I have long been a fan of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. I recall first watching my best friend wander the D.C. Wasteland and the gory mess of a mole rat's head being shot off. I was captivated by the expansive desolation and his sense of familiarity, as a former D.C. resident, with various dilapidated monuments.
When New Vegas came out, I was excited to begin my own journey through the post-apocalyptic setting, which turned into a solid eight hours of conversation and roaming a rodent and insect infested desert landscape. Tracing the damaged roads through semi-inhabited townships, I relished the unknown around each corner, temporarily buffered from the game's ability to become a mundane practice in killing.
Many times have I returned to wander the wastes of Fallout. As a black man (Cecil), as a white woman (Mary), as an avatar of myself. I have awoken from nightmares where I relived the never-ending hell of gunfire and the green-brown skin of Super Mutants lit up by the neon light of the Pip Boy in the dark labyrinthine hallways of Our Lady of Hope Hospital. I return to flee from enemies and scrounge through devastation for spare caps, stimpacks, or ammo. I roam, bleary eyed, for hours on end through the Wasteland.
But recently, I've wondered about Fallout and the vision it presents of life after nuclear war. Interrogating the political imagination of the game has lead me to ask about the forms of communal life it valorizes and what it relegates to the boundaries of human-ness. In order to better understand this text, I turned to the work of others, not only essays on Fallout but on visions of the post-apocalypse. Inevitably, this research encouraged me to reconsider my initial questions.
What was I interested in? Fallout? Nuclear war? Visions of the end of humanity? A latent impulse toward visions of complete destruction as a testament to the how deeply entrenched the reification of capital is and how difficult it is to imagine a functional world after capital? I did not anticipate that the initial thread I had tried to follow would be connected to a sweater still in the process of being made.
The title of blog suggests a temporary answer to the question: I am interested in visions of life after the "end." How video games, novels, short stories, etc. have depicted human life after catastrophe; what political, social and cultural structures texts have envisioned as being created or sustained after large scale destruction. I hope to use the space of this blog as a repository for musings, whether those be summaries of articles or stories or simply pontifications.
My hope is that this blog will be capable of demonstrating what "visions after the end" tell us about the conditions of our pre-apocalyptic lives.
When New Vegas came out, I was excited to begin my own journey through the post-apocalyptic setting, which turned into a solid eight hours of conversation and roaming a rodent and insect infested desert landscape. Tracing the damaged roads through semi-inhabited townships, I relished the unknown around each corner, temporarily buffered from the game's ability to become a mundane practice in killing.
Many times have I returned to wander the wastes of Fallout. As a black man (Cecil), as a white woman (Mary), as an avatar of myself. I have awoken from nightmares where I relived the never-ending hell of gunfire and the green-brown skin of Super Mutants lit up by the neon light of the Pip Boy in the dark labyrinthine hallways of Our Lady of Hope Hospital. I return to flee from enemies and scrounge through devastation for spare caps, stimpacks, or ammo. I roam, bleary eyed, for hours on end through the Wasteland.
But recently, I've wondered about Fallout and the vision it presents of life after nuclear war. Interrogating the political imagination of the game has lead me to ask about the forms of communal life it valorizes and what it relegates to the boundaries of human-ness. In order to better understand this text, I turned to the work of others, not only essays on Fallout but on visions of the post-apocalypse. Inevitably, this research encouraged me to reconsider my initial questions.
What was I interested in? Fallout? Nuclear war? Visions of the end of humanity? A latent impulse toward visions of complete destruction as a testament to the how deeply entrenched the reification of capital is and how difficult it is to imagine a functional world after capital? I did not anticipate that the initial thread I had tried to follow would be connected to a sweater still in the process of being made.
The title of blog suggests a temporary answer to the question: I am interested in visions of life after the "end." How video games, novels, short stories, etc. have depicted human life after catastrophe; what political, social and cultural structures texts have envisioned as being created or sustained after large scale destruction. I hope to use the space of this blog as a repository for musings, whether those be summaries of articles or stories or simply pontifications.
My hope is that this blog will be capable of demonstrating what "visions after the end" tell us about the conditions of our pre-apocalyptic lives.
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