One thing that annoys me post-Fallout tv show is that I keep seeing people complain that they canonized who dropped the bombs after all these years, and I agree that would be a shitty and terrible thing to do, narratively, because not knowing is very much the point. However:
They did not, in fact, do that.
What they did was canonize that Vault-Tec intended the bombs to be dropped - but that isn't exactly groundbreaking news. Simply looking at the existence of the vaults could tell you that. If all the vaults were legit then simply selling the promise of safety works in the absence of actual war, but that is very explicitly not what most of those vaults were about. Every single vault with a fucked-up experiment involved - i.e., most of them - required the end of the world to actually happen in order to serve their purpose, so it was inevitable that Vault-Tec hastened the end. I really don't know jack shit about any of the intricacies of canon pre-FO4 because I've never played them and wiki only gets me so far, but even I know that. It's baked into the premise.
But something that people are kind of forgetting here is that just because someone plans to do something, that does not mean that they go on to actually do it. Intention does not equal outcome: any number of things could have led to the bombs dropping, with or without Vault-Tec's intervention. Hell, they could have done their best to hasten things along and then fucked it up so bad they made it take longer, we don't know. Anything could have happened in the (probably at least a) year between that secret meeting and the day the bombs fell, and the show didn't canonize jack shit we didn't already know. Except for one thing:
The other corporations were all in on it.
That was the shocking thing to me - not shocking as implausible, mind you, just shocking as in "oh shit they went there." That's the shiny new worm in the apple that I wish more people were talking about because hoo boy, way to understand the fuckin' assignment, writers. That it wasn't just Vault-Tec, it was all of them, every single one of those greedy megalomaniacal fucks trampling each other to shove their snouts in the apocalypse trough. Because at the end of the day, the end of the world didn't happen because on single board of executives were uniquely terrible people. The end of the world happened because everyone at the top of the food chain thought the world would be better off if only they could control what kind of people would be allowed to live in it.
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
