#ladycavalier

But also like, SURELY even in the Commonwealth there are just straight-up bicycle gangs, right?? There would have absolutely have been a movement to a) clear out and bury (or whatever method of interring disturbs less radiation in the soil) as many skeletons lying in the open as possible, and b) people who do their best to clear out and reconstruct (I use this loosely) major roadways for the sake of bicycles, brahmin-led carts and wagons (so that caravans can have more going for them, I suppose?), and I assume so that people can take major pieces of furniture or infrastructural resources or whatever from a to b while building their settlements. Show me where the cyclists are at!!

My personal thing that almost certainly I will (one day) get to in the epilogue of my fic, Unbreaking, is that there's a debate about literacy rates in the Commonwealth, and regardless of whether it makes sense for people to be highly literate, the game seems to think they are, SO: 200 years have passed? We should probably get better at distributing print information about weapon maintenance, farming, schooling, construction, repair manuals, whatever else is important so that people stay alive and do a bit better for themselves than huts that lack four solid walls, in a world in which there are radstorms and —worse— radsnow (!!!???). Maybe we can assume this is something the game brushes over for the most part, because this is a weird deep dive sort of a thing interesting to probably only me, but show me the large-scale printing press!!!

And of course if we assume there is a large scale printing press and other factories, we have to assume several significant transportation routes are fairly secured. Maybe that's a minutemen thing, maybe not, but I think I would find it fairly atmospheric for the apocalypse to stroll through a couple of tightly-protected thoroughfares aside from the area outside of Diamond City, and then raiders can have a highwaymen vibe to them instead of what feels like being haphazardly placed about the map. I do think that parts of the map should, realistically, be a lot safer from raiders and super mutants, 200 yrs in.

If I had a spare week, I could write a few tens of thousands of words on this, and maybe some parts of it are partially addressed by canon and I've missed it, but whatever, here are my thoughts.