I was watching a lot of the Dagoth Ur AI videos for a minute and quickly realized a lot of the comments were getting way too enthusiastic over the fantasy racism.
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.
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.
If Pol Pot proclaimed to be fascist from the get go instead of pretending to be communist, he would absolutely get uncritical support from conservatives and his actions would be framed as “just did what he had to do to protect Cambodia from communism”
imagine if he was white and doing his shit in let's say east europe, revolting against the soviet-aligned government
based retvrn to tradition man taking the woke academia out to the rye field
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"Where's Pollak Petrov when you need him?" -chud replying under a tweet from a guy wearing glasses in his profile pic
Can you imagine some fascist leader in Eastern Europe revolting against soviet forces ever being popular?
They'd probably end up doing something like supporting the Nazis even as the Nazis killed many of their own people (many of whom fought FOR the Soviet Union), then return there after the war, then be killed off in the, say, 1950's
There's no way westerners and their own country would lionize them, no shot
You see that a lot right now with helldiver's 2. People watching the opening and saying stuff like "if the us military made ads like this I would sign up." Check out the comment section here
When they can make really good AI, they're going to make one based on Paul Verhoeven and force it to direct recruitment ads for eternity.
Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere (Project Aces, PS1, 1999)
I've been playing it a lot over the last week and making fun of chuds who are like "no but seriously this is actually based" is fun. Luckily most everyone I've run into has been in on the joke.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Thats not how fucking dialectics works you stupid cuck. I didn’t study Hegel (plus continental philosophy in general) at Harvard for 7 FUCKING YEARS for some LOW LIFE KNOW IT ALL who’s CLEARLY never fucking read Hegel as he would KNOW that HEGEL has NEVER FUCKING EVER used the terms “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” to start perpetuating these LIES at VERY SINGLE FUCKING OPPORTUNITY. this isn’t Hegel my friend. No no no. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis was thought up by Fichte and it’s clearly inferior to Hegels dialectical method of imminent critique. Yes. It’s called imminent critique. And dialectics is only ONE PART of Hegels full method. Which again is called Imminent critique which you would know if you had ACTUALLY BOTHERED TO READ HEGEL ITS LITERALLY IN THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC YOU DUMB FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT. I honestly cannot believe the fucking arrogance to come into the wasteland, spouting that anti Hegel garbage. Where did you get your fucking info on dialectics? Fucking Jason Unruhe? Jesus fucking Christ I cannot deal with this bullshit right now I’m sorry I’m leaving I’m fucking leaving.
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Hegel is an idealist though
love me an orator who speaks with convection, getting the air all heated up
disturbing number of people think that "galactic empire is so cool" in star wars
They had cooler looking space ships, which was enough for me as a kid.
But that's because I was a dumb kid. I was like "I wanna be a Jedi but with the evil powers but I only use them for good. I am a reformed Sith. Lightning hands of justice!"
You can be the cool jedi in Knights of the Old Republic. For me, the old republic is the best era for star wars, best media too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7szRTHRg04Q
The funny thing to me is that Caesar himself isn't really all that charismatic. You get to meet someone that the game has been framing up until this point as a legendary mastermind who's bent the mighty NCR to his will, but then you find some crass old fuck who speaks like a used car dealership owner who's read a philosophy book that one time and is clearly huffing up his own supply. A skilled manipulator who's more well-read than the average wastelander certainly (he was a Follower of the Apocalypse) but he's clearly just making shit up as he goes through his egotistical quest to become something more than just another warlord.
That's the beautiful thing that's lost on these dipshits precisely because they deep down are aware of their own mediocrity so they can relate to the man Edward Sallow within the myth of Caesar.
Do not forget the "saying that everyone except of us is evil" part.
It's somewhat uncanny how much 4chan gives up the ghost about what they're like or how they operate.
"Wow...villain is so kewl! Now I want to do evil stuff just like the cool supervillain." Sometimes I think, maybe I am immune to propaganda.
This post is sayin Caesar is stupid, what are you responding to?
Not pictured: dozens of anons complaining about their favorite Nazi being made fun of
damn.. now i have an itch to install new vegas for like the bagillionth time
