Fallout: Canterlot City

This scene you have seen many times before.

You see the television on and an advertisement from so long ago of a company that even though it’s gone, it changed the way the country would not be what it is today.

The camera pans out and instead of the normal living room full of contemporary furnishing, it is now a destroyed and dilapidated house that only houses a skeleton on a sofa.

The world is not what it was and is now only a fallout wasteland filled with irradiated fauna, raiders ready to pillage everyone and the unknown.

Welcome to Fallout: Canterlot City.

Think of this little chapter as something of a prologue/introduction to this new world that had splintered from The Many Destinies of Sunset Shimmer. This is one world that was made with the intention of seeing carefully into those things that make the world of Fallout so interesting for me and others.

To understand this world we need to talk not only of the original Fallout, you know, the real video game series that is now property of Bethesda, but to those works of fiction that have been created as tribute and homage of this amazing series.

There are two worlds that I think we need to talk about; the first one is, of course, Fallout Equestria. This is a world that needs to be read more than explained since it is so expansive that trying to mention the story and all of its spin-offs need its own database. To make things a little easier, this world has nothing to do with Sunset and is its own story; if you want you can go and check it out.

The other work that we need to talk about is Fallout Equestria Girls and I do believe that that world and this will be scrutinized and compared in some ways but beyond having Sunset as a protagonist -or deuteragonist in the case of Fallout Equestria Girls- there is little to no real comparison in both stories.

In Fallout: Canterlot City, Sunset Shimmer is in a different point of life than the one in FEG - from now on I’ll try to refer to Fallout: Canterlot City as FCC and Fallout Equestria Girls as FEG -. In terms of timeline, FEG starts at the end of Rainbow Rocks in a manner of speaking, finding a Sunset who is already redeemed and kinder in general while the one in FCC is still the bad girl that is trying to find her place in this new world.

Another difference is the way these two stories look at things and the way the world works. In FEG, people are trying to rebuild the world around them after only some years since the bombs fell, which in Fallout lore is possible considering how fast radiation disappeared in most of the wasteland. The world they have in in a sense less harsh and characters bounce back easier from shocking moments. In FCC, things are not that nice; the world left behind the members of Vault 47 as you may see. Many of the things that had happened in the games had happened in here, just like the Vault Dweller being exiled or the Courier declaring New Vegas an independent state.

Life in FCC is harsher with many actions having some kind of repercussion, being either socially or mentally, just like in the case of Sunset Shimmer and the way she reacts after doing her first kill. It will also deal with serious aspects of Fallout that are almost seen as an afterthought, like addiction to substances like Sunset with Nuka Cola, who the Zetans are, the Forced Evolution Virus and what kind of strange symptoms it can have and if there is some kind of cure beyond the vial you find at the Institute and several others.

This is not going to a nice story where the girls will be cheery - although they will have moments of peace and relaxation -, it will be hard and dangerous, because war… war never changes.