art

[magnuspeccatori]

I made some Modern Nuka-Cola can redesigns! :D

Diving into the world of Fallout, I've reimagined the iconic Nuka Cola bottles as sleek, modern 16oz cans. Each design is a mix of nostalgia and contemporary aesthetics, blending the essence of the wasteland with a touch of futuristic flair

Which one should I do next? I'm thinking Sunset Sarsaparilla would be cool!

[new-eyes-extra-colors]

@fuzzydreamin found it!

It’s super weird that Fallout 4 introduces one interesting raider gang with its own quest and dialogue pretty early on and then has generic raiders in the rest of the game

[miimo96]

Ya know I had my doubts at 1st but with 3 new episodes out now I can confidently say that I am absolutely LOVING Your friendly neighborhood Spider man, from the music, to the choreography, to the way things are setup, to even the characterizations/meanings behind some episodes I can say that this show is getting really good,

For example I love how this show is foreshadowing Lonnies decent into becoming tombstone by having him already getting his name as well as joining a gang, I get the feeling that Lonnie will only fully become Tombstone once peter messes up somehow, either by accidentally knocking him into a vat of some chemicals due to a fight between him and scorpion giving him his iconic stone skin or by having him being transfomed by scorpion as a way of revenge for him attacking him earlier, which will be sad AF if this happens, I also love how episode 4 represented the meaning and concept of Spiderman as well as planted the seeds for Peter and harry's relationship as well as their eventual fallout, with norman OBVIOUSLY favoring Peter/ Spider man more than harry rn. I also love the references/reimaginings to classic and underrated villains like Speed demon or Unicorn, characters I haven't heard the names of in a long time,

Another thing I really loved was how once again episode 4 represented the meaning/ appeal of Spiderman, with each costume peter tried on not having the core themes of what makes Spiderman so great, like the fact that his costume is red and blue to mainly give off a friendlier vibe and appeal to all people alike, the fact that he chooses to represent himself as a spider due to his powers and because of how simple the concept of Spiderman is, and the fact that his costume represents himself and isn't supposed to be very flashy or dramatic, making it easier for him be aerodynamic as well as look cool, I think that episode was supposed to represent how Norman sees Spiderman, he wants Peter to be HIS version of a superhero and wants him to be quote unquote a "SUPERIOR" Spider man, he doesn't want Peter to be his own person, he wants him under his thumb, despite everything we see, Norman is still norman and he'll eventually become the Goblin, because where there's a Spiderman there's ALWAYS a goblin, and I can already see the seeds they're planting for this man, yeah idk about you, but I totally can't wait for the next episode ^^ let's hope they keep up this momentum

[iowadream]

okay just finished the recent chapters of deltarune. (unedited) first impressions:

the chapter 3 story line sideswiped me in how human it is. like it's fundamentally a story about how quickly grief can spiral into isolation and fragmentation. A divorce, a daughter's disappearance, a professional digrace, a deathly illness, and a case of empty nester syndrome all come together to damage inter- and intra-familial bonds that never really recovered. sure some of it is happening for plotty reasons and it's told through the vantage point of an anthropomorphized television but all of those things feel like really banal sources of grief in people's lives. there's more at play with the symbolism of the CRT as outdated technology in the internet age, but what tenna fundamentally was was a conduit for bonds both within and between the Dreemurrs and the Holidays. The in media res nature of deltarune's plot means that we are living in the fallout of the damage to these bonds. The dreemurr house always feels particularly empty. every interaction asgore has with any dreemurr or holiday reeks of desparately trying to hold onto something that is falling through his fingers. Carol has retreated into her work and is only seen expressing anger and frustration towards anyone other than kris. All of kris and noelle's interactions feel overly stilted and constantly reference the nostalgic, as if they had once been close and then grown apart. in fact, i would argue that the "familiarity without active closeness" dynamic between kris and noelle is exactly what enables the snowgrave route to be played in the first place. I think that toby fox is an especially strong writer when it comes to that humanity. I'm reminded of an early review of undertale which describes its gameplay loop as "balancing the complexity of compassion with the simplicity of the sword;" hell, that was the CENTRAL NARRATIVE MECHANISM that set it apart from all other rpgs! He also strikes this really good goofy-serious balance that I've only ever seen done before in BoJack horseman. without that deftness of balance i don't think he would be able to deliver that message about grief through tenna, who is a walter cronkite-johnny carson caricature.

one of the biggest complaints I've had about video games's growing pains as an art form is that it feels like all the western video game "auteurs" are either a) just trying to make movies with controller input (Neil Druckman, David Cage, etc) or b) are Edmund McMillen. it stinks so heavily of "we demand to be taken seriously" and Japan is DECADES ahead of us in this respect (Goichi Suda, Hideo Kojima, Hidetaka Miyazaki, etc). it reminds me of that Ursula k leguin quote about how people who are tourists to an art form commonly denigrated in the cultural consciousness will make art within that art form that seeks to wantonly deconstruct and subvert everything they can. but those artists inherently coming at that mode of expression from a condescending place, rather than from a place of love and admiration, and as a result, they make something far more pedestrian than they thought. and i think that what sets toby fox apart as a video game auteur is how he does absolutely none of that. every single interaction, battle, mechanic, is dripping with love and passion for the medium he's working in. and he does a lot of subverting and deconstructing of the form he's working within; he's reimagined the narrative progression, the battle system, how you deal damage to enemies, how enemies deal damage to you, and it always feels fresh, purposeful, and inspired each time. There has never been a point where deltarune has felt stale, and it feels almost effortless for toby to generate a gameplay loop that feels fun and original at each iteration.

he's also really funny. cannot count how many times that game has elicited a genuine laugh out of me

he's never topping a cyber's world but there were some heater moments off the soundtrack, more in chapter 4 than chapter 3 imo. like he gets reichian in some places and i love the pitch shifted bells shit he does

[open-sketchbook]

my girlfriend is asking for where she can find your written works, she really likes the one post you made about your mindstate wandering w/r/t making porn stories and she'd love to support you & read your stories

Sure!

I write my (public) fiction on the website Sufficient Velocity, a sci-fi forum. Most of them are in the form of 'quests', interactive stories; my day job is an independent tabletop roleplaying game designer, so the two things go hand in hand.

I unfortunately am both very busy and kind of a mess mentally, so fiction gets picked up and dropped a lot, and I write less than ever these days due to the shambles that my life has become.

For my quests, the stuff I'm proudest of is...

Castles of Steel, a longrunning (though currently on hiatus) story set in an alternate world much like our own, but with radically different gender politics. It's about the first woman in the navy of a country a lot like 1910s Imperial Japan, and more generally about how state power and imperialism entangles itself with and recoups social progress.

A Splinter in your Mind, a retelling of the Matrix with new characters and reimagined twists and worldbuilding. It makes the trans subtext into trans dommetext, and I feel its some of my cleverest writing.

Suffer Not, and especially its sequel The Witch Lives. Suffer Not is a Warhammer 40,000 fic about an Inquisitor who abuses her powers to actually make people's lives better, and is the story of her slowly realizing it is not enough. The Witch Lives takes place ten years later, following the grown up psyker the Inquisitor adopted, and focuses much more on faith, history, and the little people.

The Spider-Liv Trilogy started as a silly and honestly kind of bad extreme-divergence spiderman AU, but its sequel The Amazing Arachne is, I think, genuinely really good, because it's about what happens when a superhero gets hurt and then doesn't get better.

I've managed to properly publish two pieces of writing, as in you can get them in book form, and I'm still really proud of both.

Whispers from the Deep is an adaptation of the quest that defined the setting of my roleplaying game Flying Circus. It's about a young woman who steals a plane and runs away from her abuser with her boyfriend, and then has to take up life as an aerial mercenary in a 1920s-themed post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Also, she's a fish person and her village is a Cthulhu cult!

Lieutenant Fusilier in the Farthest Reaches is a pastiche of the Richard Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell, moving the setting from the Napoleonic Wars to a bizarre future world where sentient, cheerfully productive robots were invented in the early 19th century and promptly took all the jobs, elevating all of humanity to the gentry and then to the stars. It's about a redcoated robot soldier who uses her immortality to save up and buy a commission in the Army of Great Britain and Beyond, a position normally occupied exclusively by humans, and then facing the fallout of her decision and the life choices leading to it as her first deployment spirals out of control. It's also, sorta, a parody of Star Trek; the Galactic Concert is a mechanized, Regency-themed Federation, and the back half of the book is basically about how the problems of a world cannot be solved by an away team of well-meaning people with stun pistols.

[orange-coloredsky-archive]

anyways if you want to read a Black fallout fanfic writer's very short and unorganized reimagining of the story from the lens of a Black woman character read a mirror is harder to hold. Black love and joy and interiority and complexity above all

[demenshah]

i got fallout prime memes in my mind 24/7 like nothing you've ever seen before. Cooper Howard as Actual Cannibal Shia Labeouf. American Gothic but make it Ghoulcy. that very last "you comin'?" reimagined as "do you want to eat shrimps with the wimps or have lobster with a monster". Etcetera. Etcetera. Take my hand. Come take a stroll in my beautiful mind like a garden.

[baudouinette]

My Kingdom of Heaven themed fictions (projects and ongoing):

Heaven Can’t Wait (Baldwin x OC) ongoing, arranged [“interfaith”] marriage, long fic, magical realism but with historical accuracy, slow burn, fairy tale tropes

REPEL (Baldwin x leperOC) short story, Greek tragedy style

Vide Cor Meum (Baldwin x time travelerOC) Two versions: one as an original story/novel, another reimagined as an Assassin’s Creed fanfic.

Sidi Mansour (Saladin x OC) no info to avoid spoilers, the hooks are best if discovered within the reading of it

He Cries Tears of Silver Modern AU Baldwin x blindOC one-shot. “You cannot change the whole world, but you have already changed mine.” (Maybe I should swap the title for Vide Cor Meum, it would fit better, but it does suit the theme of the time travel one too though) inspired by City of Angels and A Patch of Blue.

Chanterai Por Mon Corage?? Dragon themed story, influenced by HTTYD & HOTD.

(Baldwin x HinduOC) Vampire themed.

A Fallout crossover AU with Baldwin as a ghoul. I began making some drawings of this concept last year, including one based on a tweet, but I did not like the drawings at all (have to fix them)

A one-shot or short story based on my Sultan AU concept of him

Which of these interests you the most? :)

Someday this will be a masterlist, as for now it is still under construction, but I wanted to create an easy access to the current projects, and some info on them

Sorry that there are no x reader fics from me, but I’ve never gone for it since it’s just not my style, though I have read many in general before. Every time I’ve given it a try there’s simply something that doesn’t quite work, like it’s not compatible with the way I write.

If you read any please consider leaving a comment!

[thefalloutwiki]

Fallout 4: November 10, 2015

8 years ago today, on November 10, 2015, Fallout 4 officially released to the world, bringing us a brand new Fallout experience 5 years since the last!

Happy 8th Anniversary Fallout 4! I remember watching the E3 Presentation for the game, and being so excited for it!

Pre-production on Fallout 4 began shortly after the completion of Fallout 3's final add-on, Mothership Zeta. Art development started in 2009.

Similar to Fallout 3, one of the first things they created was the game's Power Armor, originally designed as a reimagining of the T-45.

The legendary Adam Adamowicz contributed to the game prior to his passing, with sketches of his work on the game being included in The Art of Fallout 4.

According to artist Jonah Lobe, Adam was ultimately responsible for designing the game's Super Mutants!

On June 2, 2015, a countdown timer was added to Bethesda's Fallout website, expiring at 10 AM EDT the following day.

Seconds before the counter ended, the trailer for Fallout 4 was released to the world.

On June 14, 2015, Bethesda showcased the game at E3 2015, with Todd Howard taking the stage to talk about it extensively.

Fallout 4 released on November 10, 2015, giving us more Fallout experiences to cherish! We absolutely love the companions the game gave us, as well as so much more.

Thank you to all of the skilled developers who worked on it. Your contributions all created an awesome game!

[ck-17088]

Similarities between Transformers One and the Aligned Continuity (aka Transformers: Prime) 

Watching the trailers and reading the interviews made me realize that there are many similarities between TF One and the Aligned Continuity. As a reminder (or for those who don't know)- the Aligned Continuity consisted of the War for Cybertron games, Transformers: Prime, Robots in Disguise, Rescue Bots, etc.

Transformers: Prime got me into the fandom, so it's interesting to see a multi-million-dollar movie use elements from the continuity it is a part of.

Here is a list of similarities I have found so far. 

Note: I'll also be mentioning IDW1 briefly since the Aligned continuity and IDW1 comics have similar concepts and have constantly exchanged ideas with each other.

Megatron's name: D-16

In TF One, D-16 will become Megatron. D-16 is a name directly taken from the Aligned Continuity and has been solely associated with it until now. Even though Prime Megatron and IDW1 Megatron have very similar backstories—both being miners and then revolutionaries—only Aligned Megatron was also known as D-16.

Caste system/Social Inequality (hinted)

In both the Aligned and IDW1 continuities, pre-war Cybertronian society had a rigid caste system where one's role in society, thus their life, was determined by their alternate mode (Functionism in IDW1). In Aligned, Orion Pax's desire to learn more about this system, specifically the corruption and inequality it created, leads him to find Megatron (as described in Exodus and TF: Prime). The two become friends who desire change for their society. The interviews with Josh Cooley (the director) hint that something similar exists on Cybertron and is the main cause of their fallout.

 

The thing that starts the wedge between him [D-16] and Orion Pax is that the world is not what they thought it was, and they then start to form two different views on how to solve the problem.

 (Entertainment, Comic-Con 2024 Issue) 

In addition, someone on Twitter -who saw an early screening-said that the movie was "very in-line with IDW's ideas for how the war started," so it's safe to say it draws heavily from Aligned/IDW.  

Extra note: Another interview with Cooley revealed that in an early version of the film, Megatron was supposed to be a gladiator. He and Orion Pax were also supposed to have "very different backgrounds" - which sounds very similar to the data clerk and gladiator origins of the Aligned continuity.  

 Unfortunately, the limited runtime meant Cooley had to limit how much of the characters' origins to show on screen, including changing part of Megatron's accepted story. "If we had all the time in the world, it would've been fun to show Megatron as a gladiator and have the two characters come from very different backgrounds," Cooley added. "We actually had a gladiator scene that alluded to this origin that was cut out." Instead, Orion and D-16 are reimagined as bunkmates working as miners to bring Energon back to the planet after a years-long drought.

(IndieWire)

Cooley also mentioned being given a "bible" of the franchise's entire lore, which reminds me of the Binder of Revelation Hasbro made, or the source material for the Aligned Continuity...

The 13 Primes 

The 13 Primes will appear in the movie (you can spot them in both trailers). The idea of the 13 Primes isn't new, but this particular group version is heavily inspired by the Aligned Continuity. In Aligned, Alpha Trion is canonically one of the 13 Primes (aka the Covenant Primes, who also include Prima, Solus, and Megatronus). He wasn't considered a Prime in other stories before TF: Prime. The Covenant Primes also appear in Cyberverse and Earthspark, and TF One continues the trend. 

Below (in order):

Onyx Prime design from the Covenant of Primus

A mysterious statue (being?) from the trailer that looks very much like the Aligned Onyx Prime

Mysterious beings (Primes?) behind Optimus

Airachnid

 The design for Airachnid in TF One is very similar to the design in TF: Prime. Both have the "arms" on their backs and similar head shapes.

Vehicons 

Some Cybertronians look like the Vehicons. Looks like we're getting multiple Steves…. 

Extra: Brian Tyler 

Not directly related to the story, but the composer for Transformers: Prime (aka the genius who made the ionic Prime theme) is back and composing the music for the movie. If I hear the Prime theme in the movie theater, I might start screaming. 😂

I think it's so cool to see how much influence one continuity can have on the franchise, so much so that its elements are used in a movie that'll soon be seen by millions of people and future generations.

[perfectlypreservedpie]

MacCready Fanfiction Recs (Fallout 4)

hey everybody, nobody asked for this but in the midst of writing fallout fanfic I was feeling a special kind of love for my favorite fo4 fanfics and wanted to recommend them in case you hadn't read 'em. Because they are VERY GOOD and writing fanfic is hard, so you gotta give props to those who sweat for your comfort fics.

I'm gonna recommend my top three finished fanfics, and then two more bonus fics that are being updated rn. As a clarifier, these are all Maccready fallout 4 fics. so. keep that in mind.

im tagging the authors and also anybody who wants to join and share their favorites too!

3. THE FATHER(S) AND THE SON(S) on ao3 by @sirmanmister

I'm going to preface this rec by saying this: there is Fanon MacCready. There is canon MacCready. And then there is ascended!whatBethesdawishesitWAS MacCready, which exists solely in this fanfiction. The characterization of Mac is so well written. He is snarky, he is vulnerable. He desperately wants to grow up but doesn't know how. He has the most sick character arc in this story!!!

It's not a romance but instead a coming of age story where the sole survivor becomes a de-facto parent to Mac. The heart of the story is about how to raise a child while you're still trying to grow up yourself. The apocalypse setting lends itself well because the Wasteland is a place where NOTHING is beautiful, but the way that M!Sosu and MacCready care for their sons is beautiful. Which makes it special and worth fighting for.

As a fun fact, I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy for class a week after finishing this fic and I was thinking about this fic the whole time because the themes of fatherhood during an apocalypse hit a lot of the same beats. Maybe my professor would kick me in the teeth by comparing fic to McCarthy, but @sirmanmister YOU ARE MY CORMAC MCCARTHY <3

2. WORKING CLASS HERO on ao3 by @bluegrasskitty

This is the kind of fic you take with you to toilet, to work, in-between classes. It will suck you in. AND THERE'S A SEQUEL TOO YOU GUYS‼️

The sole survivor in this story is the model for the Nuka Cola girl. You know the hot lady in the spacesuit? SHE HAS A BACKSTORY. AND YALL IT MADE ME WEEP. During some point of the story, I sort of stopped rooting for MacCready to be the narrator and just wanted Nora Cabot to take the reins. When I tell you I think of this oc every two to three business weeks. She's an incredible leading lady. I can't look at Nuka Girl posters in the game without thinking of Nora Cabot, my beloved.

the sequel IS SO FIRE. It's the best reimagining of 'what happened after the institute blew up' that I've ever read. im gnawing at the bars of my enclosure actually.

A VERY GOOD PLOT TWIST I CANNOT MENTION TO NEW READERS BUT IF YOU'VE READ IT YOU'LL UNDERSTAND. AND IF YOU UNDERSTAND DM ME I HAVE TO TALK TO SOMEBODY ABOUT IT. HHh.

The amount of world building that @bluegrasskitty puts into this story is insane. They ARE Beth Esda.

As a fun fact, I didn't know that radchickens were canon in fallout. I thought it was a plot device made up by this author to excuse the ability to make cake in this book, but radchickens ARE real. When I was playing Far Harbor last year, I found radchickens and thought that @bluegrasskitty manifested them into existence because they had that kind of power.

that being said, I still think this author has that kind of power.

1. Atom Bomb Baby on ao3 by @starlightwrites

I think you dropped something....my jaw.

fellas. fellas. this is my comfort fic. You ever had a comfort fic? Something you come back to at least once a year to reread to feel something? the fiction equivalent of chicken noodle soup? this is what Atom Bomb Baby is to me. this is peak literature actually. if I ever figure out book binding, im doing this one first.

Plot wise, it's a retelling of Fallout 4's main story through the perspective of MacCready. But (and im wheezing as I say this) it's also so much more THAN THAT.

this fic author understands that MacCready is not a womanizer but is in fact a touch starved loser. and they are CORRECT.

MacCready spends the entire fic like 'uuuhhhh I dunno about this one, boss!'

ITS BEST FRIENDS TO LOVERS RAHHHHHH

it also has a nostalgia feel to me too, because reading it gives me the same feeling as what it was like to play the game for the first time, years ago. maybe it's because I've read it so many times over the years, but reading it feels so satisfying.

The author spends 10 chapters at the end solely dedicated to an epilogue. I wish more stories did this. They go through the wringer in this story, and it's so deeply satisfying to see how cleanly everything gets wrapped up. MacCready and the Lola work really well together as a couple, so it's awesome to see how they work together after the battle is done.

6 out of 5 stars.

BONUS FICS !! aka fics that are still updating! I squeal with joy when I get an ao3 email about these: 1. Best Laid Plans on ao3 by @druidgroves - Georgia Tate is an incredible character and sole survivor! She was a teacher prewar, so it's really fun to get her perspective on the world. She cares a lot about education and libraries and I find her really relatable and endearing. It's a cool thing for a character in an apocalypse to care about! It also makes for fun tension with Mac, who's written as a pragmatic survivor. A great take on familiar characters and their dynamics. - And It's a great slow burn! I'm really enjoying reading it. 2. Long Time Running on ao3 by @twosides--samecoin - If you've ever thought that Med-Tek was too convenient an option for Duncan's cure, this fic was written with you in mind. - RJ goes to Canada and im obsessed with it. - If you're interested in fallout lore, specifically the bit where the U.S annexed Canada and wished that there was more info about that, I would highly recommend this fic. Twosides--samecoin put in THE WORK. The world building they do to explain Canada's side of the Great War is so fun!!! its genuinely such a thrill to read!

I'm tagging the authors who I mentioned, if you all have favorite fics (fallout or otherwise, I'd love to hear em!) Thank you for making good art!