#sorry i got longwinded!! i honestly want to write a paper about this someday orz

[vaultsixtynine]

Heyo! This text post is a response to covenmouse's really cool post! For the first section I will talk as if I am addressing her, but after that I'm going to delineate into a blurb I've wanted to write about FNV for a very long time. Cut for brevity and convenience.

Just putting my 2 cents in here, and upfront I'm going to say that I definitely agree with you. The "rabid legion fan" condition has continually boggled me since I first picked up and played the game and tried to talk to others about it and it SERIOUSLY concerns me sometimes because there's "hoo hoo ha ha I'm playing an evil character in this video game" and "I fully and knowingly support a slaveholding, rapist, misogynistic, vaguely genocidal society that wants to literally crush all of remaining civilization under its boot heel" and they are VERY DIFFERENT. That's some heavy shit, and half of the FNV fan population never seems to bat an eye? And even side with the Legion? There's plenty of opportunities to change your mind - you can go to talk to Caesar, decide that this is not what you want, and blow his head off - It's fully within the player character's power to do all that and more at several points in the story. As for what you said, I have no 'but' clause other than to note it always seemed to me like both the game plot and in-game dialogue set the NCR up as? Significantly better? Than the Legion? Like okay, Bitter Springs was a violation of acceptable standards of warfare and also of human rights and everybody fucking knows it and NCR is awful for essentially covering it up (just using this instance as an example) but they're by far the way way lesser of two evils, and I feel the game always represents that. It could also be my automatic anti-Legion bias that I had from the very beginning of my first playthrough of the game that I never picked up on the writing trying to present them as two equal evils, but... anyway.

I'm going on to talk about something that I'm not quite sure if the writers meant to do or not, but it still happened and it's something I've been thinking about for literal years: 

The NCR is much more like historical Rome than the Legion ever was or ever will be. And I'm not sure if this is something that we were supposed to pick up on as an ironic twist, or if Obsidian did it unknowingly (Obsidian's writing teams have always been superb in my opinion, and I'll give them the benefit of thinking they did it intentionally!) 

Basically: I have a pretty strong background in Classical History (gross history nerd, I know) and four years of Latin and I feel like I'm in a pretty good place to do some historical analysis of the similarities and differences of Rome with both the NCR and the Legion.

Essentially, it comes down to culture. NCR and Legion are both large empire-like entities that take over land and the people living on it, it's true. Superficially, they're similar. Legion fancies itself Roman and speaks as much Latin as they can know, they dress as closely as they can, they structure their battle formations and their very small society after a grand mental impression they have of How Rome Was. And they're wrong, and that's the best part. 

NCR? Is itself, a many-tentacled and greedy republic going for land and money and run by politicians and rich people. Guess what. That is exactly how Rome was, that is exactly it. It had politicians and bureaucracy and rich families and poor families and a SOCIAL. STRUCTURE. And with social structure (in a chicken-or-the-egg kind of way) comes CULTURE. Culture is the pivoting point of all civilization, basically, and NCR has one. 

What makes the Legion 'Not-Rome' is their structure. One supreme dictator with actual CONTROL over what goes on all the time within his society. Roman emperors? Rarely had control over more than a handful of things at a time, and bureaucracy continued as always even after the Republic was replaced with an Emperor office by historical Caesar. FNV Caesar set up his society to be as close to Rome as he could, but by destroying and assimilating all the groups he conquered instead of conquering and largely letting CULTURE continue as it had (with slight modifications), Caesar made his ideal image of Rome... not Rome. 

Rome had a culture, and a civilian population. The Legion has an army, and only an army, and everything goes to serve that army - there is no culture, no society, no civilians. The NCR expands to feed money to the homeland, to the people living there, who are the real impetus of how the NCR works - and when they conquer, they say "This is NCR land" and set up some soldiers, and then (by the large portion of whatever conquered population it is) they are ignored. Incorporated. Taxes are levied and infrastructure built, and the people grow used to the idea of being part of the NCR. 

Essentially what I'm saying is: the Legion runs an eternal scorched-earth campaign, and that's why they continue to expand: they need more people to sacrifice, more people to kill, more women to rape. They have no civilization of their own, so they take from others, and take and take and take until there's nothing left. They take the men and make them soldiers (most of who die), they take the women and kill the ones that can't bear children and enslave the rest - no better than pack animals for heavy labor and their offspring - and children are also enslaved and indoctrinated, so that they can die for the Bull as well. 

This is not a civilization, it's an army - and only an army. 

Rome was never "just an army" - Rome was always a populace that had a civilian base and a military arm that reached out and got more and more for its people and the hubris of its leaders - and Rome learned that it's better not to destroy the culture of the places you conquer, but to live and let live.

And the NCR behaves in almost the same manner: money is what's important, and in the pursuit of land and pride and some semblance of NCR patriotism - culture's preserved, and incorporated, and people continue to live and make things and build an identity from that. 

Rome wouldn't conquer Vegas to destroy it; Rome would conquer Vegas to get fat off of it - just as the NCR is attempting to do during the plot of FNV. The Legion wants Vegas for one thing: to destroy it, to consume it, and to move on.