#i welcome good faith discussion tho especially if anyone can answer / explain things im confused about because i might have missed somethin

[jazzmckay]

i finally finished the fallout show, so here are my thoughts. i will talk about both things i enjoyed and things i didn't enjoy. be aware that i'm one of Those west coast fallout fans so this will be bethesda-critical, although it's never my goal to be a hater or make fans of bethesda games feel bad for enjoying them.

spoilers for not only the show, but most fallout games ive played, which includes: fallout, fallout 2, fallout 3, and fallout: new vegas

lets start with the positive!

things i enjoyed:

the aesthetics: it just plain looks good. it matches the games pretty accurately, it brought the world of fallout to this new medium very well. visually, it definitely looks like fallout, and i thought it had some nice cinematography and shot framing. i like that it was never too dark to see what was going on, i like that it was fairly vibrant even with the unavoidable Brown Wasteland, Metal Grey Vault palettes. the costumes were great. i liked how the people looked realistic for the world they're living in. i would have liked cooper to be more standard ghouly, but after having seen the full show, i'm fine with it. the ghouls have a lot of range, physically, and it does make sense for cooper to be more human-like because he's actively preserving himself, and probably did so pre-war as well. all in all it was visually great

the main characters: lucy is a fantastic main character. i love how shaped she is from living in vault 33 specifically, with her moral compass, view of the world, social uniqueness, and relationship with sex. i adore that she's such a positive person, always wanting to see the best in others and make the best of any situation, but that doesn't mean she can't get hurt and angry, can't fight when she has to. she's fun and badass, i really like her. maximus is just as complex, shaped by the brotherhood instead of the vault--again, moral compass, view of the world etc all coloured by where he's spent most of his life, just in a different way from lucy. more grey, more skewed, more manipulated, in my opinion, even though of course vault 33 was quite manipulated as well. his struggle with identity is awesome. i like how both of them are a little weird, a little socially unhinged, and majorly biased about the world. i enjoyed maximus' struggle and journey with coming into his own. i'll be eager to see that continue in s2. cooper took me almost the ENTIRE season to warm up to. at first he was the kind of character i found interesting, but difficult to like. right from the start, you know he wasn't always like this, and 200 years in the wasteland has understandably changed him, but i was still very "fuck this guy, hes a prick and he annoys me" for most of the show. the final episode finally tipped me over onto the "okay yeah im properly into this character now" side. he's definitely layered, just takes a bit to see more than the outer one that makes him just look like... a major piece of shit. i love a dark character as much as the next guy, but i prefer if it Makes Sense, and i didn't fully get him until the last ep. eager to see how he develops going forward as well. don't have a lot to say about norm, i just really like him. hell yeah fuck shit up, little bro

the side characters: betty and stephanie fascinate me, especially after learning who they really are. moldaver is SO COOL and a milf for real oh my god i'm a little obsessed. thaddeus surprised me with his depth. ma june was really cool and felt sort of quintessential fallout to me. even just the one-off people of the wasteland were really interesting to me. they were real people with a place in this world, no matter how small. (you'll notice i havent mentioned dane, even though being nb myself, a nb character should be a big deal to me. well. i still dont entirely know how i feel about dane, unfortunately)

the vault lore: from start to finish, i was HOOKED on everything to do with the vaults. the concept of 3 vaults being connected and able to trade with each other when necessary was interesting. i liked the concept of vault 33 and how it gave the characters a different culture about relationships and sex. then i enjoyed the suspense of the lie unravelling, of following norm's arc of defying what he'd been raised with to figure everything out. it was very tense and mysterious.

vault lore part 2: historically, i've not been a fan of pre-war society actually being shown. didn't like that they did that in fo4, though part of that could be that i just massively dislike the choices they made for it, including how it locked the player too much into an unchangeable (heterosexual) backstory. i guess i'm not fully against the pre-bomb time being shown as long as it's lore-friendly, and i'm pleasantly surprised that the show was pretty lore-friendly indeed. not entirely. i have some major gripes that i will get into later, but i liked the tension and intrigue of the big corporations doing their gross capitalism shit, and cooper finding out just how fucked up they are. the idea of the vault ownership being split up between different companies and therefore different ideals so "the best ideas of how to continue civilization can win" was interesting! i think it's more grounded to say that most vaults were trying to make something viable for the future, not just fucked up experiments for the sake of it, but the ideas were extreme and many doomed to failure. i wouldn't even say this is a retconn, a lot of the vaults, even the ones that got really messed up, can be viewed as an attempt at making something good, just with amoral methods

how the brotherhood was portrayed: FINALLY bethesda has written the brotherhood in a way more reflective of what they're supposed to be. the brotherhood are not the ultimate heroic knights in shining armour. they're not just a grandstanding military faction. caveat that i don't know the fo4 brotherhood personally, but fo3!brotherhood was so incomprehensible. in fo1, the brotherhood is reclusive and focused on technological / scientific information. they are a force to be reckoned with when convinced to take good action, but they're on the insular side. in fo2, they're a destroyed shadow of what they were, with barely any presence. in fnv they're even more reclusive, entirely xenophobic to anyone outside of the brotherhood and further stuck in their ways. you can help them improve, but there are cult vibes. and the show? i am impressed by how they focused on those cult vibes! the brotherhood doesn't have to be 100% the same every time when there's a lot of geography between chapters and different points in the last 200 have different needs, different goals and enemies, but the brotherhood should, imo, always be a grey area. when lucy asked "this is good right, the brotherhood are the good guys?" and maximus and thaddeus were like....... eh... it's. a complicated organization. THATS THE REAL SHIT. complex. a bit uncomfortable because they're reclusive and teach their people biased ideas of the wasteland. an ideology that makes sense in-verse, but isn't a simple dichotomy of good or bad. some parts of it were uncomfortable for me in a "well thats an odd writing choice" but most of it was uncomfortable in the way the brotherhood is SUPPOSED to be uncomfortable, and i am here for that

the scene where maximus comes clean to lucy and she accepts him, because she's learned how complicated the surface world is, and she has been travelling with him enough to see who he really is

the fnv theme cue when the ncr flag was shown. got me emotional fr

lucy is down to fuck and i LOVE that for her. it's great to see a female main character be so into sex without it being for any reason other than... she thinks sex is good and fun

the lucy/maximus ship. im officially on team "people who say its boring and lacking in chemistry might be not giving the black character the consideration he deserves because of internalized racism" sorry

i can ALSO get behind the lucy/cooper ship, after the last episode. it feels like theyre on somewhat even ground now. i can go for a begrudging allies pair. they should have rough, angry sex and remind each other it doesn't mean anything after and then they both go and pine and/or brood about the people they wish they were with, or wish they were with but in a happier story

the music in general

cx404 my beloved <3

things i did not enjoy:

the biggest issue is, of course, the way the show completely fucked with and/or retconned fallout: new vegas. in my opinion, it was very disrespectful, to the point where it's hard to see it as anything but maliciously intentional for mr. todd 'liar' howard to literally nuke the center of west coast fallout's world. it feels scummy. it feels tone deaf. it feels like a kid stomping on another kids sand castle at the beach because all they understand is destruction and coming out on top. and it also makes NO sense. the show says shady sands was bombed in 2277, which is the year of the first battle of hoover dam, and 4 years before the start of fnv. it renders everything in fnv void. the thing is that shady sands is just one small part of the ncr--in fo1, its a small farming village just getting started and a couple generations later in fo2, it isnt even recognizable as shady sands anymore, its just. The New California Republic. it's huge! it's sprawling! bombing a single city wouldn't have wiped out the ncr--and even the show acknowledges this with vault 4 and moldaver's people--but it's still too significant a calamity that fnv could have happened the way it did proceeding it. you can't just add an event like this and think it'll work when no one in fnv mentions it, when it can't retroactively impact the ncr's future that is already shown. and even though the show does allow that remnants of the ncr have survived, they didn't do it in the way that makes sense, in my opinion. what would make sense is having an entire nation losing its capitol, but the rest being able to continue on. it doesnt make sense for them to become what they did in the show, nor having it be a non-issue during fnv. the ncr could not have had a continued presence in the mojave if that nuke really happened. ive seen pieces of articles and such about how they were careful to follow the timeline and "dont worry, fnv still happened!" but.... they most certainly did not follow the timeline, and what they did utterly fucks up fnv's narrative

the answering of the question "who fired the first bomb". while i enjoyed the backstory, i did not enjoy this question being answered. the point of fallout is not who was right and who was wrong. the point isnt about there being a good side, a bad side, a justification for anything. the point is that nuclear bombs are horrific and what happened to the world is the ultimate tragedy. and it's about communities still being able to rise from the ashes and make something real. it's about people being able to survive and thrive. yes, conflict persists, but the world has not ended, and in west coast fallout, entire cities have grown up from nothing to take on a way of life all on their own, different from the pre-war days, but no longer weighed down by the tragedy, either. east coast fallout is post-apocalypse. west coast fallout is post-post-apocalypse. it's supposed to be post-post-apocalypse, and who dropped the bombs does not matter. the point is that war never changes--but people do. the old world is gone, what happened happened, and society has to move on. answering the question of who dropped the bombs serves no narrative purpose

and if america dropped the bombs on themselves--what does that mean for the rest of the world? of course, we have never known if the rest of the world is still out there continuing as normal, but making the bombs in america an inside job has new implications for china's part in everything. i do wonder if the shift away from the american-chinese conflict is a sensitivity issue. i'm not knowledgeable enough on the topic to speak on it further

robert house's potential/likely character assassination: the best way i could possibly read it is that house was being reticent about his true feelings because it wouldn't have been very tactful to oppose an entire room of capitalism moguls. but his part in planning the bombs is, if taken at face value, utterly opposed to his actual goals as stated in fnv. i want to believe he was just flying under the radar to get information. but it either doesnt make sense, or we dont have the full story yet, because house's intentions were to save new vegas from the bombs, and he wasn't able to save the entire area, which he should have been able to do if in the know, and he also would have been able to get the platinum chip on a better timeline if he was in the know. i'm trying to reserve judgement in case they elaborate on him in s2, but s1!house is.... not fnv!house

needed more pre-existing rad creatures. i'm guessing the bear was supposed to be a yao guai even though they didn't name it, but the gulper was new, and i wouldve liked to see geckos, maybe nightstalkers or cazadors if possible, just... anything properly reminiscent of west coast fallout. based on the final scenes, i'd like to think we'll see deathclaws in s2. please.

sometimes there were bouts of confusing / weird writing. episode 6 in particular had me a bit "what the fuck is going on and why are certain characters acting like this????". the scene where maximus reveals himself to thaddeus was also lackluster in my opinion. i think it should have been drawn out at least a bit. maximus trying to explain, thaddeus being conflicted--not just an immediate flip. it's hard to believe maximus would injure thaddeus THAT badly without trying something else first. whiplash for real. maximus was a little weird in vault 4 and i genuinely don't know what vibe they were going for. at first i thought he'd been drugged and the people there were going to experiment on him. (also how did cooper NOT SEE the "test subjects" over the door when he was doing the vault-tec ad? i dont remember if the name plate was shown in the commercial itself but i sure hope not or, uhhh... people would have known something bad was up). it was just a bit ??? for me, that whole damn episode. what was with the ncr remnants acting Like That? i don't get it and it was never addressed again? am i just supposed to believe that a couple decades or whatever separated from the ncr society has turned them into a cult? what association do they even have with moldaver anymore? its all so weird and unexplained. and if moldaver opposed vault-tec, how did she end up in cryo with them? i guess she didn't actively walk away from it? maybe im missing something here

on that note, the portrayal of the ncr: moldaver and her people end up being ncr but they were played the whole time like raiders. only for the end of the show to have moldaver's settlement be totally normal people just living their lives. what the hell? and the vault 4 people, again, were unsettling and confusing, i don't understand what i'm supposed to take away from this. i suppose the point is that time has changed both groups, and moldaver's been pushed to extremes, but the framing was just.... weird and iffy for me. it's a far cry from the ncr i'm used to

final thoughts:

i did overall enjoy the show, but i suppose, as they say about games like fo4, "it was a good show, but it wasn't a good fallout show". i was pleasantly surprised in a lot of ways, but the fact remains that bethesda misses, or disregards, the whole point of fallout. often they go directly against the original message of fallout. most modern fallout just isn't what it was when it started or what it is when created by people who were there at the beginning. it's painful being a west coast fan specifically, sometimes, because todd is always finding new ways to massacre my boy. but if i pretend this isn't canon and that it has no bearing on one of my favourite games, if i look at it just as it is instead of something that hinges with a bunch of other stories... it was surprisingly enjoyable. i just have to turn off the part of my brain that wants to fight mr howard in the dennys parking lot at 4am