the fallout era

[metaphorset]

What is lore? (Baby, don't hurt me...) What is canon?

 

Are they facts? Nope. They might be regarded as facts based on what people know or believe at a given time. At one point, people all over Europe and America believed in witches on flying brooms, the Japanese believed that their souls are located in the shirikodama (lit. "small anus ball") and that it's dangerous to fall into rivers, lakes and ponds, because the Kappa will rip it out and then they die and in general, many people still believe in bearded men sitting on clouds as the creator of this world.

 

Even in times where written history is a common thing, people still have their folklore or lore and some of them regard them as facts. Apparently Hitler was an extremely bad painter who could only paint stick figures (he wasn't good in some aspects - like act painting, due to shame, but quite good in others - like architecture, otherwise he wouldn't have gotten an invitation to the entrance exam of the art academy at all), Napoleon was tiny man (based on the false transcription of French and British measurement systems - he was actually of average height) and Albert Einstein was extremely bad in school (based on the misconception that German and Swiss school grade systems are the same).

 

Lore and canon are facts until proven otherwise.

 

Whether in books, games, movies or tv shows, lore or canon can be bent and broken at any time, granted you do it right. And by "right", I mean "interesting and fitting" and not necessarily "logical". It's like the difference in detective stories, where you have very good ones and extremely bad ones. The good ones don't have to give you all the clues. They need to have red herrings and dead ends to be interesting. In the end, the murderer is always a figure you already met throughout the story, but most likely one you didn't suspect. The bad ones bring in a distant nephew from a foreign country right at the end, who didn't appear in the story so far at all.

 

Now, let's move on to how BGS treats lore and canon. Uncle Pete tweeted that he is "not interested in discussing how realistic things are in an alternate universe post-apoc game w/ talking mutants and ghouls". Take this and the fact that Emil Pagliarulo not only isn't quite the best but also one of way too few story tellers BGS employs and add their new strategy ("live services" said in a Jim-Sterling-esque voice) and you can answer that question very easily.

 

There is no end to the Fallout era until Bethesda (or their money givers) say so. The same goes for the TES era. As long as BGS makes money with their schtick, they are going to play it. Whether they keep shoehorning new events into the lore and the canon or by planing it more carefully, remains to be seen.

Edited May 15, 2019 by metaphorset