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A reminder of the rules of Fridge Brilliance:

This is a personal moment for the viewer, so every example is signed by the contributor. If you start off with "This Troper", really, you have no excuse. We're going to hit you on the head.

This revelation can come from anywhere, even from this very page.

Also, this page is of a generally positive nature, and a Fridge Brilliance does not have to be Word Of God. In fact, it usually isn't, and the viewer might be putting more thought into it than the creator ever did. This is not a place for personal commentary on another's remark or arguing without adding a Fridge Brilliance comment of your own.

Click here to return to the video game Fridge Brilliance page.

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The Fallout Universe

• I always wondered why the world of Fallout was stuck in the 50s. And then it hit me: This is a world that runs by 50s science. It's not stuck in the 50s, it practically IS the 50s! - gumbal1
• The Brotherhood of steel are essentially communist, and the Enclave are the remnants of the old Pre-war Government. I'll let that one sink in.
  • How on earth is the Brotherhood Communist? Their philosophy is to keep advance technology from falling into the hands of others and extreme isolationism. In no part does it involve anything about the equal distribution of wealth or creating a classless society.
• That the vaults weren't ever meant save anyone they were meant to test different forms long term space travel.Think about it the Enclave's original plan was to colonize another planet. Think about different experiments used for the vaults
• I just had one while reading this page. Above there's constant mentioning of the 50's and the Cold War fears. That made me realize that Fallout is basically a combination of what the future was to people in the 50s (ray guns and cheesy-looking robots) and their greatest fears (a nuclear holocaust). The weapons changed to meet the expectation of the future while many of the appliances (radios, soda machines, refrigerators) stayed the same as in the mid to late 50s. We're playing the same thing that was Nightmare Fuel for someone living in the Cold War.
• It seems kind of strange that Unarmed would be governed by Endurance instead of Strength, like Melee is. However, having a higher Damage Threshold (which is also tied to Endurance) means that the impact would be less likely to cause damage to the puncher himself, so it's an interesting example of a Required Secondary Power.
• The back story says that in the years leading up to the war, all the fossil fuels on earth where used up, and the subsequent collapse of global ecomonies and the scramble for resources was one of the driving factors behind the war. This explains a lot about the setting. Why are cars nuclear powered? No oil for fuel. Why is everything glass and metal? Because you can't make plastics without oil.
• Radiation isn't what caused the mutation. The FEV got out durring the war and infected humans and animals. The mutations blamed on radiation (Ghoulism for example) was either the result of the indivual either adapting to lethal levels of radiation with help of the FEV, of the FEV itself mutating with exposure to radiation.
  • Contradicted by the authors. The Fallout universe works on 50s SCIENCE! and mutations that are not said to be the work of FEV are caued by radiation, including ghouls (with the single exception of Harold.

Fallout 1&2

• • When the Overseer banished you, I have thought "Damn the overseer", but when you realize that in the sequel, he knew about the experiments and Enclave. He knew you can't stay here since you will be at risk of being captured by the Enclave eventually so he sends you off north to hide from the Enclave hoping that at least one of them made it out alive. Your tribe did...for a while.
    • Let's re-bastard him for a bit. He knew about the experiments and the Enclave. He knew they needed the Vault citizens as a control group; but also needed some Vault stock to leave, settle down, and generally be able to be abducted by the Enclave otherwise 13's experiment would fail. The Overseer set you up. Ignoring FO 2's Guardian of Forever encounter (Which, given FO 2's general tone, is probably a non-canon joke anyway), you have to wonder how much of FO 1's plot was a set up. You have to wonder if the Water Chip failure was accidental or intentional on behalf of the Overseer. If it weren't for the existence of the the Master and the Military Base, how likely would it have been that the Vault Dweller would have been exiled soon afterwards for some spurious reason? The exile was planned, the resulting mutiny by some of the other Dwellers was planned, Arroyo was planned. Everything happened because the Enclave required it, and the Overseer was a bastard for letting it happen.
    • Correction: a)the Enclave didn't have a special need for Vault 13's unmutated population before they started experimenting with FEV between the games. b) Vault 13 was intended to be sealed and undisturbed for 200 years to research long-term isolation (kind of important data when planning non-FTL space travel). Thus putting the Vault in a situation where the Overseer had to open the Vault door prematurately under extremely stressful climate would be unbeneficial and indeed the situation led to Dwellers revolting against him and freeing themselves from the Vault experiment. the Overseer is still a bastard for not letting people go because Enclave wouldn't like it, though. There is till some Brilliance to it: Overseer wasn't completely full of shit when he said that encouragement to leave the Vault would result in much misery. Attempting to live off dead, irradiated land didn't exactly fare well for Arroyo.
• Listin to "Maybe" again. Pay attention to the lyrics. They could possibly be interpreted as being about The Overseer forcing you to leave Vault 13.
  • "I Don't Want To Set The World On Fire" was the first choice for the music in Fallout 1. However, Interplay couldn't afford the rights to that song, and the developers settled on "Maybe."
• If you decide to join The Master in Fallout, you are treated to a the bad ending, part of which involves The Vault Dweller struggling and writhing in desperation before being dipped in the vat of FEV, contrasting the consensual nature of your turning. What occurred to me was that The Master possesses psychic powers, which may possibly extend to mind control. Therefore, an explanation could be that in the presence of The Master, The Vault Dweller's mental defences were briefly overwhelmed, allowing The Master to manipulate him/her into joining him, and later, before being dipped, the Dweller had come to their senses and were resisting, though a tad too late, leading to the unnecessary massacre of Vault 13 and all of its inhabitants.
• The Vault Dweller in Fallout 1 went in the only direction that did not have fresh water. If he went north, he would have hit Vault City with it's spare water chips, If he went east, he would have hit the Mojave and Lake Mead, which was untouched by the nukes. Instead he went south... -SYLOH
• Rhombus, despite given a voice and talking head, seems to be a pretty minor character in the first Fallout. He has little to say outside of effectively telling you to shut and leave, and contributes to no quests. It's generally better to not speak to him at all, lest you anger him. However, he is the one factor in the game that determines the future of the Brotherhood of Steel. If he dies, then the ending reveals that the Brotherhood goes on to conquer the wasteland. But if lives, he takes over as the next High Elder, and continues the organization's isolationism. Therefore, we can credit Rhombus for being the one most responsible for making the Brotherhood's isolationist policy as extreme as it was by the time Fallout: New Vegas rolls around. -Exotrix

Fallout 3

• In the opening scene of Fallout 3, with the nuclear devastation, and that opening song involving not wanting to set the world on fire, and only wanting to start a fire in your lover's heart. Now compare that to John Henry Eden, who speaks of his country that he loves so much, even referring to it as his "dear, sweet America," and who says he wants to reach out into you, the listener's, heart. Now, remember that Eden is an amalgam of the personalities of dozens of Presidents, including the warmongering ones who triggered the nuclear war with China. And note Eden's long-term goals. They may not have wanted to set the world on fire, but....
• You do the tutorials in Vault 101.
• John Henry Eden talks with a Virginian accent. Virgina was the home state to more presidents then any other.
  • One could argue that Eden is doing Northern Virginia, but even that is a Mid-Atlantic accent without more "Southern" inflections. Eden's speaking mostly like Fake American Malcolm McDowell with a generic folksy Southern twang and a few other inflections, without Northern Virginian patois or a Deep Southern drawl. This is especially notable compared to other areas of Virginia, such as Appalachia, Richmond or Rural Virginia (which have very different accents that are drastically different from each other as well as the north), as is the realization that Eden claims to be a good ol' boy from Kentucky and definitely does not have that accent.
• In many reviews of the game I had read, snarky attention seemed to be paid to the fact that so much of the Capital Wasteland was still standing and often relatively unmolested after a nuclear conflict and 200 years of exposure. At first I was inclined to agree, but then I thought of the cultural divergence between the Fallout universe and ours. Society seemed stuck in a perpetual and idealized version of the 50's from what seemed to be post-World War II up until 2077. That's over a century of Cold War paranoia, which means that society had been nuke-proofing everything up until the Great War. Along with whatever technological advances afforded the process, of course things like large buildings, power generators, and the like would still be standing; they were built to last. --Big Wheel
  • But it's inconsistent with previous lore. The West Tek Research Facility in Fallout 1, a high tech research facility, was hit by a direct nuclear blast and the surface structures were completely gone, leaving a giant hole in the ground. Los Angeles is called Boneyard because the buildings have been blasted apart so much that only the metal "bones" of skyscrapers remain.
  • All the bulidings in DC are made with reinforced concrete, why is that important? Buildings made of reinforced concrete remained standing at ground zero of both hiroshima and nagasaki. Skyscrapers aren't built like that, and have a lot more surface area for the blast wave to impact. Each building would also shield the building behind it progressively lessing the damage.
    • The problem there is that not only were there nuclear bombs to contend with, but there is also over 200 years of weathering and no maintenance, with an on-going war between Super Mutants and everyone else during that time. Many concrete buildings, even reinforced ones, are only built to withstand a relatively short amount of time (nuclear reactors are only built with about a century of stability, for instance). While major buildings like say, the CN Tower, are often built with longevity in mind, smaller, less important buildings would fall over and wither away.
• I heard complaints about how in Fallout 3 somehow everyone is surviving off of 200 year old food, but I picked up a package of fancy lad's snack cakes one day and realized- They're twinkies! Everyone is eating tv dinners and junk food stuffed full of so many preservatives they could last for 200 years. Which makes me wonder, just what are "Dandy Boy Apples?" - Rantingdude
  • Preservatives in real life only work so well. Even twinkies go stale in a few weeks and become inedible shortly after that. So this remains a wild inaccuracy placed largely for atmospheric reasons.
• My Fridge Brilliance for that is similar, because I wondered why there were so much food in cans and packets, all instant and stuff. Then I realised: in the Fifties, people ate basically no fresh food, because preserved food was all New and Sciency. This is thus the perfect explanation for why there's so much food around. - Air Of Mystery
  • I thought it was because all the organic stuff has rotten away or been eaten already.
• Actually, there's an even better Frigde Brilliance for the food. The radiation in the game is not real radiation, but the radiation depicted in 50's fiction, the kind that can mutate people to have superpowers, animals to grow larger... and preserve food! The radiation keeps the food from spoiling.
  • Radiation is used to remove bacteria in a fashion similar to pasturization; it does nothing to slow the breakdown and denaturization of proteins and so on, to say nothing for the growth of new bacteria after the cleansing.
    • In the real world, yes, you are right - but in the Fallout world of 50s SCIENCE!, things are different,
• When I came across the giant fire ants, I stood back and shot them to death because I knew they'd shoot fire at me because of the name. It wasn't until much later I realised that the name wasn't meant to indicate they shot fire, but that they were literally a giant version of fire ants, and their shooting of fire had nothing to do with their name. When I heard stories of people getting killed by the flames because they pulled out a baseball bat or something and tried to smack them in the head, the brilliance struck me.
• Some Fridge Horror for me: I was exploring the world at my leisure, and stumbled across a wrecked, abandoned farmstead. I read through the logs and got some warm fuzzy feelings about how people are still thriving in the post-apocalyptic world. Reading the last log, I figured they got spooked by some raiders and decided to up and leave. It wasn't until I went to get a snack that it hit me - On my way to the farmstead, I had just passed through an area called the Grisly Diner, a raider-occupied, trapped diner, complete with seemingly freshly-cut bits of bodies hanging from chains. Oh Crap. -Chaz GELF
• Some people complained about the stereotypical 'little green men' aliens (Mothership Zeta DLC), and their equally stereotypical technology. I was inclined to complain with them...until I realised something. Fallout is set in a fifties stasis. And back in the fifties, that's what people thought aliens were like, so their design is keeping in perfectly with the setting!
• The Pitt is quite possibly the single most unliveable place in the Fallout universe - And that's saying something. Why is this? In the 50s, Pittsburg was so polluted, and the smog so thick, it was not uncommon to have streetlights on during the day. It's since improved in the real world, but Fallout's never advanced culturally past the 50s. The air and environment of the city continuously got worse until the day the bombs hit... It may have degenerated further with radiation, but Pittsburg was almost entirely unliveable to start with.
  • Or that smog actually shielded the place somehow like an aerosolized version of a lead blanket. Sure civilization crumbled and everything went to hell soon after the bomb but its telling that the city itself is still there and that people WERE there even before the BOS moved through and "cleansed" the area.
• Similar to "Maybe" in Fallout 1 as stated above in this page, listen to "Way Back Home's" lyrics. Fitting to the Lone Wanderer's banishment from Vault 101, his former home, after either peacefully and violently fixing the chaos.
• The first time I played Fallout 3, I got a little annoyed that President Eden's plan was to release FEV to exterminate the mutated inhabitants of the Wasteland, when President Richardson's plan in Fallout 2 was... to release FEV to exterminate the mutated inhabitants of the Wasteland. Lazy writing, I thought. Then I realised, Eden is a computer, who contains all the records of the presidents of the US, from Washington to Richardson, he would have known all about Richardson's plan, and being a computer, completely lacking in imagination. It's not lazy writing to have him apeing Richardson's idea, it's positively brilliant.
  • This also comes down an assessment of the way reactionary and xenophobic cultures such as what the US turned into in the Fallout universe, and the Enclave fully embodied. They are themselves often unimaginative, rehashing the same ideas over and over, because they often can't allow change in themselves as much as they can't tolerate change around them. And after all, the first FEV extermination plan only failed because of one tribal they never could have planned on. How likely is that to happen a second time? -KZadBhat

Fallout New Vegas

• Likewise the opening song for New Vegas (Frank Sinatra's Blue Moon) was how Victor saved you from certain death. Since in an uncaring wasteland where your death will just be another casualty. It was really rare to see someone save you from certain death. Very meaningful indeed.
• Always wondered why both Arcade and Veronica were Invisible to Gaydar and then I realized it was rather symbolic, both were part of the remnants of what's left of civilization and that with them swinging the other way, it was effectively the end of the Enclave and Brotherhood and the fact that the people related to it are slowly but surely dying out
  • Unfortunate Implications, much?
• Also, in a similar vein as the post above: think about the cover for a second. The first Fallout game that didn't have a suit of power armor on it's cover, but an NCR Ranger. Even though Power Armor as a symbol for old-world technology still is powerful, it gets replaced after 200 years with the symbols of the new world, just like the factions tied strongly to the old world get exchanged with new structures.
  • Oh, no. The NCR Ranger outfit is still old world tech, it's just being used by a different faction, just like with the Brotherhood's Power Armor. Go play Honest Hearts (focus on the subplot featuring that old survivalist who fled to Zion after the bombs fell) and Lonesome Road. There's plenty of evidence of military-grade armor that is exactly like NCR Ranger equipment.
• The Vaults play only a minor role in the game, but the game has to start you out with a Vault Jumpsuit anyway for consistency's sake. But why Vault 21? 21=7*3. 777. JACKPOT.
  • Also, 21 is blackjack
  • Actually, Doc Mitchell gives you the Vault 21 jumpsuit and Pip Boy after he patches you up. It's Vault 21 since he came from Vault 21 (You can ask Sarah about it). But the reason that Vault 21 is the one that was placed in Vegas and had a gambling experiment probably is because of those reasons.