Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Worship the Bomb

Ever since that famous scene in Planet of the Apes with the temple dedicated to an unexploded nuclear missile, I’ve been fascinated with the concept of post-apocalyptic theology. The duality of simultaneously worshiping death and finding ways to validate the lives of those who continue to survive takes on a very literal dynamic in these stories and it allows for some unique and fascinating narrative possibilities. While numerous classic geek works from Tank Girl to Adventure Time examine this in one way or another, I have long been particularly fascinated by the Children of Atom from Fallout. Granted, with the amount of time I’ve spent playing Fallout games, I know more about their beliefs than I do many real-life religions, but something about the Children of Atom hits right at the issue of what our artistic musings about post-apocalyptic religion really say about us as a culture.

Top: Warboys pray at the altar of V8 in Mad Max: Fury Road. Bottom: High Confessor Tektus leads the Children of Atom in praying to a nuclear submarine in Fallout 4.

While we don’t know what a post-apocalyptic religion would actually look like, we have real-life cults with apocalyptic visions that share some commonalities. We also have real-life mainstream religions that reference apocalyptic events. Large-scale death and destruction are a historical part of most major religions, in some cases as an allegorical component to the philosophy and in some cases as a literal part of the religion’s history, often both. Many of these stories are given apocalyptic qualities in their retelling. But “fictional anthropologies” of future religions are incredibly revealing and deeply fascinating. From the various “mini culture” city-states deifying gasoline and automobiles in the wastes of Mad Max’s Australia, to a monk guarding the knowledge of the past in Canticle for Leibowitz, to a tribe worshiping the power of the Ringworld engineers’ long abandoned buildings, there are some common themes among our favorite works in this sub-genre that are worth exploring. To me, the Church of Atom is an arguably perfect example of those themes, so I have chosen to focus mainly on them throughout this post.

Discriminating against the Body Electric: Fallout’s Synths as a Metaphor for Institutionalized Racism

I’ve been a huge Fallout fan for almost two decades now, reveling not only in its lore and gameplay but also its humorous yet (usually) thoughtful treatment of social issues. The post-apocalyptic genre lends itself to this in a unique way. By incorporating sci-fi and fantasy elements, these stories can deal with fairly abstract concepts. By grounding their narratives in a world steeped in dirt, decay, and the conflict between the social contract and raw survival, the best examples of the genre are often able to address these issues in an accessible (and fun) manner.

If you’ve somehow managed to avoid playing/watching/reading about Fallout 4, here’s a bit of background before we dive in. Set in the post-apocalyptic ruins of Boston in the year 2287, the story of Fallout 4 revolves heavily around synths. Synths are synthetic people, made from human DNA, indistinguishable from humans, and created to serve as a labor class for the manipulative and technologically advanced Institute. They are inspired by, if not directly based on, Blade Runner’s replicants. In one way or another, all the major factions involved in the game’s central plot have an interest in what the synths represent and what is to become of them.

A generation 3 synth in production

On the surface, the parallels to western slavery are pretty clear. The synths are a race of people viewed as “human-like” by their masters and used as free labor to maintain the status quo for a leisure class. They are given virtually no rights and are seen as little more than machines. While their masters take pains to prevent them from being killed or seriously harmed, this is mostly due to the expense involved in replacing them rather than any real concern for their well-being. There is also an underground group seeking to liberate them. This group calls itself the Railroad and is a direct reference to the real-life Underground Railroad, being referred to as such even within the world of the game.

The idea that synths are meant to represent slavery as a human institution was clear to me from the get-go. But in addition to this central metaphor, the treatment of synths and their place in the game’s civilization goes much deeper. There are parallels to infamous examples of racial and cultural discrimination throughout human history, as well as constant remarks by NPCs that the synths are infiltrating their communities and plotting terrible things. Fear that a synth might be living next door, might kill you in your sleep, and might poison the town’s drinking water is a near constant. While some of this is certainly due to the shadowy operations of their human masters, the synth race has become synonymous with deceit, violence, and threats to civilization itself. Sound familiar? This demonization and scapegoating of an entire class of people is common to most examples of real-life discrimination, and synths are a consistent metaphor for that in Fallout 4.

Crawl Out Through the Fallout: How Fallout 4 Failed Their Female Characters

Over the holidays I told myself I was going to finish Fallout 4. This didn’t happen for a variety of reasons, one of the most glaring ones being that despite how hype Bethesda made me for the game, it didn’t exactly live up to everything I felt was promised. These situations where a game is just so utterly in the middle are frustrating. It’s not that the game was bad, and I did have fun playing it, yet ultimately it was like plain sponge cake: good for a while, but not interesting enough to keep me coming back for more. I know I’m not the only one who feels like this—lord knows there are only so many Minutemen missions you can do before you avoid getting in Preston’s dialogue radius. However, where some people are on the side of criticizing the game’s awkward building system, or the combat system, I’m more in the group that thinks the writing is what kept this game from being great. There are lots of things I could critique about it, but one of the things that struck me the most was how uneven the narrative power (and even in-game social power) between the women and men was.

Spoilers for Fallout 4 under the cut.

Fanfiction Fridays: Fio, Fieri, Factus by oneshycrow

So, being completely honest here, I’ve been playing Splatoon pretty obsessively all week. As such, I was considering just not doing this Fanfiction Fridays and playing more, but I’m pretty sure all the authors would kill me. Or at least give me the worst looks, and I can’t stand to be looked at with anything less than devotion and reverence. Since I wasn’t really into reading fic on the inner turmoil of being both a squid and a kid, I decided to look toward another game I’ve also been getting into: Fallout.

I must have made a wish on a lucky star to begin my Fallout journey preceding the Fallout 4 announcement in such a timely manner, but then again, not like the East Coast by way of Boston is going to do much for me when I’m getting destroyed by frying deathclaws in the Mojave. Soon after starting I knew New Vegas was going to be my installment of choice, what with its actually-gray morality, interesting story that starts off with the player getting shot in the head and killed, and brainwashing me by playing “Big Iron” by Marty Robbins five hundred times in a row. However, when faced between the two main groups—one which literally deals in slavery and the patriarchy, and the other on-the-surface only mildly corrupt and doing the best they can—it’s east to lose a sense of that gray morality. So, while I wouldn’t have guessed it going into things, today’s fic takes a very interesting look into the life of Caesar’s Legion (aforementioned slavers). It’s most interesting because it features a woman.

“Oh, he might have went on living, but he made one fatal slip: when he tried to match the stranger with the big iron on his hip. Big iron on his—” someone make it stop, please. I’m begging you.