I think I'm glad that dumbass phrase has entered the general online lexicon, really
just with fallout coming up again, been thinking about it. fallout 2's writers decided the new villain should be the Enclave. when the world ended, the government of the United States maintained continuity on a fucked up art deco oil rig with six storey tall Guy Faces on each corner pillar. they've just been surviving there, doing evil research and stuff, and there's a President of the United States and everything, and they eventually make their move to "reclaim" the mainland from who they see as the freaks and mutants that have infested it.
then the oil rig gets fucking blown up because it didn't really have many defensive countermeasures (as an oil rig and all) and like, that's kind of it. that's what The Enclave was. the specific guys in that specific place. and then they all got killed. the end.
until bethesda came around and in the mining of recognizable symbols decided the Enclave should come back somehow as the villains of Fallout 3, because there were just more of them. not "this is another remnant of the pre-war government that survived", just no, more guys that call themselves The Enclave specifically. they all get killed, and then bethesda made a DLC where they all die even more. they skipped fallout 4 but they showed up in fallout 76 and all died I think. and now they're in the show?
there's such a dreamlike quality to it, because like, if there were so many of them and they had all these resources this whole time, how did they fail in fallout 2? they only exist in new stuff because they were in the old stuff but because they're in the new stuff their position in the old stuff no longer makes sense. (see also: the show just tossing half a dozen new vaults into the los angeles area. boy is the master's face red!)
and now we have a snappy little phrase for this phenomenon of bringing back an old villain for the sake of "do you remember this?" no matter how little sense it makes. somehow, palpatine has returned
