kaseythinksaboutgames

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

(Adding these tags by @couriersixty because this is a really neat point)

So, I saw an interview with the show’s writers and it gave me a lot of thoughts regarding fallout, narrative themes, and colonialism.

First off, I consider myself pretty misanthropic, but even I know “people are evil and innately bad and destructive” isn’t the theme of fallout. That’s doing a lot to lift the blame off of American imperialism and how *that* is the great evil the series warns us about, not “everyone is like this”. The first game opens with us seeing American soldiers executing prisoners of war as America annexes Canada to take petroleum and uranium: it’s clearly about American evil and military/imperial evil, not something innate to all people.

Second, fallout is unique *because* you see “civilization” in a post-apocalyptic setting. Tim Cain has a quote about fallout 1 where he said “my concern in this story is the ethics of life in the aftermath of nuclear war, not building a better laser gun”, and that’s pretty central to fallout. Rather than stagnating, it tries to show us how life would adapt and move on from the apocalypse. The world will change, yes, but it will change in that the apocalypse will become more distant. The future won’t look much like the day the bombs dropped.

Third, what a colonial view to have! “Where’s civilization? Where’s *everything*?” is what you got from westerns? You think railroads and churches being built in recently stolen territory (as is common in Wild West stories) is “civilization”? Wanna tell us what you think America was pre-colonization, Wagner?

It shows this perspective that doesn’t truly want to admit the flaws of America, either willfully or (more likely) due to ignorance. It’s a sheltered perspective, one that doesn’t know history, one that doesn’t know other cultures, one that doesn’t even know the themes of the story it’s writing for…

Edit: this next quote doesn’t have anything to do with those points, it just feels wrong to me to write so spitefully for a series…

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

So, I saw an interview with the show’s writers and it gave me a lot of thoughts regarding fallout, narrative themes, and colonialism.

First off, I consider myself pretty misanthropic, but even I know “people are evil and innately bad and destructive” isn’t the theme of fallout. That’s doing a lot to lift the blame off of American imperialism and how *that* is the great evil the series warns us about, not “everyone is like this”. The first game opens with us seeing American soldiers executing prisoners of war as America annexes Canada to take petroleum and uranium: it’s clearly about American evil and military/imperial evil, not something innate to all people.

Second, fallout is unique *because* you see “civilization” in a post-apocalyptic setting. Tim Cain has a quote about fallout 1 where he said “my concern in this story is the ethics of life in the aftermath of nuclear war, not building a better laser gun”, and that’s pretty central to fallout. Rather than stagnating, it tries to show us how life would adapt and move on from the apocalypse. The world will change, yes, but it will change in that the apocalypse will become more distant. The future won’t look much like the day the bombs dropped.

Third, what a colonial view to have! “Where’s civilization? Where’s *everything*?” is what you got from westerns? You think railroads and churches being built in recently stolen territory (as is common in Wild West stories) is “civilization”? Wanna tell us what you think America was pre-colonization, Wagner?

It shows this perspective that doesn’t truly want to admit the flaws of America, either willfully or (more likely) due to ignorance. It’s a sheltered perspective, one that doesn’t know history, one that doesn’t know other cultures, one that doesn’t even know the themes of the story it’s writing for…

Edit: this next quote doesn’t have anything to do with those points, it just feels wrong to me to write so spitefully for a series…

#fallout #fallout tv series #my essays and rambles #just… the colonialist perspective here drives me mad #the way it lifts blame away from American evils #and says it’s innate to us all rather than cultural? #a white American perspective devoid of outside views and refusing to listen to them…

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

Trying to diverge from your usual concepts when making OCs for games is wild because you end up with stuff like

Maria, Red, Katherine, and Philomena’s quests: I’m here to provide help, I want to build a better future for the wasteland and help people OVERCOME the old world, not restore it! The days of Old World Blues will give way to New World Hope!!

Marnie’s quest:

#fallout #fallout OCs #context: Marnie does not think wastelanders are people #she believes she needs to ‘civilize’ the wasteland #and it does not go well for her or anyone around her #I feel like this post is gonna be incomprehensible and I’ll lose followers for it #but the realization Marnie is doing the plot of undertale the musical was hilarious and I gotta share it

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

Okay so I've been playing That's Not My Neighbor lately, and it's helping me with misinformation detection because the mindset it puts me into is Very Nice

So. The doppelgangers in game come in varying levels of detectability. Some of them are very obvious. Some others are almost right. But I want to talk about a potential warning sign: the list.

You see, sometimes the person who's trying to come in is not on the list we get every day, that contains people who want to come in that day. And sometimes, that person is a legit human who just didn't have the opportunity to put themselves on the list. and sometimes, it's a doppel you don't want to let in.

What you do in this case is call their apartment. Sometimes when the one trying to come in is a doppel, the human person will be home. So now when an info comes from a source that's not official or trustworthy, I stop and think "this info is not on the list" and pick up the phone and google it.

Sometimes, it's a misinformation doppelganger. And sometimes, it's just a civilian who was unfortunate with the list.

So, guys, call the apartment of the info.

#i don’t know this game but I really like that approach #games teaching us to be wary and investigate…

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

#sonic the hedgehog #this is so good

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

A wild pfp!

#yokai watch #this is so cute aaaa

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

#fallout #oh man I would’ve loved to have him as a party member

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

I keep seeing people say “the fallout show didn’t retcon new Vegas, it’s fine”, but I think they’re ignoring the bigger issue of it retconning 1 & 2

If the boneyard is replaced with shady sands, if shady sands is built around pre-war ruins rather than being a new community, if the followers of the apocalypse didn’t exist, if three vaults were so close to the children of the cathedral yet never got found in their searches…

Doesn’t it feel like a big plot hole for the entire first game?

#fallout #fallout show #spoilers

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

read your criticism and have a genuine question about your thoughts on the branding scene. i completely understand how max's branding is inherently tied to a racist history, and it always will be, but i dont feel like the scene itself was written with that bias/intent. thaddeus also gets branded in later episodes and it's implied to happen to every aspirant upon their promotion. at what point in writing are black characters morally barred from specific story points because of their similarities to a history that's not directly related? sort of similar with barb, at what point can black characters not do bad things at all, especially in a story where there are near a dozen non-black characters who do worse things? also considering it's implied (at least, i understood it as) she's sticking to vault-tec to protect her family?

I am not in the best position to comment on this, because I am not black. I will do my best to add what I can, but this is a space for others to chime in.

Barb is interesting because she's essentially become the person who did the most heinous crime in the entire setting- by far and away worse than anything anyone has ever done. There really aren't white characters who did worse things- because all the crimes of Caesar or the Enclave or whoever else pale in comparison to being the one who literally set into motion the total annihilation of all nations on Earth.

The issue is they've created a setting that is, as presented, colorblind. Race is invisible to the writers, who did not consider it meaningfully while producing the show- as is often the case with white creatives putting characters of color into their stories. This is not inherently bad- many great scifi stories feature a largely colorblind setting. Look at the relative inclusivity of star trek as an example.

The thing that makes Fallout different from Star Trek however is that this is a show that is intensely concerned with depicting the specific brand of nationalistic American politics of the 1950s and the Cold War- and they've reproduced that system for the show but with a black woman at the head. That's where the issue comes up.

This was a system that had racism baked into it by design. It still does. American Nationalism and corporate violence are built on racism against black people and other minorities. And this show desperately wants to depict these things, but they've decided to put a black woman at the head of them. They're depicting systems that are, by their nature, violently racist- but they've decided to portray them as being run by a black housewife.

Fallout 3 does a similar thing with how it depicts every major slaver as a black person. Eulogy Jones, the slave buyer at Paradise Falls, the head slaver in the Abe Lincoln memorial, Ashur in The Pitt. Hell Mothership Zeta adds in a black woman from the wasteland and even SHE'S revealed to have been a slaver. This is something Bethesda consistently does- depicting ideologies and practices with a deep history of racialized violence- and then showing black people at the head of them, seemingly to try to skirt around actually addressing racism meaningfully in their stories. (I use Fallout 3 as an example but Fallout 4 does many of these same things.)

Thaddeus does also get branded, and he does also get treated to the same demeaning servanthood as Maximus. The difference, quite frankly, is that Thaddeus is white. There are just some things that are straight up inappropriate to depict happening to black characters. Never before this series has the Brotherhood ever done brandings- and yet this show opens with it in the first episode and introduces this brand new jarring concept with the visceral image of a black man being branded by faceless fascist cultists.

It's also important to note that even if they didn't intend the scene as racist, it still is. Like I don't think the scriptwriter sat down and said "oh I'm gonna do a racism" cuz intent just doesn't matter here. The scene was intended as a way of showing the severity of the brotherhood- but it also thoughtlessly reproduces images of historic black violence.

@orange-coloredsky I know you've been talking about this stuff all day, and your initial posts about the antiblack racism in the series were what prompted me to write my thoughts today- which is what this ask is in response to. I was curious if you have any other input with all this.

I'd also be more than happy to have any additional input from people better suited to answer these questions.

#fallout #oh man this is solid analysis #I love the way you examine this and just. everything #the writing is so insanely fucked and I’m so glad to have this takedown of it

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

[ID: a black and white sketch of the Sole Survivor and X6-88 from Fallout 4. Sole is an older Black woman with a face & neck tattoo, wearing a du-rag on her head. She is smiling and looking at X6, who stands behind her, covering his face and nearly doubling over with laughter. End ID]

draw your favorite Black characters happy and smiling TODAY ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

#I love!!!! #fallout #gotta pry about your sole survivor sometime…

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

Long post ahead. My full thoughts on the fallout series. TW for references to Sexual Assault, racism, antisemitism. It's not particularly in depth here- but I do reference specific acts of violence done in the show.

I've had people insinuate I'm only mad because I'm a New Vegas fan, because I think they retconned the lore. I'm not upset at the fallout show for its dubious lore additions and reworks. I think they're quite bad in places, but they're by far the least of the show's problems.

This isn't a case of a New Vegas fan mad they messed with my game in a way I didn't like.

Please refer to literally any of my posts pointing out the racism and antisemitism in the show. They brand a black man in episode 1. They named the enclave scientist after a real life holocaust survivor and then spent most of the show lobbing around his decapitated head like a volleyball.

But I'd like to consider other elements of the show. View it as a whole.

Consider the inherent misogyny of having a female main character whose entire character arc is just her getting abused for 8 episodes. How the trajectory of her character revolves around not giving up on the humanity of the man who waterboarded her and sold her to organ harvesters. A female main character who is raped in the first episode and watches her entire community get brutalized and who comes out of it completely unphased- still as plucky as ever- just worried about her dad.

Consider the horror of having a black woman be the one to drop the bombs. Consider the horror of her leading a council of elites who have infiltrated and taken over the US government. Consider the ways this group is presented and shown, the ways every fault of the US government in the series is offloaded onto a shadowy group of elites.

Consider how the capitalist critique of the show only goes so far as saying there's a secret organization of bad people who must be purged. The antisemitism and conspiratorial nonsense inherent to that premise.

Consider the rampant classism with the show's depiction of Wastelanders as either animalistic monsters or too stupid to live.

Consider the ways the show punishes nearly every act of kindness- the ways the world rewards might-makes-right authoritarians.

Consider the way the NCR collapsed offscreen because a disgruntled husband was mad his wife left him, and how after it collapsed the army immediately became raiders and the survivors became blood drinking cultists. Don't give me "it's just shady sands that collapsed" because the NCR was a developed nation. If one of their cities blew up, they would send aid. They would assist.

Consider the ableism of the treatment of ghouls, how every ghoul is now a ticking time bomb, how Lucy helps free a small dementia-riddled old woman ghoul from a medical torture facility and then is immediately punished with the woman trying to inexplicably murder her. Thaddeus openly talks about ghoul exterminationism and it's never a joke or a bit- he just says it and nobody reacts or says anything.

Consider the way the show constantly uses sex crimes as comedy and horror- the incest jokes and the "chicken fucker" bit, and the Vault 4 monster impregnation and the main character's rape in the first episode.

Consider the way the Vault 33 town councillors use real world progressive talking points about restorative justice and prison abolition and multiculturalism- meanwhile Norm advocates for the death penalty and a closed society. How Norm is shown as good and righteous and the vault dwellers range from deluded to damningly stupid- how the mere concept of restorative justice is made a farce because the NCR raiders are screaming about eating organs and murdering people 24/7.

Consider the way they removed the Boneyard, and the Followers of the Apocalypse by extension. In New Vegas we heard about the Followers operating a university in LA. It's gone now. Not destroyed by bombs- but written out of existence because the Boneyard never existed, and Shady Sands is in its place. Consider what that says about this world- that the group most dedicated to peace and rebuilding has been surgically excised from the narrative- destroyed more wholly than even the NCR- written out of existence entirely.

This is the single most reactionary fallout story that has been produced. By a fucking country mile.

Whatever lore critiques there are should be secondary. The storytelling is reactionary in ways I straight up have not seen from other Bethesda entries in the series. It is cruel to a fault, and depicts a world that is incapable of healing or growing- where the best you can do is hold onto that small spark of goodness while every bit of the society around you tries to murder it out of you. This isn't a story about rebuilding, or about postwar politics, or about society- it's about dueling warlords and might makes right attitudes and grimdark views of the nature of humanity. It's fallout in aesthetics alone- and it's perhaps the most hateful thing I've seen come out of this series outside of the actual neonazis in the fanbase.

Whatever hope there is in Moldaver's final moments looking out over the glittering ruins of LA is undercut by the knowledge of what came before. What was destroyed. And it's undercut by the Brotherhood's totalitarian control. It's not hopeful, it's the bare minimum of survival. It's all the progress of the postwar world, 200 years of humanity and history, reduced to just barely getting the lights back on.

In the intro to fallout 1, "War Never Changes" is used as thematic glue. It ties together two concepts- past wars- and present capitalism and militarism.

Ron Perlman describes the Roman Empire, the Spanish conquests of the Americas, and the Nazi regime- and then he says "war never changes" and uses it to connect those past atrocities to the modern world of the setting- to the war that ended everything. The phrase existed to link the resource wars and their ensuing fallout to all the crimes of empire prior. War never changes wasn't a hard and fast rule of human nature- it was a specific condemnation of America.

Lonesome Road even ends with the phrase refuted. War Never Changes. But men do, through the roads they walk. There is hope. That's what this series has always been about. The Master died at the end of fallout 1 and said "leave while you still have hope."

In this show, the black woman Vault Tec exec who ends the world says the phrase. It's stripped of all meaning. Just a generic throwback because it's a famous phrase in the series' history. It's not a condemnation of America, it's a celebratory thing. Vault Tec toasting to the end of the world.

What a thing to see this series become. What a thing to see celebrated.

#fallout #this is genuinely such a good analysis and it’s so cathartic to read #this is why the show is so upsetting #not because it ‘might’ retcon new Vegas #but because of the racism and sexism and classism and antisemitism and imperialism #and how it erases the west coast’s story as a whole #replacing the anti-American messages of how evil imperialism is #with just. a claim that this is how everyone is and will be #a bitter and self destructive message that genuinely hates the audience

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

Genuinely, what is the point of setting the Fallout show on the west coast if it was just going to invalidate everything that happened in the West Coast Trilogy. Shady Sands has fallen, the NCR is a memory, New Vegas is a crater in the ground. The New California Republic, Caesar's Legion, The Enclave, Mr. House, all brushed to the side for a wasteland with no semblance of human society beyond shanty-towns; with no semblance of the legitimate cities of Fallouts 2 and New Vegas. All to what end? To allow the Brotherhood of Steel to make an undeserved comeback?

If anything, I think the series should be the final nail in the coffin that Bethesda fundamentally misunderstands Fallout. In a franchise whose very nature is defined by the Atom Bomb and how it was used as a means to an end by a corrupt Capitalist system; how humanity rose from the ashes of a broken world with the dream of building something better; how our only hope for the future is to learn from our past mistakes and create a world where they can never be made again; Bethesda seems determined to keep us stuck in the past. That we should never advance past the ideals of the nation that led us to this nuclear landscape in the first place, that we should never try to make something new atop the ashes of what came before. That we should just forever stay rats scurrying in the wastes, amongst the shattered visage of Ozymandias and the fruits of his labor, looking up to what he left behind as an example of the kind of existence we should strive to create. Very telling indeed.

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

Kinda cracky Animal crossing! AU

#animal crossing #star trek #heck I gotta learn what the last one is referencing…

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

Spoilers for the fallout show but like… does this kinda mean none of the west coast games happened???

1) no mention of the master or super mutants, no mention of how the master overlooked 3 extra vaults near his HQ, the boneyard not existing and being replaced with shady sands, he might’ve just not existed

2) existence of an enclave city implies the chosen one might’ve never fought the enclave and defeated their west coast presence

NV) NCR destroyed before new Vegas even happens

Just… huh. So the east coast brotherhood takes over California and the NCR’s remnants are a cannibal raider cult. It just feels almost spiteful and insulting to disregard all the story like that…

#fallout #fallout tv series #fallout tv show #spoilers

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

also I know I’m strolling in seven years late to Horizon’s representation problems but I feel like these games are an instructive example in how the liberal imagination understands “good representation.” the game seems to take a lot of care in demonstrating (what the developers understand to be) a fully post-racial society by way of universal racial integration - every society or ‘tribe’ or group of people you encounter is almost uniformly racially diverse. Being generous, I think this is an attempt to avoid any possible racist implications in the fanciful costumes and outfits that Horizon is known for; there is a lot of focus in representing the different people of Horizon’s world through what they wear. You can immediately tell an Oseram from a Carja, not by their racial makeup, but by their clothing. This means that, if you meet a particularly ‘savage people’ (a term characters in the game use semi-frequently) who wear ‘exotic clothing’ and face-paint, the diverse racial makeup of the group prevents (or is intended to prevent) a racist conclusion about that group. 

Likewise, the game presents a world free from systemic homophobic prejudice - Aloy is notably gay, but also her asking people about their partners, or assuming other people around her are gay, generally passes without comment. Horizon is presenting a fully ‘integrated’ social world, one whose conflicts are not meant to map onto ‘modern-day’ racism and homophobia.

But the underlying logic and structure of racism and homophobia (and binaristic, oppositional gender) are left intact. Humanity in Horizon is still presented as fundamentally separate from nature, moving overtop of it, extracting what they need from it, but never part of it as such. And this construction of nature as separate from “man” is not problematised, “man” just gets universalised into “human,” and “human” gets universalised into a non-racial category. This is completely side-stepping the history of this construction of nature as a white supremacist, colonial, capitalist construction, an understanding of nature as something colonial Europe is meant to hold dominion over through the dehumanisation of non-white, non-European people, converting them into non-human labourers and pests who live atop the land Europe is attempting to colonise and enclose. “Nature” in the modern western understanding is a fundamentally racial concept; nature is a ‘scientific, rational, biological’ container meant to house everything non-human about the world, an object to be studied and exploited by the one true subject of history, Mankind - and who is considered part of mankind is a question of whether you belong to the white European ruling class.

I think Aloy in particular represents this problem well - her access to and understanding of pre-apocalypse technology makes her universally suspicious and dismissive of any religious or ‘spiritual’ beliefs she encounters in other groups, frequently getting into reddit-atheist-adjacent quibbles with the ‘unenlightened,’ ‘primitive’ people of the world about the fact that the machines that harvest food for them and take care of the land are not gods, silly, they’re just machines! Her only real counterpart in terms of technological understanding is Sylens (a Black man), who is an antagonist. Like despite the game’s attempts at neutralising race as a coherent category, it is kind of unavoidable to notice that the protagonist is a white woman who’s only equal is a Black man engaging in constant deception for his own benefit lol

And Aloy’s anti-religious sentiments are deeply funny, because the game’s narrative itself has a theological relationship to technology - humans destroyed the world with technology, yes, but salvation of humanity is only possible through technology, specifically a globe-spanning technological system meant to be an environmental steward to the planet, repairing the damage caused by previous technological catastrophes and human wars. Human beings themselves are insufficient to the task of taking care of the planet, and “nature” itself is incapable of self-governance or regulation. And the way this technological system is made to function properly again is, hilariously, unlocked through the genetic code of a white woman, a perfect clone of the technological system’s original creator. the solution to Horizon’s central conflict and threat is, ultimately, a white saviour 

And so the appropriative elements of Horizon - calling the Nora ‘braves,’ the abstracting of hundreds of north american Indigenous cultures into mere aesthetics and symbols, the invocation of words like savage and primitive, and so on - are not surface-level problematic elements of an otherwise anti-racist game, they are indicative of a liberal anti-racist imaginary, a place where we’re all equal human beings whose main problem are vague sectarian grudges, without looking at or dealing with any of the underlying ideological frameworks that produced race or gender in the first place.

So I think Horizon is, despite attempts to imagine a post-racist world, nonetheless very limited in how it represents this post-racial world because it understands racism as prejudice against particular phenotypic characteristics, not an underlying logic that renders “nature” and “human” as fundamentally racial concepts in history

#horizon zero dawn #this is so fascinating #and such a good analysis of the distillation of cultures into aesthetics and stereotypes #along with the Eurocentric perspective crippling their ability to see the real issues…

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

thinking about how the extra area added on to a pacifist run of undertale, the true lab, is about alphys's past mistakes. how it ends with the story reaffirming that, despite the pain she's caused, the thing that matters is that she has now made the choice to do the right thing. she's still worthy of her friends' love.

thinking about how undertale doesn't expect the player to get a pacifist ending for the first time. how it's more likely than not that the player will kill toriel the first time they battle her, how lots of players don't initially figure out how to end undyne's fight without killing her, etc. what it expects — not even expects, really, but hopes — is that the player, if they care enough, will use their canonically acknowledged power over time to make up for those mistakes.

no matter how many neutral runs a player has done before committing to the pacifist run, the thing that matters to the characters, to the story, is that you've chosen, now, to do the right thing.

compared to alphys, the player honestly gets off lightly, in that you're the only one (other than flowey) who really remembers any harm you might have caused. and any direct guilting the game could have done about it is long past at this point. instead, as undertale often does, it makes its point via parallels: alphys caused harm, and she knows it. she has committed to being better. in doing so, she has unlocked for herself a better ending to her story. and she deserves it. she's forgiven.

those structural narrative parallels are all over undertale, if you know where to look. and that's one of the things that makes it so fuckin' good.

#undertale #this is such a good point… #I thought on forgiveness in undertale and I like this interpretation of it #it’s very nice

[kaseythinksaboutgames]

Been replaying SMT1 again. I really do enjoy the first entry a ton and wish we would get a new entry in that fashion, kinda like Strange Journey. I had more ideas for BG but I just can't get any further to something I really like.

#shin megami tensei #HECK YES I LOVE SMT1 #AND I LOVE FURRIES #GREAT COMBO