#fallout prime

Like sorry folks, while I could be thinking about turning that man out sloppy style I'm actually having a solo deep dive on the psychology of populace control in Fallout's vault societies and how the show introduced a literal mind control device that should really have more people talking about the greater scope of Vault-Tec and their investors already having put 200+ years into socialization and conduct controlled brainwashing. And it didn't just impact 33 & 32, every vault (even control vaults) with a population had some degree of this.

Also I think this societal brainwashing directly impacts how wastelanders see vault dwellers. Like not only are they usually naive (and easy to lie to, cheat, steal from and kill) but they are almost to a single one conditioned from birth to be helpful, kind, intelligent (not wise), and not question authority. It isn't just growing up in the "safety" of a vault that makes them a target (and annoying as fuck) to the average wastelander, it's that they have no sense of the world outside the vault or the nature of people who were raised in it without the "loving embrace" of their vault to teach them the vastly different values of each world. This is why vault dwellers typically don't last long in the wasteland alone unless they are in some way aberrations.

You see this in Fallout 3, the Lone Wanderer is an aberration because they were not born in the vault, their father who raised them was born in the wastes and had no such conditioning to be a proper vault dweller. You see this in Fallout 4, Nate/Nora were isolated in their cryopod and as such had no exposure to social conditioning as that was never part of the vault's experiment so they emerged with pre-war values that had not been manipulated to the more useful parody of what they were by vault society. In the show, you see this with Lucy too. Lucy, who only barely survived her first day outside the vault because while being a badass for a vault dweller, she very much still is a vault dweller who Wilzig correctly identified as highly likely to die on her own. She survived and has continued being a badass as she's acclimated and learned the way the wasteland works through not just Coop but Wilzig, Max, and every situation she's survived so far. Lucy is beating the odds because of who she is and the help she's getting along the way (either of these on their own I think would not be enough to make it), I feel that had she been left entirely on her own she wouldn't have made it more than a few weeks even as great as she is at adapting.

This makes me super excited to see if they let Norm stay out in the wasteland with Claudia because I believe he is also an aberration, someone who has not been fully indoctrinated by the culture he was born into and is both curious about the world and suspicious of everything. Claudia is also an aberration as someone who is (reportedly, though I have theories) pre-war who has not been indoctrinated but also supposedly was not with Vault-Tec long enough to have really been in on the goals of the entire program (probably not even the full details of the Bud's Buds program).

Wanted

nsfw version on my patreon here