I think we completely forgot one tiny detail that existed ever since of Fallout 1 here: the vaults are completely isolated environment. If you and your family entered a bunker, and is forced to live there for the remainders of your lives, and no signs of ever being able to get out of it for generations, does it mind-boggling for you to pass down whatever you know to your children and then their children? Is it really THAT bad that vaults are able to somehow completely or partially retain their knowledge of history, and/or even cultural identity and ideology for generations considering they're in complete isolation?
But some things are silly enough to not make sense. How someone who was born in a isolated vault generations after the bombs can be a 'communist' sympatizer? Were the others claiming him to have a private secret satellite to communicate with imaginary active communist cells outside the vault? Or a direct line to Moscow's vault where the evil communists are still plotting to conquer the world, maybe?
How can it be a valid argument to hate someone in the context they are in?
Notice I didn't mention other old world references such as the justice bloc and their poster with a baseball player saying to play for the winning team for instance. Because it's not alien to such a environment, it still make sense somehow, even if it's silly too.
Eh
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas_intro
"
dedicated to old-world values of democracy and the rule of law." If that doesn't implies exact reference to exact emulation of pre-War America, then I don't know what is. Perhaps I missed something here because I vaguely remembering details of pre-War America not really being all about democracy and rule of law during the periods nearing the start of the Great War, but the fact that the intro referred to it as exactly '
old-world value' I'm pretty sure about what I'm saying.
I'm also going to add here in regards to Vault 11 knowing about communism. If Shady Sands, which was established by a subgroup of Vault 15's dwellers, somehow able to grow into New California Republic who tried to emulate what's referred to as 'old-world values of democracy and the rule of law', even though considering they abandoned the vault long, long before Vault 11 is abandoned, why is it mind-boggling that another vault completely isolated for generations to somehow remember historical details such as 'communism'?
"
dedicated to old-world values of democracy and the rule of law." Is the key phrase indeed, it doesn't say nor mean "dedicated to recreate pre-war america". Democracy and rule of law aren't american's exclusive, in both successes and failures. Most of what I believe we still call the modern western world, which isn't limited to the US, share the same successes, failures and mind set. In depth, if sometimes not in form. What you seem to see as typically american in most of Fallout, I see it as typically 'modern west'.
"
dedicated to old-world values of democracy and the rule of law." Could even be applied to a society taking inspiration from old greek's democracies in the antiquity, or even a 'new roman republic of the wastes'.
I think this is just how role-playing games works in general. While many RPGs let you play a blank slate characters such as the Vault Dweller and the Courier, they're not ACTUALLY blank slate because you begin playing the game when the characters are more or less 'matured' enough by that time, cause otherwise you'll begin a playthrough literally with the character as a baby and we know how that turns out, don't we? This means there are actual historical and background details of the characters that are more or less decided by the developers, such as the Vault Dweller being from Vault 13 which happened to have water problem, or the Courier having spend his/her life delivering stuff from place to place up until the point where he draw the 'lucky' straw and happened to carry precisely the object sought by Mr. House and Benny, known as the Platinum Chip.
And this is where the part of the game of role-playing comes in: developers can sprinkle dialogue options here and there for players to choose IF they want to further elaborate their own character background. One prominent example I can think of in case of Fallout 1's Vault Dweller is how I can elaborate my character's background as a scientist by choosing that dialogue option with the farmer in Shady Sands where VD told the farmer to use crop rotation when planting and harvesting the crops. Meanwhile, New Vegas is filled to the brim with this opportunity. Other than what you mentioned above, the Courier can either point out that he/she didn't know what a fish is; OR with enough INT the Courier can show that he/she knows what a fish is when talking to Cass; and then if you have Lady Killer perk, the Courier can imply that he had sex and impregnated a woman in Montana around 18 years prior when talking to the Lonesome Drifter. For full list of this background details, you can read it here
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Courier
You will get no argument from me on this, mostly. I was and still am a adventure gamer before any other type of game, and therefore prefer when characters have a actual personality and history of their own.
What I am arguing is that Fallout is a post apocalypse world, as in the world was reset, and so the post apocalypse characters of this world should not grasp most of pre-war ideologies or definitions, if any.
Yes, this apply to groups like vault dwellers and BOS-like style of organization as well, because it's one thing to read about some things, it's a other to grasp them and refer to it as if you do.
Some pre-war characters can refer to it, but only if they don't expect a post-war character to really grasp the full picture as if they had actually been there to see it, and therefore not go into accurate details that became irrelevant with the bombs. I think mr House does it pretty well, and Dean Domino too in a different style.
Randall Clark mentioned in one of his terminal entries where he encountered a group of 24 children. The fact that they're there at all, with the youngest maybe 8 and the oldest between 13-14 implies that they're boys and girls scouts. Which in turn imply that Zion is one of the place where these child scouts visit for a trip. For all we know, Joshua Graham could somehow somewhere encountered a piece of information that alluded to this detail about child scouts, could be a brochure or a poster somewhere in Zion.
As for Christine speaking about Chinese Americans, she spoke of them in context 'Chinese-American internment camp' and the place she referred to is called 'Little Yangtze'. I don't know about you, but once again, for all we know Christine might have remembered a tiny detail of her study with the BoS, who highly likely kept access to historical archives, and deduced from the fact that the camp is called 'Little Yangtze' it must have been an interment camp where they experimented on Chinese. Or perhaps she called it precisely 'Chinese-American' because she stumbles upon a piece of information somewhere in that camp or somewhere in the Big MT where the patients are precisely called Chinese-American.
It might seem easy to us, in the age and context we live in to put 2 and 2 together and grasp things we see, experience or hear about often enough in still relevant aspects of the modern world. I don't believe it should be that easy for characters of a Fallout world.
Christine should speak of pre-war prisonners or the like, not of chinese americans as if it meant something to her in a practical sense.
I have to say the more I think about it the more I'm confused as to why you keep fuzzing about these tiny details.
To exorcise them from my head maybe, or reconcile what I perceive as a different approach between Fallout 1 and New Vegas.
I too am confused as to why I can't just look the other way, so to speak. I can call bethesda's fan fictions, well, bethesda's fan fictions, then plug my hears and sing 'LA LA LA' without a problem and without wasting too much time on writting walls of text about it, I always could.
But the current subject of discussion don't want to be so easily disregarded in my mind, for some reason.
Don't think your input isn't appreciated, even if I keep whinning.
.