[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the Fallout lorecast.
[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that explores the boundaries of our knowledge about the world of Fallout.
[SPEAKER_00]: So on the Patreon chat last week, we discussed the number of different kinds of things you could find in other media games, whatever, that reference Fallout, because Fallout has been a big influence on other media, but what about the other way around?
[SPEAKER_00]: What are the references that fall out makes to other media?
[SPEAKER_00]: What are the inspirations and little things that the developers have implanted into the game that reference pop culture, popular movies, and other games?
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is going to be interesting for a few different reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all,
[SPEAKER_00]: If you go way back, I'm talking years back.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've listened through the show, you probably remember an episode where I talked about all the movies that inspired fall out in some of the books and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this list is much bigger and it comes from a, let's call it tricky source.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I have in front of me right now is a list on the fandom.com wiki of
[SPEAKER_00]: 126 different references and this is going to be an investigation because as we all know, wikis are a wonderful source of information but they don't always get everything right.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are often
[SPEAKER_00]: filled in by people in the community, and sometimes the things that they talk about, the things that they reference, and even the actual references themselves when you go down the rabbit hole, don't actually hold up.
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't mean that wikis are without their worth and their value.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're a integral part of doing the research.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, they are often inspiration in
[SPEAKER_00]: starting down a path with something, I often pull information from different wikis or different forums places like Reddit that inspire the episodes or create a at least a baseline amount of information.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the trick with using them is that you always have to vet the source.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't just read it and then expect it to be 100% right, 100% of the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a good place to start, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it gives you the whole story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another example of this is I've been going through the pre-war businesses recently and this is going to be a new series that kind of goes between those episodes if it works out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hopefully this episode works out and it becomes a new series, but my point is that that list of pre-war businesses does exist on a wiki.
[SPEAKER_00]: but I absolutely have to do more research with every single one of those entries to make sure that not only is it accurate but to find other information in and around it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of the time, the things that are referenced there are not the full story and you've heard me expand upon that multiple times where I was able to delve deeper and find more out than what was originally just posted in the wiki.
[SPEAKER_00]: So with all of that said, we are going to investigate the cultural references in fallout, and also see how accurate the wiki is, the fandom.com wiki is about this, and we're going to start with fallout three.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right, 126 entries just for fallout three, and eventually we'll move on from there, and who knows?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, my gut says, I don't have insight knowledge on this,
[SPEAKER_00]: is a Fallout 3 remaster, so this might be a lot of fun to go through before that comes out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when we all play through the game again, we're going to have these things on our mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's get into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our first entry is, well, alphabetically, it begins with a number because numbers go before letters, if you're doing alphabetical order, which is kind of a funny way to say that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But anyway, we are starting with the novel, 1984.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you know of 1984, if you've read it, then it makes sense that there would be some references and fallout because, well, we'll get into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's what we're going to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to read you the entry on the fandom.com site.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I'm going to give you a synopsis of what the reference is.
[SPEAKER_00]: So basically an overview of what 1984 is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we're going to look into the details and see if they hold up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I'm going to speculate about some other things that might actually be good or better references
[SPEAKER_00]: Irving Chen's daily affirmation reads, Comrade Chen is watching you, which references the quote Big Brother is watching you from 1984.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second point here, the Vault 92 overseers terminal contains the phrase, Sanity is not statistical, which is a reference to the book's quote, Sanity was statistical.
[SPEAKER_00]: Alright, so those are the references.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, what exactly is 1984?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if we go to the Britannica site, yes, an encyclopedia, not a wiki, this is the description we get for the book.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just to bring everybody up on the same page, you don't have to read the whole book, but here's what it says.
[SPEAKER_00]: 1984, a novel by English author, George Orwell published in 1949 as a warning against a talitarianism.
[SPEAKER_00]: The novels chilling dystopia made a deep impression on readers and Orwell's ideas entered mainstream culture in a way achieved by very few books.
[SPEAKER_00]: The book's title and many of its concepts, such as big brother and the thought police, are instantly recognized and understood, often as by-words for modern social and political abuses.
[SPEAKER_00]: The book is set in 1984 in Ushiana, one of three perpetually warring to tallitarian states.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other two are Eurasia and East Asia.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oceana is governed by the all-controlling party with the capital P, which has brainwashed the population into unthinking obedience to its leader, Big Brother.
[SPEAKER_00]: The party has created a propagandistic language known as New Speak, which is designed to limit free thought and promote the party's doctrines.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its words include double-think, belief in contradictory ideas, simultaneously, which is reflected in the party's slogans, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
[SPEAKER_00]: The party maintains control through the thought police and continual surveillance, so you can already see some of the themes that have seaped into fallout, and
[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, a lot of our actual real world, so that's the gist of it, there's more in the summary, but we're not going to spend the whole time doing the summary.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just want to give you kind of that foundation to make sure we're all on a level playing field discussing the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so going back to the entry about 1984, again, the first reference is Irving Chang's Daily Affirmations Reads.
[SPEAKER_00]: Comred Cheng is watching you, which is a reference to the quote, Big Brother is watching you.
[SPEAKER_00]: That sounds like an accurate reference to 1984.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you dig into this a little bit and you look at Irving Cheng's personal computer, where this entry is supposed to be, there is no Comred Cheng is watching you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you might remember Irving Cheng,
[SPEAKER_00]: as one of the wealthy people in ten pennies tower.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he is the guy that walks around talking about communism and he believes himself to be the descendant of Chairman Chang, the leader of the People's Republic of China.
[SPEAKER_00]: from before the war and during the war.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some interesting stuff going on there, but if we look at his terminal, we only have a few entries.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first entry says, Welcome Comrade, which makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: He calls people Comrade.
[SPEAKER_00]: He believes he's a descendant of the leader of the Communist.
[SPEAKER_00]: regime that was running China at the time, then there's another post rebuilding proposal.
[SPEAKER_00]: We excel at destroying the old world and we excel at building a new one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chairman Chang.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a quote from Chairman Chiang, and there's more, which really sets up our understanding of what he believes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It says 200 years ago, Chairman Chiang led his armies to defeat the decadent rulers of this land.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, his humble descendant, Comrade Chiang, shall lead its noble people to rebuild a brighter land in its place.
[SPEAKER_00]: By uniting to work together, we can eradicate the twin dangers of lawlessness and disease.
[SPEAKER_00]: with unified soldiers we can cleanse the land of beasts and highway men with organized farmers we can overcome starvation and poverty when competing villages are destroyed almost unite under the glorious leadership of comradeshing and the 10 penny commune yes this is not pre war stuff this is pre war flavored stuff that he is putting here and he's an old man at this point but he still seems to
[SPEAKER_00]: Rebuilding plans for fixing the world in, of course, that never really plays out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's not what the Wiki was referencing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was saying that there was a daily affirmation that reads Comrade Chang is watching you.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only daily affirmation we get in his terminal simply says, when glory for our motherland.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing about Chairman Chang is watching you, no big brother stuff, just when glory for our motherland.
[SPEAKER_00]: So is the entry absolutely wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it just made up?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I've done some research and really all I can find is that this might be one of those things that just gets referenced by the internet and then keeps getting referenced on the internet that people believe to be true and then just don't look it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that one feels like a dead end to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what about the second entry here?
[SPEAKER_00]: The vault 92 overseers terminal contains the phrase, sanity is not statistical, which is a reference to the book's quote, sanity was statistical.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we look at the overseers terminal, it turns out that this is actually true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vault 92 overseers personal entry, 0-0-0-897-377, Malias says W-N-M-S-C-E is a failure, so there's been a few deaths.
[SPEAKER_00]: One step back, two steps forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's easy to suppress what everyone in the vault are calling crazy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've added a command word in their suggested implants, simply say the phrase, sanity is not statistical, and they will stop dead in their tracks.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've informed the guards of this, but I've told them only to use it when out of your shot of anyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the reference is accurate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now what was going on in Vault 92 and why does this make any sense with 1984?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well if you recall Vault 92 is the musicians vault.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the one where a bunch of musicians, the best musicians across the land were all invited into the same vault,
[SPEAKER_00]: with the concept of preserving musical talent into the future.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in actuality, the test that was being performed on them had to do with white noise generators and the implementation of subliminal messaging into their minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the overseer is using a command phrase to trigger or calm the residents, the ones who suffer from auditory hallucination from the experiments, and by stating sanity is not statistical.
[SPEAKER_00]: The game is having the overseer reject
[SPEAKER_00]: The Orwellian concept found in 1984.
[SPEAKER_00]: The overseer is basically arguing that an individual sanity is an objective reality that cannot be defined by the statistics, the behavior of the collective, the belief of everyone else.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this makes sense as a command line because it is very specifically pushing back against the idea that the thing that's impending on your brain, the thing that's making you go crazy, this idea that reality has to match what everyone else believes and therefore if it doesn't it is not reality which drives us crazy because we all want to believe our own thoughts,
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this command line is in direct contrast to the idea that you have to give up that autonomy in order to be part of the collective, which goes right back to 1984.
[SPEAKER_00]: The entire premise in 1984 is about this group that is part of Oceana and how the leadership, how big brother convinces everybody of the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: through implementing, like, culture-wide decrees about what reality is, and if you don't agree with that, then you are not part of the group.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole idea is to define for the populace what they want reality to be, what the leadership wants reality to be, because that's what benefits
[SPEAKER_00]: truth, reality, all of that is not based on anything other than matching the consensus that is put in front of you.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you do not believe what everyone else believes, then you are not believing reality, then you are not dealing with truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, do you see the connection here to Vault 92?
[SPEAKER_00]: This makes a lot of sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: It also makes a lot of sense that the overseer's terminal would use this reference.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so good job, fandom.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: You got this one right.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it also is interesting because it implies that the book, 1984, might have been something the overseer read.
[SPEAKER_00]: It might be something that exists in Fallout.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is absolutely possible because the book was originally published in 1949.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see, you can absolutely see in this book the effects of World War II and the way that that made people question the way that human beings work, the way the society works and all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you could see the direct lineage from those ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: into Vault 92 and the experiment with subliminal messaging and dealing with people and the fallout of them being, well, influenced to believe what the Vault wants them to believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: So phantom.com got one of the two, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's definitely a reference on that second one, but
[SPEAKER_00]: What other kinds of things, not just in Fallout 3, but across the Fallout games, feel like they could be inspired by 1984, so I created a list of ideas and these aren't necessarily direct references to a specific quote or something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are more conceptual, but I think some of these have some possibility here.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what about Oceana, what about the concept of vaults and vault tech working like Oceana, like Big Brother, that feels like something that extends beyond just vault 92?
[SPEAKER_00]: So from a meta perspective, the idea that
[SPEAKER_00]: Vault tech is the arbiter of truth in any of these experiments and what they say is the way the world will appear to those people in the vault.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then absolutely, this feels like a big brother thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that in a broad sense makes a lot of sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, you could see any single overseer as a stand-in for big brother in many of the vaults, because they are the be-all end-all decision-maker when it comes to the lives of the people in that vault, and their reality gets imposed on everyone in the vault.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that makes sense too.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is one point on this, this whole concept of the way Oceana works, that is more specific.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember the goat test, the aptitude test that all the vault dwellers take in order to determine what they're going to do with their lives?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and fall out, the generalized occupational aptitude test, the goat is very similar to the aptitude test that they take in 1984, which sorts people into the party in order to decide their exact place in society.
[SPEAKER_00]: it strips away individual choice and it leads you into something that you're going to do for the rest of your life because it's better for the state.
[SPEAKER_00]: Individuality is suppressed.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to live your lives according to the ways that the state wants, the ways that the vault wants, and you have to believe what they tell you as the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's no questioning the goat,
[SPEAKER_00]: So here's another concept, another way that this works out in fallout.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we jump over to fallout 4 and we take a look at the institute, we realize that it's not just vault tech and it's not just the vaults that operate the way that the party capital P party does in 1984.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the institute doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: They are replacing people with synths.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, reality, the truth of the situation, they have to convince people to believe something as the truth that isn't actually the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that has some flavors of 1984, but also, there's a little bit of new speak in the Institute as well, because they dehumanize their own synths.
[SPEAKER_00]: They call them units or hardware or assets.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is linguistic control, this is something that totalitarian regimes of all different stripes try to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, marketing, the way marketing works is that, I mean, how many times have you seen a commercial where they used a word to describe a thing and you're like, I don't know if that's the word I would have used to describe that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's intentional.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're trying to shape your perceptions around something by using specific words.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you are part of the institute, then you need to believe deep down that these things that you're building aren't actually people.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are hardware.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are units.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are assets.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to take away in your own mind any sense of empathy or emotion or autonomy that
[SPEAKER_00]: Act like they have in order for you to keep going about your business, making more of them, because if you were to believe that they were people, then that would be a moral issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: That would be a problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that connects back to the concept of new speak, which a lot of us would just call propaganda at this point.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what about following new Vegas?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there anything in following new Vegas that seems like 1984?
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's go back to the old world blues DLC.
[SPEAKER_00]: It basically incinerates books because they think they're seditious or anti-government.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, in 1984, the government has these things called memory holes where they throw history into furnaces to burn it and make it disappear forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: Book burning, this is a big totalitarian thing, whenever you see things in the real world where people are trying to ban or destroy books, it's because they are trying to rewrite history
[SPEAKER_00]: The book shoot is a actual, well, living sort of embodiment of this.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not just like a hole in the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are a robot that actively destroys anything that doesn't match what should be considered truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm putting that shit in a nice little hand quote.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm saying it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's not just the only part here.
[SPEAKER_00]: you find it in house 101.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the book, room 101 is the final torture chamber where they break your spirit by using your absolute worst fears.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the book's case, a cage of rats locked onto your face.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which reminds me of...
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the bees, not the bees, but rats instead.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, some of you are going to get that reference.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the robot jokes about putting a re-indoctrination module on you, involving a cage and rats.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, it's dark and it's supposed to be kind of funny, it's a satire.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's one of those, like, if you've read the books, you get the reference moments.
[SPEAKER_00]: It absolutely is a reference to 1984.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there you go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Other references and other games other than Fallout 3, but that's what we're going to start.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know this is a format that's a little bit odd, but it's kind of fun because it takes us on this adventure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now there is a meta layer to all of this, which I find kind of hilarious.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first entry we're looking at is 1984.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the only one we're going to have time on this episode four because we're going to dig into a boy in his dog on the next episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: So getting ready for that pretty dark stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that
[SPEAKER_00]: I am investigating what this one specific wiki says about these different references, and the very first one on here is about defining truth and reality through information and words that change people's perspectives of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in this case, we discovered that the
[SPEAKER_00]: it is something that seems to have been made up whole cloth now I might get some one of you guys might dig into this and go well actually if you if you look through if you go back in the game and you dig through the files or something like that that reference is there it just wasn't referenced in the terminal stuff that you can see or maybe maybe I messed up maybe you have to do a thing that unlocks another entry in the terminal and I didn't see it but I haven't found any evidence for any of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But who knows?
[SPEAKER_00]: I could be wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's the point.
[SPEAKER_00]: The point here is that when we are presented information that feels contrary to our perspective of reality, it makes us question ourselves, it makes us question reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you do this enough, then eventually you start to believe the new speak.
[SPEAKER_00]: You start to believe the propaganda.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like somebody involved 92, you start to go crazy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what I'm actually uncovering here is now I don't think this is intentional but it's an example of how if you get the information wrong or you just convey something you want other people to believe and it gets repeated enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: It starts to feel like reality because most people don't go back and check the source.
[SPEAKER_00]: The more you tell people with confidence that something is real or something is not real, the more they start to believe you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the more people who repeat those same things, the more it gets believed and eventually you end up with something like this that just gets replicated across the internet and comradeshing is not watching you.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not even a reference.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it I don't know it's he's it's funny because he's part of this communist thing but the commune I mean guess the communists were watching people but there really isn't that same sense around them that they I guess you could say they were like big brother to their own people they probably were it's fallout
[SPEAKER_00]: But it feels kind of like a stretch, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like wouldn't it have made more sense to make this up and say it was the overseers terminal that said that for Vault 92 or some other overseer, then Comred Changs just hanging out in 10 penny tower, doing his thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: viewing propaganda, but he's not watching every.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has no power.
[SPEAKER_00]: How would he be watching everyone that doesn't make sense, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So there you go.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's our first entry.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to bounce back and forth between this thing that I'm doing here and the prewar businesses.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we'll get back to that on a future episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when we pick back up on this, it'll be a boy in his dog, which is a movie we talked about before.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then after that, the band AC DC.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah,
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was a long one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of these are not going to be as long as this one.
[SPEAKER_00]: But hey, we're going to take quick break.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I'm going to go think our patrons.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will be right back.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you have any questions about Nucleworld, I'd be delighted to answer them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks again for being here, and if you enjoy the show, if you want to support what I'm doing with this show and do you want to keep it going, then I would really appreciate your support on patreon.com slash fallout lork as the like Joel C and Fox 345 who signed up recently.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's going to do it for this week.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll be back next week with some more pre-war businesses, most likely, unless I get some other crazy idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and until then,
[SPEAKER_00]: Stay safe out there, and if you hear the line sanity is not statistical, you might be in Vault 92, you might want to get that checked out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could be a problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, I'll see you next time.
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