Thinking about how Lucy convincing Maximus to leave the suit behind demonstrated to him that she’s didn’t only care about him for his armour or because he was a knight. Maximus being raised by the brotherhood made it seem like there was only strength and worth in titles and suits of armour and how he thought he’d made a friend in Thaddues until he revealed his identity. But then he met Lucy and lied cause he was scared but when she told him to leave the armour behind he realised that armour wasn’t why she cared about him .He could finally feel loved enough in himself to be able to say his real name to Lucy and open up to her. Maximus I need to give you a hug.

Voy + Textposts 15

(Voy + Textposts 14) + (Voy + Textposts 16)

Potentially controversial take: I kind of hope Fallout S2 doesn't try to write around any single New Vegas ending.

Instead, replace the Courier with Benny. New Vegas is some alternative timeline where he severely underestimates a postman, but your choices still matter as now you get to compare them to what would have happened if you never came along. A world where Benny actually got to carry out his plan, successfully or not. Dealing with the aftermath of that is way more interesting than finding out the "correct" ending to a game everyone debates the right choices in.

...

Plus I want to see the people who call Benny babygirl go up against the people lusting over the Ghoul.

Remember when Picard kept asking Data follow up questions at dinner because he was trying to cock block Lwaxana and when they cut back Data has opened a PowerPoint presentation.

He was truly living the infodump dream in this episode.

Never really understood the "why hasn't Riker become a captain yet?" plotline. Like first of all, if he's not ready, he shouldn't be pushed. But furthermore, if he's happy and good at being a first officer, why does he need to become a captain? I know there's the whole "in the military it's up or out" thing, but whether or not you consider Starfleet to be a military, it shouldn't be

Episode 2 details

The details... I can't. They thought of everything.

I binged the Fallout show yesterday and the "oh, no dogs allowed in the vaults" thing being the last straw in Coop's relationship was just... I thought it was great. Not just because I like dogs, or because Fallout has a long tradition of the protag being a dog person, but because as a dog person, the thought that my spouse could have grown so alienated from me as to not realize what a huge fucking deal it would be for me to give up/put down my dog for her plans was just chilling. Like, just a great illustration of how wide Vault-Tec's secrets have levered that chasm.

She can't tell him why it's so vital to get into a specific vault, or even let him inow that it's more than general anxiety about the war that has her so stressed. She's so consumed with this idea of a least-hellish path forwards that she's already written off their dog and while she's sorry for their kid losing the dog, she can't even remember that her husband is exactly the kind of guy to a) dig in his heels about his dog and b) REALLY dig in his heels about his dog being written off with no one even bothering to discuss it with him.

Fallout TV spoilers and rant under the cut:

My issue with the decision to have Vault Tec definitively drop the bombs isn't just that it "shouldn't" matter, but that it takes the bite out of Vault Tec as a criticism of anything.

The series actually starts off pretty strong in that department: Fiduciary responsibility means that privatising a public service will reduce it to it's most profitable state and that's unlikely to be in the public interest. Any innovation that disrupts an industry but can't be monetised will never see the light of day. Vault Tec is both of these taken to the extreme, a business selling the solution to nuclear armageddon is of course going to be more concerned about maintaining demand for tickets than actually delivering anything to customers who can no longer pay.

Where it falls apart is introducing the idea of a secretive cabal with a nuclear arsenal and goals of world domination. That's no longer a criticism of anything. It's cartoon supervillainy. The end of the world doesn't come when a CEO gets ambitious, it comes about when a CEO decides that the potential end of the world next financial quarter will make this finance quarter's reports look good and keeps deciding that until one day they look at the window and are shocked to see the horizon is gone.

I suspect the show makers decided to try and establish Vault Tec as a singular villain connecting all the plots, which worked well. It just wound up doing the same thing all commercially successful criticisms of capitalism do: Not actually criticise anything.

I remember hoping the Fallout show wouldn't reveal who dropped the first bomb because that's not the point. Instead they made it a handful of corporate elites (masterminded by a Black woman, which is fucked up for reasons other people have articulated better than I can as a white girl) whose goal was nuclear armageddon.

For me, Fallout's message was always that there are no winners in war, and that long after the governments who dropped the bombs fell to their own warmongering hubris, 200 years of future generations are still paying for their crimes. But in the show, there are winners. The corporations get exactly what they want. It's not the tragic consequence of failing political systems reliant on militarism, it's an intentional move by an elite cabal who planned it all along.

Having the people who ruined the world still alive in the future takes away the idea that there was no justice after the bombs fell. The specter of nuclear war brought on by military posturing and arms racing gone too far is a much more sinister and devastating antagonist to me than Some Guys who wanted to make money and take over the world. You can punish Some Guy, but you can't punish long-dead governments who destroyed their own people for nothing. To me, who started the war and why was never the point. It was ambiguous because war never changes; this war was just like any other but with more permanent consequences.

I know everyone has their own opinions and interpretations, and that not everyone sees this the way I do, but to me shifting the blame for the apocalypse onto an elite secret organization of corporate heads looking to create a "new world order" sounds like something my drunk alt-right great uncle would say at Thanksgiving to divert the conversation away from the deeper systemic issues plaguing the world's nuclear superpowers.

Anyway, feel free to ignore me but I just had to write this out so people can see where I'm coming from. Much love to all my Fallout homies! ❤️

it’s kind of crazy that both fallout new Vegas and fallout 4 have the same driving force for the first half of the narrative (find the guy who wronged you and make him pay) but Benny is so much more memorable and narratively interesting than Kellogg.

It’s a matter of a strong character foil versus a weak one, in my opinion.

Benny and the courier are very much alike. They are both ambitious people who are willing to do anything possible to stack the odds in their favour. Honestly, Benny and the courier are the same card, reversed.

The Sole Survivor and Kellogg are also intended to be character foils. The game tries to convince us of this with the scenes in Kellogg’s mind, where we see that he ‘isn’t so different’ from our protagonist after all. But we don’t know anything about Kellogg other than his backstory. How can he parallel the protagonist if we don’t know which traits he has? Which traits the two of them share?

(As a side note, I wish Fallout 4 had touched way more on the ‘Man/Woman Out of Time’ thing. The protagonist being frozen in the past + Kellogg being functionally immortal would’ve been really cool to explore! Especially in the context of grief!)

In the end, I think the reason Benny is a more powerful character foil is that he doesn’t disappear from the world when you kill him. The chairmen can mourn him, House will comment on it, and even NPCs across the Mojave will talk about Benny’s death!

In Kellogg’s case, the protagonist is basically the only person who knows he even existed! Once he’s dead HE’s DEAD! He disappears completely from the narrative! As soon as you leave fort Hagen, the game doesn’t bother looking back.

that’s why Benny is a more haunting force for new Vegas; particularly an independent courier. You are Benny’s legacy because you are what he leaves behind whether he likes it or not. People remember him as the couriers victim. Meanwhile, nobody remembers Kellogg at all. The memory of who Kellogg was dies with you, and you can choose to forget him.

i hate all FNV mods that restore/add an option to convince Mr. House to broker a truce between himself and the Brotherhood of Steel because it's not just a symptom of a completionist, goopy goblin gamer brain that doesn't want to miss out on any of the CONTENT, but also because Mr. House's inflexibility on his desire to see the Brotherhood of Steel exterminated is such a significant character moment. Because it's a moment where this autocrat who views himself as purely rational, purely objective, and purely motivated by an altruistic desire to protect (what he thinks are) the best interests of humanity is forced to let his mask slip in front of the lackey on which he completely depends. He has zero reasonable rationale to want the Brotherhood destroyed and he knows it, he just hates them, and he hates them just because he thinks that they're just fucking lame. He, personally, finds the cultish medieval technoknight schtick obnoxious enough to justify total obliteration, and the fact that he will not back down on this is supposed to be revealing! It makes sense, too, if you understand how aesthetically driven his vision for the future of Vegas and humanity is and how badly a bunch of LARPers in power armor wandering around outside clashes with that aesthetic (he is, literally, a RETVRN guy, except he wants to "retvrn" to everybody looking like they're going to see the Rat Pack perform in concert). Mr. House's stubbornness on this issue is intentionally frustrating, especially if you're someone who up to this point may have found him otherwise agreeable! The Brotherhood of Steel is also something of a mirror, or a competitor even, to Mr. House's vision of himself as the sole worthy heir to the splendor of pre-war technology and control thereof, but that's actually far less important than the fact that he just hates their pussy

My biggest plothole hangup with fallout 4 is kellog and how shitty he was done so the theory i propose: they should have just made kellog a synth lol? Like think about it:

1.) Eliminates the factor of "how the fuck did kellog live so long and not age?". Ingame shaun basically goes "institute technology we retired cuz (bullshit reason)" which is so dumb cuz its technology THAT STOPS YOU FROM AGING. But if it wasnt a real kellog but a synth recreation it would be like a cool "ooooh shit" twist moment as soon as you pick up the synth piece. Like thats not the real kellog they just made him again. Cloned him if you will.

2.) Good way to introduce the synths into the story. Theres so many places you'll see them beforehand but having kellog be the big "oh shit" moment for those who just speed through the plot would have rocked.

3.) The inherent tragedy of it. Idk i cant relate to kellog ingame cuz the memories quest utterly fails for me. Oh wow he lost his wife and child hes just like me fr- like fuck OFFFFF that happened to me too and i didnt go around killing innocent people. BOZO. But if he was a synth its a realization of like. This guy didnt do that. This is someone who fully believed he did and shared those memories but its like he didnt do it. Hes a victim of the institute just as much as you are. He legit doesnt know better. The implication of "if he found out he was a synth of a person long dead and his memories weren't real could he have gotten better" will always hang over your head.

4.) Paints institute in a more evil fucked up light . Asking shaun "what do you MEAN you recreated the guy that kidnapped you and brutally killed your other parent." And shaun just goes "well he was a good agent idk i admire the usefulness." Its like that collateral damage line but goes hard. Even better if he truly doesnt get why you're mad about it and at some point you see kellog again im the institute and are like WTF and shauns like oh we just made him again. If it makes you feel better you could kill him again too. We can make as many as you want. Like would that not be metal but also kinda horrifying

I do often wonder what the Tyler's neighbours thought after the Doctor made an entrance into Rose's life. Like, Rose's disappears for a whole year. Jackie blames the boyfriend. Rose then turns up, and they hear from Jackie that Rose had been travelling with some kind of Doctor!

Not to mention, he looked old enough to be her dad! They see him around for a while now and then, when Rose comes to see Jackie. But suddenly, he disappears! And now Rose is off travelling with a younger man, who also seems to be a Doctor!

Poor Mickey! Dropped by his girlfriend for two different blokes! And then of course, one day Mickey disappears as well! Rumour has it he had been at that school which blew up, but never came home! Then came the ghosts, and then Rose is back with her second Doctor, holding hands and giggling. They seem totally surprised by the turn of events. Like, where on Earth could they have been travelling that didn't have any Ghosts?

By the end of the day, all of the Tylers are missing.

Only a man in an army coat comes by once to knock on the flat door. But there's no answer, and he leaves looking crestfallen. And now the Powell Estate feels less joyful. The Tyler's had been a fixture for over two decades. They'd comforted Jackie when her poor husband had died in that tragic accident. They'd watched little Rose grow without her father, but incredibly close to her mother.

They watched a heartbroken Jackie as she searched for a whole year for her only child. And watched with happy surprise as they reunited unexpectedly.

But now they were all gone. Even Mickey Smith, the happy go lucky kid who'd always had a soft spot for Rose. All they knew for sure, was that that family fell into trouble the moment Rose met that first Doctor. And it had only gotten worse from there.

Couple of years pass, and they hear rumours that Mickey Smith has suddenly reappeared. Only he doesn't return to the estate, and marries a woman named Martha apparently.

They don't blame him for not returning to the Estate.

Too many ghosts.

Proposal for a high concept show about a Netflix producer greenlighting an adaptation of the Great Gatsby, but while everyone else is working on it they're just staring at social media engagement statistics for their desired demographic.

It’s been two years since the great gatsby entered the public domain and Netflix hasn’t even made a horrible miniseries adaptation where they are all hot and gay and racially diverse but in a totally hollow meaningless unsexy way. We used to live in society

fiona and sasha getting dragged out of gearbox's lost and found is sooo funny honestly. i know the real diehards have been aware of this for a while but the promo tweet really hit me. seeing the twitter replies going "why weren't they in borderlands 3?" "why is this a book and not a game?" "why wasn't this the plot of tales 2?" ... heartwarming. inspiring. with enough social media pressure you too can badger a franchise into remembering two women of colour and giving them a spinoff novel a decade after their game first released

Ashes from Fallout 4 vs Nyan Cat from Nyan Cat: Lost in Space. Vote for your fav!!

Need help picking? Check down here!

Ashes - Bethesda Game Studios - 2015 - Gray tabby cat:

i feel like ashes should win bc he's a fun niche answer. that's it.

Nyan Cat - isTom Games - 2015 - Poptart:

iconic cat

Remember when Picard kept asking Data follow up questions at dinner because he was trying to cock block Lwaxana and when they cut back Data has opened a PowerPoint presentation.

He was truly living the infodump dream in this episode.