okay I've seen the Fallout show. time to make it everyone's problem. Yeah spoilers obviously.
I think when you're six games and a tv show into a media property you have to find something new for it to be about. I think you have to find new themes and ideas. I think you are well past the point of being able to keep retreading and revisiting the same ideas over and over again.
The TV show somewhat gets away with it by virtue of being an adaptation; it's fun to see it playing the hits in a new medium, and it's the first time I've seen a video game property adapted in a way that feels so in touch with the source material. I enjoyed that the show has toilet skeletons and the terminal hacking minigame in it. When Mr House showed up I was full blown Leo pointing.
And then when New Vegas shows up at the end I was not Leo pointing. I was thinking, "oh are they going to raze that too?"
I think the people who made the Fallout TV show really, truly get Fallout. I just wish they also had, like, one (1) idea. I think thematic and tonal consistency may just be a managerial way of saying stagnancy.
A particular brainrot that a lot of post-apocalyptic stories suffer from is basically hanging entire plots off the Machinations of the Ancients. The people who lived before the catastrophe made all the decisions, had all the agency. Everyone else is just existing in the choices they made; they can never build anything or solve anything on their own.
Ancient prelapsarian maguffins are, to paraphrase a wise man, both the cause of and solution to all problems. I am unfond of this trope; I think it flattens and dehumanises characters, I think it robs them of real dramatic potential.
In having a literal actual prewar Vault-Tec goon blow up Shady Sands, the Fallout TV show essentially asserts that there's no world at all outside of the vaults; the wasteland itself is just another vault-tec experiment, already set up and cataloged.
Frankly, I find that kind of a boring direction. It also doesn't escape me that the first time Fallout as a series really strenuously made the argument that 'Fallout is getting too civilized' was in, you know, one of the worst Fallout releases ever (namely, the final New Vegas DLC).
And what really eats at me is like, Fallout 4 was predicated on finding something new for Fallout to be about. It did have an idea. It wasn't a good one, but they were trying!
This show is just... it's a Product. It's Lore. It's... IP Management. And I don't know, it was fine, but I guess I would have liked a story instead.
