Mojave Disco Dancer

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!

Thank you so much for the tag! @4sa

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!

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.

Muchas gracias por el tag corazón @radawaycuntt

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".

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.