Why do we like Fallout?
At face value it’s an easy question to answer.
We get to shoot monsters, both human and non, with lasers, smack giant roaches with baseball
bats, and, um, build shitty houses. We like it because it’s a game, and games are fun,
the end. Right?
Well. Sorta. Sure. But why Fallout? Why any post-apocalyptic game for that matter? Or
post-apocalyptic anything? We love them. Seriously. We love them so much that the AAA game industry
has latched onto Post Apocalyptia like it’s a gold-encrusted teat, shoving games both
great and terrible our way for, shit over a decade: Wasteland, Metro, Dead Island, Dead
Rising, Left 4 Dead, The Walking Dead, Zombies ate my Neighbors, The Last Of Us, which fucking
killed it, and, of course, Fallout. It’s not just video games either. The Walking Dead,
aside from being an amazing comic, is one of the most watched television shows in history,
and Mad Max Fury Road was MEDIOCRE. What? No it wasn’t. It was awesome. He’s just
bitter because everyone’s happy he’s dead.
So why Fallout? Why is this terrible, terrible world so fucking awesome? Well, I’m not
the first to ask this question, and I won’t be the last. YouTuber Jamin Warren of PBS
Game/Show asked this very question earlier this year. Essentially, he chalked it up as
a combination of catharsis, a sense of relief we get from seeing fictional characters go
through terrible ordeals, and Hedonic Reversal--the concept of our brains deriving satisfaction
from overcoming tough obstacles and personal trials and tribulation---s. It’s why we,
you know, watch sad movies, get tattoos, and call our parents. Now, I’m bastardizing
his video quite a bit, because I’m just summarizing it here, and you should definitely
go watch it after this if you haven’t yet. He makes some great points in it.
But I don’t think he goes deep enough into it. He’s not wrong when he points out that
horrible settings where awful things happen to people have been around for forever. We
even have a term for it: Greek Tragedy. Where literally the worst things happen to fucking
everybody. Oftentimes for no real reason other than life fucking sucks. And apocalyptic stories--well,
they’re old as hell. In Christianity there’s the biblical book of Revelation, in Islam
there’s Yawm ad-Dīn, the time of Judgement. There’s Ragnarök in Norse Mythology, a
giant war between the gods that’ll just, you know. Destroy everything. Apocalypses
aren’t new--but post-apocalypses? They are new. Well. Kinda.
The first post-apocalyptic story we’d recognize that matches the stories we tell nowadays
was actually published in 1826 by Mary Shelley. Sound familiar? She should. She’s most well
known for writing Frankenstein, but that’s not the book I’m talking about here. Actually
the book I’m talking about is The Last Man, which follows a group of people struggling
to survive in a world ravaged by a plague. Unfortunately, the title is a major spoiler,
and eventually it’s just one dude alive by himself. It explores feelings of isolation
that still influence apocalyptic stories today.
I’m not going to dwell on old books too much, but I do have to talk about I Am Legend,
which is probably one of the best books I’ve ever read, to be entirely honest with you.
There have been tons of movies and other media influenced by this book, but most don’t
even come close to touching the core themes of the book. It’s pretty simple really:
a man in a world of vampires, the only one who’s managed to avoid being turned into
a monstrosity, struggles to maintain his humanity. The book wrestles with what it means to even
be human, and challenges modern conceptions of “normalcy.” For instance: is not killing
zombies actually normal in a world where zombies exist?
Anyway. Point is, apocalyptic and post-apoc alyptic stories have been around for a long
time. Apocalyptic ones originate from a time where we became aware that there were forces
beyond our control and comprehension that could change the very definition of normal,
and potentially completely eradicate humanity entirely. In ancient times, these were things
like volcanos, colossal storms, et cetera. As our understanding of the world grew, we
expanded to include things like pandemics in The Last Man and I Am Legend, and as we
created the means of our own eradication with the atom bomb, we got things like Dr. Strangelove:
a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of...well, honestly something people were really concerned would
actually happen. In fact, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
The Bomb is essentially the prototype for the Great War in the Fallout Universe. One
person shoots first, everyone’s fucked because everyone launches everything they have at
everyone else.
I’m 28 years old. Well. Right now I am. I was born in 1987, right at the very end
of the Cold War. To me, it might as well be fiction. It’s nothing I ever personally
experienced, and it’s something I’ve only heard about from old people and read about
in books, so it’s easy for someone like me and probably you too to forget that for,
like, some people’s entire lives they were worried that any day now could be the end
of human civilization as we know it. I know videos like duck and cover seem kind of quaint
now, but you have to realize that people who watched that as children had utter faith in
the messages being put in front of them. They had no reason to not believe that at any second
all of this around us could go to shit.
The 70s and 80s brought us some of the best and most iconic post-apocalyptic movies that
tried to wrestle with this psychology--adults who had grown up fearing instantaneous, searing
oblivion trying to process what a world after everything ends would be like. We get A Boy
And His Dog and Mad Max, movies that portray a bona fide hellscape of terror, where grown
men eat dog food and dress like...well. Okay honestly I wish I could dress like that.
But at some point something switched. Mad Max, A Boy And His Dog--these aren’t worlds
where we want to live. These aren’t the kind of stories we watch and go “Oh, fuck
yes, I want to be that.” But we do do that, with movies, TV, and Video Games. Like when
I’m watching The Walking Dead, I’m not like, “OH MY GOD THIS SEEMS TERRIFYING,”
I’m like “Holy fuck, I could do this so much better than you you fucking idiot. Here,
let’s start an apocalypse right fucking now and I’ll show you.” When did apocalypses
stop being scary and start being awesome? I mean, I’m not alone in this right? Am
I the only one who got together with their friends and came up with a detailed plan for
what they’d do when zombies DO come--not if? Well, something changed in the early 90s--something
kinda small, but also kinda big that changed the entire way we frame geopolitical politics
across the world: The Berlin Wall came tumbling down. The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961
by East Germany. It was a wall in Berlin that divided, um, normal Germany from the part
of Germany that was absorbed into the Soviet Union. It was used to keep people out, and
to keep people in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union and the United States were, effectively,
the two major powers pointing nuclear-weapons at each other for decades during the Cold
War. The Berlin Wall stood as a symbol of all the fears and anxieties people across
the world had about nuclear annihilation. Its demolition symbolized a step in the right
direction: a lowering of tensions, and a return to normalcy.
This is the world I grew up in. One where tensions were dissipating. And it’s the
world that Fallout and The Walking Dead were born in. Suddenly the threat of annihilation
doesn’t seem so iminate, but we just spent like 50 years stressing out about it. It’s
time to let off some steam. Sure, mom and grandpa freaked out about nuclear bombs dropping
on their heads, but we now know how ridiculous that is, right? Let’s have some goofy fun
with it.
So. Apocalypses are fun because of post-red-scare jubilation, right? Well, maybe. But what if
it’s not as simple as that?
“But you just said that--”
Yeah, I know, I say a lot of things. And I definitely think the end of the cold war is
a huge reason why we love post-apocalyptic stories instead of find them only terrifying.
But let’s dig deeper into it for a sec.
In the article Why Do We Love Apocalyptic Movies, writer Christopher Finke--Finke? Whatever.
Christopher Somethingorother lays out two rules for Post Apocalyptic Stories that makes
them so compelling:
1. The End is Fucking Nigh: governments spin out of control and lose their grip over citizens,
mad scientists go a little too mad, or maybe there’s just a big fucking rock hurdling
toward us. ANyway, shit’s about to get real.
Rule 2. The end? It never actually happens. It comes close. Terrible things happen. Thousands,
millions, and even billions of people get shift-deleted from the planet. Life is difficult
as fuck, but people still survive, however many few.
I wanna talk about Snowpiercer.
Don’t forget the rules though. They’re important. Oh, um, also spoilers for Snowpiercer,
I guess. I just watched it. So I don’t care.
Snowpiercer is a post-apocalyptic dystopian movie where all of humanity has been wiped
out when scientists try to correct for Global Warming and accidentally freeze the whole
planet. Oops. Anyway, the only humans left alive after this calamity are a few hundred
folk who are living on a cruise train with a self-sustaining ecosystem. The protagonist
of the movie is from the dregs of society, those who are in the back of the train, who
slowly works his way up to the front of the train and dismantles all of the social order.
This movie is important because the train is a caricature of our real world. There’s
social and class divisions, and everyone is trapped within this literal box of culture
and society, where there are arbitrary rules that are arbitrarily dictated down to them
from the time they’re born. Why are you an upper-class citizen? Because you were born
in the foremost cars, not the ones in the rear. Everything is controlled, social mobility
is difficult, and you feel trapped. You feel like you have no control over your life.
Post-Apocalyptic stories are the answer to this gnawing feeling of social stagnation
and lack of control. Bills? Who the fuck cares about fucking bills, a bomb’s been dropped
on all our heads. I can do whatever I want. Society, this train, fuck it, it’s over.
Sure, institutionalized healthcare may be fucked, but I can lived in an abandoned subway
if I want to, as long as I can keep the Ghoul population under control.
I’m going to rip straight from that article from earlier, where Finke quotes literature
researcher Wes Burdine, who says,
Why are we excited about the apocalypse? Well, for one it kinda feels like we’re constantly
on the brink of collapse, doesn’t it? Remember Rule 1: The End is Nigh. There’s wars going
on all over the place, global warming, threats of asteroids, economic bubbles--even if you
try to maintain perspective, it still feels like, at any moment, all of this could come
crashing down. So why’s that awesome? Because, in the event that we survive, it frees us
to do...whatever the fuck we want. We can be a hero who rises above the lack of established
order and maintains our humanity, or we can finally, FINALLY be the asshole we’ve always
secretly wanted to be, shooting people in the face when they annoy us and stealing when
it suits us, because who’s going to stop you when you have the biggest gun in the room?
Apocalyptic stories aren’t going anywhere any time soon. The Cold War may be over, sure,
but we’ve got all sorts of things to worry about all the time. Our every day reality
feels like Rule 1. Whether it’s the outbreak of Ebola in 2014 that everyone thought was
going to kill us--thanks again for that sensationalized coverage, western media-- or renewed tensions
with Russia over Syria and Turkey, or the impending doom of global climate change, overpopulation,
solar flares, supervolcanos--we’ll never, ever be out of things to worry about on this
planet. And as long as there are things to worry about, and societies that impose those
worries upon us, we’ll be looking for an escape, and a way to tell ourselves that in
spite of it all, no matter what happens to this train, we’ll persevere and maintain
control over our own lives and our own direction. Rule 2. The end never comes. The apocalypse
is the reset button that saves us from our own boredom and lack of control. And THAT
is why Fallout is fun.
Thanks for watching.