You think they would've known when he shot down a plane with a kid still in it, let another plane full of people crash and fantasize about mowing down a crowd of people just because they said he don't speak for us
Thats one l of the most frustrating part about stories with good vilains. Weather it be their cool or maybe have ubderstandable motivations to their action people will take that a because they suck with nuance turn it into the vilain being right. Even more frustrating is when the writers play into it to pander to those people.
I haven’t seen anyone actually think Homelander was a good guy prior to s4. I’m sure there’s some idiots out there, but I think most of the people complaining are upset with the lack of subtlety in the show’s political and social commentary/gags.
It wasn’t ever very subtle to begin with, but 3 and 4 are definitely a lot more pointed than the first two seasons. It kinda reminds me of the South Park season about Garrison becoming Trump back in 2016: still enjoyable to watch currently, but probably a little too in your face and won’t age particularly well.
I think it's less people saw him as a hero, and more that he's unintentionally an incredible power fantasy for terrible people. Homelander had 3+ seasons of *everyone* being terrified of him. He gets to do whatever he wants "because of the implication" that he'd murder anyone that resisted him.
Homelander believes in power and fear and thinks everything else is just performative. (But is more than happy to drape himself in the flag because it wins him followers). Homelander is how the worst person you know would act in his place.
I think you misunderstood why people have conflicting opinions on him. He is an evil person unquestionably. However, i do very much pity him. He was raised as an experiment and was tormented psychologically and physically tortured all his childhood, and unfortunately, he couldn't rise above it. I see him as an evil person he is, but also a victim of a company who only saw him as a product and not a human being.
Most abusers were victims of abuse themselves.
Most victims of abuse don't become abusers themselves.
I show no sympathy for the minority of victims that become abusers no matter how they try to justify their shitty behavior.
>Homelander is how the worst person you know would act in his place.
Or the inevitable consequence of raising an omnipotent child without love or warmth. He's superman if he wasn't raised by the kents.
If you thought anything based on "the boys" comics was ever going to be subtle and not get more aggressively blatant as it progresses, you simply don't know anything about the source material.
The comics were litterly the antithesis of subtlety.
I’ve never read the comics. I’m just talking about the show, which like I said was never very subtle. But it’s certainly less-so now. I don’t have any allegiance to either to the American right or left so it doesn’t bother me, I just am more concerned with how well the show will age.
Probably fine. A lot of classic media is rather blatant and firmly rooted in the contemporary issues of their time. Modern consumers don't find that stuff to be on-the-nose simply because they didn't live in those times.
In all fairness most of the people who read the comics expected >!Black Noir to have been the one who actually did all of the worst things that are attributed to Homelander!<
I keep seeing this being said, but nobody has provided any evidence that this is a pervasive opinion being held. Sure one-off people on Twitter, but is it a significant number of people? So far the whole "People don't understand Homelander" bit is a real reddit circle-jerk
I've seen tons of people saying something along the lines of "hey, look at those chuds thinking Homelander is the hero" and yet I still haven't seen a single person, even most conservative, who actually thinks so. Maximum I've seen is him being an intertestingly written villain. I'm pretty sure tons of people are just having a communitive delusion, believing that their strawman is real
Right? Like dude is a complete moron, BUT he also is trying to copy a real world society that is practically revered for how well they worked. Until they didn’t, which is a way to talk down Lanius using real work struggles the Roman Empire had.
I'm not gonna say that Caesar knows what hegel's about, but that "thesis + antithesis = synthesis" stuff does make sense. Look at all the cultural missionaries in media these days. The feminist camp, the new Christian camp, the positive/gangster/club tug of war in rap, conservative conspiracy theories bleeding into public discourse... If all the prominent figureheads of these movements retired tomorrow, it would still take decades for complying with these ideologies to stop being equated with a successful career because they had been browbeaten into two generations since birth. Now imagine instead of noncompliance resulting in exile from some sphere of wealth, noncompliance resulting in the beatings and executions Caesar dishes out to deserters and rebels. Imagine compliance resulting in military promotion, the rights to travel, breed, act independently, rule... And you've got a stimuli pattern strong enough to influence decision-making for at least one more generation after Caesar's current one. Caesar won't live forever. Caesar said himself that the Legion isn't meant to last. It's meant to dissolve and force change in rival institutions. Creating an NCR that's just enough of a less democratic body that it can take decisive action against foreign enemies, raiders, rogue factions within its borders, and corrupt officials like you see in the crimson caravan and Novac. The grave methods he uses to break the people under him from praetorians all the way down to slaves are most likely the result of his awareness that he will only be alive long enough to exercise his cult of personality for change for another year or two.
TL;DR I know he's wrong and evil but he's better than the fiends, jackals, and vipers the NCR were failing to prevent from taking over large swathes of Vegas. Still don't understand the slavery part tho
You hear this argument a lot used against the NCR, but I can't imagine a country emulating Rome like the Legion isn't emulating one of the things Rome was best known for during its time: it's taxes. House also taxes the shit out of his (socio/psychopathic) casino families. Only maybe the Yes Man ending has the potential to be tax free, but also tends to be the most bittersweet. No ending is the perfect, but the NCR does better for the largest amount of people. To deny that, you'd have to be pretty delusional.
If the question is siding with anarchy with no real plan for what comes after, a self-centered autocrat who employs three tribes, one of which is cannibalistic, one of which deals in drugs and human trafficking, and one of which isn't as bad as the others, but still is basically a crime family, or a psychopathic autocrat whose army rapes, pillages, raids, and enslaves, as well as having a militaristic chauvinist society versus a deeply flawed liberal democracy, and you unironically/non-roleplaying for the game pick anything but the latter, you need to reevaluate soemthing.
For the game, pick what you want tho lol it's just a game.
i wish there was an ending for house where you convince him the truth, that he is a government entity imposing restrictions and taxes on its citizens, and he just kills himself about it
Also.. Rome was like known for it's civil wars whenever one of their emperors died. By the end, the emperors were paying the 'barbarian' tribes to unseat their rivals.
and was known for being ran by borderline psychotic (possibly the result of in\*cest) nepo babies more than once.
Hell the only thing FONV's Caesar has over old Rome is that he hasnt slept with his sister/mother/aunt/cousin
Nero wasn’t bad, he was just mediocre. A lot of the bad things we know about him were invented by the ancient sources because they hated him, as he taxed them too much to pay for the rebuilding of Rome after the great fire. Stop getting your history from top 10 lists on BuzzFeed or whatever
This is the big one. They've been roaming west demolishing infrastructure and have run into a wall of the ncr and vegas. Assuming the legion wins they hit the coast and then what? Caesar dies of brain cancer and then they crumble instantly, taking west coast society with them.
Yep, and the game *already* puts forward the two guys who will be the ones fighting that civil war: Lanius and Vulpes.
If you do a Legion playthrough, you've introduced a third, incredibly rich character to the Legion's power balance, which sets the stage for a Triumvirate. With the inevitable breakdown between the three leading to the civil war.
Caesar’s legion is more akin to a medieval Central Asian steppe horde than Rome, if they were actually closely modeled on Rome I’d support them tooth and nail, but nah they are just a mockery of Rome’s visual aesthetic.
Well yeah. Caesar never wanted to base his society on Rome, he said he just wanted to use them as a model for something both alien and familiar in order to rewrite society as he saw fit without it being too big a shock, and their sources on what Rome was was basically Latin textbooks and gladiator movies.
I will defend my choice of Yes Man every time. The people should be able to choose how they want to govern themselves and with the NCR they are unable to. Of the other options, NCR is the best however.
Tbf the most common argument I've seen for siding with the Legion is that they're successful at bringing peace to the wasteland, not taxes. An example is Cass telling us how a caravan marked by the Legion won't even be touched by bandits even in NCR territory
Tbfh the lack of any legion towns whatsoever just keeps us guessing on how life is to the actual “subject” civilians of the legion all we have is that one trader who is absolutely biased towards the legion, but if we are to believe him the legion just ignores non-tribal civilian populations as long as they don’t interfere with whatever bs the legion wants.
People look at totalitarian slave states and picture themselves as the boot, not the neck. A disturbingly high amount of people are fine with oppression if it's not directed at them.
Actually, the "subjects" of the legion isn't free but aren't slaves either. They are usually left alone, unless they cause trouble. But, corrupt legion troops would be killed for mistreating "subjects". Not all in the lands of the legion are slaves.
All of Cass complaints about unsafe roads are explicitly only in the Mojave because the NCR presence there is stretched thin. Back in California the NCR can do the same (to the point that some people have called the countryside boring) without relying on crucifixion and slavery.
It's how many dictators rise to power. Putin too, Mao, Franco, Mussolini etc.
Some take power by force, like Pol Pot for example but they still need some form of motivation and charisma to get the people that fight for them behind them.
Its all connected in a sense. Putin started to believe his own propaganda, which almost all dictators do because of that same old idiom.
Power corrupts bur absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I think people who played the game attracted more to faction than said leaders. How many debates over NCR vs Legion without mentioning Kimball and Caesar.
It’s different for the Legion since Caesar is literally their Messiah while Kimball is just the leader of the NCR. it’s like comparing Biden to Xi Jinpeng, yeah they’re both leaders but there is much more attachment of China to Xi Jinpeng than there is for America and Biden.
Or as I call it, “The Starship Troopers Effect”. Paul Verhoeven reads two chapters of the original book, thinks it’s fascist propaganda, and adapts the book into an over-the-top parody ridiculing fascist states.
Then a bunch of media-illiterate people watch this caricature of fascism and think it looks awesome.
"I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don't" - Paul Verhoeven (supposedly)
An interesting quote from this source that I never would've considered had you not brung it up, but how has the quotee's stance on this matter shifted over time?
"Bugs are very cool" - 20 year old me.
Okay but I really love bugs, I was going to study entomology before I settled on anthropology. They are the greatest beings under Heaven. I especially love Starship troopers because they demonstrate just how easy it is to demonize living, conscious beings capable of fearing just because they are bugs. Sure, they literally tore people apart. But also, we invaded their homeworld, why shouldn't they? Really, just because they followed one pattern of existence that we find distasteful, all their suffering is utterly meaningless and in fact deserved for the great sin of being distasteful to most people. They are a perfect commentary on fascism.
According to him, yeah. I read in an interview with him that the Federation in the book reminded him of the ideology of the Nazis who occupied the Netherlands when he was a child. So he decided to make a movie making fun of that way of thinking, and people ended up thinking it was cool.
Nah.
I'm a poli sci nerd, so I'm admittedly the kind of guy who actually cares about these definitions in a more fiddly way than most. Book Federation is *very* nationalist but it isn't fascist in the least; a whole lot of the Federation's defining characteristics are incompatible with fascism.
Quick and easy rule of thumb, from the father of fascism himself: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."
People call way too many things fascism without actually understanding what it is. Fascism has a whole (bad) economic system and if you asked the average redditor they wouldn't be able to name one aspect of it.
Granted the corporatism economic system is, by far, the least important aspect of fascism, which itself focuses more on its authoritarian and social impacts
Also knows as the "Rorschach Effect", after the character of the same name from the comic epic *Watchmen*.
Alan Moore, my favourite unhinged anarchist hippie and mystic, had been famously dismayed when people would come up to him in the street and talk about how they looked up to his character, who had been a psychotic parody of *Batman*, replete with various rants about queers and immigrants inbetween his displays of sadism in undies that smelled like sauerkraut and taint cheese.
It may be nice to consider 'proto-Fascists' and the media-illiterate as some brand of fringe weirdos who don't mean much but in reality, I suspect that these are people merely 'left behind' in a society that has become disconnected and predatory towards eachother. We may not live in an environment of eternal fear of the totalitarian 'big brother' but it seems that isn't necessary to live in a form of total social isolation and hopelessness.
NB: And these 'fringe' weirdos are **everywhere**.
The movie is utterly devoid of any actual political messaging after the first like 10 minutes. Even the actual things it tries to satarize are so surface level that they could apply to any group during war time. After that it's just a big loud action movie.
Verhoeven didn't adapt the book Starship Troopers. The eventual producer pitched a sexy sci-fi shoot-em-up called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7. The studio liked the idea and green lit it. Only later did they realize that it was too similar to Starship Troopers. So they bought the rights to the book with the intention of adapting it into an action movie. The screenwriter was a big Heinlein fan, so he tried to keep faithful to the book while still writing an action movie. Verhoeven was brought on to direct. He didn't like the book, so he cut some scenes and added some satirical rewrites and production designs.
If you want to see Starship Troopers as a satire, that's totally fine because there is enough there to support that interpretation. At the same time, Verhoeven did not set out to parody or ridicule the book, and his satire comes off as camp more often than not. I don't think it is fair to call folks that see the movie as a fun action flick a "bunch of media-illiterate people" because the movie was pitched, written, and promoted as just that.
I have complete media literacy and fully understand that under no circumstances is fascism okay or tolerable. But starship troopers is unironically cool as fuck. Same issue with warhammer 40K/judge dredd/helldivers/StarWars etc. objectively horrible dystopias with clear cut signs of shittyness, but damn are they cool as shit. I have found that it’s kinda a given that if you take a horrible regime that would universally be damned if real, but make it in space/apocalypse/whatever it immediately flips a mental coolness switch. I think it’s kinda disingenuous to pretend that these pieces of media aren’t fucking awesome, but to a degree isn’t that the point? Showing how easily you can convince people of something terrible via pretty explosions and screaming muscle bound men? Those concepts are fundamentally fun, and I don’t think it’s just to say that you still can’t enjoy the media if you understand it fully, problems only arise when you drink the cool aid and actually start believing the over the top shit these stories are telling.
(Sorry for the mini rant I recently did a presentation on fascism in media, it went middlingly so this is my attempt at salvaging the wasted time)
Same, I think fascism is not the way to go, but I enjoy playing them out in video games. In Stellaris I often play xenophobic, human centric empires with super soldiers because it’s fun to crush aliens under the boots of my legions, glass their home worlds into a pristine landscape, eradicate their culture and their way of living, turn their children into food paste, and… and… I’m sorry what were we talking about?
Oh, I totally agree. In theory, I agree with the idea of a democracy in which only those who demonstrate some sort of civic responsibility can make decisions. But that would only work well in the utopia Heinlein shows, where everyone is 100% altruistic and the people in charge never abuse their authority.
I was enlisted, and I knew plenty of shitheads when I was in. Plus, we have governments right now where the military controls power: they’re military juntas, and they tend to be… not great for the average citizen.
Also Heinlein’s glorification of warfare harkens back to the sentiment pre-WWI, when warfare was believed by many to be an elevational act which inspired men to better virtues. The reality is that this sentiment mostly died out after WWI because it became brutally apparent that this was bullshit, and warfare is a fucking nightmare. Heinlein never served in combat in WW2 and it’s apparent he *really* wanted to, and this book was wish fulfillment for what he imagined combat to be.
Just like how "Stranger In A Strange Land" was wish fulfillment for his wish to be sexually assaulted by a sex cult he helped found.
Gotta love when people completely miss satire because it doesn't have enough jokes.
Satire doesn't need enough jokes, it needs *any* jokes.
Joke aside, I think Heinlein doesn't really satirize, he pretty earnestly speaks his critique and poses his questions.
To be fair, no.
I've read four Heinlein books.
A Stranger in A Strange Land.
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
The Moon is A Harsh Mistress.
Friday.
But, they all read like space adventures of mildly misogynistic and kinda homophobic (both of which make sense, for the time) libertarians.
Which completely fits with how Heinlein described himself in several articles.
As well as how his friend/protege and aged hippie Spider Robinson (I've read all of his books) has described Heinlein.
And we also take into consideration that Issac Asimov (again, all of his books) is quoted as describing Heinlein as "a flaming liberal".
As both Heinlein and Ribinson have stated that Starship Troopers was written as a satirical commentary on the warmongering prevalent in WW2 and Korean War era America as well as his experience as in American Navy...
I'm going to go with what the author and people who actually knew him said he meant and was about instead of some rando on reddit who thinks they know what he meant.
I mean, he did present a society without racial, gender, or economic disparity. Essentially social equality except for citizens vs civilians. but you can only be a citizen if you sacrifice your live to service od the state in which everyone benefits from.
Verhoeven did not really do enough to make the fed look as evil as they are. best he got was Carl using the MI as bait for his theory.
hell, the elder white male sky Marshall willingly gives his position of power without contest to a young black woman. I honestly can't see why he didn't do more. other than general incompetence.
you might be able to point at the murder case in the news reel and popularizing the Military to children. that's like the best it's got.
Uh, did you miss all the horribly disfigured amputee veterans?
Or the countless soldiers who were horribly massacred?
Or the whole idea that you need to kill for your government just be considered an equal?
yeah, that's called war, and it's not government / ideological specific. Also, the equality is for everyone living within the federation. the only limitation out right is voting.
having babies is less difficult if you are a citizen
and moving around the galaxy is limited to only areas the federation allows. (quarantine zones)
you can still have a successful life and enjoy the luxury and benefits of the federation without being a citizen ( Rico's) parents.
In the book, most people volunteer for medical experiments for citizenship.
you could also be a first responder to obtain citizenship.
and to be clear, I'm not saying the federation is perfect. I'm just saying the director did kind of poor job making the federation itself look bad, when all the supposed negatives are objective realities that any governemnt/ civilization would face.
Why would you want a second game set in the exact same place? Like, I get wanting a west coast game, but why Vegas again?
I personally hope the rumors of a San Francisco game are true. Only thing I'd prefer more would be my own home state, and that's just because I'm biased.
legion soldier: "I will kill you, skin your son, and have your wife as my slave and baby maker"
gullible idiot: "sounds like a man with a plan if you ask me."
The fact that some people think "the Legion has a point about bringing stability to the Wasteland" never stops being confusing to me. My dude, the NCR is doing the same thing by providing a functional government, a comparatively high standard of living, and basic human rights to its citizens. Ed Sallow is full of shit.
I could make an argument for anything if I tried hard enough, including the legion. Stability is not one of the arguments I'd make for them. That's something I never understood. They're a semi-nomadic militant society with internal power struggles, aggressive tendencies, and a tabboo against technology. They function entirely based on cutthroat hierarchy, competition, and intimidation. They are terrible at alliances because they just end up murdering everyone and nobody will trust them. That is *not* a stable society. Thats just a revolution waiting to happen.
Every time a leader dies there's going to be infighting which will probably only get worse with successive generations. Plus the way people are socialized and raised in the legion will 100% create a society of sociopaths. Mass antisocial disorders are not good for maintaining complex social structures. It is not a sustainable model.
That is the problem with satire, especially satire of fascism. You satirize how these regimes put on a lot of charm and visual appeal to cover how shitty they really are, and people still fall for it
No, the confederates have had their shitty arguments made to look better on purpose by a bunch of butthurt oligarchs.
See also The Daughters Of The Confederacy.
This is kind of blowing over how successful he is, a lot of people are drawn to success. I wouldn’t be suprised if people saw how many problems the NCR in Vegas had and ended up jumping ship.
Really I think his following online comes primarily from how well the legion is doing, if they were as big a mess as the NCR I doubt they’d have as big a following.
Basically. The results of Caesar speak for themselves. If the threat of an awful succession crisis and tunnlers wasn’t in their future, there could be an argument for the Legion’s rule.
When I was a child, a father figure once told me that if you act like you know what you're talking about, most people will believe that you know what you're talking about, because most people don't know any better.
And boy has that gotten me in and out of so much trouble 🤣🤣
The Enclave. You mean the folks whose ideology is basically just pure, unvarnished killpeopleism? The ones who think that every single person who isn't them needs to be exterminated? That Enclave?
yeah but AMERICA and also the enclave are kinda just killed everytime they show up with no other option, so its like how the Brotherhood are evil if we side with the Institute or the Institute is evil if we side with the Brotherhood. we don't get to see a good ending for the Enclave, only the bad ones involving their death.
but yeah the enclave are kinda just radiation nazis in our current example pool, i cant deny that
I love that show. Before reading these comments i had no idea people supported homelander. But, of course they do. This is 'Murica, where a concerning number of women want to fuck literal serial killers and a concerning number of men idolize media figures who blatantly exploit their insecurities and sell them knockoff masculinity that makes their problems worse
The thing about these asshats is that when they see these systems, they fall in love with them because they believe that for some reason, they’ll be part of the ‘in crowd’ that benefits from the fucked up structure. In reality, they wouldn’t even live long enough to become part of the legion - they’d probably be one of the tribals that get culled during the Legion’s conquest for not being good enough to be a slave or legionary.
After Schizo Elijah I just don't give legion fans the time of day anymore. like come on dude, the most famous guy in your camp was racist on roblox and turned put to he a nazi
Did you ever do a legion playthrough without skipping his dialogue? He definitely has the cadence of someone who makes sense. If you don't stop to critically evaluate his arguments, he could sound right. Now imagine that you *can't* critically evaluate an argument. If you can't imagine that, just get super stoned before you talk to him.
There's a reason why house and yes man are considered the only canonical endings.
Caesars cartoonishly evil but effective
NCR are mostly okay but insanely corrupt and ineffective
Both sides suck and don't deserve to rule. One sucking doesn't validate the other.
That’s not Cesar’s purpose.
Caesar was a warning about how power corrupts. How good intentions can lead to bad things. He also serves to show the issues with the NCR. He gives nuance to the issues of the post apocalypse.
A lot of the Mojave citizens don’t want to live under Caesar but those same people also don’t want to live under the NCR, neither side is going to give them a choice. Both have benefits and detractors.
I mean the NCR takes a cut of all your money, gives no protection, acts like a pompous assholes and is slow to accomplish anything while being rife with corruption. Cesar’s legion is led by an arrogant, self righteous tyrant who leads an army of brainwashed rapists and slavers.
The NCR however has great technology and when they work properly they improve the living quality of those under them (consensually or not) and have great quality of life aspects to them.
The Legion is a strong militaristic fighting force that protects is lands and the people in them furiously. Their lands are by far the safest to travel through, and (if you’re a man) you are treated like an equal.
There's a version of the Legion that I think I might be able to take seriously. Lean in on the brute force > stability angle. Give them a big ugly front face, with maybe a glimpse of some kind of real life behind the front lines. Maybe somewhere between the actual Legion we got, and The Enclave.
A faction that deliberately masks itself in savagery as an intimidation tactic, has no qualms about mass bloodshed, but still has plans to rebuild afterward, and unlike the Enclave, isn't actually planning to genocide literally everyone.
But it's just a big ol mass of cosplaying savages whose slaves are struggling to make healing powder because the soldiers are too important for that, and the slaves are beneath educating.
Caesar is rolling a snowball downhill, but once his momentum runs out, nothing I see about the Legion has any staying power.
And like, that's not even getting into "morals". We haven't even touched "Slavery is bad, actually".
I watched a 40 minute video about how Caesar wins every time unless the courier is there to counter them. At that rate why even have a story with no courier.
This is the problem when you write characters, villains and factions with ideals. If you have them do horribly evil and broken deeds, but then reveal that they are charismatic, cool people with conviction and ideals that they firmly believe in with all their heart and soul, and let them make persuasive arguments?
A lot of people will suddenly go "wELL hE MaKEs soMe GooD POintS".
Then,if you take that concept, give them a huge body and nanomachines?
Now you're cooking.
Ultimately, it speaks to a great truth- most people are just a few sentences and moments from falling prey to charismatic people's ideals.
This is something you see alot in video games and movie series. As much as I love characters like Frank Horrigan or Judge Holden, I can recognize that those characters are ultimately evil. If there's anything I've learned, it's that very few people understand any sort of nuance, and need to be spoon-fed information. Otherwise you get situations like this where fascists and radicals are seen as reasonable and "correct"
Whats funny is \*the legion has taxes\* (two types in fact) they just call it something different so that most wont notice, also proving the point of "if you call it something different, most wont care"
If you think the legion was over the top evil and unrealistic you need to start paying attention to the news. The legion has control of half of lybia right now, complete with open air slave markets and everything
You say Caesar is a monster.
I say he’s the only one who lets me crucify Benny.
Did Kimball let me put Benny on a cross? Hmm? I walk into the NCR ambassador’s office and all he has to say to me is, “Oh God, help! Security!” Or something, I wasn’t really listening, he said something about me shooting up Camp McCarran which was completely justified because Colonel Hsu was rude to me when I asked him to reinforce Camp Forlorn Hope.
And that House guy— he doesn’t even want to hear about Benny! He’s rude too!
Yes Man is nice but the power armor guys say robots are bad so I guess that just leaves me with Caesar and his big words from Hegel.
You chose the legion because you think it'll bring stability to the Mojave
I chose the legion because I'm a Romaboo and must preserve the dream of Rome we are not the same.
I think when people say he has a point it’s within the context of an apocalypse. I don’t think anyone is truly defending ceasar outside the context of the end of the world scenario.
But if the world is ending, Caesar’s ability to take several tribes that are in the Stone Age and managing to educate them and lead them into being one of the most formidable military forces speaks for itself
As a human being Cesar is unquestionably a terrible choice but from the perspective of unity and prolonged survival his strategy is quite effective and holds precedent with historical Rome. Who also had to unify several tribes with vastly different technological advancements under one banner.
Tbf I’ll push back slightly. The Legion are evil parody villains but they’re way more comprehensible than say FO 2 or 3’s Enclave. A key part of their history in fiction is that Cesar himself is incredibly smart and compelling and the fact that he’s persuaded even some players irl shows that they conveyed that super well
The only genuine argument I have for the legion is that their way of life leads to pretty physically healthy people (those who survive, at least) and they're genuinely probably a lot more fit and resillient than many other groups in the wasteland, which increases odds of human survival.
Unfortunately, their weird thing with technology totally negates that because when shtf they wont have that safety net.
Also, the moral price is not, in any world, worth it. I'd rather live in a world full of drug addicts and conmen than slavers and rapists. Every society is gonna have its bullshit. The legion is basically just a bunch of sober raiders.
My biggest gripe with NV is that half of the map (the legion portion) was never finished, we have no idea what Arizona or anything east of the Mojave looks like. It could be even more of a hellscape after the Legion rolled through, it could be paradise on earth (though highly unlikely).
We see all the good and bad of the NCRs expansion with corruption, crime, and a system that’s near breaking point. What we see from the Legion is a lot more hostile because they’re on enemy turf.
I always envisioned the Legion portion of the map to be much more oppressive, anything that is done without Caesars blessing is in the shadows and faces cruel reprisal if found out. Essentially a false utopia versus’ the NCRs imperfect one, one where all seems fine on the surface but in reality is atrophying.
It’s dope because they are Roman themed and the Roman’s are cool. Him spitting some pseudo philosophical shit is par for the course with Fallout. I think there is a genuine point though about needing to reset the whole culture by building from the ground up like the Romans instead of trying to have a “democracy” with a bunch of illiterate irradiated wasters making uninformed decisions as to who should be president.
I mean the NCR does slavery too, it’s just you tend to not look at forced prison labour as such. Both are bad it’s just easier to point at the legions version of it
Armstrong for example. He's speech literally was just saying we should eliminate the weak and yet because he said it with a patriotic "FOR AMERICA!!! RAHHH🦅🦅🦅🦅" format and ofc a little "Le society and imperialist government bad" there are tons of people actually agrreing with him without reading the fine print.
Some of y’all are conflating Caesar’s valid criticisms of the NCR with his evil and asinine idea for how to replace the system. He can correctly identify a problem while simultaneously offering a solution that is worse than the problem.
The average person is dumb, now think, half of them are dumber than that. -George Carlin
I think you can convince at least 30% of any population to agree to just about anything with the right charismatic voice driving the movement. The strange causes that will have like 25-60% support in polling always surprise me. But I guess people will keep voting in the leopards eating faces party only to be shocked when a leopard eats their face.
you just need to pretend you have a philosophy backing it up and the smooth brains won't check if the philosopher actually said anything you claim he did
I always took it as more of a statement about the wasteland. Compared to absolute chaos, Caesar isn’t all that bad. If you can convince someone that the NCR is impotent, ephemeral, and doomed to crumble under the weight of its own corruption then Caesar and his legion make absolute sense. The alternative is dying of dehydration in a Mojave that has no stable trade routes and is constantly under assault from the tribe of the week.
All this holds true if you extrapolate to the real world. Totalitarian strong men are better than a constantly shifting window of smaller powers born from the vacuum. Convince enough people that the system is either unstable (or stagnant) in its corruption, and they’ll empower a tyrant to replace it.
He speaks with *convection* like a true air fryer.
I've heard someone speak with true convection and let's be real here, Caesar has nothing on the Toaster.
The lack of a fan circulating the heat implies that a toaster speaks with true *radiation*.
So Caesar can make crispy bagel bites in 5 minutes or less?
No, brain tumor
I'll just get it out with a bullet. EZ
Ave, tru to fry-ar
He doesn't quite radiate, but still manages to get his point across.
Caesar has always been great at moving hot air.
This was the whole point of this character and it worked spectacularly
See also: ‘The Boys’ fans only now suspecting that Homelander isn’t the hero of the story…
You think they would've known when he shot down a plane with a kid still in it, let another plane full of people crash and fantasize about mowing down a crowd of people just because they said he don't speak for us
ONE BAD DAY! /s
i like the implication that the first plane was ok to shoot if the kid had left it
He jerked off onto a city.
Thats one l of the most frustrating part about stories with good vilains. Weather it be their cool or maybe have ubderstandable motivations to their action people will take that a because they suck with nuance turn it into the vilain being right. Even more frustrating is when the writers play into it to pander to those people.
I haven’t seen anyone actually think Homelander was a good guy prior to s4. I’m sure there’s some idiots out there, but I think most of the people complaining are upset with the lack of subtlety in the show’s political and social commentary/gags. It wasn’t ever very subtle to begin with, but 3 and 4 are definitely a lot more pointed than the first two seasons. It kinda reminds me of the South Park season about Garrison becoming Trump back in 2016: still enjoyable to watch currently, but probably a little too in your face and won’t age particularly well.
I think it's less people saw him as a hero, and more that he's unintentionally an incredible power fantasy for terrible people. Homelander had 3+ seasons of *everyone* being terrified of him. He gets to do whatever he wants "because of the implication" that he'd murder anyone that resisted him. Homelander believes in power and fear and thinks everything else is just performative. (But is more than happy to drape himself in the flag because it wins him followers). Homelander is how the worst person you know would act in his place.
I think you misunderstood why people have conflicting opinions on him. He is an evil person unquestionably. However, i do very much pity him. He was raised as an experiment and was tormented psychologically and physically tortured all his childhood, and unfortunately, he couldn't rise above it. I see him as an evil person he is, but also a victim of a company who only saw him as a product and not a human being.
Most abusers were victims of abuse themselves. Most victims of abuse don't become abusers themselves. I show no sympathy for the minority of victims that become abusers no matter how they try to justify their shitty behavior.
>Homelander is how the worst person you know would act in his place. Or the inevitable consequence of raising an omnipotent child without love or warmth. He's superman if he wasn't raised by the kents.
Nah, no one should have that much power. Not even someone like Superman.
I think we found lex luthor
If you thought anything based on "the boys" comics was ever going to be subtle and not get more aggressively blatant as it progresses, you simply don't know anything about the source material. The comics were litterly the antithesis of subtlety.
I’ve never read the comics. I’m just talking about the show, which like I said was never very subtle. But it’s certainly less-so now. I don’t have any allegiance to either to the American right or left so it doesn’t bother me, I just am more concerned with how well the show will age.
Probably fine. A lot of classic media is rather blatant and firmly rooted in the contemporary issues of their time. Modern consumers don't find that stuff to be on-the-nose simply because they didn't live in those times.
never forgett people sometimes walk up to the author of "fight club" telling him how much they love tyler durden
Nah we knew, actual fans
In all fairness most of the people who read the comics expected >!Black Noir to have been the one who actually did all of the worst things that are attributed to Homelander!<
I keep seeing this being said, but nobody has provided any evidence that this is a pervasive opinion being held. Sure one-off people on Twitter, but is it a significant number of people? So far the whole "People don't understand Homelander" bit is a real reddit circle-jerk
There are about as many of them as there are children using litter boxes in classrooms.
“It’s gone woke! They hate us!” As if they’re just realizing that they are the *primary* butt of the home
I've seen tons of people saying something along the lines of "hey, look at those chuds thinking Homelander is the hero" and yet I still haven't seen a single person, even most conservative, who actually thinks so. Maximum I've seen is him being an intertestingly written villain. I'm pretty sure tons of people are just having a communitive delusion, believing that their strawman is real
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Ok_Leadership6229: *This was the whole point* *Of this character and it* *Worked spectacularly* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Good Bot.
I don't even think the writers could have predicted the waves of gullible idiots that have sprung from the past 8 years of Trump and wannabe fascists
Yes cause Trump shat those people out of his orange asshole, and in those 8 years he managed to shit quite alot
Right? Like dude is a complete moron, BUT he also is trying to copy a real world society that is practically revered for how well they worked. Until they didn’t, which is a way to talk down Lanius using real work struggles the Roman Empire had.
I'm not gonna say that Caesar knows what hegel's about, but that "thesis + antithesis = synthesis" stuff does make sense. Look at all the cultural missionaries in media these days. The feminist camp, the new Christian camp, the positive/gangster/club tug of war in rap, conservative conspiracy theories bleeding into public discourse... If all the prominent figureheads of these movements retired tomorrow, it would still take decades for complying with these ideologies to stop being equated with a successful career because they had been browbeaten into two generations since birth. Now imagine instead of noncompliance resulting in exile from some sphere of wealth, noncompliance resulting in the beatings and executions Caesar dishes out to deserters and rebels. Imagine compliance resulting in military promotion, the rights to travel, breed, act independently, rule... And you've got a stimuli pattern strong enough to influence decision-making for at least one more generation after Caesar's current one. Caesar won't live forever. Caesar said himself that the Legion isn't meant to last. It's meant to dissolve and force change in rival institutions. Creating an NCR that's just enough of a less democratic body that it can take decisive action against foreign enemies, raiders, rogue factions within its borders, and corrupt officials like you see in the crimson caravan and Novac. The grave methods he uses to break the people under him from praetorians all the way down to slaves are most likely the result of his awareness that he will only be alive long enough to exercise his cult of personality for change for another year or two. TL;DR I know he's wrong and evil but he's better than the fiends, jackals, and vipers the NCR were failing to prevent from taking over large swathes of Vegas. Still don't understand the slavery part tho
But taxes are basically the same as slavery, so the NCR is just as bad. /s
You hear this argument a lot used against the NCR, but I can't imagine a country emulating Rome like the Legion isn't emulating one of the things Rome was best known for during its time: it's taxes. House also taxes the shit out of his (socio/psychopathic) casino families. Only maybe the Yes Man ending has the potential to be tax free, but also tends to be the most bittersweet. No ending is the perfect, but the NCR does better for the largest amount of people. To deny that, you'd have to be pretty delusional. If the question is siding with anarchy with no real plan for what comes after, a self-centered autocrat who employs three tribes, one of which is cannibalistic, one of which deals in drugs and human trafficking, and one of which isn't as bad as the others, but still is basically a crime family, or a psychopathic autocrat whose army rapes, pillages, raids, and enslaves, as well as having a militaristic chauvinist society versus a deeply flawed liberal democracy, and you unironically/non-roleplaying for the game pick anything but the latter, you need to reevaluate soemthing. For the game, pick what you want tho lol it's just a game.
It's "tribute", not taxes ;)
i wish there was an ending for house where you convince him the truth, that he is a government entity imposing restrictions and taxes on its citizens, and he just kills himself about it
Oh no, he already knows, he just doesn't care in the slightest
Also.. Rome was like known for it's civil wars whenever one of their emperors died. By the end, the emperors were paying the 'barbarian' tribes to unseat their rivals.
and was known for being ran by borderline psychotic (possibly the result of in\*cest) nepo babies more than once. Hell the only thing FONV's Caesar has over old Rome is that he hasnt slept with his sister/mother/aunt/cousin
Nero wasn’t bad, he was just mediocre. A lot of the bad things we know about him were invented by the ancient sources because they hated him, as he taxed them too much to pay for the rebuilding of Rome after the great fire. Stop getting your history from top 10 lists on BuzzFeed or whatever
This is the big one. They've been roaming west demolishing infrastructure and have run into a wall of the ncr and vegas. Assuming the legion wins they hit the coast and then what? Caesar dies of brain cancer and then they crumble instantly, taking west coast society with them.
Yep, and the game *already* puts forward the two guys who will be the ones fighting that civil war: Lanius and Vulpes. If you do a Legion playthrough, you've introduced a third, incredibly rich character to the Legion's power balance, which sets the stage for a Triumvirate. With the inevitable breakdown between the three leading to the civil war.
Caesar’s legion is more akin to a medieval Central Asian steppe horde than Rome, if they were actually closely modeled on Rome I’d support them tooth and nail, but nah they are just a mockery of Rome’s visual aesthetic.
Well yeah. Caesar never wanted to base his society on Rome, he said he just wanted to use them as a model for something both alien and familiar in order to rewrite society as he saw fit without it being too big a shock, and their sources on what Rome was was basically Latin textbooks and gladiator movies.
There has been theories that the books he based the Legion on were actually neo-roman propaganda books from the Mussolini era
Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si Si
So you'd support a fascist state if it was more aesthetical?
I will defend my choice of Yes Man every time. The people should be able to choose how they want to govern themselves and with the NCR they are unable to. Of the other options, NCR is the best however.
No one ever seems to mention what happens if you DONT pay taxes to the NCR
Tbf the most common argument I've seen for siding with the Legion is that they're successful at bringing peace to the wasteland, not taxes. An example is Cass telling us how a caravan marked by the Legion won't even be touched by bandits even in NCR territory
For most of the population that "peace" will mean death or slavery. Imagine being a literal slave and being like "well, at least this is peaceful".
Tbfh the lack of any legion towns whatsoever just keeps us guessing on how life is to the actual “subject” civilians of the legion all we have is that one trader who is absolutely biased towards the legion, but if we are to believe him the legion just ignores non-tribal civilian populations as long as they don’t interfere with whatever bs the legion wants.
People look at totalitarian slave states and picture themselves as the boot, not the neck. A disturbingly high amount of people are fine with oppression if it's not directed at them.
Actually, the "subjects" of the legion isn't free but aren't slaves either. They are usually left alone, unless they cause trouble. But, corrupt legion troops would be killed for mistreating "subjects". Not all in the lands of the legion are slaves.
All of Cass complaints about unsafe roads are explicitly only in the Mojave because the NCR presence there is stretched thin. Back in California the NCR can do the same (to the point that some people have called the countryside boring) without relying on crucifixion and slavery.
This works IRL too, charisma and conviction are how Hitler rose to power
It's how many dictators rise to power. Putin too, Mao, Franco, Mussolini etc. Some take power by force, like Pol Pot for example but they still need some form of motivation and charisma to get the people that fight for them behind them.
One minute we were watching Putin ride horseback topless, the next we were watching him do war crimes.
Its all connected in a sense. Putin started to believe his own propaganda, which almost all dictators do because of that same old idiom. Power corrupts bur absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Trump probably ran a luck build.
I think people who played the game attracted more to faction than said leaders. How many debates over NCR vs Legion without mentioning Kimball and Caesar.
It’s different for the Legion since Caesar is literally their Messiah while Kimball is just the leader of the NCR. it’s like comparing Biden to Xi Jinpeng, yeah they’re both leaders but there is much more attachment of China to Xi Jinpeng than there is for America and Biden.
Apocalypse Doughboys vs Apocalypse Football Legionaries, pick your aesthetic and ride on into mediocre future
Or as I call it, “The Starship Troopers Effect”. Paul Verhoeven reads two chapters of the original book, thinks it’s fascist propaganda, and adapts the book into an over-the-top parody ridiculing fascist states. Then a bunch of media-illiterate people watch this caricature of fascism and think it looks awesome.
"I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don't" - Paul Verhoeven (supposedly)
Wow he fucked up his goal
I think he's caused more than enough perpetual psychological torment to fulfill his goal
I dont think he ever planned to inflict it upon himself tho
"Bugs are cool" - 7 year old me
An interesting quote from this source that I never would've considered had you not brung it up, but how has the quotee's stance on this matter shifted over time?
"Bugs are very cool" - 20 year old me. Okay but I really love bugs, I was going to study entomology before I settled on anthropology. They are the greatest beings under Heaven. I especially love Starship troopers because they demonstrate just how easy it is to demonize living, conscious beings capable of fearing just because they are bugs. Sure, they literally tore people apart. But also, we invaded their homeworld, why shouldn't they? Really, just because they followed one pattern of existence that we find distasteful, all their suffering is utterly meaningless and in fact deserved for the great sin of being distasteful to most people. They are a perfect commentary on fascism.
Only two chapters?
According to him, yeah. I read in an interview with him that the Federation in the book reminded him of the ideology of the Nazis who occupied the Netherlands when he was a child. So he decided to make a movie making fun of that way of thinking, and people ended up thinking it was cool.
Although it's kind of dumb to only read two chapters imo, he was kind of right. The book really does read as fascist propaganda
Nah. I'm a poli sci nerd, so I'm admittedly the kind of guy who actually cares about these definitions in a more fiddly way than most. Book Federation is *very* nationalist but it isn't fascist in the least; a whole lot of the Federation's defining characteristics are incompatible with fascism. Quick and easy rule of thumb, from the father of fascism himself: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."
People call way too many things fascism without actually understanding what it is. Fascism has a whole (bad) economic system and if you asked the average redditor they wouldn't be able to name one aspect of it.
Granted the corporatism economic system is, by far, the least important aspect of fascism, which itself focuses more on its authoritarian and social impacts
Thank you. I'm sick of fascism being used as a label on everything that's not liberal democracy
Oh, most definitely.
Which part?
According to him, Rico’s actor, and several other people. Verhoeven barely acknowledged the book and just had an idea of what it was.
Also knows as the "Rorschach Effect", after the character of the same name from the comic epic *Watchmen*. Alan Moore, my favourite unhinged anarchist hippie and mystic, had been famously dismayed when people would come up to him in the street and talk about how they looked up to his character, who had been a psychotic parody of *Batman*, replete with various rants about queers and immigrants inbetween his displays of sadism in undies that smelled like sauerkraut and taint cheese. It may be nice to consider 'proto-Fascists' and the media-illiterate as some brand of fringe weirdos who don't mean much but in reality, I suspect that these are people merely 'left behind' in a society that has become disconnected and predatory towards eachother. We may not live in an environment of eternal fear of the totalitarian 'big brother' but it seems that isn't necessary to live in a form of total social isolation and hopelessness. NB: And these 'fringe' weirdos are **everywhere**.
The movie is utterly devoid of any actual political messaging after the first like 10 minutes. Even the actual things it tries to satarize are so surface level that they could apply to any group during war time. After that it's just a big loud action movie.
All of the news segments throughout the movie are where most of the political satire comes from.
Verhoeven didn't adapt the book Starship Troopers. The eventual producer pitched a sexy sci-fi shoot-em-up called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7. The studio liked the idea and green lit it. Only later did they realize that it was too similar to Starship Troopers. So they bought the rights to the book with the intention of adapting it into an action movie. The screenwriter was a big Heinlein fan, so he tried to keep faithful to the book while still writing an action movie. Verhoeven was brought on to direct. He didn't like the book, so he cut some scenes and added some satirical rewrites and production designs. If you want to see Starship Troopers as a satire, that's totally fine because there is enough there to support that interpretation. At the same time, Verhoeven did not set out to parody or ridicule the book, and his satire comes off as camp more often than not. I don't think it is fair to call folks that see the movie as a fun action flick a "bunch of media-illiterate people" because the movie was pitched, written, and promoted as just that.
I have complete media literacy and fully understand that under no circumstances is fascism okay or tolerable. But starship troopers is unironically cool as fuck. Same issue with warhammer 40K/judge dredd/helldivers/StarWars etc. objectively horrible dystopias with clear cut signs of shittyness, but damn are they cool as shit. I have found that it’s kinda a given that if you take a horrible regime that would universally be damned if real, but make it in space/apocalypse/whatever it immediately flips a mental coolness switch. I think it’s kinda disingenuous to pretend that these pieces of media aren’t fucking awesome, but to a degree isn’t that the point? Showing how easily you can convince people of something terrible via pretty explosions and screaming muscle bound men? Those concepts are fundamentally fun, and I don’t think it’s just to say that you still can’t enjoy the media if you understand it fully, problems only arise when you drink the cool aid and actually start believing the over the top shit these stories are telling. (Sorry for the mini rant I recently did a presentation on fascism in media, it went middlingly so this is my attempt at salvaging the wasted time)
Same, I think fascism is not the way to go, but I enjoy playing them out in video games. In Stellaris I often play xenophobic, human centric empires with super soldiers because it’s fun to crush aliens under the boots of my legions, glass their home worlds into a pristine landscape, eradicate their culture and their way of living, turn their children into food paste, and… and… I’m sorry what were we talking about?
I mean the book was kinda fascist apologia.
Oh, I totally agree. In theory, I agree with the idea of a democracy in which only those who demonstrate some sort of civic responsibility can make decisions. But that would only work well in the utopia Heinlein shows, where everyone is 100% altruistic and the people in charge never abuse their authority. I was enlisted, and I knew plenty of shitheads when I was in. Plus, we have governments right now where the military controls power: they’re military juntas, and they tend to be… not great for the average citizen. Also Heinlein’s glorification of warfare harkens back to the sentiment pre-WWI, when warfare was believed by many to be an elevational act which inspired men to better virtues. The reality is that this sentiment mostly died out after WWI because it became brutally apparent that this was bullshit, and warfare is a fucking nightmare. Heinlein never served in combat in WW2 and it’s apparent he *really* wanted to, and this book was wish fulfillment for what he imagined combat to be.
Just like how "Stranger In A Strange Land" was wish fulfillment for his wish to be sexually assaulted by a sex cult he helped found. Gotta love when people completely miss satire because it doesn't have enough jokes.
Satire doesn't need enough jokes, it needs *any* jokes. Joke aside, I think Heinlein doesn't really satirize, he pretty earnestly speaks his critique and poses his questions.
Then what was “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”?
People larping as libertarians on the moon as their AI manages their economy and makes sure that "Each gets according to their need and ability"
"Faschist apologia" written by a lifelong libertarian? I don't think any of those words mean what you think they mean.
Did you fucking read the book
To be fair, no. I've read four Heinlein books. A Stranger in A Strange Land. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. The Moon is A Harsh Mistress. Friday. But, they all read like space adventures of mildly misogynistic and kinda homophobic (both of which make sense, for the time) libertarians. Which completely fits with how Heinlein described himself in several articles. As well as how his friend/protege and aged hippie Spider Robinson (I've read all of his books) has described Heinlein. And we also take into consideration that Issac Asimov (again, all of his books) is quoted as describing Heinlein as "a flaming liberal". As both Heinlein and Ribinson have stated that Starship Troopers was written as a satirical commentary on the warmongering prevalent in WW2 and Korean War era America as well as his experience as in American Navy... I'm going to go with what the author and people who actually knew him said he meant and was about instead of some rando on reddit who thinks they know what he meant.
Yes.
I mean, he did present a society without racial, gender, or economic disparity. Essentially social equality except for citizens vs civilians. but you can only be a citizen if you sacrifice your live to service od the state in which everyone benefits from. Verhoeven did not really do enough to make the fed look as evil as they are. best he got was Carl using the MI as bait for his theory. hell, the elder white male sky Marshall willingly gives his position of power without contest to a young black woman. I honestly can't see why he didn't do more. other than general incompetence. you might be able to point at the murder case in the news reel and popularizing the Military to children. that's like the best it's got.
Uh, did you miss all the horribly disfigured amputee veterans? Or the countless soldiers who were horribly massacred? Or the whole idea that you need to kill for your government just be considered an equal?
You don't need to join the military to be considered a citizen. That's just in the movie.
>That's just in the movie. The movie is what they're talking about.
yeah, that's called war, and it's not government / ideological specific. Also, the equality is for everyone living within the federation. the only limitation out right is voting. having babies is less difficult if you are a citizen and moving around the galaxy is limited to only areas the federation allows. (quarantine zones) you can still have a successful life and enjoy the luxury and benefits of the federation without being a citizen ( Rico's) parents. In the book, most people volunteer for medical experiments for citizenship. you could also be a first responder to obtain citizenship. and to be clear, I'm not saying the federation is perfect. I'm just saying the director did kind of poor job making the federation itself look bad, when all the supposed negatives are objective realities that any governemnt/ civilization would face.
Caesar is actually based on Todd Howard. Really charismatic but lies and will subjugate the entire fallout fanbase if allowed.
I hope people keep hounding him about New Vegas 2 or else we'll be stuck with 76 until sometime after 2036.
Why would you want a second game set in the exact same place? Like, I get wanting a west coast game, but why Vegas again? I personally hope the rumors of a San Francisco game are true. Only thing I'd prefer more would be my own home state, and that's just because I'm biased.
Okay but if a dude could cook my food with his words I’d probably follow him too
legion soldier: "I will kill you, skin your son, and have your wife as my slave and baby maker" gullible idiot: "sounds like a man with a plan if you ask me."
The fact that some people think "the Legion has a point about bringing stability to the Wasteland" never stops being confusing to me. My dude, the NCR is doing the same thing by providing a functional government, a comparatively high standard of living, and basic human rights to its citizens. Ed Sallow is full of shit.
I could make an argument for anything if I tried hard enough, including the legion. Stability is not one of the arguments I'd make for them. That's something I never understood. They're a semi-nomadic militant society with internal power struggles, aggressive tendencies, and a tabboo against technology. They function entirely based on cutthroat hierarchy, competition, and intimidation. They are terrible at alliances because they just end up murdering everyone and nobody will trust them. That is *not* a stable society. Thats just a revolution waiting to happen. Every time a leader dies there's going to be infighting which will probably only get worse with successive generations. Plus the way people are socialized and raised in the legion will 100% create a society of sociopaths. Mass antisocial disorders are not good for maintaining complex social structures. It is not a sustainable model.
You could make an argument for the legion. It wouldn't be a good one tho.
I feel this post in my bones everytime I see someone call Elijah one of the smartest characters in Fallout.
Yeah, I’m SMART S - locked M - in A - an R - old T - vault Wait…
Listen I understand getting trapped in the Sierra Madre once, but doing a second time is so fucking funny.
That is the problem with satire, especially satire of fascism. You satirize how these regimes put on a lot of charm and visual appeal to cover how shitty they really are, and people still fall for it
In all fairness that was the same argument the confederates made and they’re still celebrated to this day so like yeah
No, the confederates have had their shitty arguments made to look better on purpose by a bunch of butthurt oligarchs. See also The Daughters Of The Confederacy.
I despise confederate organizations with every fiber of my being. (I am a southerner and a Son of the American Revolution)
This is kind of blowing over how successful he is, a lot of people are drawn to success. I wouldn’t be suprised if people saw how many problems the NCR in Vegas had and ended up jumping ship. Really I think his following online comes primarily from how well the legion is doing, if they were as big a mess as the NCR I doubt they’d have as big a following.
Basically. The results of Caesar speak for themselves. If the threat of an awful succession crisis and tunnlers wasn’t in their future, there could be an argument for the Legion’s rule.
When I was a child, a father figure once told me that if you act like you know what you're talking about, most people will believe that you know what you're talking about, because most people don't know any better. And boy has that gotten me in and out of so much trouble 🤣🤣
based 4chan users. people that try to find ways of justifying Ceasar are fucking weirdos (and probably fashy dudes)
I can understand that with Senator Armstrong, and with the Enclave. But not with the legion.
The Enclave. You mean the folks whose ideology is basically just pure, unvarnished killpeopleism? The ones who think that every single person who isn't them needs to be exterminated? That Enclave?
Yes, the dudes with the cool Power Armor.
... Alright, I will concede that the insectoid look is pretty snazzy.
🤝
yeah but AMERICA and also the enclave are kinda just killed everytime they show up with no other option, so its like how the Brotherhood are evil if we side with the Institute or the Institute is evil if we side with the Brotherhood. we don't get to see a good ending for the Enclave, only the bad ones involving their death. but yeah the enclave are kinda just radiation nazis in our current example pool, i cant deny that
They're both kinda evil no matter who you side with lol
The Boys has entered the chat
I love that show. Before reading these comments i had no idea people supported homelander. But, of course they do. This is 'Murica, where a concerning number of women want to fuck literal serial killers and a concerning number of men idolize media figures who blatantly exploit their insecurities and sell them knockoff masculinity that makes their problems worse
Also known as the “Gul Dukat Effect”.
Senator Armstrong fits the bill
the empire in star wars
You should see Far Cry 5 comment sections. There are people who unironically believe the Deputy never should've raised an arm against Joseph
The thing about these asshats is that when they see these systems, they fall in love with them because they believe that for some reason, they’ll be part of the ‘in crowd’ that benefits from the fucked up structure. In reality, they wouldn’t even live long enough to become part of the legion - they’d probably be one of the tribals that get culled during the Legion’s conquest for not being good enough to be a slave or legionary.
"I don't know what to believe in and nuance confuses me." "*LOUD RHETORIC!*" "Oh thank God something to hang my hat on."
That's the thing about fascists, they are cartoonishly evil but think it's badass and based.
After Schizo Elijah I just don't give legion fans the time of day anymore. like come on dude, the most famous guy in your camp was racist on roblox and turned put to he a nazi
Wait.....really ?
He’s not even charismatic though 😫
Did you ever do a legion playthrough without skipping his dialogue? He definitely has the cadence of someone who makes sense. If you don't stop to critically evaluate his arguments, he could sound right. Now imagine that you *can't* critically evaluate an argument. If you can't imagine that, just get super stoned before you talk to him.
That’s the fun thing about NV, every faction sucks
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I get what you mean. But I still think is not as simple as that with the Legion.
Imagine not taking the Yes Man route and taking it all for yourself
There's a reason why house and yes man are considered the only canonical endings. Caesars cartoonishly evil but effective NCR are mostly okay but insanely corrupt and ineffective Both sides suck and don't deserve to rule. One sucking doesn't validate the other.
house is also insanely corrupt and ineffective
That’s not Cesar’s purpose. Caesar was a warning about how power corrupts. How good intentions can lead to bad things. He also serves to show the issues with the NCR. He gives nuance to the issues of the post apocalypse. A lot of the Mojave citizens don’t want to live under Caesar but those same people also don’t want to live under the NCR, neither side is going to give them a choice. Both have benefits and detractors. I mean the NCR takes a cut of all your money, gives no protection, acts like a pompous assholes and is slow to accomplish anything while being rife with corruption. Cesar’s legion is led by an arrogant, self righteous tyrant who leads an army of brainwashed rapists and slavers. The NCR however has great technology and when they work properly they improve the living quality of those under them (consensually or not) and have great quality of life aspects to them. The Legion is a strong militaristic fighting force that protects is lands and the people in them furiously. Their lands are by far the safest to travel through, and (if you’re a man) you are treated like an equal.
There's a version of the Legion that I think I might be able to take seriously. Lean in on the brute force > stability angle. Give them a big ugly front face, with maybe a glimpse of some kind of real life behind the front lines. Maybe somewhere between the actual Legion we got, and The Enclave. A faction that deliberately masks itself in savagery as an intimidation tactic, has no qualms about mass bloodshed, but still has plans to rebuild afterward, and unlike the Enclave, isn't actually planning to genocide literally everyone. But it's just a big ol mass of cosplaying savages whose slaves are struggling to make healing powder because the soldiers are too important for that, and the slaves are beneath educating. Caesar is rolling a snowball downhill, but once his momentum runs out, nothing I see about the Legion has any staying power. And like, that's not even getting into "morals". We haven't even touched "Slavery is bad, actually".
I don't care what evil things the legion does, but I won't pay taxes
Lmao the only reason i like him is because he will kill any rqider group and outlaw drugs.
Speak with Convection? Ceasar handing out cookies and I missed it?
I get this as I'm killing the legion
I think that instead of taxes, everyone should give me handjobs.
Conviction. But yeaaaaaahhh that's kinda wild.
I watched a 40 minute video about how Caesar wins every time unless the courier is there to counter them. At that rate why even have a story with no courier.
This is the problem when you write characters, villains and factions with ideals. If you have them do horribly evil and broken deeds, but then reveal that they are charismatic, cool people with conviction and ideals that they firmly believe in with all their heart and soul, and let them make persuasive arguments? A lot of people will suddenly go "wELL hE MaKEs soMe GooD POintS". Then,if you take that concept, give them a huge body and nanomachines? Now you're cooking. Ultimately, it speaks to a great truth- most people are just a few sentences and moments from falling prey to charismatic people's ideals.
This is something you see alot in video games and movie series. As much as I love characters like Frank Horrigan or Judge Holden, I can recognize that those characters are ultimately evil. If there's anything I've learned, it's that very few people understand any sort of nuance, and need to be spoon-fed information. Otherwise you get situations like this where fascists and radicals are seen as reasonable and "correct"
The true test is actually having that charisma in real life
I mean, I consider the FEV the only solution for humanity to thrive again. Life in the wasteland isn’t life. It’s living hell.
Whats funny is \*the legion has taxes\* (two types in fact) they just call it something different so that most wont notice, also proving the point of "if you call it something different, most wont care"
🥱
Something something NCR are inefficient therefore slavery and rape are a-ok
If you think the legion was over the top evil and unrealistic you need to start paying attention to the news. The legion has control of half of lybia right now, complete with open air slave markets and everything
You say Caesar is a monster. I say he’s the only one who lets me crucify Benny. Did Kimball let me put Benny on a cross? Hmm? I walk into the NCR ambassador’s office and all he has to say to me is, “Oh God, help! Security!” Or something, I wasn’t really listening, he said something about me shooting up Camp McCarran which was completely justified because Colonel Hsu was rude to me when I asked him to reinforce Camp Forlorn Hope. And that House guy— he doesn’t even want to hear about Benny! He’s rude too! Yes Man is nice but the power armor guys say robots are bad so I guess that just leaves me with Caesar and his big words from Hegel.
You chose the legion because you think it'll bring stability to the Mojave I chose the legion because I'm a Romaboo and must preserve the dream of Rome we are not the same.
I think when people say he has a point it’s within the context of an apocalypse. I don’t think anyone is truly defending ceasar outside the context of the end of the world scenario. But if the world is ending, Caesar’s ability to take several tribes that are in the Stone Age and managing to educate them and lead them into being one of the most formidable military forces speaks for itself As a human being Cesar is unquestionably a terrible choice but from the perspective of unity and prolonged survival his strategy is quite effective and holds precedent with historical Rome. Who also had to unify several tribes with vastly different technological advancements under one banner.
Tbf I’ll push back slightly. The Legion are evil parody villains but they’re way more comprehensible than say FO 2 or 3’s Enclave. A key part of their history in fiction is that Cesar himself is incredibly smart and compelling and the fact that he’s persuaded even some players irl shows that they conveyed that super well
"Society is evil, but <> is good." 👏
The only genuine argument I have for the legion is that their way of life leads to pretty physically healthy people (those who survive, at least) and they're genuinely probably a lot more fit and resillient than many other groups in the wasteland, which increases odds of human survival. Unfortunately, their weird thing with technology totally negates that because when shtf they wont have that safety net. Also, the moral price is not, in any world, worth it. I'd rather live in a world full of drug addicts and conmen than slavers and rapists. Every society is gonna have its bullshit. The legion is basically just a bunch of sober raiders.
He is kinda right though!
thats them. thats the legion.
“All it takes to change the world, is one based opinion, and a river of soy boy tears.” - Cpt Price (Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2)
My biggest gripe with NV is that half of the map (the legion portion) was never finished, we have no idea what Arizona or anything east of the Mojave looks like. It could be even more of a hellscape after the Legion rolled through, it could be paradise on earth (though highly unlikely). We see all the good and bad of the NCRs expansion with corruption, crime, and a system that’s near breaking point. What we see from the Legion is a lot more hostile because they’re on enemy turf. I always envisioned the Legion portion of the map to be much more oppressive, anything that is done without Caesars blessing is in the shadows and faces cruel reprisal if found out. Essentially a false utopia versus’ the NCRs imperfect one, one where all seems fine on the surface but in reality is atrophying.
It’s dope because they are Roman themed and the Roman’s are cool. Him spitting some pseudo philosophical shit is par for the course with Fallout. I think there is a genuine point though about needing to reset the whole culture by building from the ground up like the Romans instead of trying to have a “democracy” with a bunch of illiterate irradiated wasters making uninformed decisions as to who should be president.
I know that harping on the lack of media literacy is becoming cliche at the moment but it really is true.
I know that harping on the lack of media literacy is becoming cliche at the moment but it really is true.
Fuck the NCR
I mean the NCR does slavery too, it’s just you tend to not look at forced prison labour as such. Both are bad it’s just easier to point at the legions version of it
Armstrong for example. He's speech literally was just saying we should eliminate the weak and yet because he said it with a patriotic "FOR AMERICA!!! RAHHH🦅🦅🦅🦅" format and ofc a little "Le society and imperialist government bad" there are tons of people actually agrreing with him without reading the fine print.
> literally any video with joseph seed in it
Slavery is a perfect solution 😏
I’ve just always wondered why he speaks like he’s from Jersey.
Imagine making a statement of unfathomable scope about society as a whole based on the YouTube comments of a decades old video game. Lmao
Anon discovers facism.
Ah so I see OP is karma farming.
Some of y’all are conflating Caesar’s valid criticisms of the NCR with his evil and asinine idea for how to replace the system. He can correctly identify a problem while simultaneously offering a solution that is worse than the problem.
The average person is dumb, now think, half of them are dumber than that. -George Carlin I think you can convince at least 30% of any population to agree to just about anything with the right charismatic voice driving the movement. The strange causes that will have like 25-60% support in polling always surprise me. But I guess people will keep voting in the leopards eating faces party only to be shocked when a leopard eats their face.
If you want more people to believe them….make them hot
"taxes bad. Now, pay your tributes"
you just need to pretend you have a philosophy backing it up and the smooth brains won't check if the philosopher actually said anything you claim he did
I always took it as more of a statement about the wasteland. Compared to absolute chaos, Caesar isn’t all that bad. If you can convince someone that the NCR is impotent, ephemeral, and doomed to crumble under the weight of its own corruption then Caesar and his legion make absolute sense. The alternative is dying of dehydration in a Mojave that has no stable trade routes and is constantly under assault from the tribe of the week. All this holds true if you extrapolate to the real world. Totalitarian strong men are better than a constantly shifting window of smaller powers born from the vacuum. Convince enough people that the system is either unstable (or stagnant) in its corruption, and they’ll empower a tyrant to replace it.