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Is there an official backstory for the Fallout world?


stebbinsd

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for a second there I was going to argue but then I thought about it, apparently oxymoron refers to the appearance of contradiction, not requiring an actual one
zeerust is best described as what people 50 years ago thought up for the future in earnest, would be 20 years ago, today

a variety of (80's) movies set in the early 2000's or 2010's that were "in the future" count as this as well as 1970's ones
perhaps something like a clockwork orange doesn't, can't remember when it's set, but it's not really trying to be "futuristic" so much as tell about a society in the future, although some of its more odd and foreign aesthetics could be considered potentially this, one also notes that because of the emphasis on societal/social aspects, that it's more a reference to a change in cultural preferences, and similarly the dated cars and so on could simply be used as convenience due to the obvious impossibility of inventing a new car that's actually from the future (our present) back then, since such a thing would be from then, not now - then

Edited by tartarsauce2
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yeah the term that means an advanced future with old tech is Retrofuturism... which is what Fallout is supposed to be. zeerust (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zeerust) is the "Datedness of something originally intended to seem futuristic" which would be early Star Trek and Back to the Future.

 

Can I just say, "retrofuturism" is an oxymoron if I ever saw one.

 

Oh well, different words for basically the same thing. *shrug*

 

eh they arent often used as in the case of a story line you will never hear a Retro-futuristic world refer to itself as one nor would you hear a zeerust one do the same. also most zeerust worlds were never intended to be a zeerust one. most scifi is destined to become zeerust in time.

 

I would argue that zeerust is an aesthetic (though only in retrospect) and retrofuturism is the artistic choice to invoke it. I don't think there is any practical difference in the actual results.

The definition of both makes them quite different. Zeerust means something that is supposed to be high tech and futuristic but isnt. For example a phone with a cord on a spceship.

 

Retrofuturistic is not an oxymoron (a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction) though i can see the misunderstanding based on the definition of oxymoron.

 

There is a very strong difference between the two. One is not intentional and can look like a lot of things (early star trek is zeerust not Retrofuturistic) where as Retrofuturistic is intentionally supposed to look like the 50s - 80s eras and being in the future with "advanced technology".... Why are we discussing this... These are words that dont even matter that much.

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retrofuturistic IS an oxymoron because the definition merely states that it is the appearance of contradiction, which means if someone thinks it's contradictory then it's possibly an oxymoron, and if there's a general consensus that there's something to the idea even if it's not correct, then it's an oxymoron
the relative ease of mistaking it as that is what drives the term's legitimacy

not the actual fact of it being that
I was about to say what you said but then I looked it up on a hunch

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retrofuturistic IS an oxymoron because the definition merely states that it is the appearance of contradiction, which means if someone thinks it's contradictory then it's possibly an oxymoron, and if there's a general consensus that there's something to the idea even if it's not correct, then it's an oxymoron

the relative ease of mistaking it as that is what drives the term's legitimacy

not the actual fact of it being that

I was about to say what you said but then I looked it up on a hunch

My bad then. I stand corrected... Can we get back on subbject though? This thread is about fallout lore not zeerust, Retrofuturistic, or oxymorons.

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