ghostadventuretime:

belharza:

tbh i love how everything about the legion in fallout: new vegas represents the adoration of a nonexistent(/irrelevant) history within and outside the discipline of the classics, chiefly by faux-well-read white men

“caesar” has cobbled his culture together out of what a pseudo-educated, self-professed historian imagines rome to be: it disowns the power that real roman women wielded, instead favoring a simplified version where women have no power in any sphere; it uses roman slavery as an excuse for its own very un-ancient version; it mixes clerical and classical latin pronunciation, sometimes in the same sentence, butchering words under the guise of enforcing the revival of a sad, half-remembered lingua franca

i don’t think i expected a videogame to address the co-opting of the classics, of all things, by fascism (after a fashion).  certainly not in a day and age where we expect to see all sorts of delightful videogame(/movie/tv/whatever) factions dressed up with superficial roman aesthetics and ideals, almost all of these divorced from the history that created them (and created our culture’s oft-dangerous and -selective obsession with them)

and it’s particularly unsettling, if brilliant, that all this goes over the heads of so many gamers

This is also why the fact that Ceaser *specifically mentions Hegel* when justifying the legion is so brilliant! I don’t know if this was directly intended by Obsidian (though how could it not be!) but the direct and concious construction of a social order which forces the overcoming of dualisms (mind/body, machine/nature, subject/object) was a central, often explicitly stated philosophical goal behind 20th century facisct movements – in particular the Italian facisct party, which attempted to position the Italy of the Future as wholly claiming the legacy of the Romans while also disavowing its “decadence.” (Giovanni Gentile, who was a neo hegelian, rebuilt the education system under Mussolini around these ideas.)

(Thinking about it now, I wonder if ceaser’s ideology was also meant to serve as an indirect commentary on what seemed to be the very fascist and militaristic aspects of pre-War American society in the fallout universe…)