MYTH #9: MUTANTS, SUPERMUTANS, ULTRAMUTANTS
Myth: After a nuclear apocalypse many people will have turned into hideous mutants, and some will even have attained superpowers from the radiation.
Reality: Studies on the consequences of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and also the Chernobyl disaster have shown that people exposed to the effects of ionized radiation simply die. There is simply no biological basis for adaptive mutation, like those seen in Drosophila flies, for the human body. The problem here is hidden in humankind's insufficient birth rate and extremely long lifespan. As it relates to the effects of radiation on the next generation – that is just a sad story.
In After Reset RPG: 123 years after the Reset, most of the descendants of those who lived through the nuclear apocalypse on the surface of the Earth look and genetically are the same Homo sapiens. Of course, with the passage of time there are some adaptive changes such as increased liver size (for better filtration of harmful substances) or in the retina of the eye (for more protection from UV radiation), but in most cases this is practically unidentifiable without serious medical study. From time to time in the settlements of the survivors, children with visibly noticeable mutations are born, but they rarely survive birth and natural selection in general. And if they survive, they suffer persecution worse than Tyrion in Game of Thrones. As a rule these mutants are called Deviants. They lead unsociable or reclusive lives. Despite the fact that most of them are infertile, if they can have children, they are born completely normal.
MYTH #10: CANNIBALISM AS A FOOD SOURCE
Myth: Whether suffering from a lack of food or just to have a little extra, people started to eat each other. These cannibals started to pop up in groups and hunt other survivors in order to eat the slowest of them. These monsters, having tasted human flesh, are easy to pick out from a crowd due to their characteristic tremble.
Reality: We won't be discussing modern instances of cannibalism here, borne out of fairly rare psychological deviations. It's better to consider cannibalism as a result of hunger, which is truly unavoidable in the case of a nuclear cataclysm. A great number of instances of cannibalism out of need are known, when people faced with death from hunger had to eat the flesh of those who had already died of natural causes, or even more rarely were killed by the cannibals. But we shouldn't forget that these people became social outcasts, and the psychological trauma and feeling of guilt of those forced into cannibalism remained with them until the end of their lives, even leading some to suicide. What then are the "characteristic physiological signs" by which we can distinguish a cannibal from a normal person? Well in popular media, movies and video games they show the consequences of very real prion diseases, which are spread by eating an infected subject. But these diseases are very rare and as a rule wipe out populations on their own before they can spread.
In After Reset RPG: Everywhere in the new Eastern America, where the game takes place cannibalism is judged and acknowledged as a taboo. In the cities of the New Confederacy a proven act of cannibalism can easily lead to a hanging. For the small contingent of the United Governments in the region, cannibalism is so barbaric that they would never consider it. Some tribes of the Indian Union have resorted to ritual cannibalism from time to time, but with the development of agriculture and livestock farming even these rituals have been replaced with symbolic ones. But this relates to the major factions of the region as a whole. If we consider the question on a smaller scale, abnormal people can be found everywhere, and of course "what happens in the Wasteland stays in the Wasteland." But, of course you cannot tell a normal person from a cannibal by purely physiological attributes.
