"Yeah, Caesar's Legion is appropriating symbols. It is not literally, it is not literally like the Roman Legion, it's not literally like the Roman Republic, or the Roman Empire. It is using symbols for a purpose, for Caesar's purpose."
"'How similar is Caesar's fort to an ancient Roman fort?' I don't think it is very. If it is, it's completely coincidental."
"... there is very clearly a trend among people questioning the Legion to project the concept of military service as a noble endeavor (for which one is rewarded, no less) onto legionnaires when it's never presented in that way. They are slave soldiers. Service is not voluntary, they can't retire, there are no parades and pats on the back for them. They aren't Roman patrician officers who are going to retire to a Tuscan estate when they turn 50.
The only power that male legionaries have is to serve Caesar well enough to be promoted to a position of more responsibility. Nothing really comes with that additional responsibility other than increased scrutiny and better equipment (to match the increased danger)."
- J.E. Sawyer
Caesar's Legion is one of the most misunderstood factions in Fallout. There are two major reasons for this phenomenon: lack of development in their only video game appearance and the wider conversation surrounding the Legion.
When the average New Vegas fan talks about the Legion, it usually involves a joke about "Roman LARPers" or Caesar not understanding Hegelian Dialectics, inflating Caesar's Legion into parody. But these jokes have actually shaped how people perceive this faction and consequentially how they write about it.
The term for this is Flanderization. While normally this is described of characters who become exaggerated as a series goes on, such as Ned Flanders in The Simpsons gradually turning from a well-meaning neighbour into a Bible-thumper, this has actually happened to entire factions in Fallout via the conversations fans have to understand these groups. The Brotherhood of Steel, the Enclave, and many others have suffered from this merely because the fan content greatly outpaces the official works being produced. But Caesar's Legion is probably the biggest victim of this.
Why is this important? Because how characters are perceived can influence how they are later written and lead to a decline in the quality of the characterization and lead to further Flanderization with each successive fan project or even official work. If we indeed are getting a "Fallout: New Vegas 2", whoever is writing it may have their perception of who and what the Legion is be shaped by the conversation surrounding it and become a parody of itself. It happened very prominently in The Frontier as the meta commentary by the fans, not the creators, became it's lore. And it will most likely happen again if there's no push back.
The prominent examples of Flanderization of Caesar's Legion I'll go over is the portrayals of the Legion in two major mods: the Someguy series and Fallout: The Frontier.
I want to tackle the Someguy series first since it was the first major story mod for Fallout: New Vegas and greatly influenced the writing and characters of later mods.
The first encounter we have with Someguy's portrayal of the Legion is when Agrippa the Centurion confronts the player for killing Vulpes Inculta. Now when we see this, it would make sense in a military society that soldiers have friends and seek revenge when they die. But here in lies the rub, and that's legionnaires don't have friends. They have a brotherhood amongst themselves, as described by Ulysses, but loyalty to Caesar is their only loyalty. Caesar himself describes his men as having no value beyond as instruments of war or production. So when Agrippa takes it upon himself to avenge Vulpes, it raises an eyebrow for anyone who's looking at Legion culture and ethics.
Moving on, a common occurrence in the Someguy series is the Courier having to fight against waves of legionnaires being sent against them. In the main game of New Vegas, the Legion order of battle at Hoover Dam is described as three lines of troops: recruits at the front, experienced warriors in the middle, and veterans at the rear. Each line is sent in until the enemy is exhausted and overwhelmed. This may give the impression that Caesar's Legion uses human wave tactics to overwhelm enemies since their equipment varies between primitive blades and low quality firearms. But again, this is a Flanderization of how the Legion conducts warfare.
When they aren't forcing a capitulation (the Hang Dogs seeing their sacred animals burned alive, the Kaibabs seeing the massacre of the Ridgers, etc) or conducting a coup de grace (Vulpes breaking ranks to capture the enemy chieftan), the Legion is conducting reconnaissance, infiltrating agents and gathering intelligence, targeting supply lines, performing psychological warfare, even launching raids to take captives and inflict causalities. All of these things are barely considered when it comes to the Legion as an enemy in these fan mods. Caesar himself tells the Courier that it took four years to rebuild the Legion's strength to finally take the dam. The Legion just doesn't have a vast pool of manpower to just throw soldiers at their problems like many fans of New Vegas seem to think. Legionnaires are expendable, but not wasted.
All these details are left in the dust and we get stuck with dumb set piece battles where the Legion throws men away into a meat grinder, and we reinforce the perception that the Legion considers it's own soldiers as valueless and is more than happy for you and the NCR to wipe them out by the dozens. And from these portrayals you can see this influence bleed into later mod projects, most prominently, Fallout: The Frontier.
The Frontier is a really, really good example of what not to do when it comes to writing a faction, because all of the meta commentary within the Fallout community culminated in this one game. Clear as day, Flanderization can be spotted instantly just by the aesthetic language of the Northern Legion. The legionnaires wear either super bad guy stormtrooper armor or some faux-classical armor like the Imperials from Skyrim. Everything is so exaggerated in The Frontier that it becomes parody, and the characters within the Northern Legion are no exception.
Take for instance the faction leader, Marcus Valerius. We are told he was a doctor for the Followers of the Apocalypse (which turns out to be a meaningless lie since him being a member of the Brotherhood of Steel is just as relevant as him being a "doctor"), but became a Legate and got sent to the Frontier. We learn much later that Valerius was accepted as a Praetorian and was granted the rank of Legate after saving Caesar's life (which is completely insane. Imagine if, for example, a bodyguard saved the life of the US President and the same President rewarded him with the rank of Major-General and got command of an army). And as Legate, Valerius went on to conquer 35 tribes for the Legion.
Forgiving the contrivances, contradictions, and downright absurdity within Valerius' own story, what does it tell us? It tells us that Valerius doesn't have a character beyond what the writer thought would make a convincing Legion leader. He's educated, motivated, cruel, and tough. This is where the Flanderization is at it's peak: the writer wrote an exaggerated Legion leader figure using the most exaggerated characteristics of Caesar and Lanius.
As a consequence of this, none of his professed beliefs, history, or actions mesh with his Legion traits. He's such a good commander that he conquered more tribes than Lanius, yet he got sent to the Frontier to fail to conquer the NCR Exiles over the course of four entire years. He's so cruel that he'll beat you to near death even after he finds out you're working for Caesar, but he's also a loving father and husband. He saved the life of Caesar and rubbed elbows with the very top echelon of the Legion structure, but he's also a liberal who seeks reform.
If we accept that Valerius was so cunning that he followed Caesar's laws to the letter and that allowed him to succeed and achieve the rank of Legate, then there is almost no reason for him to believe that a reform is needed. People don't question the validity of a system when it's running so smoothly to benefit them.
Other Legion characters are basically the same phenomenon. Callidus is just The Frontier version of Vulpes, but a New Canaanite who "followed Graham". Callidus contributes to Flanderization because of his role in the story which was as the head Frumentarii. The writer clearly saw people expected a Frumentarii to be deceptive and speak in a hushed, calm voice and so they wrote accordingly. But Vulpes wasn't just a creepy, sneaky bad guy with a stone cold heart. He was a character who wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty, understood how to manipulate people, a master of disguise, and took initiative to achieve victory.
What does Callidus do? He tricks the NCR into committing an atrocity, oversees your pointless initiation, and asks you to spare his sister. He's not much of a character and what character he does have is lifted from a better written one and becomes parody.
As a side note, a recurring theme for each of these characters in the Legion is that they went out of their way individually to "join" the Legion, which contradicts what we understand about how the Legion inducts recruits. The Legion doesn't take volunteers, they enslave people. Caesar doesn't need volunteers. If you suit his purpose, you'll serve him. And if you resist, you'll die.
"Oh but this is a different Legion," you might say, but you're completely wrong. Almost every single one of these major characters "volunteered" with the original Caesar's Legion in the story. I have no idea why the writer thought this was characteristic of the Legion, but I want to make a point of it here since it didn't get the scrutiny it deserved on release and to compound the point that the Northern Legion is Caesar's Legion if it was a bad parody of itself, and careless writing will lead us here again, but perhaps in an official release and even more embarrassing.
So, where do we go from here?
To put it simply, the standard for writing needs to be much higher. If not for the sake of storytelling, at least for the sake of Fallout. On this project, we'll be going back to what Caesar's Legion is and that's "an army of slaves" ruled by a man who believes he's found the solution to the wasteland and destined to repeat history.
For Fallout: Free Cheyenne, the Legion in the Corridor Wasteland is centered in Denver. The prior campaign to capture the city nearly broke the Legion, and as such they never expanded their reach beyond the city limits. The "Iron Legate", Ferrarius, has a token garrison on hand to hold the territory from raiders and the Cheyennites, while the majority of the Legionnaires formerly under his command are out west at Hoover Dam. The soldiers that are present are unhappy as they would prefer to be fighting for Caesar at the next battle for the dam.
Despite this state of affairs, the Legion has successfully annihilated a majority of the wild dog population of Denver and have cordoned off the remainders to the inner city. The newly tamed areas have even sparked a land rush among free Legion subjects from New Mexico, seeking access to the clean water and farming opportunities of the South Platte River. As a result of this burgeoning economic activity, the demand for slaves has also increased dramatically in Denver. The Legion is now in a struggle between it's military mission and the economic interests that have moved into the ruined city.
Caesar's Legion is going to be tricky to write for this mod. What we know about the Legion in canon is limited and attempting to flesh out the faction can very easily fall into the same pitfalls as previous mods with details being exaggerated or even outright contradictions to what the faction believes and does in New Vegas. All things considered, I am looking forward to the challenge of writing this story.
To end this off and further indicate the direction of the project, I'll share an early sample of the major Legion characters in Fallout: Free Cheyenne. Ferrarius, the Legate, and Decimus, the designated Legion companion for the mod.
The first thing I wanted Ferrarius to be is distinguished from characters such as Caesar, Lanius, and even Joshua Graham by making him look like a man rather than a mythological figure. What I want to achieve with Legate Ferrarius is players seeing the world and people that the Legate's actions has affected across the wasteland, and when we come face-to-face with him he could easily be imagined as a simple family man tending to his farm. An average, unassuming person shaped by war.
Decimus, the Legion companion for Free Cheyenne, is the sorely needed personal perspective of a Legionnaire. His story will revolve around his personal conflict of fulfilling his duty to Caesar, despite his failure that has certainly marked him for death. As an assassin, Decimus will be a sort of "sneak" companion equipped with silent weapons (yes, I know a chainsaw isn't silent but the game doesn't care) and give stealth related bonuses to the player. Non-Legion aligned players will be able to recruit Decimus, but if you gain too high of a negative reputation with the Legion in Denver he will leave your party.
Thanks for reading. Consider supporting the project on Patreon for behind-the-scenes content and developer commentary like this, and following the Free Cheyenne project on Twitter and YouTube for updates.
See you around.
- userKN
