They already explained that Vault-Tec bombed the word, not China.
I saw people out in the wild cope about this detail i.e. "That's what they say they're gonna do, but it doesn't mean that's how it actually panned out!"
I wonder if they saw the complaints about that detail and so changed it to tether it more to the games, and they somehow landed on making Mr House the lynchpin behind the end of the world purely because he was a character from the series and he happened to be at that fucking awful meeting. It doesn't bear repeating because it's been said enough, but still, it cannot be overstated how fucking
retarded the idea of ending the world for "profit" is. You have to have a completely botched understanding of human beings to thing passing over a certain threshold of money just suddenly turned you retarded, insane, or just nonsensically evil.
"There's a lot of earning potential with the end of the world." Nigga,
what earnings? And why does it matter if the
end never comes, you made your bag, and what's more, you actually get to keep spending it! World ends? There's no consumers left to buy your non-existent shit! Production of goods and consumption of them would fall through the floor, assuming there's any means to produce left. I said in the post you replied to but the whole "king of the ashes" thing mostly applies to those with nothing, who end up destroying everything for a morsel of something. Most recent prominent example of such a character is Little Finger from Game of Thrones, though there's probably better examples. You wouldn't willingly or actively foster losing
everything you have just for what amounts to being a superficial despot over actual shit, and characters who destroy a lot to preserve little is usually because they only find value in
that thing. It'd make more sense for a parent to bring about nuclear annihilation to save their family, than for a billionaire to do to wind up with
less than what they had before. Even faggots IRL like Theil are just larping.
You can have that shadowy meeting of billionaires discussing the end of the world without it being retarded whilst still giving them an air of evil if absolutely necessary. In-lore I'm pretty sure everyone was being contracted by the US for some reason or other, so discussion between execs to not step on toes might've occurred, and eventually fearmongering and the war itself proved extremely lucrative for the companies so it was in their interests to prolong it and feed the public the desired sentiment to keep support for the war high. The meeting should've had a few voices of concern (House, Sinclair), just to give nuance to the fact they were at the precipice of bombs being dropped and it doesn't look like they'll be able to stop it; I use those two specifically because they both built/prepared for the end, and did so with the means to save
others besides just themselves, but I digress.
If I wrote the show but had to keep the beats, you could have that scene of the elites being selfish without shitting on House.
1. House predicts almost to the very hour when the bombs would drop (like he did in-game). He shares this info with the rest of the billionaire class so they can prepare accordingly. House can't personally save America but maybe through their combined efforts they might be able to save enough pockets of America so there's a world worth waking up to when the radiation clears. (In-line with his character IMO for the most part) He might get jeered or demurred by the others.
2. The needle drop scene to replace the old one is that Vault-Tek is already aware of when the bombs will drop, because they've been
told when it'll happen by the US gov themselves. House just made a prediction, but Vault-Tek were made privy to when the first nuke will get dropped by the
USA, so they have a deadline
. China drops theirs first though and early, making this knowledge useless in the game's context and House's prediction but still - needle drop for Goggin's character so we can more or less get the same exact scene in the show.
3. The meeting ends there so we don't see how the rest of the gathered react, and it doesn't matter anyway because it's retarded and only serves the purpose of making Goggins pissed off and disillusioned. Vault-Tek bad for being privy to this and not doing anything to stop it or spread awareness, billionaires also bad for doing the same thing. House still mentions his prediction in-game in this context because he was more correct than Vault-Tek and the US government, which strokes his ego.
The meeting is now moreso focused on the fact Vault-Tek knew the bombs would eventually get dropped and so were both preparing accordingly, all the while hoping to squeeze as much from everybody as they possibly could before sleeping through the worst of it or something, dangling the carrot of hope over a doomed population with the Vaults and receiving some assurances that the wealth they make in the here and now will still be retained once it's safe to re-surface.
I hate Communists so fucking much, man, it's unreal.
What's fucked is that the Enclave already exists as this cartoonishly evil big bad, and is even depicted as such in-show, so you can blame them for everything instead of the cliche "rich-man bad-man" that's been done a billion times before. If you wanted to be subversive, it's actually easier to make a scenario where Vault-Tek are the secret good guys (does require glazing Mr House more though); they do this by abusing government contracts to build as many vaults as humanly possible, often for absolutely retarded premises and experiments as forwarded to the government. Because they were operating off of House's prediction and beholden to the Enclave's orders, the directives meant to be sent out from Vault 0 or Vault 1 overriding the Overseer directives to conduct these experiments was never sent, so the experiments went ahead anyway as planned. It had to be done at the
exact right moment or else the US GOV/Enclave would've sent out a conflicting order preventing the vaults from actually sealing, killing everyone inside.
There, I've now written a piece of media that subverts expectations because the billionaire companies you would expect to be evil were actually intent on saving lives, but their attempt was tragically aborted by a slight miscalculation.
R.I.P Mr House.
Butchered by Bezos; cannibalised by commies.
2010 - 2025
