Not content with offering a captivating story that rightly has its place in the Fallout universe, the series has even canonized a theory very widespread among fans.
This theory focuses on Fallout’s iconic mascot, the Vault Boy. His thumbs up has indeed caused a lot of movement in the community. While this gesture was originally completely harmless, the Fallout series sent fans a sign of tolerance.
A thumbs up for the Fallout series
In 1997, Black Isle Studios and Interplay unwittingly launched a true video game monument with Fallout, the first of its kind on the PC. To represent this new outlandish post-apocalyptic freedom, a mascot was invented in the person of the Vault Boy. This little figure is as much the face of the franchise as it is of Vault-Tec, the American company to which we owe the famous fallout shelters scattered across the United States.
In most of the Vault Boy’s drawings, we can see him with a thumbs up, a wink, and a big Colgate smile on his face. Since Fallout is about a world devastated by a nuclear holocaust, this move was the subject of a theory that went viral among fans. It is said that the mascot holds his thumb up to ensure he is bigger than a mushroom cloud when off camera. This means that the smiling figure is far enough away from the explosion so as not to suffer too much from the radiation. But all along it was just a simple theory that was debunked by the game developers. This was true until the Fallout series was released on Prime Video on April 11th.
A theory that has been canonized by Prime Video’s Canon series
In the very first episode of the first season, we see Cooper Howard (also known as Ghoul in the series) on the verge of the Holocaust that would devastate the entire world. He served in the army against the communists a few years ago. He explains to his daughter that when a nuclear bomb exploded, the soldiers had to raise their thumbs in front of the mushroom cloud to make sure they were far enough away from it… or not. The series even suggests that Cooper Howard gets the thumbs up from Vault Boy. So the chemistry between the show and the games is clearly assumed.
We knew it, the Fallout series had to be part of the canon of the post-apocalyptic universe. In doing so, she allowed herself to formalize this thumbs-up story, which until now was just a simple fan theory. Regardless, the show allows even those in the know to discover for the first time some elements that have rarely been explored in games before. The adaptation thus achieves the double feat of paying excellent homage to the games it is inspired by, while also fleshing out an already extremely complex and rich story. A performance like this deserves a thumbs up from Jonathan Nolan and the entire team behind the show, right?
