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this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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i read the vault people more as smiling hitlerjugend than libs, all that talk about breeding & coming colonization of the surface
yeah except in typical corporate brained bethesda manner they made the vault dwellers completely multi-ethnic, losing any resonance the whole thing might have to anything actually happening in the real world. Same thing as in Starfield where you have a faction of cowboy-larping-muh-taxes-libertarian-dudebros who are just as ethnically diverse as the san-francisco-liberal faction on the other side of the galaxy.
just because it doesn't replicate the exact racial dynamics of historical and contemporary colonization doesn't mean it doesn't have anything to say about it
that's like saying district 9 doesn't have anything to say about apartheid because it's being used against aliens
I think comparing it to District 9's message about apartheid, where the aliens are legally-defined second-class citizens and are (IIRC) only ever referred to with a fictional racial slur, just makes Fallout seem even more shallow. At most, it's a wealthy/poor analogy, saying "the wealthy feel abstractly bad about the poor but are too comfortable in their gated communities to do anything meaningful", but imo even that is being generous given very similar dynamics are shown in the inhabited vaults from F3 onwards.
I think it's more about American exceptionalism. The vault dwellers are so sure they're the only ones who can rebuild society, only for us to find out that 1) the "impure" surface dwellers already did it, and 2) vault tec is responsible for destroying that new society (or at least a critical part of it). You can tie that very clearly to colonialist justifications that destroying indigenous societies was good because they were "backward" unlike the supposedly enlightened west, and more recently neocolonial policies that continue to destroy the global south so it can be remade into a new frontier for capital
True enough, it's just impossible to tell where corporate diversity casting ends and actual artistic intent starts. It's very strange to do the whole 1950s nostalgia thing "just without the racism" and then let the black woman do the "we need to secure a future for our children" speech and then also have that same black woman start a conspiracy to end the world for that specific purpose.
It's a very very strange show. There are parts which are supposed to feel resonant that just aren't (the whole vault tec conspiracy or the cold fusion/unlimited green energy stuff) and things that feel like the writers are telling on themselves (no idea if the "breeding the perfect middle manager" bit is hard-hitting satire or just executive brained).