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Mr. House: This is why democracy doesn't work. Look at that garbage!

Courier: ... But you are the one ruling New Vegas

Mr. House: Well, with the NCR and the legion trying to control the strip, do you really think I can afford a Securitron to broom up the place?

#mr house #fallout new vegas #fallout

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It cost me 11 stimpaks and so much luck to kill one deathclaw in Fallout 1.

And I might have to kill 3 of them on the near future.

I need better guns. Or rather, I need to level energy weapons as fast as possible so my laser pistol can help more and I need better armor. Preferably, without costing 10000 caps because Jake is a rip off

#fallout #fallout 1 #deathclaw #energy weapons #retro gaming

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I think it's worth noting the themes the DLC tries to convey and then see where the shortcomings of the writing comes from.

Perhaps because I already came from a critical standpoint that converting other people to your religion is a bad thing, but to me it never stroke me as a "Joshua and Daniel are doing a good thing". It struck to me more as a character trait, almost character flaw than anything. However it's that same trait which is associated with some positive things, such as helping them against these warmongering tribes that are bent on conquering them.

Honest hearts brings a few topics on the table:

"The burden of revenge" and "What war is worth fighting"

Joshua is a man consumed with anger and hatred. He never got payback from what he suffered from Caesar or what Salt-upon-wounds did to him. Joshua talks about fighting back against the white legs, but that's not a virtue: That's a major character flaw.

The DLC hinges on Joshua and it's A LOT. Everything about it is built to further enhance his characterization. Daniel is his foil and Salt-upon-wounds is his target of hatred. The writing of the tribes all come around to building Joshua's conflict. And that's why the writing can be seen as considerably less nuanced:

a) if the tribes are more autonomous, they wouldn't need the mormon's help, nor would Joshua or Daniel would hold nearly asmuch relevance.

b) for the tribes to be written with more depth, they would have to divert focus away from writing Joshua's conflict and designing Zion and its quests into further fleshing out the story. Perhaps it would have been a better call, but this is what I understand from it.

The entire DLC unfortunately suffers a bit from "colonizer envy" (the major influences are closer to colonizer than to the local tribes), but nowhere in the game it paints the White Legs as a community that deserves to be destroyed any more than the great khans or the fiends, for example. The game even allows you to spare and demoralize them to prevent further pursuit. They're waging war. Fighting and exerminating them is an OPTION, but it's nowhere stated as the good one, no matter how trigger happy some fans may be.

If one looks at Daniel and Joshua as the morally correct guys, the entire DLC is abhorrent.

My lens playing the game however were two well intentioned (although misguided for reasons literally centuries older than they can understand) were trying to help a few tribes who were being harassed by a third tribe (enpowered by Caesar's favors, no less) and could not agree on what is the right track to do.

I don't idolize Joshua Graham nor Daniel. I don't feel the tribes looking up to Daniel and Joshua as saviors is a good thing (and I hope they move on from that, if that even is the case.) And I feel the DLC is much more compeling this way.

But I STRONGLY agree with OP about keeping our eyes open for this kind of stuff.

The Great Khans and the Tribes of Zion/Honest Hearts

So I noticed this a few nights ago when I was trying to decide what route to go for my newest Fallout New Vegas character, and I noted something that I don't think many people have really ever clicked on.

-][-

The Great Khans, in Fallout New Vegas, are written as stand-ins for Native Americans.

Hear me out.

They are a people who have been pushed east out of their ancestral homelands time and time again, later finding a home for themselves in the Mojave. They warred with other native tribes, Mr House and what would become the Families, and then later were subject to a brutal attack on their civilians which led them to be stuck on land that was their own but was sparse in resources and are unable to meaningfully fight back against the rising Imperialistic powers of Mr House and the NCR (President Aaron Kimball later referencing and using the same "Sea to Shining Sea" rhetoric as the United States did during the Great Western Expansion, at Hoover Dam).

But what really clicked this for me was that, in the NCR ending where the Great Khans ally with the New California Republic, they are once more kicked off of their land and are sent off to a far off distant Reservation.

After the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, the Great Khans returned for a time to Red Rock Canyon. The NCR's pressing need to expand proved greater than its promise of amnesty, and before long the government decided the Khans had to go. The surviving Great Khans were relocated to an isolated, barren reservation, well north of NCR trade routes

Sounds really familiar right?

And looking at the Great Khans within this context, really reframes the context of their raiding and deep bitter anger that the Elder Khans like Papa Khan and Oscar have against the NCR.

Colonization is an ugly brutal thing, and it is also a complex one.

Like the Great Khans in New Vegas, many Native American tribes ending up raiding American citizens as a way to fight back, to strike against a rising imperialistic threat that was eager and willing to grind them against their heel, to kill their culture and bring all under the American Empire.

They fought, raided, begged, pleaded, sent letters to congress, lobbied Congress and the President and the Director of Indian Affairs, even as the infinitely more wealthy and powerful United States (even just off of the weary years of Civil War) did little to nothing to step the Westward push and actively allowed it's military to perform as it may on and off orders to get the natives off of land that had once been promised to them but was now deemed too valuable for a mere treaty to hold any sway.

And to bring this back to the actual conversation I want to have, is that I wanted to state this realization of mind in order to contrast it with another example from the exact same game.

The Dead Horses, Sorrows, and White-Legs of Honest Hearts.

Where as the Great Khans are treated with a kind of weary respect, of a people crushed beneath the wheels of a infinitely more powerful empire, struggling to find hope in a FUTURE for their people and culture, the Dead Horses and Sorrows and White-Legs are. . .honestly written with far less respect in my eyes.

The Sorrows are being actively converted by a White Savior in Daniel, who sees it as his burden to show these "innocent savages" the true faith and demands that they give up their home so that they are not "tainted" by the harshness of reality. Where they have no other visible leaders then this Foreign Priest calling their faith and interpretation of his teachings through their own cultural lens as wrong-headed.

Where Joshua Graham, the butcher who helped Caesar commit cultural genocide on dozens of tribes alone, is elected War Leader by the Dead Horses and in some endings becomes worshiped by them. Even he warns Follows-Chalk to stay in Zion lest he be corrupted by the dangers of the wider wasteland.

Now you sound like Joshua. He always tells me the tribal life is better, that I should stay here and forget the outside world.

And the White-Legs are treated as nothing but a people wholly existing of hate that deserve to be destroyed because they have been fooled by Ulysses and Caesar. Never humanized, never given a chance to learn the truth for themselves, they are written and treated almost like generic Orcs in many fantasy settings. No matter what this tribe and people are consigned to doom and slaughter.

-][-

And I say all this because I find it deeply weird how disparate these ideas and depictions are between the main game of New Vegas and it's Honest Hearts DLC.

Why are the Great Khans given so much dignity and pathos, when the Honest Hearts tribes feel almost like caricatures?

Why is Honest Hearts the way it is? And why is the writing so disparate between the two sections of the game?

#fallout new vegas #honest hearts #fnv #joshua graham #the burned man #colonization #colonialism #white saviorism #white savior complex #game design #writing

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Fun fact: Once you start posting about Fallout 1 online, you'll find the other 20 people who are still currently playing.

We will acknowledge each other in public if we ever meet and we WILL praise dogmeat for being the MVP.

It's been strange to go from being interested in parts of Fallout that are relatively popular to being interested in an event that seems to have been blogged about under 10 times in the last 4 years.

#fallout 1 #fallout #retro gaming #dogmeat #goodest boy

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Maybe one day my words will reach someone.

When they do, I hope they're comforted by them.

#writing

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Cleaning the radscorpions nest is a must for QoL, otherwise there will be a giant radscorpion nested up every 2 tiles of the overworld. Heck, there might be one on your shoes.

Also, shotgun early game is peak because its accuracy close range is wonderful and deals a lot of consisent damage.

Delightful little game, but its much less clear on the effects of each individual skill/stat. They DO affect what you do, but its much less evident than later games.

i’m playing the original Fallout (1997) and I explained the gameplay to my brother like “it’s like playing Baldur’s Gate but you don’t have much of a party and it’s just you getting gangbanged by radscorpions and you only have enough AP per turn to either shoot your gun or reload it. And god forbid you use a shotgun because it costs 5 AP to shoot and you have to reload every 2 shots.”

But overall I’m enjoying it (i think).

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Well, it's her team's loss. Two rockets and those phlog crits ammount to nothing.

living in an all girls roommates house DOES lead to yuri moments btw.

there have been times where two girls had been making out on my papasan chair and i said "hey watch me kill their entire team with the phlog real quick" and then i do and they tell me im fucking awesome.

sometimes i get kissed with tongue in response to giving someone an oreo.

isn't that cool?

#Yuri Fortress 2 #tf2 #team fortress 2 #tf2 pyro #airblast saves lives

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I got softlocked and died in Fallout 1

The frustration of losing my save was almost outweighted by my amusement of shoving myself in a situation I had no business in and getting killed over it.

Still a good game, though

#fallout 1 #fallout #Well crap

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IDC HOW HARD OR EASY CARAVAN IS, WE NEED A BETTER TUTORIAL ON HOW TO PLAY THE FUNNY CARD GAME

ANYTHING FOR YOU JOSH

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Hello, Tumblr. How are you today?

#tumblr #idk man #just chillin

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I was playing fallout 1 and I was loving the game until I suddenly stopped enjoying the game.

That was very weird to me and I tried to realize what was wrong with the game, until I realized that the problem was actually with me: I was sick, with a headache and I started playing on autopilot.

"Why do I keep dying on this mandatory encounter? Shitty game design"

> Made a non combat focused character

> Doing a combat focused, non mandatory quest

> Completely ignored upgrading my weapons and was trying to brute force it

> DID NOT READ THE DIALOGUE EXPLAINING HOW TO GET PEOPLE TO ALLY TO ME ON THAT HUGE FIGHT

At that point, I deserved the 20 game overs I got. I needed to chill out and actually rest.

#fallout #fallout 1 #gaming #retro gaming #binge playing #is horrible #do not binge #take breaks #your body will thank you for it

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And people say cataloguing isn't art...

I was looking for movies to watch on hbo and i'm fucking howling at this

#smh #smh my head

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Human apocalypse, where some zombies, for some reason, are becoming alive again and are now trying to dezombify everyone else.

REVERSE TROPE WRITING PROMPTS

Too many beds

Accidentally kidnapping a mafia boss

Really nice guy who hates only you

Academic rivals except it’s two teachers who compete to have the best class

Divorce of convenience

Too much communication

True hate’s kiss (only kissing your enemy can break a curse)

Dating your enemy’s sibling

Lovers to enemies

Hate at first sight

Love triangle where the two love interests get together instead

Fake amnesia

Soulmates who are fated to kill each other

Strangers to enemies

Instead of fake dating, everyone is convinced that you aren’t actually dating

Too hot to cuddle

Love interest CEO is a himbo/bimbo who runs their company into the ground

Nursing home au

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Finished reading the manual. Now to play the game

I'm about to start playing Fallout 1

Step one: Read the 121 pages manual

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I was not joking. Currently on page 57.

I'm about to start playing Fallout 1

Step one: Read the 121 pages manual

#I actually like instruction manuals #It feels nice to have someone explaining stuff to you. #instead of fumbling around #fallout 1