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If between what is happening in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Palestine, England and Venezuela you are still talking about the fucking US presidential election like maybe get some fucking perspective

If queer people going through slightly less genocide means more to you than the slaves we use to sustain our state and the wholesale groups of people it has slaughtered, you do not have an ideology based in empathy and/or harm mitigation, just say that you care about yourself and stop lying to everyone. (Not directed at the OP just for clarification)

Yesterday, the "lesser evil" was funding the police.

Today, the "lesser evil" is genocide.

There is no new low liberals are not willing to stoop to in order to justify lesser evilism and so long as you continue to follow that dogma you will always be lead head first into the latest and gravest attrocity against existence. Remember that "we need to protect our rights first" is exactly how you lose your rights entirely. It is only through solidarity and collective, organized action that you can protect yourself and your comrades.

The Ash Heap is for the goth aesthetic and that's good enough for me 🖤

We Need to stop pitting the Appalachia regions against each other!

The Forest is BREATHTAKING

The Toxic Valley is MAGNIFICENT

The Ash Heap

The Mire is FLOURISHING

The Savage Divide AWE-INSPIRING

The Cranberry Bog is INNOVATIVE

I still feel there's room to dislike Maximus on the axes of his misogyny and fascism. For his misogyny I think he falls into the pretty common camp of characters not intended to be sexist but end up being so due to writers having sexist beliefs. Like I said, very common and not enough for me to dislike a character on his own, usually. The fascism and desire for power are things he's seized at every opportunity, and only entertains relaxing on that when he's around Lucy and quite far into the story. I don't have a problem with characters helping others out of fascism, but ever since they met, the amount of time for Lucy to reflect on or express her emotions was drastically reduced, and her competency fell through the floor so that Maximus could save her like 3 times. I desperately want him to become a more fleshed-out character with more than a fridge for a backstory, I suppose I'm just worried about collapsing her plot into his for a "she can fix him" arc because that's literally what we see in the last few episodes. I hope they give a reasonable amount of time to flesh out these characters and see the plot organically build, I am kind of nervous given how short and concise all corporate media is today. I do also agree that a substantial amount of the hate on his character has to be racially based because I've seen Fallout fans widely adore the most horrendous characters.

"maximus is a future villain!" wrong. maximus is autistic and bad under pressure and has yet to pass a single speech check

If anybody knows good fanfic featuring the Master or Children of the Cathedral/Unity, please do send some my way. They're such an interesting antagonistic force and I crave more.

the railroad is like your local ""grassroots movement""(nonprofit industrial complex entity) and acadia is an average housing co op in portland. i know this

I honestly think NV did Little Yangtze kind of poorly, but not as bad as not really addressing the predjudice that would be faced among Chinese-American citizens, and given the imprecision of predjudice, likely many other Asian people. I understand stepping away from racial commentary when you have a team of pretty much exclusively white people, but I think that might be more of a sign you should try to hire non-white individuals and non-white writers and allow them to create meaningful artistic expressions of themselves in-line with the creative intention of your project.

A devastating and confusing thing about the Fallout setting, when you explore the pre-war aspects, is what the creators think about pre-war America. In the first games we only get hints of the pre-war world, but they seem to be some sort of wild fascist nation invading Canada. In Fallout 1, the first thing we're introduced to of the pre-war society is seeing a soldier shoot civilians and laughing.

Now, for the first 2 games and New Vegas we don't really know much. What we know is that there's a fascist military group known as the enclave who were a sort of US deep state even before the war, and that the government teamed up with corporate interests to preform vaguely MKULTRA-ish experiments with the Vaults. Basically, the government was an extreme version of the 50s American jingoism and McCarthyism.

This is well and dandy, I guess issues come up more when we get to the later games, especially 4, where it seems like none of this extreme plotting and societal civil unrest which would exist is seen. The society as presented in 4 also seems quite progressive, gay people are featured in the opening, and none of the baggage of say, civil rights not existing are included. Now on a baseline, I don't want settings to be more conservative, homophobic and sexist etc., but it becomes a very confusing setting when it's displayed both as this jingoist extreme thing with fascist tendencies aswell as a progressive place where everyone is seemingly equal. If you're focusing on the 50s as your setting, and American nationalism in the 50s, then you can't have McCarthyism spoofs and anti-communism as a societal paranoia norm while also general equality is the norm without misunderstanding why McCarthyism and nationalist jingoism is bad. A massive harm done in anti-communist paranoia is how it degrades and vilifies any progressive movements (women's rights, civil rights, homosexuality) as being morally un-American and therefore connected to communism. To ignore this just makes any critique of MacCarthyism and jingoism weird!

Basically, pre-war America in Fallout 4 becomes this both sides thing where America is both pure and equal and white fences in every instance that we see as the player (the intro), while also supposedly being this dystopic MacCarthyist hellscape that's broadcasting gladly about their war crimes in Canada, and wants to root out communism. I guess the only fix for this issue without getting into the fine print like they had to do is just not to focus too much on the pre-war world.

If anybody hasn't played a character in Fallout 4 that's mostly vulnerable and largely relies on companions to do the work, I'd highly recommend it. I downloaded an unlimited companion mod, used Codsworth, Ada, and Curie at the same time (in her robot form), and kept adjusting them with the workbench to fit the level of struggle I wanted to have with combat encounters (going straight OP automatrons gets boring quick). It's been fun thinking so hard about where I need to take cover, keeping an exit route in mind, and how I should position myself amongst my companions. It's very immersing, especially with damage mods to make enemies less tanky (and maybe to make them hit harder depending on the desired difficulty).

I feel like viewing the Commonwealth residents through the lens of extreme suspicion and deception goes a long way in making the game enjoyable, but ultimately the fact that only 5 to 10 NPCs in the game really give you actual substance means you'll be using that suspicion to basically write the characters for yourself, extrapolating on the vague details of pretty much everyone's life. Also Fallout does seem to constantly criticize old world America, but often the criticisms only apply to America and not to systems that sustained America and would inherently cause the same issues in practice. Mostly I see the issue with the BoS and NCR. They describe both with overall good goals that are hindered by corrupt people or incompetent leadership, and find it important to repeatedly let you know this. I think the concept of a state that sources its goods from slavery and exploitation, let's people die of starvation and thirst, and incarcerates people on mass due to a set of prejudiced values wasn't evil enough for the writers when making pre-war America, and thus they focused on the most egregious crimes our government has committed as well as fictionalized ones. I think it's because the writers enjoy the concept of a liberal democracy where law and order holds the society together and people of a certain class make decisions for others (so long as the ruling class sometimes makes decisions to benefit the ones being ruled). I understand NV criticizes NCR's imperialist expansion but only insofar as it objectively screws people over both materially and personally, the act of imperialism is not what is being criticized imo, but rather abrupt imperialism that doesn't provide adequate compensation to those affected. That's what the NCR would be if it fixed all the issues the game criticizes, a nationalist, imperialist force that adequately compensates those it steps over to make a better world. Same with the BoS, really the only criticisms they hold for BoS is to not randomly shoot people on sight and to share sometimes which, to me, does not feel like a disavowal of their western, hegemonic dogma, but rather just their militarism.

Todd Howard’s brain is equal parts American idolatry, stupidity, and a pathological need to lie

I kinda really hate the way Myron is treated like a funny/quirky, albeit annoying and egotistical, little group member. Even if you don't specifically get the encounter where he takes advantage of you, it seems highly likely that that still goes on regardless, especially with his position of power and environment. Obviously the main onus is on the writers for making a predator child, one of the many disgusting aspects of 2 that made me stop playing and almost not come back. Still, I wish there were more people acknowledging his heinous-ness because I feel like, exclusively based on his public perception, I'd have a wildly different mental concept of his character than what he actually is.

I literally always feel so guilty everytime I make a character in 4 bc they're always so sick and evil, but there's literally no other interesting option 💀

i have a bastard protagonist for each game, and for the bethesda games they are bastards because i am accepting what bethesda has given me without any alterations on my part. lone wanderer Ruth is a self-righteous religious freak who condescends everyone she meets and thinks she knows what's best for everyone even as she destroys entire towns. sole survivors Elias and Monica are actual, literal war criminals, with Elias having served in the special forces and Monica having committed horrific human rights violations in the pursuit of cybernetic science. fo76 Zeke is a straight-up fascist wholeheartedly supporting the Enclave and trying to rebuild america in all of its blood-soaked horror. like. bethesda fallouts lend themselves to this by default but seem to actually believe their own bullshit. fo3 says your religious belief is good and your violent acts have no real consequences; fo4 says you served in the war that explicitly involved a lot of horrific shit and you're a hero for it; fo76 wants to reestablish the fucking gold standard.

I think the way the president in 2 and Horrigan talk about "muties" sells the threat a lot more because there's a cognitive dissonance there that feels so real among bigoted treatment marginalized groups today. They don't really make sense, but they believe these things unwaveringly, and have committed a number of unspeakable atrocities based on nothing more than a hollow understanding of the world around them. Sure the Enclave in 3 talk about mutants needing to die, but it feels like a reiteration of "the strong must survive, the weak must die" that characterizes like 98% of Bethesda game factions, not like a bias informed by centuries of isolation and propoganda.

At this rate I might be the one who hates fun but I've been thinking about it and I hate how the enclave has been "mutated" (hoho) into what it is now in modern fallout products. There was something legitimately intimidating and different about them in 2, something that made their threat to all life as you knew it very tangible. I hope that's even remotely coherent

in fo2 they felt like an army of americans committing an organized genocide. they waxed philosophical in mixed company but laughed cruelly amongst themselves. they could not abide the existence of life that was not subordinate to them. they were distinctly republican patriots who owned slaves. now they're too nebulous to directly threaten rightists' worldview, by design.

in complete fairness, there's shit in the margins of fallout 3 about them detaining, scanning, and incinerating crowds of survivors, and John Henry Eden is, in concept, a satire of republican stagnancy. the thematic read is still technically functional as of 76, but it's so timidly executed that Impressively Unironic Enclave Roleplayers are easily the most notable 76 subculture.

please understand they took a softer approach so they could sell more variants of the fascist enclave hat in the atom shop. please understand there was no other way

It brings me joy how deep of a world with such abundant examples of excellent writing and game design exists for tons of potential fans of the show to get into. It's like the opposite of the hollow feeling I get after having watched a short but captivating show and finding little to no interesting canon or fan content to consume afterwards while still craving the world/writing, at least I assume.

I'm so fucking excited for the new Fallout fans dude you have no idea!!!

Imagine discovering about FEV for the first time only just watching the show? Then finding out about Frank Horrigan??? Then The Master???

what an irresistible character!!! AF attack for DoughBoy! (owned character, please do not use for any purposes)

I can't get over that one of Emil Pagliarulo's main narriative techniques is to "write what you know." Despite this THEY KEEP FUCKING WRITING SLAVERY. Especially with how ethnically homogenous the team seems to be. This shows in the way they have pretty much nothing to say about it. There's no effort put into showing you why and how people get to the mental point where they deem it acceptable to own people. Like I think the Powder Gangers are a better case where we see that NCR uses criminality to dehumanize the convicts and make them enemies against civilization in the eyes of an NCR civilian. The Paradise Falls and Nuka World slavers, however, get to own slaves because "they are strong and slaves are weak." If the NCR fails to adequately assert their narrative about slavery, both convicts and civilians alike will start to challenge this. The slavers in 3/4 don't need to assert a narrative, their narrative is actually proven true throughout the course of the games. They are strong, people don't rise against them because those people are too weak. In both cases you can turn the tide because you are meant to be stronger than the slavers or you can lead them by proving your strength. Overall, even if all those things were considered, I just don't see why slavery has to be present in every Fallout game, especially when the later ones aren't bold enough to give you a complex moral statement on literally anything let alone something so serious.

Staci Stasis by Zombina and the Skeletones reminds me so much of the Outer Worlds main plotline from the perspective of Phineas Welles.

Ideal smoke spot

THE OUTER WORLDS 1/? — The Hermit's Lodge

My piece for @falloutghoulzine ☢️ Camp Searchlight ☢️ It’s one of my favourite locations so I wanted to do a piece that included a bunch the fun landmarks throughout the town!

THIS!! I always wondered if it was intentional, but I thought connecting the periods of intense paranoia between the Salem Witch Trails, the Red Scare, and Commonwealth's treatment of synths was something they should've leaned into a bit harder and developed that theme a bit more.

Do you think Fallout 4 was set in Massachusetts so they could tell a sort of Salam Witch Trials narrative, but instead of witches it's synths?

Because though there is the occasional bad synth, how many were just trying to live their lives? How many people killed or accused their own kin because of the hysteria? How many innocents were killed because of it?

a development team that looks like this could not possibly have any preconceived biases against Black people. noooo way. its just a mistake that all of the Black people in fo4 are slaves or named after fascist colonizers or murdered or stereotypical conspiracy freaks. there is no way that the reality of this team is reflected in the art they create over and over and over and over and over and over and

[ID 1: A photo of the Fallout 4 development team taken from above and forward, showing a large crowd smiling at the camera, made up apparently entirely by white people, and almost entirely by white men. End ID.]

Even apart from all the offensive depictions of tribal people themselves, I just can't fathom for writing purposes why you would make two groups and completely outsource their ability to make decisions for their groups to two random missionary figures without adding a possibility of them taking control of their own future (oh yeah colonialism that's why).

I give out flowers. Every petal is peace, and the stem is unity. Or are the petals unity and the stem peace? Oh no, I don’t remember! Do you want one?

i love the ghost people…. their lore honestly makes me love dead money so much. reblogs > likes