this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Hey, I'm going to use your comment to shamelessly self-promote my old post about how the conventions of American apocalypse media reflect the country's state as a settler colonial society!
Read through it and I agree. The lawless nature of the apocalypse results in the juvenile power fantasy of being the cool strong badass who changes the world all on their own (typically through violence), which fulfills a kind of libertarian dream where people are able to vicariously exercise their authority, which is of course in stark contrast to the real world where they are generally powerless. This is exacerbated by the structure in most RPGs due to having a single protagonist, and especially with Fallout due to Bethesda's design philosophy of making you the coolest biggest badass of all time around whom everything revolves. At the end of the day it all comes back to the yeoman farmer fantasy, where everybody (read: white men) would be able to own and work some tract of land (though in reality most of the work would be done by slaves, and the land was stolen through genocide), which has persisted since the founding of this hellhole.
The Postman by David Brin is more or less about this. Also, credit to the OG fallouts - You do change the world, a lot, but it's mostly incidental to what you were doing at the time. Like you save Tandy from some radscorpions early in the first game, and then she goes on to become President of the NCR. It's less "This guy is the only person with agency" and more that people whose lives you touch while you're passing through go on to live their own lives, but you helped.
GOOD post
That's something i've always loved about interplay's fallouts. The Apocalypse as Western thing is there, but a lot of it is an excuse to introduce the character to all these zany societies and their problems. Hey, the miners are all hepped up on fentacoke and it's killing people! Okay, just bob on over to gangster controlled new reno, participate in a war between rival gangster families, rig some boxing matches, kill the jackass making jet, go back to redding and... "hey champ. Uh... so thank you for stopping jet, but now that you're back could you maybe look at the giant carnivorous aliens infesting the mines?
I think redding had a labor dispute thing, too.
Also, in the first FO the had a cut epilogue beat for The Den. If you helped the sheriff take down the crime boss the city would stagnate under the sheriff's rule. If you helped the crime boss the city would grow as people kept visiting and they'd eventually outgrow the crime boss on their own.