Super Mutant - Tumblr Posts
Inktober, Fallout Goretober day 2: Supermutant. I went with Grandma Lily. 😊
Ragdoll and baby go zzzzzzzzz sleep
Jon from Many A True Nerd explains beautifully how the Super Mutants of Fallout 3 are in the death throes of extinction, and how this story is told in-game without ever making it explicit.
Essentially, they're desperately searching for more FEV to create more mutants because their numbers are getting so low. That's why they're all over the Vault-Tec offices - they're looking for more vaults, because they think FEV comes from vaults. It's why Vault 87 is full of failed mutations - they're capturing humans and shoving them into any old shit to try and find the secret to mutation. They've been cut off from rational super mutants, from their own history, for so long that they no longer function as intelligent beings (apart from Fawkes).
There's a question which the west coast Fallout games are quietly litigating, which is that age-old gotcha about what you do with the remaining orcs once you've deposed Sauron. In the original Fallout, the Super Mutants are basically universally aligned against the quote-unquote "good guys," for whatever value of that term is applicable to the wasteland at large, but subsequent games make it clear that this was an ideological thing, and a product of the political moment of the mutants creation rather than an ontological quality that they have. The game is very aware that this is something that was done to them, and the tragedy of that; the first mutant you're likely to run into is dying scared and alone.
Fallout 2 presents super mutants who've broken in every direction ideologically in the aftermath of the Unity's collapse; the peacemakers under Marcus at Broken Hills, Gond as a member of the abolitionist NCR rangers, reactionary remnants of the original mutant army, genocidal self-hating fascists like Frank Horrigan. Fallout: New Vegas iterates on this beautifully. The mutants dovetail perfectly with the theme of how every faction in the wasteland is trying and oftentimes failing to reckon with the weight of history. Their utopian movement imploded outside of living memory, closer to the apocalypse than to the present day. The survivors- who can only dwindle in number due to their sterility- have been left to reckon with that in whatever way they can. And they have their backs to about a hundred and twenty years of that reckoning not going particularly well, of being the bugbear and boogeymen for bullies and ideologues whose grandparents weren't even alive to suffer from the Unity's actions. The lack of a collective future for mutantkind casts a pall over even the best ending for Jacobstown; humans are collectively resilient within this setting, but through violence, and accidents, dementia and senility, the day will inevitably come when there are no mutants left. And worse still will be the day before that, when there's only one mutant left. Finding some form of satisfaction or contentment within that dwindling window, with the world against you, is a task that falls to the individual mutant. (Take Mean Sonovabitch, for example. He seems to be doing alright for himself.)
Then we slide on over to the east coast games, where the mutants are.... morons. Cannibals. Marauders. And when you meet one who isn't, the game throws itself a ticker-tape parade for containing such an audacious twist. To go back to the orc thing, it's like if The Hobbit had contained a lengthy, empathetic subplot about the rich internality and fleshed-out-if-deeply-flawed ideology of the orcs, and then there was a pivot to treating them like a monolithic block of ontologically evil marauders in LOTR. While staring you straight in the eye the whole time, unblinking. Daring you to say something
You know that one brotherhood soldier that comes out to give you a nuke to defeat the behemoth outside GNR? Well she didn’t show up. So guess who kill a behemoth at level 8
I don’t even need to go to GNR. I just wanted to listen to three dog while I’m scavenging. Worth it though
Here’s my evidence a bit late.
This is the FEV lab in the institute, I couldn’t find any terminal entries about it but I didn’t look that hard
No mod play through as well.
Bye!
So..can we talk about the whole lot of cats that can be found in the lower level of the institute???
