Don't have a preferred name, you can call me like my OC, Julia, or you can call me Dancer or Hey You, whatever you prefer! She/her, historian in my 20s. Fluent in both Spanish and English, with some French thrown in there although I'm still learning.
This blog is mainly to share my interests and rambling thoughts, which are mostly but not reduced to Fallout. As a warning, I'm particularly interested in Caesar's Legion, more from a historical and anthropological perspective than because I agree with them, but I still want to be very clear about it because a lot of my posts and fics delve deep into the Legion and I don't want anyone to be surprised.
Other interests of mine you may find here are ASOIAF, POTC, Disco Elysium, languages, literature and history. I'm open to any type of questions.
☢ My AO3 — AnodicDiscoDancer
☢ My New Vegas OC, Julie/Julia/Courier Six can be found under the tag oc: julia six
☢ My posts analysing Caesar's Legion can be found under the tag caesar's legion historian
☢ My occasional art is under the tag anodic art
Enjoy your stay and leave something of the happiness you bring!
Bethesda/Obsidian be like: oh guess what? For once we’ll have a group of mexicans in canon :) …… but sike!!!!!! We had the vault 22 dwellers kill and cannibalize them after invading their home
I refuse to believe the Mojave, Utah, NCR and the Legion are so... gringo after 200 years. México was right there, the frontiers are already gone, and in the lore they bothered in writing a US-Mexican war and a US invasion and annexation of territories, but that doesn't have any cultural implications? They didn't put much thought either in the languages nor the food. I know I know, time constraints and such, but come on, you telling me no one out there is mixing prewar totopos, elote, brahmin cheese and radioactive chilli straight in the bag, or that the legionaries don't drink horchata during their marching (a beverage that historically was considered by the Romans to have healing properties, even though it was made with a different base ingredient). It's eye rolling because you have really small groups of tourists creating new languages and cultures, but Mexico is zero relevant. For all we know, Raúl may be playing a prank on us and México and all of Latinoamerica is a utopia down there now that the US se fue finalmente al infierno.
When they were alone, if she was in particularly good spirits, she would sing or dance to Old World music, insisting that she was terrible at both. It was true regarding singing, although Joshua didn't mind it because it was like the final stage of her laughter. A chaotic combustion of joy, as if it couldn't be contained in her chest and she just had the imperative need to sing. The same couldn't be said for dancing. When she danced she was water. She made the planet change its rotation with the movement of her hips, no matter if she was dancing or on top of him.
But it wasn’t water running down his brow and clouding his vision. He brushed the back of his hand against his forehead, staining it with his own blood — the cut wasn’t too deep, but he would need a couple of stitches. Julia would be concerned, like it always happened when he returned with a wound, and that thought gave a purpose to his pain. The Legate took water from one of the bandits and poured it over his head, tasting his own blood and sweat mixed with the lukewarm water as it ran down his face. He spat what had gotten into his mouth and assessed the carnage around him.
Three of his men had died; two locals and one legionary. As for the raiders, the Legate gave little consideration to their tearful plea, crying out for mercy. He had no intention in taking some dirty bandits as prisoners. A nod of his head was enough for flashes of sharp metal like stars raining down in the night to cut rivers of blood that gushed from the flesh onto the ground. The Legate watched them die, watched them go from nothing to nothing, listened to the last sounds that would come out of their open throats, but wouldn't be there to watch them break down and disappear as if they never existed. He gave another order, brief and concise, to take their dead back with them.
The locals would appreciate it. Julia too. Even the legionaries, perhaps.
A gust of arid wind comes to clash against his wet face and the direct sun is merciless on his eyes, making him turn his back to avoid the direct light. In the distance a tree had caught fire, a column of black smoke stabbing an infinite blue sky in a failed attempt at reaching the castellanus clouds swayed by the crude wind.
Tagging @lord-alligator @radawaycuntt @mai-mellow @crimson-centurion @akwafort and whoever see this and wants to share their beautiful works!
This is a WIP for my next chapter that I'm struggling a lot with, but finally it's all coming together 🙌
Tagged by @tunnelsnke AND @worthlesssix THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!
From across the table, Cass downed a second shot and screwed her face up at the burn, “Look, I’m not saying it’s unexpected. I know better than anybody this ain’t the safest job in the world, but fuck, you think there’d be some sense to it.”
Johanna flicked her eyes to the mourners as they made their way up the hill towards the cemetery, then back to her magazine, “Uh huh.”
“Legionaries ambush a caravan, take nothing and torch it? Seems pointless until you realize they’re sending a message that they don’t need our supplies. But a random townie killing him over a hunk of silver? It’s crazy.”
“… Yeah.”
“Years of loyal service to the company, and for what? A pine box and six feet of soil.” Cass jabbed the table with her finger for emphasis, “There’s a lesson here; know when to cut your losses and run.”
“Cass. I got it. Could we skip today’s lecture? I’m really not in the mood.”
“Alright, alright, don’t have to tell me twice.” Cass held her hands up, “But while we’re on the subject… How’re you holding up?”
“The sun’s hot, the food tastes like copper, my clothes don’t fit, and I think I’m depressed,” Johanna rolled her eyes at herself and made a small notation on the page, “But I’m not dead, so I shouldn’t complain.”
“I won’t think any lower of you if you do.” Cass nodded towards the funeral, “You doin’ okay with all that?”
It was the last thing Johanna wanted to talk about, but they couldn’t duck it forever. The first night’s interrogation had stuck to the play-by-play of Johanna’s day, making her recite each beat forwards and back for nearly an hour until Cass was convinced it was halfway true, at which point she cut her loose and the actress promptly crashed for fourteen hours.
When Johanna resurfaced, the remainder of day two had opened with questions about Primm Slim, the robot House had commandeered, and how he’d gone from “cuddly as a kitten with every bandit and raider that rolled through town” to “a gunslinging action star,” but Johanna’s explanation of some forgotten code being tripped was more plausible than any of Cass’ wild theories, and the unsatisfying conversation turned instead to the more interesting topic of Benny.
By day three Cass had cooled off significantly, so when the subject of Johanna’s boss came up she was willing to let the lack of name slide, especially with how much else Johanna had shared about him, and they’d spent a fair amount of time blaming House for everything under the sun since.
All things considered, day seven was as good a day as any to get into the murder.
Johanna carefully folded her magazine and placed it and her pen on the table, “I’m not sure what to say. I’m managing, but in a weird way it feels wrong to be sad, if that makes sense? Because I’m pretty sure his family would hate me if they knew.”
“You can’t blame yourself for wrong place wrong time-type shit.” Cass poured another couple of shots and slid one over, “Trust me, I sympathize with the impulse, but there’s gonna be plenty for you to regret once you get back on the road. Don’t go borrowing guilt.”
“Still, he wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for me. Or maybe he would have but he wouldn’t have died, or…” Johanna picked up the glass, “I don’t know. It’s just something I have to live with. What about you?”
“Eh. You’d think I’d be used to watching someone bite it by now, but no matter how many times it happens, it never goes down any easier. Plus it always leaves me with this awful sort of feeling, like I’ve got this nasty muck on my clothes that won’t wash off, and it makes me wish I could track down their stupid family and dump it on them like, “Here! This is your muck to deal with! I don’t want it!”” Cass grimaced distastefully and raised her shot, “Whatever, it’ll pass. Always does, right? But in the meantime: here’s to getting rid of guilt and muck.”
Johanna wasn’t sure she agreed but it felt rude to leave her hanging, so she drank, then pensively swirled the remainder in her hand.
Cass cleared her throat, “And in the spirit of letting go of shit that doesn’t concern us, I was planning on paying my respects when the crowd dies down, if you’re interested. Even if it’s just walking me to the graveyard ‘cause it’d do you some good to get out, instead of moping around about a guy you didn’t kill.”
I tag @euclidparabellum and @friendo and @roberthouse69 and @dannyburke if any of you are working on anything!
And because this excerpt is from an in progress chapter but is technically final draft material because it's earlier in the chapter, I've included some Actually Unfinished Stuff below the cut to show the contrast
Dialogue comes easily to me, so usually I'll jot down scripts with occasionally gestures, which by the final draft get revised so completely that they're unrecognizable. Also when I run into problems, like plot holes or a character needs to reach a certain conclusion that they're too far from, I type out what I need to accomplish or what I already concretely know and then brainstorm my options, including pros and cons for each ending so I can decide the one that works best.
Also last week I took a four day break from plot stuff and just wrote... whatever I could think of to give my brain a break, anyway here's some real House stuff I enjoyed working on, I guess it's like an AU where he was deteriorating and eventually fell comatose and the courier found something to help bring him back so now he's... recovering and maybe slightly de-aging? 🤔 Still old asf though, I need him.
If there's one historical figure I draw parallelisms with Caesar is undoubtedly Napoleon Bonaparte. I can perfectly picture in my mind a young Edward Sallow reading The Sorrows of Young Werther and believing that no one has suffered greater than him and that no one understands history and the human condition like him. Overall I imagine Caesar being a victim of his own dramatism, and his unrelenting narcissism. I imagine him during the years after the First Battle of Hoover Dam, haunted at night by what he did to Joshua Graham, only for that small spark of regret to morph into narcissistic resentment. Why did Joshua make him do that? Why must he suffer for other's failures? After all he'd done for him, how could he abandon him like he did?
I can even envision Caesar as he watches Joshua burn and being thrown into the Grand Canyon thinking "look what you made me do".
Now, before I draw some comparisons between Napoleon and Caesar, I have some Napoleon quotes that I feel could've come out of Caesar's mouth (and they may as well have done so, because I'm sure Caesar appropriates other man's words):
If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds.... I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.
All authority is in the throne; and what is the throne? This wooden frame covered with velvet? No, I am the throne.
When you have an enemy in your power, deprive him of the means of ever injuring you.
Women are nothing but machines for producing children.
Destiny urges me to a goal of which I am ignorant. Until that goal is attained I am invulnerable, unassailable. When Destiny has accomplished her purpose in me, a fly may suffice to destroy me.
Besides their personalities, Napoleon was ragingly misogynistic, and his views of women and their role in society are not that different from what you imagine Caesar must've thought. There's of course the similarities regarding how both men rose in power thanks to systems they wished to destroy (Napoleon was a son of the French Revolution, and at the same time, the one who put an end to it, and Caesar wouldn't have been allowed to create the Legion if not for the nation he intends to crush as his ultimate goal) and how they were absolutely adored by the military class.
And finally, I totally imagine Caesar writing an angsty romance novel, the same way Napoleon wrote Clisson et Eugénie in 1795, but of course with Joshua Graham as the subject of that tormenting love. Something he kept as a secret but that he believes is the best piece of literature ever written, using convoluted metaphors in place for sex, and of course, being absolute trash if you were to read it.
PS: Not related to Napoleon, but I like to imagine that Caesar tried to read The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes at different points in life, and while he claims it's one of the most important pieces of literature ever written, he never managed to finish it, let alone understand it. He just knows that it has something to do with humans in a state of nature being dumb savages, and has quotes memorized when he wants to impress someone.
I usually post about the Legion, but lately I've been thinking about one aspect I wish was explored about the NCR; journalism, and more specifically, war photographers. I was checking on Robert Capa and his work, and now I can't stop imagining how interesting it would be if we had a NCR character (or even a courier) who was a war photographer and photojournalist. Imagine how much depth would we gain if we had a character like that, maybe paired with a writer or a journalist, the same way Capa worked with Ernest Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War.
Imagine the incredible in-universe pictures we could have from the conflict in the Mojave.
I'll try to elaborate more on these ideas in a future post, but for now I'm sharing my favourite picture taken by Robert Capa and that I think could be a great inspiration for NCR aligned characters. In the inscription it reads "UHP (Union of Proletariat Brothers) swear upon these letters, brothers, that you will sooner die than live under tyranny".
i like when fiction treats love as a more complicated force and not something that is inherently pure or redemptive. portray it as flawed and complex as any other human impulse. give me love as prejudice, love as possessive stasis, love as addiction, love as blindness, etc.
@euclidparabellum I have admittedly fallen a bit behind on your fic, but I got inspired. I’m in a crazy religious man mood. I used your one drawing of Julia as reference. 👉👈
Not a new idea, not even the first time I go over this, but for me, the biggest issue with the Fallout show is that it refuses to allow the universe to move forward. It stole its history.
One thing I loved about Fallout 1, 2 and NV was the sense of history. It was a world that had a living, breathing history. Yes, we know about the past, and we discover a lot of things that predate the great war, but for most people in universe the ruins of the Old World are what the ruins of Rome were for Medieval people. The present is built upon the past and fills the gaps that inevitably get destroyed.
It's not even about the decisions made by the show, but how and why they're made, and how that narrows the universe. Imagine if we were given a NCR that culturally goes through a period similar to the Renaissance, rediscovering a past they consider more advanced (in this case, America), and at the same time, politically you have the inner corruption of their institutions. You can even bring back the Enclave this way; not the Enclave in full glory, but remnants of the Enclave who were granted pardons and were given more power as the NCR had to give compromises during the war with the Legion. The Enclave's ideas living, not the Enclave itself. You could explore themes of nostalgia, how humanity makes the same mistakes with different excuses, the dangers of imperialism AND create something new. New Californian art, ideas, culture, influenced both from this sense of nostalgia and their own wave of patriotism after defeating the Legion two times.
You could explore so different things. The struggles of the masses in the NCR, who shouldn't be a 1:1 of America either way. The NCR is made out of Vault dwellers, wastelanders, Enclave remnants, Brotherhood of Steel, tribals, ghouls and even supermutants. If we stretch our headcanon, we could imagine there are New Canaanite refugees in the NCR too. All those people have their own culture, mentality and struggles. Where do they work? How do they organize?
As for the Legion, they had so much they could've done with them. Even more so than the NCR, since what we have in New Vegas is just bare bones. Explore their own myths, the Cult of Mars, a civil war that happens not because of the greatness of Caesar, but his failure. How as a society, they struggle to reconcile their worldview and ideas with the material reality that a lot of their weaknesses come directly from Caesar's dogma. Warrior societies can't be sustained by warriors and war alone, what about their own scribes? Priests? The civil population of the Legion, all that stuff. Who are the inner factions of the Legion? We know the Blackfoots take great pride in being the tribe that originated the Legion, would they claim power after Caesar dies? Would there be revisionists who doubt, not Caesar's ideas, but Caesar himself? Imagine the potential and the historical irony, of Caesar being considered unworthy of his own ideas, of being a false Son of Mars. Of being forgotten and rejected by his own creation, with no one left to remember who Edward Sallow was.
Of course, doing all this would eventually remove recognizable elements from the franchise, some things would be left behind and new ones will be created. But I'm a bit tired of "war, war never changes" because it doesn't even say anything about the nature of war. As it is today, war never changes just means nuking North America all the way back to rockabilly Neolithic.
