Conversations around Fallout are coming up that are asking all sorts of questions about the continuity or the history or the integration of ideas from game to game in some kind of linear plot that flows from one spot to another as if it's a world with a diegesis that works on rules.
It's not.
It's fuckin' nonsense.
Fallout 1 takes place in 2161, 84 years after the nuclear event. Fallout 3 takes place a hundred years later. Ostensibly, the same computers are lit up and have the same continuity of power through that whole period, unweathered by time. Batteries have not corroded in their seats and melted through. Food in plastic wrappers has not crumbled to dust as moisture slowly leaves them, plastic itself has not corroded. Guns unmaintained for a century in spaces filling with radioactive dust have not melted. There's a buried lovecraftian monster the size of the state of Wyoming. Radiation can make you immortal but ugly. Aliens show up to steal cows.
Fallout is not a world for a lore bible or coherent sense or meaningful narrative that cares about tangible realities and political premises.
Fallout is a world of vibes. It is the fear of our parents' nuclear obliteration handed to us, the people who have to live in the world they made and what that means.
Bear this in mind every time you see some weirdo talking about 'the canon' of Fallout. It's nonsense. It's never not been nonsense. It's not a sci-fi series. It's a romantic fantasy, as driven by feelings and emotional anxieties as the world of Tolkein's Elves.
