TV Series Retcon Thread

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

The idea that Mr. House knew the world was going to end, like literally knew people that said “yeah we’re gonna nuke the world, you in?”, and then both agreed to this plan yet somehow forgot that it was happening on Saturday, not Sunday, just makes him look hilariously incompetent.

 

[Risewild]

Who attacked first wasn't in the Fallout Bible. It was Tim saying it on a recent-ish video on his channel. I don't know which video, but I did watch him saying that apparently, it was news for many people that China launched the missiles first in a video before the TV series was released.

I also just remembered that in Fallout 2 President Richardson straight up says that China launched first:

We were winning, too. And then those damn Reds launched everything they had. We barely got our birds up.

So yeah, Fallout 2 already mentions that China launched first.

 

[Bradylama]

China launching first makes sense because they were losing the war. American leaders knew they were triggering the conditions for Mutually Assured Destruction, but they pushed for total victory anyway because they needed to control Asia's resources as well as the Americas. It's the one bit of lore that gives Fallout the most resonance with the real world. If we destroy ourselves it will be out of a refusal to change, just as the old world of Fallout refused to change before total annihilation.

What the show has done is take that critique of the world system we perpetuate, and shot it in the back of the head to be replaced with a cartoon show for toddlers. The world was destroyed by bad men who are ontologically evil because uh, capitalism? That's what's hot these days. People hate capitalism lately, it's in the demos. Fallout already had an eminently relevant critique of capitalism, and they replaced it with something so retarded it actually wraps around to being fascist. It validates eugenics while pretending to critique it, portrays the common people of the wasteland as idiot scum who are moral equals to the people who destroyed the world. This only makes sense to the mind of someone who interprets the world purely through the received narratives of popular culture.

 

[Haiduc74]

To add to the retcon list, Shady Sands was moved all the way to the surrounding LA area instead of being in it's FO1-FO2 location, completely breaking the Vault Dweller's interaction with the settlement and all consequent events, including the formation of the NCR itself.

 

[AgentBJ09]

To add to the retcon list, Shady Sands was moved all the way to the surrounding LA area instead of being in it's FO1-FO2 location, completely breaking the Vault Dweller's interaction with the settlement and all consequent events, including the formation of the NCR itself.

Yep. I'll be updating the list in a few days to account for all the new retcons people have spotted.

Creetosis got quite a few, as did Enclave Emily, Arch and SyntheticMan. They'll be referenced too.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Vault-Tec was always supposed to be a dystopian parody of the excesses of capitalism, Tim Cain has said as much and it's just plainly obvious.

Then neither you or Tim Cain understand what capitalism is. You don't get to call it "capitalism" just because you don't like it particularly when the government takes the money of the population under threat of the loss of liberty, decide they want something produced, decide who gets to produce it, and then gives them a stack of money to do it. There's absolutely nothing capitalism about that.

The idea of their being some fundamental flaw that the ghoul's aware of and takes advantage of is perfectly fine, par for the course. But the problem itself is quite silly.

This I agree with. The T-51b is "made from poly-laminate composite capable of absorbing over 2500 joules of kinetic energy, and is covered with a 10 micron ablative silver coating, for protection against lasers and ionizing radiation". So, what weld would it have on chest plate? You can weld laminate composites, but why do that when you could just form it in that shape? You're not expecting that chest plate to move, you want it to be solid. Not to mention welding those pieces together instead of just forming them in that shape would make the manufacturing process that much more difficult. You don't weld together the interior of a hot tub, and a lot of the modern ones are composite laminates.

I chalk this up to the writers not knowing what Power Armor is made from.

Shady Sands' Fall in 2277 - This one is obvious. If Shady Sands fell, even if not to a nuke, it retcons a lot of dialogue from New Vegas where people were saying the city was fine but suffering from several issues born from the NCR's greed and expansionism.

This is clearly a retcon. That chalkboard is in Vault 4 where the refugees from Shady Sands are. The only reason not to put a date on a timeline would be if it just happened or you don't know the date. Since the refugees there would know what year it was nuked, you can rule that out. Considering Maximus was a Shady Sands survivor as a kid and he's a full grown manlet in the show, it didn't just happen. They obviously intended Shady Sands got nuked in 2277, which is why it says it fell in 2277 and there's an arrow pointing to the mushroom cloud.

It becomes even more clear when Lucy says her mom died in 2277. The only reason why her dad would tell her this is if he thought that's when he killed her. If he didn't think he killed her, she could just pop back in with her PipBoy, right? Since that outbreak apparently also happened in 2277, that's also the only time she could have died and no one question what happened to her. Everyone was locked in their rooms. And how did that outbreak happen? How does a disease get in a sealed vault? If someone went outside and came back, bringing a disease with them - in 2277, which oddly aligns with "The Fall of Shady Sands". That's assuming there even was a disease, and Overseer McLean didn't just say there was a disease to lock everyone down so he could slip out and go get his wife and kids.

 

[Bradylama]

Then neither you or Tim Cain understand what capitalism is. You don't get to call it "capitalism" just because you don't like it particularly when the government takes the money of the population under threat of the loss of liberty, decide they want something produced, decide who gets to produce it, and then gives them a stack of money to do it. There's absolutely nothing capitalism about that.

That's literally how capitalism developed starting with English enclosure laws. State intervention in the development of capitalism was a political affair of picking & choosing who gets a leg up in starting and operating new industries. First it was aristocrats trying to rationalize agriculture by dispossessing peasants, then it was industrialists who had a proven model for development. The United States government overinvested into the expansion of railroads, to the point they overdeveloped and fomented a market crash. But the important thing is that they developed the railroads which were necessary for a capitalist market economy. Vault-Tec being a government contractor is how capitalism has always been done. Even the India companies needed to be chartered by sovereign authorities.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

That's literally how capitalism developed starting with English enclosure laws.

Or.. Now hear me out. It was the logical next step from a barter system.

 

[Bradylama]

Or.. Now hear me out. It was the logical next step from a barter system.

Markets developed long before capitalism, and "capitalism" is not defined by the existence of market exchange or else nothing would have changed about political economy in the last 4000 years. If capitalism is the primacy of capital in society as its orienting mode of production, the material conditions for capitalism don't even arise until the 18th & 19th centuries. The development of trade capital through colonialism was invested into industrial capital, which was the basis upon which productivity and capital accumulation could accelerate into the highly abstracted and financialized form of capitalism that we know today.

At every historical stage these developments were guided by state intervention, and the primary beneficiaries were those with the social and political connections to capitalize. Each historical stage is also characterized by the class struggle between the aristocracy and bourgeois over who would have control of the franchise as these developments bloomed. If it weren't for the liberal revolutions in England, The Netherlands, the US, and France; we may not have had "capitalism" at all, or at least not a system in which the bourgeois are the primary owners of capital.

Point being: history does not follow a "logical" guideline. History ebbs and flows according to material circumstances and pre-existing social forces. Your assumption that capitalism depends on a certain level of liberty and consensus is misguided. Capitalism developed under conditions which were highly tyrannical, directed by the political whims of the ruling class, and depended upon excessive rates of exploitation in both the colonies and the metropole. Capitalism is not the absence of the state in the market, but the dictatorship of the bourgeois which seeks to control markets in the interest of Capital.

In the TV show capitalism basically boils down to this:

 

[Bradylama]

Not sure if this counts as a retcon, but the existence of the unmutated fawn in episode 3 raises a lot of questions. Fallout 76 is set only 25 years after the Great War, and by that time all deer seem to be Radstags. I'm not discounting the possibility of a wild animal going through minimal changes despite radiation and atmospheric FEV, but the fact that we've never seen anything like it in the SoCal wasteland before is a bit much. It's a weird detail that doesn't really save that much on the budget to begin with because the unmutated fawn has to be CGI animated anyway, so why not make it a radstag fawn?

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Your assumption that capitalism depends on a certain level of liberty and consensus is misguided. Capitalism developed under conditions which were highly tyrannical, directed by the political whims of the ruling class, and depended upon excessive rates of exploitation in both the colonies and the metropole.

No, my idea of capitalism's development is much earlier than colonies and cities. It has to do with you having chickens and your neighbor having pigs. You want pork, and have eggs. So, you trade eggs for part of a newly butchered pig. That works out great until you realize that chickens don't lay eggs in the winter and pigs only breed at certain times of the year. So, to solve that problem, you come up with a non-perishable intermediary that stores the value of both eggs and pork. Something like coins. From there, the world's your oyster.

 

[Iprovidelittlepianos]

No, my idea of capitalism's development is much earlier than colonies and cities. It has to do with you having chickens and your neighbor having pigs. You want pork, and have eggs. So, you trade eggs for part of a newly butchered pig. That works out great until you realize that chickens don't lay eggs in the winter and pigs only breed at certain times of the year. So, to solve that problem, you come up with a non-perishable intermediary that stores the value of both eggs and pork. Something like coins. From there, the world's your oyster.

That’s not exactly capitalism any more than tribes of hunter-gatherers were communists.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

That’s not exactly capitalism any more than tribes of hunter-gatherers were communists.

We're talking about how it develops. What you're saying is that a chick isn't a chicken because it doesn't have feathers yet, and I'm saying that chick will be a chicken soon.

 

[Bradylama]

We're talking about how it develops. What you're saying is that a chick isn't a chicken because it doesn't have feathers yet, and I'm saying that chick will be a chicken soon.

No, what he's saying is that your definition of capitalism is ahistorical. For one thing, for capitalism to exist there must first be "Capital," and Capital is not a real thing - it's an abstraction that represents productive value, or values that create new values. Like a machine that produces T-Shirts from cotton, or a financial instrument that provides seed funds to generate business activity. You define capitalism through the advent of mediums of exchange, like money, but money is merely a representation of exchange value. The money itself isn't productive like capital is.

That's why most historians date the earliest developments of capitalism to the early modern period, with the advent of chartered joint stock companies and private enclosures of communal lands. The very existence of Capital is a legal fiction that recognizes private ownership over productive assets like land, industrial machinery, & etc., and how ownership is distributed among shareholders. For the vast majority of human history "capitalism" does not apply because land and industry weren't privately owned, they were rather "leased" by sovereign authorities claiming to be divine intermediaries. Feudal landlords did not actually own the land, it was leased to them by their liege lords within a royal hierarchy ordained by God. The landlord did not have the right to sell their land on the market to private buyers, because they were mere stewards acting in the stead of their liege. For "capitalism" to come fully into being required the totalization of market exchange in all human affairs, which doesn't truly mature until the 1800s and the acceleration of Capital accumulation with the industrial revolution.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

For the vast majority of human history "capitalism" does not apply because land and industry weren't privately owned, they were rather "leased" by sovereign authorities claiming to be divine intermediaries.

Wait until you start paying property tax.

 

[tekhedd]

Fallout already had an eminently relevant critique of capitalism, and they replaced it with something so retarded it actually wraps around...

This. It's not that Fallout is or isn't criticizing capitalism, heck half of the joke is just mockery of 50s "modern conveniences" contrasting with the inability to solve political and diplomatic problems, ultimately destroying the world.

But, these days. Marketing is terrified of alienating the apparently quite large percentage of people who will get angry when faced by anything that makes them think. So, remove all nuance, make sure the story is so easy a toddler could follow it and then be sure to plotsplain constantly using big words, like you're trying to teach the language to martians in a first contact scenario...

Sorry, the lack of artistry just pushes my buttons. :} I'm not pro- or anti-anything to the point where it upsets me. It's more like: the games had a complex interesting story and tone (not necessarily internally consistent, just fun). Gradually, this has became less complex and safer until there is little left of the joke but the moral-message equivalent of slapstick.

 

[Gizmojunk]

alienating the apparently quite large percentage of people who will get angry when faced by anything that makes them think.

The anger comes of it being impostor syndrome.

 

[Bradylama]

This. It's not that Fallout is or isn't criticizing capitalism, heck half of the joke is just mockery of 50s "modern conveniences" contrasting with the inability to solve political and diplomatic problems, ultimately destroying the world.

But, these days. Marketing is terrified of alienating the apparently quite large percentage of people who will get angry when faced by anything that makes them think. So, remove all nuance, make sure the story is so easy a toddler could follow it and then be sure to plotsplain constantly using big words, like you're trying to teach the language to martians in a first contact scenario...

Sorry, the lack of artistry just pushes my buttons. :} I'm not pro- or anti-anything to the point where it upsets me. It's more like: the games had a complex interesting story and tone (not necessarily internally consistent, just fun). Gradually, this has became less complex and safer until there is little left of the joke but the moral-message equivalent of slapstick.

The show is so devoid of complexity that it invents the most convoluted evil conspiracy of all time, just to fit in the idea that Vault Tec started the war. It's one bad idea to start with that spawns off so many other bad ideas, it's a fractal staircase of shit.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Marketing is terrified of alienating the apparently quite large percentage of people who will get angry when faced by anything that makes them think. So, remove all nuance, make sure the story is so easy a toddler could follow it and then be sure to plotsplain constantly using big words, like you're trying to teach the language to martians in a first contact scenario.

I think it's more along the lines of they constantly toss things from the game at you so you're more focused on the memberberries to focus on the plot. If you're focused on the plot, you start to notice how things really don't make sense within the context of well, anything. How many people saw the water chip that was broken, realized it the plot for Fallout, and then never questioned why that never cropped up again? How many people watched the uses of the stimpack in the series, pointed to the screen, and never asked why they didn't use stimpacks in other situations that would have called for it? How many people didn't question Maximus getting his foot stuck in that wooden sidewalk after he kicked a rock and took out the side of that building? How many people saw them attach the rotted finger on to Lucy when the end goal was to harvest her finger, which was obviously them attempting to make Lucy question herself after Cooper said that she would be just like him if she was out in the wastes long enough? You'd think they'd give a special thanks to George Lucas for him coming up with that idea in Empire Strikes Back.

It's not that the plotlines are overly simplified, it's that the plotlines are really, really dumb and they use references to distract people so they don't think too much.

 

[Norzan]

How many people didn't question Maximus getting his foot stuck in that wooden sidewalk after he kicked a rock and took out the side of that building?

That was fucking hilarious, i was howling for minutes. The show makes an huge deal on how uber powerful the power armor makes you, to only turn around and have someone's foot stuck on something a person WITHOUT power armor could get out of.

Even the memberries are not safe from the shit writing of the show.