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I get the sentiment, but I feel like Caesar's Legion wasn't really meant to be like, satirical? The authors of New Vegas clearly intended for him to be the wrong choice, don't get me wrong, but it does still feel like a serious depiction of fascism rather than purely taking the piss out of it. It's silly only insofar as fascism itself tends to lead to silliness.
Satirizing fascists is really hard because there are irl fascists who use baby talk to spread their bullshit. If that wasn't our reality and someone wrote a game about fascists who say "fren let's make a heckin good Aryan ethno state" the author would be laughed out of the room.
I don't think they were attempting satire in the first place, is what I'm saying. It feels like they were trying to make something believable - if fascism were to coalesce in the post-nuclear world, this is what it might look like, at least that's the impression I got. Caesar liking Roman aesthetics doesn't strike me as any weirder than Hitler being into like runes and shit.
Yeah I agree. Was trying to say that an earnest attempt at portraying fascism is difficult to separate from satire because of how stupid Fascism is irl.
I've always felt like if you want your satire of fascism to actually land for the fascists themselves, you've gotta really punch below the belt and make the fascists in your work of art extremely cringe. Like imagine you meet Caesar and he's all serious, but then you go into his room and it's a weeb den with a bunch of body pillows and sex asses and shit.
Caesar claims to be building Rome, but Rome could easily weather the death of its emperor. Caesar talks of the hegelian dialectic, but it's all garbled nonsense. Caesar intends to build a new nation by the conquest and merger of the NCR, yet is apparently unaware of the concept of guerilla warfare despite the fact his army was blown away at Boulder City by an urban warfare trap. Most of his soldiers are barely trained tribesmen with swords and his conquest has so far consisted of fighting small tribes and not technologically advanced states.
I didn't say Caesar wasn't stupid and frivolous, I just said I didn't think the developers were making him stupid and frivolous as satire. Real life fascists are just as dumb as he is.
Wasn't Caesar basically winning before the player arrived though? The NCR barely won the first Hoover dam battle, and they weren't even aware of the fact that Caesar had bases on the other side of the river already, plus a bunch of legion spies sabotaging them. The impression I got was that the NCR was spread too thin and was so incompetent that this crazy fascist roman larper was going to beat them this time if the player character didn't come along and get their shit together. I do agree that the legion isn't going to survive Caesar dying though, Lanius isn't nearly as smart, and when he dies too there would be no one to take over.
I feel like some of the writers, especially Chris Avellone with his goofy Ulysses plot, leaned a little bit into a "both sides" type of storytelling. For better or for worse. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. My understanding is there was supposed to be a more fleshed out Legion storyline, with more stuff you could do for them and more involvement in Legion territory, but they ran out of time. It's true that the Legion is supposed to be evil, but all of the options seem to be set up as evil in their own way. That's part of why New Vegas excels though and still has vigorous debate to this day. The game lets you decide what the best course of action is. I'm guessing they wanted to give certain players a morally complicated reason to side with the Legion, but because so much stuff got cut, now it would make no sense at all unless a player was just being a completionist or wanted to be an asshole.
There are two otherwise neutral characters who defend the legion: Raul and that one trader you meet at the Legion camp. Raul talks about how he prefers the Legion's organization over the raider tribes that used to live in Arizona. The trader talks about the Legion in neutral, formal terms as business associates. That always felt like remnants of stuff Obsidian never finished.
Don't get me wrong either, the writers set them up to be a fascist cult, but I've always felt they wanted more nuance than that. If I'm being generous I'd say they wanted to set up the NCR and Legion as being equivalent to one another in terms of how fascist they are, but ran out of time to flesh out either perspective. Then Avellone swoops in with the Ulysses storyline to fulfill their attempts at equating the two big factions, but it always fell flat to me. Especially because the other DLCs are absolutely beautiful and memorable compared to Lonesome Road.
I think they wanted to portray the Legion as stable (so long as they had new lands to conquer and their charismatic leader doesn't die lol), but deeply evil. That trader you reference says he likes to travel through Legion lands because there are no bandits and he knows what to expect, but he is a man, and he has things the Legion wants. If you're a poor tribal boy? Straight into the meat grinder. A women? A nightmare awaits. They're a realistic evil, especially compared to the comical bad guys of the Bethesda Fallouts. Caesar is also such a jackass, he acts like he is removed from what the Legion does, that he is instead just acting out the historical moment. He thinks hes history on horseback, but hes about to die from cancer and the NCR is going to rip the Legion a new one even if he conquers Vegas.