so i finished watching the entire series and something made me feel uneasy. starting with episode 6 and going into episode 7 the show takes a very political turn. a turn against capitalism and an actual, intended or not, positive portray of communism. almost directly actually. at least, it takes the blame completely away from communism, portray some of the communist in the show as actually good people fighting against the evils of capitalism. at least those to be heavily hinted at as being communist. which made me very delighted but then it dawned to me, this is a amazon prime production based off a video game from bethesda who is now owned by microsoft. three massive, very capitalist, corporations that have shown time again to be very for profit.
but even if we remove the debate whether or not communist being portrayed as good did happen in the show, the show itself was extremely critical of capitalism and that makes me wonder why these billion dollar corporations that are the epitome of why capitalism is bad, be telling its viewers, the very nature of amazon, bethesda, and microsft, everything they stand for, the people who made the show and games, are bad? why would they want their consumers to hate the very thing that allows these elites, these companies, to exist in the first place?
is it some sort of chess move i don't understand? have we reached a state where capitalism could very well nuke the planet and people won't care so these companies don't care if criticism about them is made? or more wishful thinking, they think this will spare them from the revolution? i don't understand their move here. i don't expect capitalist companies to allow people to hate them.
>>41242so my comment here:
>have we reached a state where capitalism could very well nuke the planet and people won't care so these companies don't care if criticism about them is madei don't want to be that demoralized.
Repressive desublimation is a term, first coined by Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse in his 1964 work One-Dimensional Man, that refers to the way in which, in advanced industrial society (capitalism), "the progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements in the “higher culture.”[1] In other words, where art was previously a way to represent "that which is" from "that which is not,"[2] capitalist society causes the "flattening out"[3] of art into a commodity incorporated into society itself. As Marcuse put it in One-Dimensional Man, "The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship."
By offering instantaneous, rather than mediated, gratifications,[4] repressive desublimation was considered by Marcuse to remove the energies otherwise available for a social critique; and thus to function as an emancipating dynamic under the guise of collectivist politics.
>>41241well yeah its tv (or streaming skeuomorphism of it), of course it's backed by mass media oligopoly corps. also vaguely leftist messaging is in vogue rn
>>41249probably. havent watched yet but the only criticism ive seen of it is that it visually looks the wrong way and and incels kvetching about "canon"
>>41241anti-capitalism is just another commodity. that's one reason that capitalism is such a resilient system: if you hate captalism, great, there's this guy Marx,
I'll sell you his book. weak regimes need to suppress dissent: you couldn't buy books about how the Shah was a cunt in Imperial Iran because the Shah was a cunt who was, as history showed, had only a tenuous grasp on power. To sell such literature is to risk emboldening an opposition movement - but under a regime as strong as contemporary global capitalism, where the logic of profit always compels you to act in alignment with the system, there is no serious risk of that happening. The free competition of anti-capitalist commodities and fashions has the comfortable side effect of leading people down the garden path towards totally wasting their time. Look at contemporary political discourse like you'd look at any other fandom and everything slots into place.
what's really odd is that there aren't more defeatists out there. many people will turn from left to right or from right to left, but far fewer will log off and find some other way to waste their time. >>41310most of them still vote or engage on some level, even if only to scorn their leaders. they're defeated because they gave up at the first hurdle. they didn't get "into politics" to begin with. what's odd is that there aren't more people who
did, but ultimately analysed the situation and concluded that they've got as much political agency as they have agency over the motion of the planets. it's not rare for disillusioned socdems to become communists, disillusioned communists to become liberals, and for disillusioned liberals to turn to fascism, but very rarely do they simply give up and become gardeners.
imagine if it turned out that the outcome of every sporting event was rigged and the response of sports fans was to
swap teams and it might illustrate the oddity i'm getting at.
Semi related posts
>>38053 and
>>40750 >story
boring, telegraphed
>characters
shallow, no chemistry, mediocre acting
>set pieces
cheap, bland
The games weren't cultural masterpieces, but they were entertaining as post-apocalyptic sandboxes in which lots of individual stories could be told. An anthology series would have been more appropriate for the IP, but they decided not to do that and instead they delivered a weak main story, which is a literal fetch quest, and even weaker characters. I mean, Lucy is supposed to be this sheltered and innocent vault dweller and in less than a week she has zero qualms about sawing off the head of a kind stranger and then she just cheerfully, nonchalantly carries it around as if what she did wasn't horrific and traumatizing for her. She even pets it like she's some kind of retarded psychopath. What kind of character progression is that? Where is the pain of abandoning everything you have ever learned, where is the trial and error struggle of learning how to survive in the wasteland? The BoS guy's case is even worse, he has zero background except for that fucking refrigerator scene that they flashback to like half a dozen times. His story has 2 whole components: 1) he wants power and authority, 2) he wants to fuck Lucy. In the last episode he's offered 1) by a BoS elder but that might bring him into conflict with Lucy jeopardizing 2). So compelling!!
I'll say it again, the show might have succeeded as an anthology series. Give us the story of a prisoner escaping an NCR chain gang who joins a group of highwaymen in order to survive, and the story of the bighorn rancher who struggles to maintain his business amid the attacks of those same highwaymen on his convoys, or a story about a farmer who loses his family to a deathclaw and makes it his life's mission to hunt it down. More complicated stories about duty, loyalty and morality could be told using the different factions as frames. The FO world is fleshed out enough for hundreds of these stories and any one of them would be better than the garbage this TV show has delivered.
P.S. check out Fallout: Red Star for a good film/tv adaptation of fallout.
>>41379>Where is the pain of abandoning everything you have ever learnedThey make it pretty clear that her vault is preparing to go to the surface. Her dad literally says the plan is for her kids to be the generation that starts settling up there. And in the beginning it shows that the vault is actively training people in useful skills. It's basically explained that she's The Type to be an adventurer anyway, so that gets a pass tbh. You raise other good points though.
>I'll say it again, the show might have succeeded as an anthology series.From a business perspective it did succeed. The mass audience they want wouldn't be interested in an anthology, especially not on an episode-by-episode basis. Maybe something like True Detective doing a different plot each season.
>>41381>They make it pretty clear that her vault is preparing to go to the surfaceI get that they're planning to settle the surface, the whole Reclamation Day thing, I just found her reactions and behavior tonally jarring.
>From a business perspective it did succeedRight, and an anthology would make it more difficult for the showrunners to create suspense at the end of every episode to keep people watching. I still think that conceptually it's the better format for an adapting the games - exploring many side quests instead of just one contrived main quest, so to speak.
>>41389is that really any different from what the average player would do
in new vegas you basically wake up and almost immediately get into a shootout where you kill half a dozen men
>>41389Also in her vault, dead bodies are unceremoniously tossed into a composting machine. So she definitely does not care about giving a corpse "dignity" or whatever.
>>41390Mutilating a corpse is different than killing someone.
capital subsumes all criticism of it. this is nothing new
>>41249it's
acceptablethere's various ways in which it deviates from the timeline which as someone who's played the series since FO1 is annoying. the way the BoS is portrayed is very much Bethesda's nu-BoS that engages with its surroundings, starts fights with surrounding factions etc. this is very unlike the BoS in FO1 and FO2 where they're very insular. in FO1 they send you on a suicidal fetch quest to get rid of you when you ask to join them
>>41260I think Cooper Howard is actually an FEV mutant like Harold, not a ghoul. this because he still has his ears. Cooper is also evasive when Lucy asks him how he got the way he is ("something like that"). but that theory requires Bethesda to care about the lore, which they don't, so it might just be that makeup is easier if you leave the ears alone
>>41379>An anthology series would have been more appropriate for the IPI thought it was going to be an anthology for about half the first episode which had me more excited for the series. sadly they didn't do that
>>41382now we're talking. indeed the desire to achieve a perfect monopoly is one of the cornerstones of communist economics. antitrust laws are historically regressive and an expression of petty bourgeois jealousy
>>41413chicago or detroit would be cool to look at, especially how they developed in the pre-war world in the fallout universe
but most of america is samey enough anyways that aesthetically there wouldnt be much difference
>>41430also lmao @ michael rapaport playing the douchey bos knight
this guy really channels himself in his roles
Watched it, I liked it. I don't care if it's recuperation when they literally say "monopoly capitalism" (can you name another show that speaks it out this openly?) and all that, art and entertainment can never be fully subsumed under capital, it's not "repressive desublimation" or whatever, "One Dimensional Man" is the work of Marcuse that moved him further away from Marxism by the way. Basically what some anons are implying is that anti-capitalist art can ipso facto not exist, which is ridiculous. I guess Frida Kahlo didn't exist.
Yes, there is the phenomenon of radical art being recuperated to perpetuate capitalism, this isn't a pristine or new insight, in fact, this Fallout show makes the exact same point - of course, under the guise of not taking itself too seriously. It's an Amazon show produced by Bethesda, directed by one of the Nolan brothers, it's not coming from a "radical" perspective, which is exactly why it isn't recuperation, there is nothing to recuperate - in contrast to like Che shirts for example, who went from the mortal enemy of the West to a popcultural icon.
The show makes a more intelligent point that is still easy to understand for the audience, more than just "corporations are bad" like The Boys: VaultTec sells post-apocalyptic bunkers, so it is in their interest to fight peace negotiations. It hits pretty well with the current climate, where peace negotiations are sabotaged on behalf of the military-industrial complex, in Ukraine for example. It's still very satirical, but if you think about the actual story without the over-the-top imagery, it's actually pretty bleak.
So yeah, good show. I don't know why people complain about the acting, the black dude wasn't too good, but what's wrong with the chick who played Lizzy? Also, the set pieces were DEFINITELY not cheap.
One criticism I have is that Jonathan Nolan just copy-pasted the "man in black" character from Westworld 100% with Cooper/the Ghoul. I mean that is so obvious, I thought it was Ed Harris under that make-up.
The show didn't make me feel anything. The plot is strung together with a mishmash of coincidences with no rhyme or reason beyond narrative necessity. The Enclave scientist stumbles into the protagonist in the middle of the wasteland. Max is singled out and promoted so he can start his adventure. Max and the knight happen to land in the exact place where the scientist had lunch. The knight immediately dies so max can get the armor. Everyone converges at the same town at the same time. The entire show is like this and it feels so fucking lazy. The fight scenes are ruined by the 50s music, slow motion, poorly timed comedic relief: "Get that jelly mold out of here!". There are traces of good storytelling in the show (the encounter between the ghoul and the other ghoul, the organ farm sequence, the voting sequence and concurrent Norman subplot, the ghoul-governmint scene) but these are exceptions from the rule.
>>41498the cinematography bad by modern standards. it's artless, but competent. If you mute it, set the saturation to zero, raise contrast, lower gamma, and fix the speed you can see that some shots would be pretty good if it wasn't for the music, sets, costumes, and actors.
>>41506>They could have shown pre-war america as it was described in the games: militarized, chaotic, impoverished, but they made it look idyllic in the show and they did the same in the intro to FO4intro to fo4 only shows idyllic suburbia but the rest of the game definitely shows hints of what the actual real world outside of that suburbia is like, like the kim wu logs
in the intro scene to the series, there's red scare talk between the gossiping suburbanites, and in howard's flashbacks it shows his acting roles becoming more violent and warlike
>>41506They don't just namedrop capitalism (which is still a rare thing in mainstream productions, there are people like Boots Riley but he's more of an indie producer - Jonathan Nolan's Westworld had plenty of theme that worked as a critique of capitalism, but never once called it that), they show a simple logic chain about the weapons industry having an objective interest in launching WWIII. This is something the average normie can easily digest.
>The pre-war controversy is between the American Dream (equal opportunity capitalism that brings prosperity to all who work) and the monopoly capitalism that killed it.I mean, this is kind of what happened? For all those who were allowed to participate in the American Dream (e.g. not including blacks, Irish catholics, Chinese and other minorities) it did exist unter the Hamiltonian "American System" until, well, monopoly capitalism killed it.
>It's a fantasy conflict for a fantasy world and it's impossible to translate that message into reality.I guess I heavily disagree, French enlightenment era thinkers were forced to only write comedies, or about Asian fantasy lands, to avoid censorship by the crown. Again, I already mentioned Boots Riley, and he caught some flak for being out in the open with his beliefs, and even he has to use the guise of comedy, satire and fantasy.
>>41503>The show didn't make me feel anything. The plot is strung together with a mishmash of coincidences with no rhyme or reason beyond narrative necessity. The Enclave scientist stumbles into the protagonist in the middle of the wasteland. Max is singled out and promoted so he can start his adventure. Max and the knight happen to land in the exact place where the scientist had lunch. The knight immediately dies so max can get the armor. Everyone converges at the same town at the same time. I agree with all of this, but writers who do their own world-building are always guilty of this. Everyone bumps into each other in Lord of the Rings too, which is regarded as a masterpiece of narration. But yeah, they really fast-forwarded that, with everyone converging in episode two.
> scientist had lunch. The knight immediately dies so max can get the armor. Everyone converges at the same town at the same time. The entire show is like this and it feels so fucking lazy. The fight scenes are ruined by the 50s music, slow motion, poorly timed comedic reliefI don't mind comedic relief because the show is already far out there with their overall theme, with ridiculous premises, so I am glad it doesn't take itself too seriously. But I agree with the 50s music, I mean I generally don't like that type of music, some really dig it, but I've never understood the appeal to own the entire discography of Johnny Cash or whatever. Shit is just boring and even lacks the technical skill you can appreciate in Jazz (although I hate Jazz too). But they were really overdoing it, they sort of reduced that shit towards the end which is a bit more serious.
>the cinematography bad by modern standards.That was also the weakness in Nolan's Westworld, IMO.
>>41509Sure, but that's nothing compared to how it could have been represented. Imagine this: the ghoul was a veteran who fought in Alaska, like in the show, but when he returns he doesn't become a movie star and instead gets a regular job and marries a low-level Vault-Tec employee. They live in a small suburban house on the outskirts of LA. He returns (walking, to save fuel for his car) from his work at the munitions factory, where labor discipline is strictly enforced, late in the evening and the family sits around the table to have a dinner that consists of spam and beans from the government food bank. He asks his daughter what she learned in school that day and it was some propaganda narrative about the Alaska campaign. He gets angry and starts explaining that it's all bullshit and his wife tries to calm him down but they're silenced by a power blackout. His co-worker friend is arrested for being a subversive and he convinces his wife to attend an anti-war demonstration with him. At the protest, vertibirds equipped with loudspeakers declare that it's an unlawful assembly and that it will be dispersed with force. The demonstrators are stunned by a sonic generator and MP stormtroopers start pulling people out of the crowd for summary execution. The ghoul and his wife are separated and he sees her get executed as he's fleeing from the scene. He returns home and flees the city with his daughter, crashing through a military checkpoint while the bombs drop behind him.
All of the other pre-war characters could have been similarly modified to preserve the exposition while communicating a strong message that pre-war america is a deeply sick society locked in an unwinnable war for resources. Maybe the ghoul could have remained an actor, but he stars in a role playing an american soldier fighting a racist caricature of the chinese like in American anti-japanese ww2 propaganda. His wife is Chinese-American and she gets sent to a concentration camp and when he protests he gets ostracized as a communist sympathizer a la red scare. Anything but the softcore bullshit we're treated to in the show.
>>41511>they show a simple logic chainWe're Marxists, we know that the show's logic is incoherent. A ceasefire would supercharge the arms industry into another arms race and Vault-Tec could continue making billions from selling spaces in their vaults to paranoiac Americans. It's more of a critique of PMCs since the antagonists post-war (bud's buds) are all middle-managers.
>I mean, this is kind of what happened?I don't want to quibble over the details of this point, because I broadly agree. I meant that the conflict as presented poorly represents the circumstances: a social order in its terminal death phase that's in the process of cannibalizing the world for profit.
>>41515The Fellowship doesn't just bump into each other, since they're explicitly a team put together for a mission, but there are a few examples.
>bilbo bumps into gollum and the ring in the backstory>frodo and sam bump into faramir>merry and pippin bump into treebeardofc somebody could make jokes about "pippin bumps into a skeleton and then gandalf bumps into a balrog" or whatever, but these examples are pretty much coincidences. LotR has the caveat that there's an actual God character and some lesser divinities guiding the events with intent that the story goes a certain way.
>>41513I wasn't talking about Marxists, when you don't make something satirical the message will fly over people's heads. How many people know that The Matrix was influenced by Baudrillard? One of the best anticapitalist shows I've watched recently was Severance, and people didn't even seem to get that.
>a social order in its terminal death phase that's in the process of cannibalizing the world for profit.A civilization in death spiral also shows remarkable signs of decadence by the leisure class. I thought that this was protrayed in Cooper's backstory, and the Hollywood/Beverly Hills enviroment he was surrounded with.
Just finished it. It's ok, which is a lot better than most of these adaptations.
The biggest problem for me is the overarching plot feels pretty contrived for the sake of having a story to tell for a neat season of TV. The way that the plot threads come together makes the setting feel too small. If you want it to feel like a big open world, you want everything to be connected to other things out there. You want it to seem like there's always more you haven't seen. As the Ghoul says "thou shalt always be sidetracked by bullshit." I get they wanted to have a complete arc for the main characters this season, but they didn't have to
all converge on the same plot point.
Teasing
New Vegas for season 2 makes me think they are going to really fuck up the lore and cause way more arguments.
>>41241You are right about the show being pretty on the nose anti-capitalism. The bad character monologuing about the evil plan does it while staring down the barrel of the camera, explaining to the audience the capitalist basis of the motivations. Amazon and Bethesda don't care though because it will make them money. But hey, if they incidentally lead more people to think capitalism is bad, then it's a win-win. They'll sell us the rope we hang them with, and so on.
You're wrong about the communist part though. There's no communists in the show. The main person from that group outright says they're not communists, and calling people communists is just a scapegoat and a cope.
>>41537oh, i loved the show. op just got me annoyed cause i had the impression that the show went out of their way to say the hollywood people were *not* communists and the US was in a mcarthyist frenzy. politically it's important to distinguish between anti-capitalism and communism.
but you could say the trends of concentration and centralization of capital will inevitably lead to a singular company like vault-tec essentially usurping the power of the state (which is after-all, nothing but the bourgeois organized). and from that point organizing nuclear war so they can rebuild it in the aftermath. that's a fun idea.
in the show though it comes off a bit cabally i think though.
>>41538The "communists" aren't even anti-capitalist though. They are just mad at Vault Tec for
keeping cold fusion hidden as a trade secret instead of letting their company sell it to the world.
>>41559um you can split it up into weekly watch sessions
it's got a "previously on…" montage at the beginning of every episode, like old tv shows, as well
>>41559You can also just stop watching it if you don't like it. I usually watch stuff and play games while doing some cardio.
>>41564>I like how the franchise popularizes the idea of a nuclear war for the masses. I guess? It's kind of making it out as something you shouldn't take so seriously though. Like everything in the universe is unrealistic (which is the point)
>>41564The point of the first Fallout game came from the wuesyion, "What if our (America's) Cold War 1950's fears were real?". That and it was meant to explore the ethics of a post-nuclear world. Besthedsa made it into a 1950's sci-fi theme park set after the bimbs just fell.
Vid relayed
>>41575Maybe this gets brought up in those videos, haven't watched, but it's like how the first two games only use the 50's doo wop music shit in the intro and it's clearly non diegetic, it sets the tone for the audience but in universe just because it uses a retro-futuristic atompunk aesthetic doesn't mean they would literally still be listening to music that is at that point hundreds of years old
then in bethesda fallout the 50s music becomes diegetic on the pip boy radio with absolutely no justification.
>>41594>Maybe this gets brought up in those videosit does. one of them cuts a battle scene from nu-Fallout with FO2 where the latter is just ambience. they also point out that FO1/2
isn't 50's retrofuturist America because that world got blown up. you'd expect the people inhabiting the post-war world to not want to recreate the antebellum world since, you know, it led to the War
>>41596another thing one of the videos bring up is the use of bottle caps on the east coast. within FO1/2 and even FO:T caps aren't the only currency in use. they're sometimes called Hub bucks in FO1, and they're useless in FO2, having been supplanted by NCR dollars (except the different types of scrip used in Redding). you can even find a crashed Nuka Cola truck with thousands of worthless caps in a random encounter in FO2. in FO:T the Brotherhood has its own scrip, while the surrounding wasteland uses ring pulls. there's only one merchant in FO:T that exchanges scrip for RPs I think
it would have been far more interesting for Bethesda to pick something else as the medium of exchange other than caps
>>41688That belongs more in the Chernobyl thread TBH
>>9068 Also did you take that from
>>>/edu/21949 ?
>>41689>That belongs more in the Chernobyl thread TBH >>9068 But it's about fallout lore and the fact that becoming a ghoul has some real world basis in biology and if it was real would probably affect or be affected by skin color which might have some complicated implications.
>Also did you take that from >>>/edu/21949 ?I thought of separately from that.
>>41512that would be cool
gives me eraserhead type vibes
you could also play up the racism to show how irrational the pre-war society and culture was
but its a sanitized amazon show, i doubt they would try to make people feel weird watching something like that
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