so from cursory observation the bizarre discourse that seems to have crystallized about the Fallout TV Show is those nasty hateful new vegas fans have no media literacy and just can't let people enjoy things and like
- what an insane guy to make up to be mad at
and - christ, "fandom" is fucked up.
I don't think it's meaningful to apply a "modern" adjective to the fandom in this case, cuz I think it's always kinda been like this back to the star trek tos days, but there might be something to how audiences for Stuff in general have exploded in the last couple decades. videogames are a colossal industry not because a videogame made in 2023 is necessarily better and therefore more successful than one made in 1993, it's just the market has expanded. but anyways
I see a lot of the "let people enjoy things" stuff- as a veteran hater in the era of forums especially- and it's revealing of such a... insecurity, I think I might be so bold as to call it, in Fandom. there's a lot of fandom-as-brand that's especially revealed by long-running videogame franchises, like Fallout and Halo, that even beyond the complex production process with their "original creators" have been sold off as a franchise to other studios and other people. often, these franchises become very different to what they were originally as they are expanded to new audiences by new creators. still, to a lot of people, the Brand is what they are a fan of. attacks on the brand, especially by people who are supposedly part of the fandom in-group, are unacceptable. how can a fellow loyalist betray the brand in this manner?
I like to complain about stuff if it sucks. complaining identifies what is useless or detrimental and seeks to cut it away. it is therapeutic, satisfying in itself, but it is also a whetstone, making both the complainer and what is complained about sharper in the act. this is the hater's wisdom.
this sort of Fandom Tension really just asks: why do you like something? on a surface level I like Fallout because I was exposed to it early, yes, but I also had a VHS of Gallavants (1984). I actually played a lot of fallout 3 when it came out, but it didn't last, because it lacked that lasting element that was what I actually liked about fallout beyond the things I remembered like the mascot and power armor helmet design. that element arose again in new vegas- the existence of ideas within the game's world and systems, the concept that the creators even bothered to ask "why would things in the game world be this way?" there's actually a popular mod that combines new vegas and fallout 3, and I never understood how players that chose it could withstand the fundamental narrative and thematic whiplash between "this empire's reach for resources exceeds its grasp" and "go get some 200 year old consumer goods from the shelves of this grocery store filled with arbitrary murderers". like, I don't need that. I can eat dog food, but I choose not to. fallouts 1, 2, and new vegas have at times a separate fandom because they represent a distinctly separate vision from what fallout has become under Bethesda's pen.
to their credit, Bethesda did, to a degree, recognize their vision for Fallout was irreconcilable with what had come before them, which is why the whole West Coast / East Coast thing came about. bethesda played over there in the east, and let the original stuff and the stuff following its legacy exist over there in the west. bethesda took up all the signs of Fallout- names and aesthetics like the Brotherhood of Steel, the Enclave, Deathclaws, vaults, the mascot guy- and discarded their meanings, using them to create the wacky sheet metal and environmental storytelling skeletons theme park world Fallout has become synonymous with.
the Fallout TV Show has become such a lightning rod for Poster Controversy because it is breaking the ancient pact of the two coasts. it takes Bethesda stuff, the focus on recognizable "remember this?" signs over a deeper meaning, and places it firmly in the realm of guys who'll talk to you about supply lines. beyond the issue of retcons- which do exist beyond a single ambiguous date- a clash has been forced between two kinds of Fan. do you like something because of recognizable symbols, or because of what those symbols were used to represent?
the really saucy thing is this likely wasn't at all intentional by Bethesda as an entity, because I don't think even their head writers really care that much. from what I can see, bethesda as a company was fairly hands-off, and most of this might be coming from the westworld guy who's the actual writer I think. and that's interesting. the broadly popular "vault suits and bobbleheads and stuff from the games, you recognize that, right?" perspective has conquered the way of the logistics freaks who'll seek out the NCR sharecropper guy to listen to him talk about how post-nuclear nevada civilization manages food and water. unlike caesar's whole bit about hegelian dialectics, I don't think we're getting a synthesis on this one
aka how to critique the Fallout TV show without being a lore nerd or arguing that Bethesda is just somehow worse at making video games.
'old world blues' is a theme more powerful today than 15 years ago. the idea that new societies of the post-apocalypse are stuck recreating the past that destroyed itself, a capitalist realism that imagined the end of the world, lived through it, and still cannot stop imagining capitalism. it's an important theme in 1 & 2 (the Master cannot create his new world with the tools of the old, the villain in 2 is the President of the United States), and the explicit thesis of New Vegas.
in New Vegas we're presented a false dichotomy between the democracy of the NCR, and the autocracy of the Legion. we experience the world initially mired in the NCR's failings. we see its carceral system, we see its imperialist expansion, we see its corruption that would have doomed a war necessary to its survival without player intervention. so we are primed to be open to its seeming alternative, the Legion, and? they're awful. caesar is shallow, he uses misconstructed philosophy to justify a fascist state that still suffers old world blues and will collapse when he dies, which he will without player intervention.
what about mr house? he promises progress, to combine the capitalist and autocratic 'strengths' of the other major factions but progress for who? he's dependent on the NCR to survive, and again doomed without player intervention.
he's a comparison point, the Legion is a comparison point. that capitalism and autocracy aren't strengths but weaknesses. the NCR's capitalism has concentrated power in the few, whose interests are diminishing its promised liberties and stretching it too thin. the Legion's autocracy makes it dependent on caesar, who is a "dead man walking."
we are sadly missing an important piece. yes, the game was supposed to have more Legion content but neither the game nor we need that to critique them. what is really missing is the Followers of the Apocalypse main quest. this group of anarchists and socialists that work to spread knowledge and new ideas in the wasteland, such as the sharecropping co-operative we can find in Freeside.
without this piece our ultimate answer is to surrender to tactically siding with the NCR, help its better qualities shine through. it's voting for Labour/Democrats even though they're worse every election, it's not satisfying and it was never supposed to be. the game becomes very explicit about this in its DLCs, with Lonesome Road offering to wipe the slate clean as a desperate attempt to stop these ideas.
and this is actually a fair critique of the game, it drives us to answer it never provides and due to how these games are made, could never provide. there was never going to be a New Vegas 2 where the NCR collapses due to internal systemic pressures and the fallout (ha) of the Legion's collapse where social and military revolution from the Followers presents itself as the option to progress the wasteland.
New Vegas also isn't pure. it incorporates much of the tonal shift and worldbuilding that Bethesda presented in Fallout 3. in 1 & 2 the 50s atompunk retrofuturism was dead, and the cultures of the wasteland (esp Tribals, see 2's T-51 cover art) were distinct as that old world was lost to them. in New Vegas the pre-war culture lives on, we shoot super mutants as Mr (New) Vegas tells us that our spurs go jingle, jangle, jingle. but, to its credit, these becomes strengths as incorporated into its thesis and, to Bethesda's credit, none of these initial changes and visual evolutions were incompatible with Old Fallout.
Probably the key thing to emphasise in that discussion would be that "Bethesda" is not a creative monolith: It's a maze of shell companies which have been shuffling creatives around, and burning them out, for longer than I've been alive. Some of these different generations of creatives had done some fascinating things before Bethesda reached what I can only imagine to be its final, calcified state as a corporate entity - but most influential were the ones who came up with a story about the imperial core engineering a regime change in the periphery, and who in the process enacted a "storyworld reboot" (I argue a "reboot", specifically, into the realm of sociological storytelling) which would be short-lived in the "canon" but everlasting in the public eye.
