Today's update us all about Caesar's Legion. Man, are these guys major league assholes. Long before you meet them, you hear all these outrageous rumors, about their aggression, their cruelty, their utter contempt for any not of their number and it seems a little overblown, but then you get to the town of Nipton, and you find that the reality is worse.
These are a group of people who are somehow under the impression that it is acceptable human behavior to hold a "lottery" where the first place winner gets to go free, the second place winner gets his legs broken, and the losers get enslaved, beheaded, or crucified. They do this to an entire town, who's primary sin is being foolish and greedy enough to do business with them. And then they wrap these atrocities up in a sort of fatuous self-righteousness, condemning all outsiders as "profligates" who are "dissolute."
I am honestly having a hard time thinking of a more despicable group of video game villains (that they, in leaving a taunting message after their raid on Ranger Station Charlie, made a special point of mentioning they captured a woman alive is just . . . ugh - maybe you could dial it down on the darkness just a bit, Fallout: New Vegas).
Yet they're not exactly unrealistic. I wrote earlier about the problem of video game evil degenerating into pure, motiveless, puppy-kicking malice, and Caesar's Legion certainly seems to qualify . . . except all the terrible shit they get up to, the real Roman Empire did as bad or worse, and for much the same reasons. The evil of Caesar's Legion is distressingly recognizable - it is the arrogant, power-worshiping, culturally exclusionary evil that is behind virtually every part of human history that makes you wish a meteor would hit the planet so life could start over from square one. They have a strong morality - that only applies to the in-group, they are dedicated to keeping public order . . . by any means necessary, and the warrior ideal that gives them cultural cohesion simultaneously builds up a dangerous masculinism that degrades women for no reason other than to stroke the egos of the socially dominant group. It's actually a textbook reactionary ideology.
In a more straightforward game, they'd work perfectly as antagonists. I'm picturing something like a more action-packed version of The Handmaid's Tale where Offred somehow gets her hands on a flamethrower (and, however much it would completely ignore the themes of the book, I would still definitely play that game). The problem with Caesar's Legion here is that they obscure the fact that the New California Republic is actually the game's main villain.
The Fallout series has always had a bit of the western genre in its DNA, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Fallout: New Vegas. The NCR, even more than in Fallout 2 represents the encroachment of civilization upon a previously free and independent society. The parallels with the United States' 19th century colonization of the continent could not be more explicit. You even have Native American stand-ins in the form of the Great Khans, who were previously forced out of territory closer to the NCRs heartland (speculation - would using actual Native Americans for this role have been a welcome move towards inclusion and the acknowledgement of real historical events, or would have seemed too on the nose - also, after playing four Fallout games, I'm kind of getting the impression that no Native Americans survived the great war) who are subject to further harassment and massacre, and eventually moved into a reservation (the fact that the main character of the previous games is largely responsible for this is a discussion for another time).
So what you have, in essence, is a group of people who were doing fine on their own, until a well-intentioned, but thoughtless imperial power forces its way in with the dual mandate of spreading liberal ideology and claiming resources it really has no moral right to, and due to bureaucratic incompetence and the intrinsic difference in systemic incentives between the roles, is far better at the latter task than the former. The question then becomes, how do you possibly resist such a force? The wealth they bring with them has an enormously transformative (mostly for the better) effect on your lifestyle, and it's not as if your local strongman is a bastion of humanist enlightenment, so the logical, and perhaps even the moral, choice is to go along with them, but the problem is that you don't actually have a choice. They smile and play nice, and it may even be that official policy back in their capitol is to leave you be, but the choice is a false one. To the people who brave the frontier, you are an obstacle. If you don't assimilate, you'll be displaced, and if you do assimilate, they will do everything in their power to erase everything about you that makes you unique, because they're convinced that their way is the best way.
Yet, in all honesty, you can't support a continuation of the status quo. The wasteland is so filled with raiders and monsters that it's not safe to travel, and the preexisting local culture is dominated by whoever has the biggest guns and the most willingness to use them. Ideally, what you'd want is for the NCR to give you enough breathing room to develop on your own, while trying to steer local politics in a direction that emulates the best of their governmental and social traditions while maintaining a distinctively Mojave character. But that would require the NCR to respect local autonomy and cede control of valuable strategic resources to powers outside their sphere of influence, so that's never going to happen.
It's a melancholy, nuanced conflict, where right and wrong are difficult to see, and where your outlaw character has to make hard choices about whether taking down a bad system is worth fighting good people. It's an intriguing and unconventional choice as a backdrop for a science fiction game . . . unless you add in a howlingly awful faction of nakedly aggressive conquerors - in which case the Mojave is bound to be overrun anyway so you might as well choose the lesser of two evils.
On the other hand, maybe the reason the themes seem so muddled is because they're actually going for some other theme. In terms of social groups in the Mojave, it breaks down into - Caesar's Legion, the NCR, the Strip, Raiders, and then assorted tribal societies like the Great Khans, the Boomers, Novac, Goodsprings, Primm, and the Bright Followers (though the last barely count since their intent is to leave the planet ASAP). And from that list, it becomes clear that a larger issue at play here is how one defines political legitimacy in the wake of a complete breakdown of public order.
The NCR and Caesar's Legion are more or less traditional states. Though they have different methods, they are both highly organized and seek to control territories and populations for the purposes of mobilizing labor and resources in service of a centralized authority.
The Strip is interesting because it's organized much like a state, but goes out of its way to shun the trappings of statehood (if I were in the mood to stir up shit, I'd call it a "libertarian monarchy"). It's controlled by an autocrat who shows little interest in day-to-day affairs and takes no title other than "guy who owns the securitrons." Below him are a class of aristocratic elites who nonetheless insist on referring to themselves as "crime families" despite the fact that they are the primary wielders of civic authority in the territory they occupy.
Which brings us to the Raiders. Much like the families of the Strip, they are referred to in the game as a criminal organization, but ultimately the land they occupy is not under the control of any sovereign power. Yes, their primary means of subsistence appears to be theft from other, more settled people, but how does that distinguish them from imperialist states like Caesar's Legion and the NCR, who are more than happy to move into places uninvited and take things that don't belong to them? The main difference appears to be the fact that they don't seek to establish political authority over the territory they control.
Then there are the tribal groups. These can actually be sorted into two categories. The Great Khans and the Boomers are like proto-states. They have a certain degree of formality about things like succession and the chain of command and they form a group identity centered around their ethnic and cultural distinctiveness. The Great Khans, in particular, are interesting, because they are a displaced people, who, in the time period of Fallout 1 & 2, were classified as raiders, but have become much more settled and productive in subsequent years. This goes to show the fluidity between "raider" and "tribal," which is only natural because in the real world, "raider" is rarely a defining aspect of cultural identity and more of an economic activity that some cultures engage in. Realistically, we should be seeing more Jackal and Viper farms and manufactories, where they engage in their normal day-to-day activities which they often supplement with raiding.
Finally, we have the random villages like Goodsprings and the like. Interestingly, these are true tribal societies, and perhaps the most accurately observed of any of the Fallout series various cultures. See, the problem with "tribal" societies in Fallout 2 is that they basically came out of nowhere, and seemed almost offensively derived from western stereotypes about how "primitive" societies work. Goodsprings is much more along the lines of what you'd expect to see. Their culture is generically American, and yet they are still classically tribal. They have no particularly formal organization, but there is a respected local figure who wields moderate informal authority (in this case, Trudy) due to personal relationships and a small difference in economic status.
If I'm being brutally honest, I think this sensitive portrayal of post-nuclear American tribalism is probably an accident. The villages seem more like satellites of New Vegas than independent cultural units, and the extremely tenuous nature of their governments might well be due to shallow world-building than any attempt at anthropological realism.
Nonetheless, if I take the text as written, rather than as what I think the authors intended, it poses a fascinating question - how do you build civilization? The raw materials of society are people, but in the absence of a dynamic unifying force, most are content to follow the path of least resistance and allow the status quo to endure. So what happens when the status quo becomes untenable, and the pitiless calculus of crisis forces previously independent people to band together or perish?
Or, maybe this all just an excuse to beat Roman cosplayers to death with a rusty shovel (true fact - that was my primary weapon for like four of the first six hours of the game), and I'm vastly overthinking things. But what are the odds of that?
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