It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Fallout!
I’m mostly joking. Unlike Trump, who doesn’t appear to be joking at all
I’m a lifelong gamer.
I don’t write much about my hobby, but it’s a huge part of my identity.
RPGs, MMORPGs, tabletop, you name it. It’s one of the things my partner and I have in common—thank goodness, because hardcore nerds do not mesh well with non-gamers.
Half of our date nights involve spending hours rampaging through Elder Scrolls Online or Final Fantasy 14.
Heck, I even cut my teeth in the writing world with online roleplaying in some of the games I play. Some of my oldest and dearest friendships were built in the arena of dice and character sheets.
I have a particular fondness for the Fallout series. It has just the right blend of doom, gloom, and satirical bloom. It’s over the top, bleak, emotional and wacky fun.
The world of Fallout is easy to get immersed in, with a detailed and complicated world based on classic Americana, and a pseudo-1950s aesthetic that carries a unique charm.
The games take place hundreds of years after the world has fallen to nuclear war—hence the title—and your character is surviving and thriving in the post-post-apocalyptic wasteland of the former United States.
Post-post-apocalypse is part of Fallout’s unique worldbuilding; the apocalypse was 200 years ago, and people have long since moved on and gotten used to the new state of things.
Most Wastelanders don’t even remember the United States of America anymore. They know their regional landscape. The largest government they know is the New California Republic, and then only if they’re on the West Coast.
New civilizations have risen, people are rebuilding their settlements and living their lives amidst strife and chaos, and you learn about the pre-war world of America as you travel and explore.
What you very quickly discover is that the America in the Fallout world was not like the America of our real world today.
The timeline of the worlds split; Fallout’s pre-war America was still in the grips of the Red Scare, with the Cold War never having ended. Pre-war America in the Fallout series was an unregulated, hyper-capitalistic police state that was rounding up and interning citizens they suspected of being Communists.
The government was spying on its own citizens, corporations were left completely unchecked and faced no repercussions for horrific experiments and blatant corruption, and the economy was a mess. Hyperinflation created wild price increases, such as $25 cups of coffee.
There was a war over resource scarcity, a global pandemic forcing people to socially distance and report their neighbours for looking ill or questioning the government, and massive political instability.
To top it all off, the United States had become openly imperialistic, invading and annexing Canada and Mexico for the sake of securing the continent against America’s enemies.
Huh.
Some of that is starting to sound familiar, isn’t it?
To be clear, I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek with this comparison. The Fallout world is supposed to be wildly over the top and bombastic; it’s meant to be cartoonishly twisted.
Evil, in the Fallout world, does not pull punches. Morality took a ding to the finish after the bombs dropped.
In the real world, America is teetering on the brink of catastrophe. The man at the helm is an obvious nutcase, with dictatorial and imperialistic ambitions.
Government corruption and greed are bad enough already, but they’ll increase as Mafia Don keeps ‘running the country like a business.’ Meanwhile, the average person suffers from a lack of good governance.
It’s not like the Trump administration is going to act to curb violence; he just pardoned a massive wave of violent offenders and let them loose on the street. The message is clear; if you’re violent on Trump’s behalf, he will protect you.
In the Fallout world, I’m not sure if he’d be a pre-war President or a post-war Raider Boss.
Much like the Fallout world, the culture of the United States is shifting towards an authoritarian nightmare. Guns are worshipped, shootings—including mass shootings and school shootings—are just a fact of life, and the government will never act to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
Despite the words written in the Declaration of Independence, Americans are not entitled to ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ At least, not whilst people are starving under a rising cost of living, and healthcare is trapped behind a steep paywall.
And with a potential World War III on the horizon, fueled by Trump’s antagonistic attitude towards longtime allies like Denmark, Canada, Panama and Mexico, I wouldn’t put it past him to try and recreate Fallout’s pre-war United States.
To do that, first, he would need to annex the whole of North America. The 50 States would be consolidated, banding together into larger Commonwealths that combine multiple states under one governor.
He’d need to institute laws that turned the military into law enforcement, with checkpoints everywhere within major cities looking for ‘the enemy within.’
He’d need to build concentration camps for ‘dangerous’ immigrants and socialist infiltrators, and he’d need a surveillance state that encouraged people to rat out their neighbours.
He’d also just be a puppet; the whole system would be secretly run by a shadowy conspiracy of oligarchs who had deep connections to technology R&D and the military-industrial complex.
Of course, all of this would be happening while America was struggling in the aftermath of a pandemic which was blamed on a bio-weapon from China, and a rapidly escalating conflict with the Chinese government.
Huh. Isn’t it starting to sound familiar?
Like I said, all of this is tongue-in-cheek.
We’re not heading for a nuclear war that’ll wipe out the planet and make humanity start over in the ruins of the old world.
At least, I hope we aren’t.
But the point is, with Trump and the current iteration of the Republican party at the helm, the United States is no longer a serious and trustworthy global partner.
It looks like something out of a video game. Something fictional, unreal, and impossibly twisted. It’s a nightmare version of the America we know; all of its worst impulses thrown into high gear with all of the brakes removed.
The scariest part about Fallout’s pre-war America is that, while it’s over-the-top, it isn’t fictional at all. Life in the pre-war would have been very familiar to anyone who’s lived under authoritarianism.
The constant instability, the fear of being charged with a crime, the fear of being overheard giving even the most reasonable critique of the government, and the need to act as if you’re grateful for everything you have at all times.
The isolation of not being able to trust your neighbours, always being mindful of the look on your face when you see a soldier on the street, always having your papers on your person and being prepared to answer questions at the drop of a hat.
The knowledge that you don’t need to have done anything wrong. If somebody simply says you did something wrong, your life could be over. Literally. You could disappear and never be heard from again.
The simmering resentment of the nationalists who beat their chests and insist that now there’s a strong man at the helm, everything is great. America is strong. America is taken seriously again. America is winning.
Yes. America is starting to feel just a little bit like Fallout. And while I love the series, I don’t want to see it happen in real life.
Life in pre-war America was not a fun time; the more you learn about it in the games, the more horrified you become by every tiny detail you unearth.
It’s a creeping undercurrent of horror; that however bad the post-apocalyptic wasteland might be, there’s a chance that life before the bombs might have been even worse.
The cool part about playing a video game is that you know you can solve every problem the world has. In the game, you’re a hero; with your trusty pipe revolver, you can take out any enemy that stands in your way.
In real life, most of us aren’t that kind of hero. We’re not lone gunmen, taking on every threat alone. To prevent disaster, we have to come together.
The antidote to authoritarianism is democracy. We need to adopt the motto of the great Liberty Prime itself: democracy is non-negotiable.
Solidarity wins.
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I'm a little creeped out. Not gonna lie. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I read the comparison.
I played my way through hundreds of hours of Fallout 3 Sam and after reading your comparison between Trump's America and the world of Fallout before the bombs started falling a chill ran down my spine.