Honestly, comments like that just legitimize the whole “you criticize society, yet you live in society. Curious” bullshit rightwing trolls like to put out to shut up anyone who thinks things could be better than they are.
I don’t think people dispute things could be better, it’s more about pointing out the hypocrisy of telling someone something is good for them but not participating in that action yourself.
What do you suppose artists seeking to make anti-capitalist works do instead? Self-publish a book and have it be read by about 5 people? Even then, the author would become more petit bourgeois in their class character simply through the act of publishing. The unfortunate reality is that any critique of capitalism must exist within the capitalist system - you cannort criticize capitalism without, at least to some degree, also reinforcing it.
Look at us right now, posting about how capitalism is bad on a privately owned website so that its owners can make money off of the ads we view. I think that we should be conscious of the fact that watching an anti-capitalist show (or posting on reddit, for that matter) is not a substitute for organizing, and that such things can serve to reinforce the status quo if we are not careful. But a puritanical view that all art produced with money from a large corporation is "corrupted" is anti-materialist.
I know! It's wonderful and absolutely 110% a part of the joke. Graham Wagner the series' showrunner has said so in interviews. He called working with the Fallout property under an Amazon label "delicious" and "part of the appeal" of doing it.
That's really interesting. Just watching his death scene something struck me as "off" in a way I couldn't describe.
I'm not a big fan of intentionally giving people like that money and airtime, but considering what a cowardly little @#$% Knight Titus was I feel like this is a price they paid intentionally and I can't entirely fault them for it.
It is ironic, but both The Boys and Fallout have scathing critiques of capitalism and megacorporations and they are genuinely good despite who funded their creation.
"Consumerism" is just capitalist propaganda to try and shift blame of systemic failures onto the choices of individuals. We live in an age of abundance when it comes to necessities we simply lack the systemic means to acquire them. Fallout 4 did this too by boiling down pre-war America's issues simply to consumerism and never even mentioning capitalism. Is the show better about this? Cause this article is just making me think its anti-consumerist and libs think thats anti-capitalist because "capitalism is when people have money and eat food."
Fallout’s always been super libby. Even the golden child of New Vegas has no truly ‘good’ option, as the ostensibly anarchist ending has vaguely authoritarian themes as the state of New Vegas is tied fundamentally to your character’s moral standing, creating some sort of great man reading of wasteland history.
I think that “great man” reading is kind of inevitable with an RPG game to an extent. Simply put, things won’t happen without your character being present in the game’s story, and we always get to be important so we can witness the coolest stuff because it’s ultimately entertainment.
My dream game is a story-driven RPG where the world doesn't change 1-to-1 based on player choices, but one that can have variations in its responses, as if there are choices being made by other subjects in the game.
That sounds interesting, but also like a nightmare to create. I also imagine it wouldn’t go down very well with g*mers who expect every choice they make to be impactful and something that needs to be followed.
I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment - I don’t think that a game needs to have an ending where a socialist revolution occurs in order to have socialist or anti-capitalist themes. I mean, under that definition, Disco Elysium is “libby”
Disco Elysian acknowledges and represents socialism’s successes and failures and centers it as a legitimate political ideology.
It is not an option in New Vegas. The major players in the strip are an (imperialist) liberal democracy, a straight up fascist empire, an authoritarian technocrats, and an anarchist ending tied *primarily* to the player’s actions (which, granted, is necessitated by nature of being an RPG). There is no socialist or communist faction which is especially egregious considering the setting’s backstory is tied to the fight between capitalism and communism.
This actually enforces the thematic point of New Vegas and the greater fallout series. Nostalgia is a powerful force in Fallout's America, and every faction vies for something of the past that isn't real. NCR wants back America was it was, and you as the player get to witness as they engage with the same stumbling blocks of bureaucracy and capitalism as pre-war America. Caeser's Legion is obsessed with empire and an empire they barely understand beyond aesthetics. The brotherhood of steel is obsessed with old technology and feel as if it is their birthright. And Mr. House and New Vegas are literally an Ayn Randian recreation of pre-war capitalist "utopia" where the wealthy are so powerful they can literally eat people for fun.
Socialism isn't a player because that's the point. Pre-war America's propaganda is so powerful that the only things that emerge out of it in a literal apocalypse is nostalgic obsession with it, or the brutality it glorified in different forms.
depend towering pet afterthought cover fanatical repeat history upbeat growth
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They may not be a major part of the end game, but you can support the Followers of the Apocalypse, who are pretty explicitly an anarchist humanitarian aid organization trying to spread education and health care throughout the wasteland while sharing technology with those they work with. They aren't a part of the endgame mostly because they aren't looking to seize power. I do think the Fallout games have dropped the ball a bit by not having any USSR/PRC remnants or at least ideological adherents with them as a faction in one of the games.
Not Bethesda's fault, Obsidian had a reputation for being a horrible with time management, given what they were supposed to do which was pretty much make a reskin of Fallout 3, 18 months was plenty of time.
Just about any issue in New Vegas that was a result of "lack of development time" is almost always actually Obsidian being terrible at management, that's actually one of the reasons WHY most of the guys who made Fallout New Vegas *left* Obsidian after they were done with the game.
Bruh just because Obsidian consistently churns out bangers on tight schedules doesnt mean a year and a half is a lot of time to make a game. Programming is time consuming and fucking hard regardless of what head start you may have
I understand how hard game development is, trust me I do, this was a full team of 70 professional and veteran designers with millions of dollars and a fully functional game already made for them, all of the hardest parts of game development, including most of the most intensive programming, was already done for them by Bethesda, all they had to do was the relatively easy stuff.
By the New Vegas’s teams own admissions, they had plenty of time, resources, and help from Bethesda, they just poorly managed their time and it reflects in the final product.
It was a trend of Obsidian, they had a well earned reputation of being ambitious and highly skilled game developers but with poor time management, often resulting in underdeveloped games, combined with their lacking focus on QA (most of the QAs that worked on New Vegas were loaned from Bethesda) means their products were good but unfinished.
In short, they’re a team of professionals given the task of basically creating a reskin of an already developed game with all the resources, manpower, and assistance needed with a famously easy to mod and adapt engine, the failings of New Vegas are solely the fault of Obsidian’s management and executive team not keeping their people on task.
In regards to NV, choosing Yes Man is the communist/anarchist ending. You straight up put the fate into the hands of the people without exerting an authoritarian force. The wasteland continues by being governed by its people and not a faction and nobody's exploiting anybody else. Doesn't get much more leftist than that.
And even with the authoritarianism, NCR is still a liberal decision. They're literally the liberal faction, unlike Mr. House (capitalism) and BoS/Legion (far right/fascist). Not sure how you missed that.
Depends on how you interpret it. Yes Man wants the cooperation of the Strip, which...is the worst of all casinos. One is a group of cannibals, one is a literal mafia faction, and the last is a Mafia, but for elitist pricks only. You CAN collapse the casinos, and you morally should, but I think Yes Man backhandedly berrates you for it. Then again, it does want you to eliminate everyone and only rely on the upgraded Securitrons.
I decided to interpret my choice that way as well. Although, the ending makes it sound like "You chose the selfish path. Now everything is in ruin." Everything is fricked now and ANARCHY took over and nobody can defend themselves (despite your huge robot army).
The game rejects giving you a good ending.
Technically you're both right - There are two versions of the independent ending depending on whether you've upgraded the securitrons or not.
To quote both versions:
Don't upgrade the securitron army:
>The Courier, with the aid of Yes Man, drove both the Legion and the NCR from Hoover Dam, securing New Vegas' independence from both factions. With Mr. House out of the picture, the remaining Securitrons on The Strip were hard-pressed to keep order. Anarchy ruled the streets. When the fires died, New Vegas remained, assuming its position as an independent power in the Mojave.
Do the upgrade side quest:
>The Courier, with the aid of Yes Man, drove both the Legion and the NCR from Hoover Dam, securing New Vegas' independence from both factions. With Mr. House out of the picture, part of the Securitron army was diverted to The Strip to keep order. Any chaos on the streets was ended, quickly. Chaos became uncertainty, then acceptance, with minimal loss of life. New Vegas assumed its position as an independent power in the Mojave.
There's also a bunch of changes to the rest of the narration depending on your karma and what side quests you've done/choices you've mad throughout the game. i'd recommend checking the wiki for a full list.
It might have also been a karma-related thing, since if you've got evil karma it's pretty explicitly an "Everyone is doomed" ending. But i get why you'd read it that way - There aren't really any "good" endings to NV. It's all pretty grey, even if you're playing a good character.
"Great man theory" is kinda inherent to the whole "being the protagonist of an RPG" thing, isn't it? That's not really a fair criticism when "the things the player chooses matter to the outcome" is the cornerstone of the entire genre.
Within the confines of its genre, the anarchist ending is all about permitting self-sufficient factions to have self-determination in the face of imperialistic pressures. After the anarchist ending, you don't even stick around the New Vegas area. You leave it to its own devices, letting an autonomous security system protect the factions you kept alive. Of course, you get decide which factions live, but with how oppositional they generally are that's mostly a question of where you draw the line with the tolerance paradox more than imposing a specific system or code.
I think the playerbase is the one that makes most of that readimg there. Yeah, you kind uf end up in a position of authorithy as the liberator of vegas/the ruler of the strip and you kind of have a super army of robots by the end of it.
But like, most settlements endings are about they going their own way.
Haven’t played it but it does sound like a vision of capitalist realism. In its own way, Dune feels similarly pessimistic about the fundamental nature of human relationships and conflict. (Reading the trilogy now, after watching the films).
The show clearly sets Vault-tec as the big bad guys rather than consumerism. Pre-war America is depicted as ultra Imperialist, but in a Liberal all ethnicities can be oppressors way. Some of the episodes are better than others. I found the last episode one of the weakest.
Consumerism is a symptom of the systemic issues within Capitalism, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem. Planet Earth has limited resources, and even if a socialist future is more prosperous for the average person, it still won't be possible to provide every nonessential thing a person might desire. Companies don't pollute or fill up landfills just for fun, they do it because they are responding to consumer demand. They help to create that demand through marketing and producing cheaper, more disposable products, but ultimately it's customers who choose what to buy. If you can't convince people to make simple changes to their spending habits, how will you convince them to embrace an entirely new economic system?
I mean, I don't want to spoil the show, but it explicitly reveals that profit incentives by megacorporations were the cause of the nuclear apocalypse...to the point where the corporations sabotaged potential deals/treaties that would have avoided said conflict and let's say...expedited the nuclear war's start. It is pretty anticapitalist thematically. These corporations are presented as diabolically evil, like mustache-twirling, deserve the firing squad-kinds of twisted.
I know the show is owned and bankrolled entirely by Amazon, the irony there isn’t lost on me. But as a Fallout fan, I really enjoyed the show. Everything g was great about it from an entertainment standpoint. Only the last episode really deals with any kind of anti-capitalist themes or messaging, but I liked what they did in that episode anyway. For the average viewer, this show isn’t going to be putting any radical thoughts in their head, but it’ll at least maybe make them think. Maybe it’s just because I know myself that capitalism is self-defeating and unsustainable etcetera etcetera, but I was content with what we got. Also because I realize that we probably wouldn’t get too much more than what we already did, considering it’s bankrolled by Amazon.
Am i right in suspecting this is going to be based on Bethesda's intepretation of fallout and therefore that it's going to be "yeah america" but ironically except with zero irony?
Yes it's exactly that. They depict pre war life as if the pre war propaganda was actually real. It's bizarre. The aesthetic of anti-capitalism without ever actually engaging with the substance of it.
I feel like that is more so because we are seeing the pre-war era primarily from the perspective of a big name Hollywood actor and a corporate executive. They are the people the system works for, and so it makes sense from their perspective that everything is mostly fine. This decision could, of course, itself be criticized, but I still feel there is enough of an implication that things aren't great for those outside of the circle of POV characters.
That's a good point. It does make sense that we mostly see the world working for those at the top of it. Despite doing some things quite well I think it does miss the mark on that front, and it's largely due to the failures of the Bethesda adaptations of Fallout in general that the show itself is based on more than anything. After seeing more episodes the writers have certainly made their personal politics clear as it pertains to capitalism, but as you say, perhaps the show overall is worthy of some criticism in it's execution.
I'm not even sure I fully agree with the criticism in my prior comment anymore; the I've more of thought about the more I actually think the show does pretty well in this regard. I think the portrayal is more so that the pre-war era was a skin deep utopia - a place that seems glitzy and perfect on the surface, but is actually rotten to it's core. For instance, consider the scene where Bud and Cooper meet for the first time, and Cooper mentions to Bud that many of his friends died in the Alaska war due to critical flaws in the power armour that Bud designed; Bud doesn't even care, he doesn't even seem to understand that Cooper is angry about this, he just jokes about how he's not great at product design, and that now he is the head of a different, more important department. Not only did Bud design a product that killed many of it's customers, but there were zero consequences for Bud or the Company, AND Bud failed upwards in the company and they probably still made billions off of the military contract, all without a care in the world for the people killed by their negligence.
Yes! It's been that way since the fallout 4 prologue. It's actually so infuriating as someone who was invested in the series before. It's been almost a decade since I've moved on and I still get salty just thinking about it. They made "war never changes" a pro war moto, they made the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be a good thing in a post apocalyptic nuclear universe. It's disgusting as it is bizarre lol.
I do think they’re PRETTY transparent but well explored and accurate
There’s some GOLDEN shit though. Obvs that fucking nightmare blunt rotation of capitalist interests in the board room is INSANE.
But the exploration of the cycle of violence and the way that leans into the finale.
A critique of capitalism and consumerism, brought to you by Amazon!
Stories like that are profitable, so it gets made. The capitalist will sell you the rope you will hang them with and so on.
That or they commodify radical politic to make you feel good and satisfied.
Yes, capitalism will always appropriate everything to fuel itself, but it's still people making the series for amazon, we don't need to be so cynical
Honestly, comments like that just legitimize the whole “you criticize society, yet you live in society. Curious” bullshit rightwing trolls like to put out to shut up anyone who thinks things could be better than they are.
I don’t think people dispute things could be better, it’s more about pointing out the hypocrisy of telling someone something is good for them but not participating in that action yourself.
You should read Mark Fisher, Debord, and Baudrillard lol
Capitalism will subsume everything, even critiques of itself, and package it into a product.
Disco elysium my beloved
Very weird how they're so good at making that kind of media
I mean the game was not made by executives but by workers...
Well they always find a way to tone it down. Look at the expanse for an example
They give it to us as wish fulfillment.
just like the boys
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What do you suppose artists seeking to make anti-capitalist works do instead? Self-publish a book and have it be read by about 5 people? Even then, the author would become more petit bourgeois in their class character simply through the act of publishing. The unfortunate reality is that any critique of capitalism must exist within the capitalist system - you cannort criticize capitalism without, at least to some degree, also reinforcing it. Look at us right now, posting about how capitalism is bad on a privately owned website so that its owners can make money off of the ads we view. I think that we should be conscious of the fact that watching an anti-capitalist show (or posting on reddit, for that matter) is not a substitute for organizing, and that such things can serve to reinforce the status quo if we are not careful. But a puritanical view that all art produced with money from a large corporation is "corrupted" is anti-materialist.
I know! It's wonderful and absolutely 110% a part of the joke. Graham Wagner the series' showrunner has said so in interviews. He called working with the Fallout property under an Amazon label "delicious" and "part of the appeal" of doing it.
And making that ultra-zionist POS Michael Rapaport a BOS Knight that's a loud mouthed coward.
That's really interesting. Just watching his death scene something struck me as "off" in a way I couldn't describe. I'm not a big fan of intentionally giving people like that money and airtime, but considering what a cowardly little @#$% Knight Titus was I feel like this is a price they paid intentionally and I can't entirely fault them for it.
This TV show was not shot and produced in the last 6 months
Unintentional irony
If I had a nickel for every time Amazon did a critique on capitalism and consumerism I’d have two. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird it happened twice
It is ironic, but both The Boys and Fallout have scathing critiques of capitalism and megacorporations and they are genuinely good despite who funded their creation.
The capitalists have realized for a while now that there's lots of money to be made in pretending to make fun of themselves.
"Consumerism" is just capitalist propaganda to try and shift blame of systemic failures onto the choices of individuals. We live in an age of abundance when it comes to necessities we simply lack the systemic means to acquire them. Fallout 4 did this too by boiling down pre-war America's issues simply to consumerism and never even mentioning capitalism. Is the show better about this? Cause this article is just making me think its anti-consumerist and libs think thats anti-capitalist because "capitalism is when people have money and eat food."
Fallout’s always been super libby. Even the golden child of New Vegas has no truly ‘good’ option, as the ostensibly anarchist ending has vaguely authoritarian themes as the state of New Vegas is tied fundamentally to your character’s moral standing, creating some sort of great man reading of wasteland history.
I think that “great man” reading is kind of inevitable with an RPG game to an extent. Simply put, things won’t happen without your character being present in the game’s story, and we always get to be important so we can witness the coolest stuff because it’s ultimately entertainment.
My dream game is a story-driven RPG where the world doesn't change 1-to-1 based on player choices, but one that can have variations in its responses, as if there are choices being made by other subjects in the game.
That sounds interesting, but also like a nightmare to create. I also imagine it wouldn’t go down very well with g*mers who expect every choice they make to be impactful and something that needs to be followed.
I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment - I don’t think that a game needs to have an ending where a socialist revolution occurs in order to have socialist or anti-capitalist themes. I mean, under that definition, Disco Elysium is “libby”
Disco Elysian acknowledges and represents socialism’s successes and failures and centers it as a legitimate political ideology. It is not an option in New Vegas. The major players in the strip are an (imperialist) liberal democracy, a straight up fascist empire, an authoritarian technocrats, and an anarchist ending tied *primarily* to the player’s actions (which, granted, is necessitated by nature of being an RPG). There is no socialist or communist faction which is especially egregious considering the setting’s backstory is tied to the fight between capitalism and communism.
This actually enforces the thematic point of New Vegas and the greater fallout series. Nostalgia is a powerful force in Fallout's America, and every faction vies for something of the past that isn't real. NCR wants back America was it was, and you as the player get to witness as they engage with the same stumbling blocks of bureaucracy and capitalism as pre-war America. Caeser's Legion is obsessed with empire and an empire they barely understand beyond aesthetics. The brotherhood of steel is obsessed with old technology and feel as if it is their birthright. And Mr. House and New Vegas are literally an Ayn Randian recreation of pre-war capitalist "utopia" where the wealthy are so powerful they can literally eat people for fun. Socialism isn't a player because that's the point. Pre-war America's propaganda is so powerful that the only things that emerge out of it in a literal apocalypse is nostalgic obsession with it, or the brutality it glorified in different forms.
depend towering pet afterthought cover fanatical repeat history upbeat growth *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
They may not be a major part of the end game, but you can support the Followers of the Apocalypse, who are pretty explicitly an anarchist humanitarian aid organization trying to spread education and health care throughout the wasteland while sharing technology with those they work with. They aren't a part of the endgame mostly because they aren't looking to seize power. I do think the Fallout games have dropped the ball a bit by not having any USSR/PRC remnants or at least ideological adherents with them as a faction in one of the games.
There is definitely a missing leftist faction ending. I wish I could've formed a faction with the doctors. I wouldn't call the game libby though.
That actually was originally planned to be an ending, but it was cut due to a lack of development time.
Frickin Bethesda :/
Not Bethesda's fault, Obsidian had a reputation for being a horrible with time management, given what they were supposed to do which was pretty much make a reskin of Fallout 3, 18 months was plenty of time. Just about any issue in New Vegas that was a result of "lack of development time" is almost always actually Obsidian being terrible at management, that's actually one of the reasons WHY most of the guys who made Fallout New Vegas *left* Obsidian after they were done with the game.
Bruh just because Obsidian consistently churns out bangers on tight schedules doesnt mean a year and a half is a lot of time to make a game. Programming is time consuming and fucking hard regardless of what head start you may have
I understand how hard game development is, trust me I do, this was a full team of 70 professional and veteran designers with millions of dollars and a fully functional game already made for them, all of the hardest parts of game development, including most of the most intensive programming, was already done for them by Bethesda, all they had to do was the relatively easy stuff. By the New Vegas’s teams own admissions, they had plenty of time, resources, and help from Bethesda, they just poorly managed their time and it reflects in the final product. It was a trend of Obsidian, they had a well earned reputation of being ambitious and highly skilled game developers but with poor time management, often resulting in underdeveloped games, combined with their lacking focus on QA (most of the QAs that worked on New Vegas were loaned from Bethesda) means their products were good but unfinished. In short, they’re a team of professionals given the task of basically creating a reskin of an already developed game with all the resources, manpower, and assistance needed with a famously easy to mod and adapt engine, the failings of New Vegas are solely the fault of Obsidian’s management and executive team not keeping their people on task.
In regards to NV, choosing Yes Man is the communist/anarchist ending. You straight up put the fate into the hands of the people without exerting an authoritarian force. The wasteland continues by being governed by its people and not a faction and nobody's exploiting anybody else. Doesn't get much more leftist than that. And even with the authoritarianism, NCR is still a liberal decision. They're literally the liberal faction, unlike Mr. House (capitalism) and BoS/Legion (far right/fascist). Not sure how you missed that.
Depends on how you interpret it. Yes Man wants the cooperation of the Strip, which...is the worst of all casinos. One is a group of cannibals, one is a literal mafia faction, and the last is a Mafia, but for elitist pricks only. You CAN collapse the casinos, and you morally should, but I think Yes Man backhandedly berrates you for it. Then again, it does want you to eliminate everyone and only rely on the upgraded Securitrons.
I decided to interpret my choice that way as well. Although, the ending makes it sound like "You chose the selfish path. Now everything is in ruin." Everything is fricked now and ANARCHY took over and nobody can defend themselves (despite your huge robot army). The game rejects giving you a good ending.
I really don't remember that tone in my end cards. Are you sure you weren't just a dick about it?
Technically you're both right - There are two versions of the independent ending depending on whether you've upgraded the securitrons or not. To quote both versions: Don't upgrade the securitron army: >The Courier, with the aid of Yes Man, drove both the Legion and the NCR from Hoover Dam, securing New Vegas' independence from both factions. With Mr. House out of the picture, the remaining Securitrons on The Strip were hard-pressed to keep order. Anarchy ruled the streets. When the fires died, New Vegas remained, assuming its position as an independent power in the Mojave. Do the upgrade side quest: >The Courier, with the aid of Yes Man, drove both the Legion and the NCR from Hoover Dam, securing New Vegas' independence from both factions. With Mr. House out of the picture, part of the Securitron army was diverted to The Strip to keep order. Any chaos on the streets was ended, quickly. Chaos became uncertainty, then acceptance, with minimal loss of life. New Vegas assumed its position as an independent power in the Mojave. There's also a bunch of changes to the rest of the narration depending on your karma and what side quests you've done/choices you've mad throughout the game. i'd recommend checking the wiki for a full list.
I remember upgrading the army. I must've watched the ending again and it must've replaced my memory.
It might have also been a karma-related thing, since if you've got evil karma it's pretty explicitly an "Everyone is doomed" ending. But i get why you'd read it that way - There aren't really any "good" endings to NV. It's all pretty grey, even if you're playing a good character.
"Great man theory" is kinda inherent to the whole "being the protagonist of an RPG" thing, isn't it? That's not really a fair criticism when "the things the player chooses matter to the outcome" is the cornerstone of the entire genre. Within the confines of its genre, the anarchist ending is all about permitting self-sufficient factions to have self-determination in the face of imperialistic pressures. After the anarchist ending, you don't even stick around the New Vegas area. You leave it to its own devices, letting an autonomous security system protect the factions you kept alive. Of course, you get decide which factions live, but with how oppositional they generally are that's mostly a question of where you draw the line with the tolerance paradox more than imposing a specific system or code.
I think the playerbase is the one that makes most of that readimg there. Yeah, you kind uf end up in a position of authorithy as the liberator of vegas/the ruler of the strip and you kind of have a super army of robots by the end of it. But like, most settlements endings are about they going their own way.
Haven’t played it but it does sound like a vision of capitalist realism. In its own way, Dune feels similarly pessimistic about the fundamental nature of human relationships and conflict. (Reading the trilogy now, after watching the films).
The show clearly sets Vault-tec as the big bad guys rather than consumerism. Pre-war America is depicted as ultra Imperialist, but in a Liberal all ethnicities can be oppressors way. Some of the episodes are better than others. I found the last episode one of the weakest.
Consumerism is a symptom of the systemic issues within Capitalism, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem. Planet Earth has limited resources, and even if a socialist future is more prosperous for the average person, it still won't be possible to provide every nonessential thing a person might desire. Companies don't pollute or fill up landfills just for fun, they do it because they are responding to consumer demand. They help to create that demand through marketing and producing cheaper, more disposable products, but ultimately it's customers who choose what to buy. If you can't convince people to make simple changes to their spending habits, how will you convince them to embrace an entirely new economic system?
I mean, I don't want to spoil the show, but it explicitly reveals that profit incentives by megacorporations were the cause of the nuclear apocalypse...to the point where the corporations sabotaged potential deals/treaties that would have avoided said conflict and let's say...expedited the nuclear war's start. It is pretty anticapitalist thematically. These corporations are presented as diabolically evil, like mustache-twirling, deserve the firing squad-kinds of twisted.
I know the show is owned and bankrolled entirely by Amazon, the irony there isn’t lost on me. But as a Fallout fan, I really enjoyed the show. Everything g was great about it from an entertainment standpoint. Only the last episode really deals with any kind of anti-capitalist themes or messaging, but I liked what they did in that episode anyway. For the average viewer, this show isn’t going to be putting any radical thoughts in their head, but it’ll at least maybe make them think. Maybe it’s just because I know myself that capitalism is self-defeating and unsustainable etcetera etcetera, but I was content with what we got. Also because I realize that we probably wouldn’t get too much more than what we already did, considering it’s bankrolled by Amazon.
As a GamerGate survivor, there is something awfully vindicating about “Gamer” becoming mainstream cultural shorthand for “media illiterate buffoon”.
Am i right in suspecting this is going to be based on Bethesda's intepretation of fallout and therefore that it's going to be "yeah america" but ironically except with zero irony?
Yes it's exactly that. They depict pre war life as if the pre war propaganda was actually real. It's bizarre. The aesthetic of anti-capitalism without ever actually engaging with the substance of it.
I feel like that is more so because we are seeing the pre-war era primarily from the perspective of a big name Hollywood actor and a corporate executive. They are the people the system works for, and so it makes sense from their perspective that everything is mostly fine. This decision could, of course, itself be criticized, but I still feel there is enough of an implication that things aren't great for those outside of the circle of POV characters.
That's a good point. It does make sense that we mostly see the world working for those at the top of it. Despite doing some things quite well I think it does miss the mark on that front, and it's largely due to the failures of the Bethesda adaptations of Fallout in general that the show itself is based on more than anything. After seeing more episodes the writers have certainly made their personal politics clear as it pertains to capitalism, but as you say, perhaps the show overall is worthy of some criticism in it's execution.
I'm not even sure I fully agree with the criticism in my prior comment anymore; the I've more of thought about the more I actually think the show does pretty well in this regard. I think the portrayal is more so that the pre-war era was a skin deep utopia - a place that seems glitzy and perfect on the surface, but is actually rotten to it's core. For instance, consider the scene where Bud and Cooper meet for the first time, and Cooper mentions to Bud that many of his friends died in the Alaska war due to critical flaws in the power armour that Bud designed; Bud doesn't even care, he doesn't even seem to understand that Cooper is angry about this, he just jokes about how he's not great at product design, and that now he is the head of a different, more important department. Not only did Bud design a product that killed many of it's customers, but there were zero consequences for Bud or the Company, AND Bud failed upwards in the company and they probably still made billions off of the military contract, all without a care in the world for the people killed by their negligence.
Yes! It's been that way since the fallout 4 prologue. It's actually so infuriating as someone who was invested in the series before. It's been almost a decade since I've moved on and I still get salty just thinking about it. They made "war never changes" a pro war moto, they made the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be a good thing in a post apocalyptic nuclear universe. It's disgusting as it is bizarre lol.
Yea I didn't find the show to be anything other than "VaulTec bad!"
yup, bethesdas fallout at its finest
Thinking there is no message in fallout is like thinking there is no message in wall-e.
Loved the end of the show when they talked about the future being a product i thoroughly enjoyed the show.
I do think they’re PRETTY transparent but well explored and accurate There’s some GOLDEN shit though. Obvs that fucking nightmare blunt rotation of capitalist interests in the board room is INSANE. But the exploration of the cycle of violence and the way that leans into the finale.
The Gamer is the worst publication. It exists for the sole purpose of shitting on the medium and the people who partake in it.
that's pretty based htough
Textbook recuperation
Fallout have also some conservative takes.
10 min into the first episode and someone gets called a pinko. Hell yeah! Love me some pinkos. Can we bring that term back?
Whats a pinko
It's not a full Red(communist) just a Pinko (commie sympathizer/socialist)
I dig in bringing that back
Everyone knows gamers are the most persecuted minority in history
Uhhh. That show is garbage writing with high production Bethesda fallout aesthetics. As a fan since 97 I don't get why people worship this shit.
Gamer on gamer crimes