Satire works as long as it is considered satire. As soon as someone takes the caricature literally, strange things begin to happen: the villains suddenly turn out to be “based”, the parody of fascists turns into an object of sympathy, and the 1998 game is labeled as political subversion.
Just such a trap pleased anti-woke curator on Steam, leading a catalog of “insufficiently correct” games from the point of view of combating wokeism. Fallout 2 ended up in his section with a direct accusation of an anti-conservative and anti-republican agenda, plus a separate remark about the fact that the Enclave is “ironically quite attractive.”
The remaining parts of the series in the same list are classified according to the columns “not recommended” and “contain information”, that is, the entire franchise is under suspicion.
The problem is that there’s not much to hide here – the series never tried. The entire aesthetic of Fallout is built on a vicious ridicule of the American fifties, McCarthyism, the cult of the nuclear family and advertising cheerfulness against the backdrop of a scorched wasteland.
The enclave was invented as a grotesque parody of ethnonationalists planning to cleanse the continent of the “unclean” remnants of humanity.
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And yes, a specific replica in Fallout 2 exists. On the oil rig, Vice President Daniel Bird, whose dialogue is largely based on the actual statements of Dan Quayle, Vice President under George H. W. Bush, says:
I’m not part of the problem. I’m a Republican.
The answer to him was simple:
Like I said, part of the problem.
At the same time, it makes no sense to reduce Fallout to one partisan heel: the franchise is equally tough on corporate capitalism, communist horror stories and any power that gets its hands on the button.
The practical effect of such lists was exactly the opposite of what was intended: the catalog turned into a recommendation service that was simply read in reverse.
The logic is simple – the higher the game is in the irritation rating, the more likely it is that there will be something interesting inside, rather than a set of safe decorations.
