The shopkeepers “Fuck vault dwellers” speech has my hopes up that this show won’t be lib trash, but I dislike that the main girl is really Libby about Vault-Tec “Um actually you’re technically stealing Vault-Tec property which is wrong” also lol at her still having perfect eyeliner after being in the wasteland for days.
And not liking how one of the “good guys” is a Brotherhood of Steel type, I really hope they don’t make the Brotherhood a “good” faction because they kinda aren’t.
I’m assuming it’s a character arc thing and things become less lib later, here’s hoping. Because this show is freaking awesome in every other aspect. They really nailed the tone and setting. The sets and props are so cool as well.
I’m assuming The Ghoul isn’t as mean as he first appears because he didn’t hurt that chicken, and he fixed up the dog.
sigh I miss @UlyssesT@hexbear.net, he would have had so much to say about this show.
i read the vault people more as smiling hitlerjugend than libs, all that talk about breeding & coming colonization of the surface
yeah except in typical corporate brained bethesda manner they made the vault dwellers completely multi-ethnic, losing any resonance the whole thing might have to anything actually happening in the real world. Same thing as in Starfield where you have a faction of cowboy-larping-muh-taxes-libertarian-dudebros who are just as ethnically diverse as the san-francisco-liberal faction on the other side of the galaxy.
just because it doesn’t replicate the exact racial dynamics of historical and contemporary colonization doesn’t mean it doesn’t have anything to say about it
that’s like saying district 9 doesn’t have anything to say about apartheid because it’s being used against aliens
True enough, it’s just impossible to tell where corporate diversity casting ends and actual artistic intent starts. It’s very strange to do the whole 1950s nostalgia thing “just without the racism” and then let the black woman do the “we need to secure a future for our children” speech and then also have that same black woman start a conspiracy to end the world for that specific purpose.
It’s a very very strange show. There are parts which are supposed to feel resonant that just aren’t (the whole vault tec conspiracy or the cold fusion/unlimited green energy stuff) and things that feel like the writers are telling on themselves (no idea if the “breeding the perfect middle manager” bit is hard-hitting satire or just executive brained).
I think comparing it to District 9’s message about apartheid, where the aliens are legally-defined second-class citizens and are (IIRC) only ever referred to with a fictional racial slur, just makes Fallout seem even more shallow. At most, it’s a wealthy/poor analogy, saying “the wealthy feel abstractly bad about the poor but are too comfortable in their gated communities to do anything meaningful”, but imo even that is being generous given very similar dynamics are shown in the inhabited vaults from F3 onwards.
I think it’s more about American exceptionalism. The vault dwellers are so sure they’re the only ones who can rebuild society, only for us to find out that 1) the “impure” surface dwellers already did it, and 2) vault tec is responsible for destroying that new society (or at least a critical part of it). You can tie that very clearly to colonialist justifications that destroying indigenous societies was good because they were “backward” unlike the supposedly enlightened west, and more recently neocolonial policies that continue to destroy the global south so it can be remade into a new frontier for capital