I started watching the Fallout TV show and it has me thinking about the future the Fallout series envisions. Unlike a lot of other post-apocalyptic fiction, most of the Fallout media doesn’t take place until decades or even centuries after the disaster has occurred. The on-going danger of said disaster has fallen to reasonable levels and while things aren’t pleasant for anyone who lives in the world, it is tolerable. More in some places than others. Throughout it all, though, is the constant messaging of humanity being doomed to repeat its past mistakes via on-going abuses of what power remains, conspiracies to hoard resources and technology for those deemed “worthy,” and the constant strife of people struggling to survive when there’s only so much to go around. All of which is a bit farcical once your suspension of disbelief ends or you start thinking about the world and its stories outside of the context of the video games they were originally created for. I mean, I enjoyed the episode of the show I saw and I still plan to watch the rest of it when I’ve got the time (and access to a PrimeTV account), but thinking about the way the narratives shift to accommodate what we’d expect from a TV show has really highlighted the ways the series doesn’t really work for me on any kind of deeper level. At least in terms of post-apocalyptic ideation. I still enjoy playing the games and will probably enjoy this show.

Disaster fiction seems like it has been getting increasingly popular, lately. Sure, it has been around for a long time, but it seems to be a bigger and bigger part of the public consciousness to the point that it has branched out from ecological disasters or nuclear warfare into things like alternate histories, rampant disease (which was already showing up before COVID struck), and the corruption of the world via political movements like fascism or late-stage capitalism (which you could argue we’re currently living through the inciting events of right now). While I enjoy a good bit of disaster fiction as much as most do (well, maybe more than most do), a lot of it has lost its luster over the last decade as I’ve felt like impending disaster is closer than ever before. Also as I’ve learned more about the way Humans behave in disaster scenarios and in response to the visible pain and suffering of those around them. Studies has repeatedly shown that people will band together to help people out when misfortune strikes. Sure, there will always be those seeking to take advantage of any bad situation, but they will be greatly outnumbered by the people who come together to help one another. Which means all those stories of lone heroes, superhuman survivor types, and the immediate destruction of communities aren’t really reflective of what might happen in such a disaster. I mean, it’s like reading about any story that hinges on the idea of the survival of the fittest as being the way evolution works, at least in the vein that the idea exists within contemporary US society. That’s not how evolution actually works. And that’s not how people work. Humanity achieved our current global dominance through community and cooperation, not just thumbs and tools. There’s other species out there with thumbs and tools, but none of them have risen to even compete with Humans for dominance.

Fallout, in particular, focuses in on the vision of the lone hero, usually fighting some kind of dystopic version of this post-apocalyptic future but sometimes just an anti-hero type just looking to settle a score, violently right some wrongs, or find redemption. Some of the games take a bit more of a nuanced outlook than the one I’m most familiar with (Fallout 4), but I’ve read enough about the others to feel pretty confident saying that the general story of Fallout is that humanity is doomed to repeat its past as every group of people will eventually fall into the cycle of repeating old mistakes no matter what. Only a lone, self-empowered individual can do anything to change that result. Which, you know, is how video games work, which is why a great deal of that lone hero stuff that can be chalked up to the games being single player game, but the world contorts to this vision to such a degree that there is never any community of people that ever seems to be alright on their own. Even the monolithic groups, the super powers of the post-apocalypse, aren’t immune to the foibles of corrupting power, an egomaniac with a vision, or a passive leadership group that refuses to take action. It would be easy to showcase some self-sufficient groups of people that are surviving on their own by working together and cooperating, but any group that gets close to that vision without falling to internal corruption will inevitably be destroyed by one corrupted group or another.

After all, the largest population in any Fallout game is raiders and they want nothing more than to murder, pillage, and destroy. Forget that there’s plenty of real dangers out there and plenty of work for anyone to do that would earn them a comfortable (so far as anyone can be in the post-apocalypse) life. I mean, it would make way more sense for a person whose only skill is violence to establish their position as a community protector and get paid in largely unending food or water or booze or whatever because the only things keeping people from producing that stuff is the raiders (who would be the violent people joining communities as protectors) and the various irradiated creatures that seek only to consume (mindless ghouls, super mutants (who have a rough lot already and are an entire blog post on their own), and critters that got too big). After all, if the raiders don’t stop pillaging and murdering those communities, there won’t be anyone left to grow food or make things for the violent folks to take. There’s a certain point where this kind of theft or piracy will only end in the destruction of all parties. Again, I know its a video game and you need enemies to fight, but it COULD be different if it wanted to be. There could be exceptions.

Regardless of how I feel about the games, it is kind of difficult to dismiss the post-apocalyptic vision of the future that the Fallout games provide as being unrealistic. I’ve seen too much willingness in people around me to commit pointless violence to really think that there’s no way this nightmarish future couldn’t come to pass. I’ve seen too many people driven into mindless rage by things that shouldn’t matter or will never impact them to think that people will react calmly and reasonable (in the long run, anyway) of any unfolding global disaster. Too many of the people preparing for these sorts of disastrous societal outcomes are clearly just excited by the idea of being some kind of local warlord who gets to shoot people he thinks will be trying to take his two hundred cans of beans or whatever other shelf-stable junk he’s filled his bunker with (like his 20,000 rounds of ammo and extra guns on the side). I do not have a great view of modern humanity after everything I’ve seen in the last decade and I’ve begun to wonder if the results would be different if the disaster science looked at how community acts following devastation in more recent days. It’s difficult to tell what might happen, especially with how the world reacted to a long-term and much less visible disaster like COVID, and I’m not sure I’m terribly comfortable with that idea. Which is probably why I’m dragging my feet on watching this show and replaying a Fallout game of some kind (one of my friends is doing the same thing and it has lodged the idea firmly in my brain). I don’t really want to think about the future like that and it will be difficult not to imagine it given how increasingly divided modern culture is around what seem like some pretty basic things (like human rights for people who aren’t white men and not supporting genocidal warfare).

All I can really say, one way or another, is that the thing most people don’t think about when it comes to imagining a future like the one depicted in the Fallout games is that the eventual nuclear war was preceded by decades of decay and war around the world, such that everything was in short supply and society was already on the verge of collapsing for anyone who wasn’t affluent. There was a lot going on in the background that resulted in the empty devastation of the Fallout world and, thankfully, we haven’t quite gotten that bad in the real world yet. We’re closer than I’d like to be, what with rising fascism and late-stage capitalism, but we’re not there yet. We’d probably be better off if the bombs dropped on our world than the people of the Fallout universe. Probably.