The reason Iām doing this in the first place is that a lot of evil karma options in fallout 3 are just inconvenient. Like I could go out of my way to blow up a city or I could not blow up a city and get a much more convenient free house and keep access to their merchants.
So in order to keep getting the full evil karma experience, every time I do something convenient or utilitarian that raises my karma I go back to Moriartyās Saloon and just open his terminal over and over again.
Thus, my good boy points are eliminated through repeated computer touching and the regulators here are hunting me down for looking at Moriartyās personal data a hundred times in a row.
Whatās really funny about lowering your karma this way is that after you do a major good Karma action and listen to the radio, the radio DJ Three Dog will be like this horrible fucker from vault 101 we all hate him so much you know that guy? He did another fucking thing. He saved a thousand orphans.
to fallout 4's immense discredit in the matter, its decision to mandatorily define all female player characters as lawyers who married a soldier puts it behind literal fallout 1 on "does the female character feel like you're the punchline to a joke"
to elaborate on that a bit, it's actually toothgrittingly misogynistic that they contrived a scenario where there are two player characters and one of them was clearly conceptualised as The Wife of the Male Player Character, while the other was made as a character first. it's remarkable they managed to do that in a game with a character creator and no mechanical distinction between genders
that's what I mean though. when the male character has to kill people and operate power armour, it's to be expected because that's what was being set up by his history as a soldier, but when the female character does the same, it's funny because she was a lawyer. one is unremarkable and the other is a joke
iām from maine. iāve lived here my whole life. i am also native american, and in community with other native people here (wabanaki peopleā passamaquoddy, penobscot, miākmaq and maliseet). i have been to mount desert island and bar harbor (you may know as far harbor) countless times throughout my life. i am also a native studies minor in a wabanaki-led program.
mount desert island, or pesamkuk (passamaquoddy name) has been a gathering place for wabanaki people since time immemorial. indigenous presence on the island has shaped what it is today. tourism and white settlement (summer homes, a coast guard base, a national park, and myriad other tourist businesses in places such as bar harbor) during the ārusticator periodā (1840s-1920s) all but pushed major seasonal camps off the island. in fact, today most average-income people will have a difficult time living on MDI now. the crisis of affordable housing on the island was at one point so bad that teachers and firemen were traveling upwards of an hour to get to work. not great!
but that does not mean that indigenous people are simply gone from the island (or maine in general!)
in maine, the major wabanaki communities are: penobscot nation on indian island, motahkomikuk (passamaquoddy), qonasqamkuk (passamaquoddy), and sipayik (passamaquoddy). the houlton band of maliseets and miākmaq nation are both in aroostook county and do not have formal reservations in the same way. indigenous lands in maine are subject to some very interesting and frustrating legislation. for more info, look into the maine indian claims settlement act (MICSA).
image: wabanaki alliance
today, the abbe museum is in the middle of the tourist district in bar harborā it is dedicated to wabanaki history and is largely wabanaki-run. efforts into restoring traditional harvesting are ongoing (such as picking sweetgrass)!
indigenous people are still very much here and deserve much, much better than complete erasure for the kitsch aesthetic of the game. wabanaki presence COULD HAVE BEEN integrated into the game. bethesda could have made an effort to reach out to wabanaki peoples to work on representation in some way or another. the history of the place could have been mentioned. it was not.
why is this?
i think a lot of it boils down to laziness. companies do not want to pay for cultural consultation. they donāt want to take a risk at either seeming ātoo wokeā or, on the other side, not socially aware enough.
so indigenous people continue to be written out. because it is easier to pretend we are all dead.
for more information about wabanaki presence on pesamkuk:
https://abbemuseum.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/4b8da-namingthedawnlandgeorgeneptune_web.pdf (written by a passamaquoddy knowledge keeperā i have met them, very cool person!)
indians in eden by bunny mcbride and harald prins: https://ppld.overdrive.com/media/1239742
some discussion of suzanne greenlaw (maliseet) and her work around sweetgrass harvest: https://www.abbemuseum.org/blog/2018/6/21/a8ox8s8wxde6nenklfm77gayl60h87
the abbe museum website: https://www.abbemuseum.org/
New Vegas is not any better, Iām afraid to say. Iāve been meaning to do a write up on the issues associated with Indigenous representation in NV, but suffice to say, itās really, really bad.
The rep in NV plays into a lot of the worst stereotypesā noble savages, white saviors, and positioning of ānative adoptionā in the worst and most stereotypical way. I really deeply recommend reading Tuck & Yangās āDecolonization is not a metaphorā for a more in-depth analysis of some of those problems (as part of a broader and systemic conversation around Anti-Native racism)
New Vegas nearly starts to have an interesting conversation about Indigenous positionally, but fails miserably. Mormons and Anthropologists both (who are represented by Joshua Graham and Caesar) have extremely loaded histories with Indigenous people. From an essay I wrote last year (About Twilight, but still relevant):
Mormons and Indigenous people have a long, bloody, and contemptuous history. From the start, The Book of Mormon states that both Jewish and Indigenous Americans are āscattered Israelites,ā descendants of an ancient family of Jews who came across the sea from Israel and settled in America. Indigenous people are believed by Mormons to be āLamanites,ā sons and daughters of the wicked āLaman,ā and at the top of a hierarchy of cursed lineages, ācursed with rednessā or āmarked skinā for turning away from God.
[ā¦]
Mormons believe that ancient Lamanites slaughtered Nephites (pale-skinned, righteous God warriors and descendants of Nephi), despite the fact that there is no archaeological evidence or oral tradition from any Indigenous group to suggest this ever happened, and there is no genetic link between ancient Jewish populations and ancient Indigenous populations.
As a result, Mormons (like many other Christian organizations in America) took part in the brutal and paternalistic residential school system, believing that Natives needed to be āsaved.ā Of all the residential schools in the U.S., one third were run by Mormon missionaries. Beyond residential schools, Mormons also operated the āIndian Placement Programā from 1954 to 2000, responsible for sending up to fifty thousand Native children to live with Mormon foster families. Both residential schools and the Indian Placement Program were rife with every kind of abuse imaginable. The last student within the program graduated in the year 2000, five years before Twilight was published. Mormons also took part in colonial expansion, believing their cause of slaughtering and converting āLamanitesā to be righteous retribution. Along with the U.S. government, Mormons were responsible for the Bear River Massacre of 1863, in which Shoshone women and children were raped, and more than four hundred and fifty Shoshone were slaughtered.
For context around the issues with Anthropologists and Native people, refer to Vine Deloria Jr.ās collection of essays: https://archive.org/details/indiansanthropol0000unse
x, 226 p. ; 24 cm
New Vegas falls short. It does not do a successful political critique of Indigenous treatment by simply acknowledging our existence (in the most offensive, stereotypical light). Even for a piece created in the 2000s, it is beyond egregious.
Indigenous fans of Fallout have been talking about the problems of New Vegas for years. This is not a Bethesda problem, it is a systemic problem. I can think of very few game studios who have ever done any better.
Just wanted to add if you appreciate my writeups and such, a great way to support me is through my ko-fi tip jar. Things are tight for a lot of people right now, including myself, so donāt trouble yourself if you donāt have anything to spare.
Iām definitely heartened by the response this has had š
the politics of this show have gone so downhill it's ridiculous. I rly enjoy the show as a whole but like. revealing that the apocalypse actually wasn't caused by corporate greed, but by a secret government organization is so. come on now. pathetic. also the freesiders gearing up to finally defend themselves and then being unceremoniously cut off by the ncr deus exing their way into the scene??? I already wouldn't put it past bethesda but i also wouldn't be surprised if Amazon was like Please don't be mean to the corporate overlords <3 loser shit
the amount of ppl in the main tag saying this was the best part bc she said what we've "all" "always" "been thinking" is driving me insane like ok yes on a purely Realistic, Practical level removed from fiction the NCR is "not as bad" as the Legion in terms of their treatment of women etc. but has everyone forgotten that Fallout is Not Real and is a story and when telling/reading a story you have to connect the dots irt what every party represents and symbolizes and the NCR in the STORYYYY is the direct, no-changes-made reflection of the USA, the true main villain of the entire series. they are a capitalist, imperial power devoted only to their own expansion at the expense of the entire rest of the wasteland, and both willing and seeking to use nuclear weapons, just like the USA. this whole scene is literally the postwar equivalent of someone saying "well sure the USA makes bad decisions sometimes, but look at China!" like you fell for it. you fell for the main hook of the entire series and somehow came out thinking the USA (cough i mean NCR) was the good guy. im dying folks
being evil so I told Preston I didn't wanna help for the first time ever and he's such a dick about it??? you met less than 5 minutes ago and just helped kill a bunch of people without batting an eye but telling him you don't want to get into military grade power armor and lead a frontal assault right now makes him practically spit at you to go away?! dude
now i know the countdown is related to the fallout show season 2 finale, and that there's no evidence of it being literally anything else, and that expecting anything else is engaging in playground rumor, and that i dont know anything about game design, or marketting, or manufacturing, or budgeting, or shipping contracts, or finance, or publishing, or advertising, or social media management, or public relations, or executive timelines, or cross-platform cohesion, or corporate scheduling, but...... i just think *leans in* *voice gets real low and mumbly* what if *adjusts self in seat* what if the fo3 remaster shadowdropped this coming wednesday
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