the Fallout TV show managing to be both SHAMELESS fan service and also great storytelling on its own merit is so much fun to me. i am kicking my heels in delight every time a reference to the games gets made whereas usually i’d be cringing myself inside-out.
Y’know, it’s funny watching Fallout on prime with people who are Not knowledgeable about the games, because in S2E5 when Cooper gets folded like a lawn chair and turned into a kebab the general reaction of my lil watch party was “holy fuck they just killed off a major character in a horrific way”.
Meanwhile I’m sitting there, and my biggest concern is how he’s gonna extract himself from that pole. He’ll be fine once he gets some rads in his system but seriously is he gonna like. Shimmy shimmy shimmy his way up it? Is he gonna call for help? Unlikely. Will he make the injury worse by tearing his whole self off the pole? Idk maybe. Will he just stay there and cry to himself for a bit? Also maybe.
A crazy thought came to my mind today - Despite grave injuries, Cooper will live thanks to Lucy’s high luck stat. She wants him to live despite everything.
Watching fallout stuff is a bit funny at times bc its about an evil company destroying the world for their own profit and power gain and you get lines about them like “today America’s biggest company, tomorrow it’s only” brought to you by Amazon Studios.
i really like fallout because, unlike a lot of media that uses retrofuturism as just a cool aesthetic, fallout’s obsession with 1950s americana actually means something. it’s not just chrome fins and googie diners, it’s weaponized optimism. it’s that sickly-sweet propaganda sheen slathered over nuclear terror, where smiling mascots tell you to duck and cover while the government quietly preps for the end of the world. it’s about a country that believed so hard in its own greatness it signed its death warrant in cursive.
fallout takes that warped, post-war idealism, the “gee whiz!” charm of suburbia on lithium. and drags it through the dirt, showing us what happens after all the white picket fences melt into radioactive slag. in a world shaped by that specific brand of McCarthyist exceptionalism, the future isn’t flying cars and robot butlers, it’s a dinky holotape of your last moments before the bombs hit, looping forever. like vault 11, the one where the final recording plays after everyone’s already dead, revealing the whole “sacrifice one person every year or everyone dies” mandate was a lie. a loyalty test. a sick joke. and the vault passed, right before it failed, because paranoia and desperation had already eaten them alive.
that’s fallout. not just the end of the world, but the punchline that comes after the moral.
and honestly? that hits way harder than any sleek utopia. because fallout remembers: beneath all that pastel patriotism and canned laughter, something was always rotting.
