I agree with all of this, but of all their horrible mistakes in that vein I think Herbert Daring Dashwood is the most entertaining.

I disagree to a certain extent. I think the present-day culture was fairly well represented as being a sort of amalgam of pre-war garbage and a desperation to somehow reclaim it. I also think it was implied that since the Commonwealth apparently still lives in a manner similar to pre-war, that imitating that was somehow being "upper class" or whatnot. The problem with how Bethesda presented it is that far too many of the denizens of the wastes were simply too entrenched in a sort of generic Mad Max thing rather than something that would culturally evolve on its own.

I see your point. I thought it was ok, the sharp contrasts of tone being more of a surreal/absurd comment on nuclear war itself.

As well as blowing the head off a fool.

I always thought it worked as kind of a cargo cult situation. Everyone was aware that there were these wonderful things in the past, and wanted to bring that back, and so they either fell back on aping the forms and images of what they had lost, or they just went completely feral. It actually added a note of dark humor for me, everyone was mythologizing and longing for a past civilization that had actually ruined everything.

I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of these people are pretty obviously insane. Andale, the Nuka Cola woman, The woman on the bridge who doesn't know the war happened, the people trying to start a hockey team, the Enclave, all of them are obsessed with the past and they're all crazy.

In Fallout 1 & 2 the 50s aesthetic was barely used outside of the packaging and manual. I greatly preferred Fallout 3 to "genetic brown maps that are 80% roofs (but that one car looks kind of old-timey)" of the originals.

The 50's retro look was captured in fallout 1 but not in F2.

Bethesda did a great job bringing 50's culture to a PA setting.

Comic books, Butch's gang of greasers, Liberty Prime's diatribes versus communism.

If anything, Bethesda's greatest failing was trying to please the unpleaseable.

"Have any of you ever seen.... a tree?" Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up

PROTIP: If you kill Three Dog, he is replaced by an old woman named Martha who talks about an asshole that killed their DJ. You still get music.