Summary
I finished Amazon Prime’s Fallout show yesterday, by which I mean that my partner watched it on the TV next to me while I worked and surreptitiously glanced up from my laptop every few seconds. It’s not the ideal way of watching a show, but that’s how it goes sometimes. As a person whodidn’t care very much for Fallout 4 but really enjoyed the show,however, I’ve been reading discourse over its lore with mild confusion.
I know plenty about the franchise through reading about it, but I definitely don’t know as much as the people tearing their hair out about how the lore has been pushed around or changed within the show. There is, of course,the big reveal at the end of the first seasonthat explains how Fallout’s world came to be, which isn’t a retcon or an inconsistency per se, but a major reframing of our understanding of events.
Discourse Is Turning Fans Into Feral Ghouls
You’d think this would be the most upsetting thing to fans, but it’s not – it’s actually that peoplethink the show made Fallout: New Vegas non-canon. Why? Because of a date on a whiteboard. I’m not going to discredit these fans by saying small details don’t matter – Prime’s Fallout isextremely detailed when it comes to the series’ lore, so that would be disingenuous of me.
While my colleague Rhiannon Bevan wrotean impassioned pieceexplaining why the show doesn’t actually make the game non-canon, it tookTodd Howard coming out and saying explicitly that New Vegas is canonto calm angry fans. The fact remains that the show’s timeline isn’t completely clear, and a lot of these lore inconsistencies can be explained away or even explored in future seasons. It is not that big a deal.
The appearance of the Prydwen in the show alsoimplies that one specific Fallout 4 ending must be true, though which ending specifically is unclear.
When the show first released, my colleague Eric Switzer wrote thatyou can just ignore the show’s lore if you don’t want to consider it canon. I’ll go one step further and say that you may ignore all the lore. None of it matters.
It’s Not That Serious
I get the appeal of wanting every aspect of a franchise to line up perfectly. Every piece of media is a jigsaw piece that fits together perfectly, filling in the gaps so we can get a complete understanding of what was happening and who was where at any given time. The show threw this into disarray by not fitting quite right.
But consider that these events aren’t real. They’re artificially created constraints on writers who will have to twist and turn their stories to gel just right with established ‘truths’ in order to appease fans. The fact that Fallout is an established IP is constraining enough, and I think it’s pretty sick that the showrunners managed to make a show this good within the parameters they were given. If they had to rejig timelines a little here and there to create something with this much emotional impact and thematic resonance, so be it.
I think the real problem here is that people view the show primarily as being a part of a very long legacy, and therefore it has to obey the rules set out by the people who worked on the franchise long before it was a twinkle in Prime’s eye. But it’s an adaptation, one that despite being part of the canon tells a unique story.
Franchises aren’t just collections of media that you’re able to put together, they’re standalone works that have creative value in and of themselves. Like I said when the first season of HBO’s The Last of Us was airing,adaptationsmustbe allowed to adapt. Sticking too close to the source material is limiting in all the wrong ways, and for all the wrong reasons. Fallout should be allowed to exist in its own space.
Fallout
Fallout is a franchise built around a series of RPGs set in a post-nuclear world, in which great vaults have been built to shelter parts of humankind. There are six main games, various spin-offs, tabletop games, and a TV series from Amazon Studios.
