{"id":12567,"date":"2024-04-17T04:32:33","date_gmt":"2024-04-17T08:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=12567"},"modified":"2024-04-19T05:08:06","modified_gmt":"2024-04-19T09:08:06","slug":"everybody-wants-to-save-the-world-they-just-disagree-on-how","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=12567","title":{"rendered":"Everybody wants to save the world, they just disagree on how"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just finished watching the first (but hopefully not the only) season of the new Amazon Prime series, Fallout<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There have been three modern game franchises that I became quite fond of over the years, all of the post-apocalyptic genre: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.<\/em>, Metro<\/em>, and Fallout<\/em>. Metro<\/em> has incredible storytelling: For instance, meeting the last surviving theater critic or the shadow artist at the half-flooded Bolshoi station of the Moscow Metro are moments I’ll never forget. And the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.<\/em> series has its own incredible moments, foremost among them when I finished the main storyline of the third installment, Call of Pripyat<\/em>, by accident in the middle of the night, in-game time, and found myself alone, in the dead silence, near the center of a deserted, pitch dark Pripyat, with my comrades gone. The relief I felt when I retreated to the Laundromat and found that it was now full of lively stalkers like myself, eating, listening to music, sleeping… A reaffirmation of life in that dead city.<\/p>\n

And then Fallout<\/em>… Fallout<\/em> is in a league of its own. I admit I only played the 3D open world installments of the franchise, starting with Fallout 3. A game that begins with The Ink Spots<\/em> singing how they don’t want to put the world on fire… with the burned-out, post-nuclear ruins of the DC Mall serving as background scenery. A game in which, after “growing up” inside an underground Vault, you experience true daylight for the very first time, with eyes that never saw anything other than artificial lighting.<\/p>\n

So it is this Fallout<\/em> universe that was turned into a television series on Amazon Prime, and what a series it is. It captures the vibe of the game franchise perfectly, but it also stands on its own as a darn good television series.<\/p>\n

The first five minutes of the first episode already contain an instant classic: The line uttered by a little girl as she, horrified, is looking at the growing mushroom cloud enveloping Los Angeles, trying to measure it by holding out her thumb, as taught by her dad. “Is it your thumb or mine?” she asks innocently.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But the real motto of the series is a statement made by one of the main protagonists, Maximus, in episode five. “Everybody wants to save the world,” Maximus observes, “they just disagree on how.”<\/p>\n

Doesn’t that perfectly capture our present-day world of 2024, too, as we are slowly, but inevitably, stumbling towards a new “chaotic era” (to borrow an expression from another recent television adaptation, the 3 Body Problem<\/em>)? I can only hope that we don’t all end up like Shady Sands, the one-time capital city of the New California Republic, pictured above. Because, as all Fallout<\/em> players know, war… war never changes.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just finished watching the first (but hopefully not the only) season of the new Amazon Prime series, Fallout. There have been three modern game franchises that I became quite fond of over the years, all of the post-apocalyptic genre: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Metro, and Fallout. Metro has incredible storytelling: For instance, meeting the last surviving theater […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-games","category-television","category-64-id","category-28-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12567"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12573,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12567\/revisions\/12573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}