Fallout is More Than Simply Okey-dokey: It’s The Millennial Reality

Fallout is a television series for the modern Millennial: stressed, exhausted, and still saying “Okey-dokey” as we try to keep a roof over our heads.

I love the Fallout video games. I started playing them with the release of Fallout 3, what seems like a lifetime ago. Now, with the release of the Fallout TV series on Amazon Prime, the fandom has been revitalized, and I’ve found myself snorkeling happily through the ocean of great fan-art that’s started to emerge.

Fallout is an alternate-future vision of Earth, where the dream of transportable fusion power was realized in the 1950s. But, after decades of Cold War and increasingly terrifying pressure from capitalist America, war ignited and brought nuclear fire down upon the land. While many found ways to survive the apocalypse, none are so iconic in Fallout as the “vault dwellers,” those descendants of the wealthy and privileged who were sequestered in underground corporate “vaults.”

In most of the Fallout tales, vault-dwellers take on the central role, as they emerge hundreds of years after the nuclear holocaust and discover a wasteland brimming with mutated, radioactive life, and strange communities of people struggling to survive…