I played a lot of (too much of?) #Fallout 3 and NEW VEGAS from the late aughts through the early 2010s but it’s only on seeing the TV series and replaying FNV that I realized: hey, the worst bastards in the setting are all revanchists, accelerationists, or revanchist accelerationists.
I think it’s because the TV series really hammers the point home in a way that the games maybe don’t, even though it’s a strong through line in the series.
Like, “Vault-Tec and its corporate partners made sure the Great War would happen and implemented a long-term plan to rebuild the world according to their wishes” means the war itself, and all the shit Vault-Tec did/does, were part of an accelerationist project.
But even leaving that out, the Enclave, a lot of the Brotherhood of Steel, Robert House (in FNV), Caesar (oh boy, Caesar), and the Master are all engaged in their own accelerationist/revanchist projects.
Oh, and the main antagonist from the DEAD MONEY DLC, who was so bad his own revanchist-slash-accelerationist curious faction kicked him out.
While, e.g., the Enclave and Robert House are just working on long-term accelerationist projects in which the Great War was the Big Event, Caesar and the DEAD MONEY antagonist want to BE the Big Event, in different ways.
Like, even living in a world that’s evidence of how Accelerationism Doesn’t Work, these assholes think they can make it work.
Also actual working communities and societies that have arisen in the 200 years after the Great War are things to be at best ignored, or at worst destroyed, by the #fallout antagonists.
E.g., there’s a thriving collectivist community in Westside Vegas: Robert House doesn’t care about it, just the part he controls (and established by exiling many of the people who already lived there).
Caesar is a little more complicated but when you boil it down he’s just a textbook fascist.
Actually he and the Legion are, IMO, inspired by Nathan Holn and the Holnist survivalists (neo-feudalist fascists) in THE POSTMAN, which seems to be one of #fallout’s major influences, but that’s a whole other discussion.
But to sum up, to the extent that I can: #fallout isn’t about the dangers of nuclear war or the fundamentally terrible nature of humanity, really.
It’s about how you shouldn’t trust any motherfucker talking about “wiping the slate clean” or “rebuilding society” or with utopian visions that require killing a bunch of people.