Amazon’s All-Episode Fallout Drop Was Smart To Negate Haters

There’s no doubt Amazon has done a commendable job adapting Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic Fallout franchise for the small screen – which, on paper, is a hard feat to achieve considering the zany tone. Despite the show as a whole lacking that personal spark for me, the eight-episode series captured the Atom Punk aesthetic to create an authentic wastelander’s dream, filled with the somewhat brainwashed Vault Dwellers, the ruthless Ghouls, and, of course, the radioactive creatures to keep the adventure from being anything but canned peaches and marmalade.

One odd by Amazon was the decision to drop every episode at once. While this satisfied the binge culture we’ve become accustomed to in recent years, it did stand out as strange for the platform, differing from its traditional drip feed of weekly installments seen with the Jack Ryan series to The Rings of Power, The Wheel of Time, and more. Exploring this change in tactics, there’s one reason why Amazon and Bethesda respectively decided to air the adaptation in its entirety – and it concerns the haters.

Gatekeepers Are The Real Ghouls

Despite being a head-scratching idea, it’s become incredibly popular for so-called “fans” of a franchise to gatekeep the material in question after an adaptation releases – for reasons unknown. Did One Piece fans believe they were protecting Eiichiro Oda’s sacred material from the lesser Netflix subscribers and uninitiated manga readers? Or did The Last of Us’ aggravated fans think they were superior to HBO viewers because they were in the know about plot details? There’s no right or wrong way to discover and digest a pop culture project. It’s out there for everyone, often in more than one form, and this rising animosity towards new fans, targeting video games in particular, is ridiculous.

The mentality goes: They didn’t earn the right to become fans, they weren’t there from the beginning, and they didn’t put in the work throughout the games. Therefore, they’re not worthy of enjoying the material and are considered backdoor fans. Additionally and unfortunately, some gatekeepers exist in the Fallout player pool who tried to tarnish Amazon’s adaptation through “rage bait” on social media, which came as a surprise to no one including Amazon and Bethesda.

Fallout followers partial to the New Vegas spin-off story went out of their way to accuse the series of retconning the ending regarding who started the Great War, Mister House, and the Hoover Dam plotline. The adaptation certainly crafts its path through Fallout’s history, with New Vegas narratives being touched upon here and there, but since several threads in the franchise’s lore remain open-ended and up for debate, it’s hard to highlight the canon throughline in some unanswered areas. A majority of Fallout fans were more than happy to see Graham Wagner, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and the team pen a somewhat original record of events under Bethesda’s supervision, and both companies likely predicted the backlash this deviating storyline would spew up.

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Amazon’s Premeditated Race Against The Haters

It’s reasonable to see the streaming service’s all-episode drop as a smart, premeditated strategy to hook novices before the haters and gatekeepers burrowed a way into their psyches to besmirch the show. A weekly release would have given around two months’ worth of time for baiters to throw whatever misinformation they could at the series before newcomers had a chance to see the show – as many would have waited until all episodes were available before binge-watching.

By releasing the eight installments at once, everyone had the same amount of time to consume the material and marinate their verdict (though some go faster than others). As it turns out, the show garnered mostly positive reactions from newcomers and veterans alike, claiming the opening seven minutes were perfect, and has already been green-lit for season 2.

I don’t know who started the trend of attacking a new project with review bombs, sometimes even before its debut, but it’s a phase that needs to get nuked fast. Gatekeepers could also do with a RadAway to rid some of that negativity and encourage the vault door to be opened to interested wanderers who now have Fallout at the top of their list to play – a possible gateway to other post-apocalyptic games. The great thing about adaptations and video games in general is you can freely love them or hate them, and instead of verbally berating someone for their opinion, be like Cooper Howard and keep your nose out of it.

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