Master Warder Z wrote...
*SNIP to prevent walls of text*
Excellent and well thought out defense of the Legion, Its ideology and its Leader.
In fact so well done i feel ever so slightly dillussioned considering that many of these agruments would have been similar to the one i would have attempted to use.
Personally? Caesar seems to be the best fit for actually restoring some semblence of long term order and stability to the region while at the sametime ensuring its population protected and strenghend by having a localized martial body.
I think long term order and stability are the exact things you cannot expect of a Legion society. All in game evidence seems to suggest the exact opposite once Caesar is gone. Is there a plan for a transfer of power, or is the inner circle supposed to fight to the death to determine the heir apparent and consolidate power? That's an even messier affair than democratic processes. And one that's far more unpredictable than the latter.
One has to almost assume significant reform in any argument for the Legion. And there’s not much to go on in trying to envision such reform, not to mention just how much would be necessary, where the Legion may no longer be the Legion.
House is content to let the armies of the West hover at his door and merely bleed them dry; But he fails to consider the implication in his reign if the Legion ever did merely withdrawl. The NCR would rapidly overcome the Mojave and while it likely would utterly collapse in the process it would unleash even further regional chaos with a wandering and directionless Horde.
House himself realizes the importance of Caesar whom directs the Legion and hence his desire for him to remain alive until the final battle and thus the Legion wouldn't distintergrate in his backyard thus further inflaming the situation.
Hence, why I see the hallmark of the Legion as instability. House knows it. He's the smart guy here. It cannot endure as it is. Just how much of it has to change or pass away in order for it to be stable? An unstable foundation is not something upon which to build your house (no pun intended).
Again, one has to assume reform, and while Caesar seems to intimate such, its difficult see when you watch slave girls carrying overloaded packs, terror in Nipton as their primary form of cultural engagement, the destruction of family units in favor of breeding factories, and the wiping out tribal identities in order to force assimilation. Any defense of these practices gets turned on its head the moment your wife or daughter are drug off in the middle of the night to service legionnaires in a breeding factory.
That's not the stuff of stability, that is the hatchery of revolution. And that is how systems are judged, not necessarily by the view of the visionaries of such. Sure, you can kill and coerce your way to stability and power, many have done it, and even get by with overwhelming force to suppress opposition...for awhile, but eventually you will run out of the energy required to maintain a system of brutality. Then long suppressed impulses will be back in force to bite you right square in the ass. Karma really is a beeotch.
The NCR is a crumbling relic by the time of New Vegas.
Their economy is weakened and still eeking on from the transition to Water from Gold for the backing of their currency, their Government and upper class are very divided and corrupt, With social upheaval occuring rather regularly back within California according to a few individuals and with open revolution being a possiblity occuring in the new future.
And there's virtually no economy in the Legion. Where's the property? Where's the incentive, other than fear, to do anything? Everything is in service to the absolute center and re-distributed as they see fit. I haven't done a Legion playthrough, (I will have to attempt that at one point--just struggling with a character outlook at present) but the only legion trader I ever encountered was at fortification hill...and he wasn't technically legion. Are there others? Or is the Courier, in perfect irony, required to rely on the services of the profligate society they're opposed to, in order to properly outfit him or herself outside of legion issued skirt and spears?
That said they have their Pros and Cons; The NCR like the Legion presents the possiblity for stablizition, an eventual future and some semblence of order. But the baggage that goes along with it seems to outweigh it at least in my eye, having a society that throughly corrupt in charge of managing yet even more territory when their own territory is already crime and strife ridden seems to just be adding more weight to an already broken foundation.
My main point is, As horrid and brutal as life is under the Legion it is indeed life.
And that's where we would disagree. Life as a slave is no life at all. What's my purpose?...to serve the state. Very Orwellian. It's the whole die on your feet or live on your knees argument. I fail to see any life worth living in total subservience to the whims of a tyrant. I fail to see any "life" at all for a woman forced into a breeding factory whose sole purpose is to reproduce.
I've said it before:
The Legion is a relapse and total regression in the face of serious environmental stress. Now if someone believes that survival is the prime directive, and any means is a justification for that end; that stability is the end game for society, even if it means the most meager and pallid of existences for the "survivors" or “citizens” of such a system, then society groveling at the feet of tyrants and bending over to the will of dictators has its appeal…so long as YOU are one of the ruling elite or part of the enforcement arm of such a system.
Just ask the guy whose lost a wife or daughter to Legion slavery, much less the women themselves. I don't think they'd agree there's much to live for.
Crime, Corruption, Self interest and anything else detracting from society are brutally and utterly purged but this is merely the current stage of the Legion, before it reaches its ultimate Anthesis as Caesar explained it. Whom is to say what the Legion will ultimately resemble?
That said even in its current state it beats Anarchy, House or the NCR by a wide Margin.
Anarchy sounds like heaven by comparison. Just my view.
Modifié par Barbarossa2010, 13 janvier 2014 - 01:50 .
Retour en haut
