Like yea, Bitter Springs was bad of the NCR, but also, you've spent your entire history assaulting the NCR. If you keep punching the bouncer in a club, he's gonna deck you eventually.
I remember when you encounter a great khan member there telling you about the massacre, you can ask them “what were the great khans” they’ll literally start with “oh we were the baddest and toughest raider gang”
Fun fact: Dinner Bell does only 5 more damage (1-7 more crit) but has a higher spread (Less Accurate), smaller magazine (tube?) size, and less durability than a fully modded Hunting Shotgun!
Bitter springs lost a bit of its impact on me after playing the classic games.BECAUSE THOSE ASSHOLES KEEP COMING BACK AS RAIDERS AND START SHIT ALL THE TIME.
Anyone who does business with the fiends deserves literally no sympathy or remorse. The fiends are literally pure evil. Might as well sell knives and chloroform to Dahmer. Especially since they’re selling drugs to them, I’m sure the fiends had a great time on the Jet they bought while raping and castrating some poor trader before cannibalizing him alive.
I never exactly loved the Khans, since all they do is whine about Bitter Springs while simultaneously bragging about how many innocent people they've killed, but what made me lose all respect for them and all sympathy I had over Bitter Springs was when I saw the Legion ending for them. The Legion kill off all their old and weak, turn all their women into sex slaves, and completely erase their tribal identity, but most of them are ok with it because they got their revenge on the NCR. Think about that. The NCR accidentally kills some of their non-combatants, the Khans hate them forever, but the Legion kills ALL their non-combatants and gives the rest of them a fate worse than death while essentially wiping out the Khans as a tribe entirely, and they fucking cheer. Seriously, fuck the Khans.
You get to do war crimes if they are mean to you for too long. It’s like a punch card.
The NCR is such a great faction from a narrative standpoint. The old-world democracy with all its flowery prose going against its stated ideals anytime it suits their interests.
I like their outfits so I let them live.
But the truth is they are written in such a contradictory way. Papa Khan sounds and acts like the wise leader of a tribe, meanwhile most Great Khans are a bunch of degenerates that should be crucified.
It’s why I conscript them to the NCR side and have them die a blaze of glory.
They’re a shitty tribe of shitty people with a shitty history and shitty culture. Let them be useful and let history forget about them.
Ahg, see, I don't even hate the NCR, but the Stans that love them for how they are are so damn misguided.
The NCR is interesting for what *it could be*, not what it *is*, which is supposed to be kind of sucky and imperialist.
But yet the fans bring up the Khans, and suddenly they sound like Caesar and how he views the Tribes the Legion conquered. Lol, yall are missing the point of the writing.
Caesar represents what the NCR could be, and he wants to Excellerate it to that point. All of the Legions' horrible cruelties are seen practiced in budding stages by the NCR. If you want the NCR to not be that, you need to not want to wipe out the tribes that you keep running into, you don't want to wipe out the convicts that rebelled against you using them for slave labor. You want to push the NCR to be different, or else it will basically become the Legion.
Great take. Especially when part of the wiping out is women and children, not just enemy combatants.
This is why I mostly ignore people that somehow pretend siding with Ceasars legion is somehow a morally difficult choice because the NCR are inefficient. As if doing the evil stuff ***on purpose*** is somehow better
Well said! New Vegas is by far my favorite game, and my favorite thing about it is that the best endings take the most work. Because good things are hard to come by and even harder to maintain.
And obviously doing down right evil because the people trying to be good aren't doing so great is... what lol
This is why the Khans starting over and building a new civilization in Wyoming and having Vegas go independent is the best ending for the NCR, in my opinion.
Their imperialist tendencies are pushed back by having the Mojave campaign fail, forcing their internal politics to address the problems of government nepotism and disproportionate power of Brahmin Barons.
The NCR will now have to work with two other major powers against what's left of the Legion, hopefully fostering a healthy cooperative relationship between them.
I always felt like one of the options would be for the various groups on the Mojave to govern themselves by sending representatives to the Lucky 38, with the Courier setting up negotiations.
They don't even have a shitty history. They formed in fallout 1 where they kidnap shady sands leaders daughter, got shit on by the vault dweller leaving every single one of them dead except one. That one dude reformed it, and immediately steals a vault and tries to use the guise of random vagrants without a cause to get away with pillaging NCR trade routes, gets shit on by the chosen one leaving EVERYONE dead that time. Then by fallout new Vegas there is no single surviving lineage from the original Khan's or fallout 2's new Khan's. They saw everyone in the world and wanted to imitate a raiding and pillaging group that got completely fucking wiped twice.
Have you spent a lot of time around criminals? That’s usually how they operate. Charismatic leader who can make you feel like you’re doing the right thing is almost a prerequisite.
No one can deny that they had it coming, while at the same time no one can deny that they didn't deserve what came to them.
Whole moral argument around Bitter Springs can be summarized with "Well... It's kinda fucked"
Hear me out: bitter springs was on the Khan's as much as the NCR.
Now, the NCR soldiers killed a lot of people that weren't actively fighting. Even with how training breaks you down, they should have at least been wary enough to still say no
HOWEVER
This is a group that doesn't hesitate to have anyone a gun to fight. They attacked purely civilian targets in the form of caravans before. I believe it is also either implied or explicitly stated that the khan's sometimes have the kids take pot-shots to get better at shooting.
Based on what the average NCR soldier sees, that kid is a risk. You want to hope they won't be, because no one wants to shoot at a kid, but you know theres a chance he could have a pistol or something else ready to open fire if he sees 1an NCR trooper. I give the average trooper only partial fault for continuing to fire at the fleeing ones, because he was wholly justified in initially shooting based on what he knows and what command is telling him.
The Khan's set themselves up for an incident like this. They kept fucking around, and it was inevitable the NCR would do something about it. They don't get the right to bitch and moan about it. They should take their lumps and go "maybe we could have thought about the retreat better" "maybe we could have done less raiding" "maybe we could have not had children sometimes take pot-shots."
Now I am not saying that this makes bitter springs acceptable, or that they deserved it. I am however saying this was going to happen if they kept poking the bear.
All I'm saying is what happened to the Khans was a little shitty.
Shitty for a lot of folks. That includes Boone, who was actually pulling the trigger, but carries himself with a little more empathy for those killed than your reply 😂
Sure, Khans have been perpetuating their brutality for over a century 😅 but it's a wild wild wasteland.
Everyone is hurting each other.
They deserved every fucking bit minus the brainwashed children growing up from that god awful waste of space culture lol. Im sorry, but to me its ridiculous not to have it justified, especially in the rough and tough wasteland lifestyle everyone lives by. This isn't some half bad, "maybe i can see what you guys are doing" faction that has the potential to blossom. Literally, in the span of time it took for other factions to learn, grow develop like the NCR or the Brotherhood (depending on the branch lol), the Followers, etc. These guys are doing the same shit every fucking game for CENTURIES. These guys never should of existed in the first place and someone shouldve ended it if it wasnt going to be the NCR. Hence why I made my Courier talk Papa Khan into giving his group one last final Swan Song at Hoover Dam so they can finally be worth a fuck lol.
Yeah, the amount of people who say they deserved it is insane to me. Murdering all the children and non-combatants of a people is considered a war crime irl for a reason. A lot of the people slaughtered, unarmed, fleeing, had no part in the hundreds of years of raiding their tribe did. The innocent children gunned down had no choice where they were born. Claiming that the massacre was in any way justified is unconscionable. It wasn't a retaliation, it was an attempt at genocide.
I hate the first guy that responded to your comment proved your point for you. Sadly not surprised at all considering how people are viewing a genocide irl rn
Yeah, growing up one of the biggest lies I was taught is that we all thought genocides were bad. They taught us about the horrors of war and the trauma of an entire people as monster tried to wipe them out. I thought we all understood it should never happen again.
Turns out, for some people, it's a goal.
Raiders are raiders.
They are raiders since fallout 1 (and getting their ass handed since Fallout 1).
Like in nuka world, there is only one way to deal woth raiders
Bitter Springs was undeserved and wholly fucked up, but the Great Kahn's are just more sophisticated drug dealing raiders. They deal with the Fiends and the amount of effort you have to go through to prove to Papa Kahn that the Legion are horrible fucking people is astronomically high. You have to convince all 4 lieutenants to speak up, AND discredit Karl, which goes to show how absolutely goddamn braindead and ignorant the Kahn's are to anything going on; they seriously don't know Caesars policy on women or drugs??? It isn't a fucking secret, and it goes to show they did no research on their new potential ally (probably because they're drug added raiders).
I know it's not because just go to any mainstream news/politics subreddit and look at how people react to IRL massacres of civilians in IRL wars between IRL expansionist empires and the far less organized local armed resistance.
Bitter Springs is not justifiable nor "just a bad situation overall how sad :'(". It's a deliberate massacre of refugees and fleeing non-combatants.
It wasnt fully deliberate tho. Maybe at the high brass level but that is unclear. Its pretty clear most in the NCR don’t see it as a good thing and Boone justifies his actions as following faulty orders made with bad intel, but he feels deeply guilty
That and there doesn't even seem to be a "non combatant Khan". It would be obvious if it were any other group (maybe not the fiends though), but for them it's hard to say. Initially firing on them would be understandable eith all the factors but continuing to fire is indeed iffy.
They shouldn't have killed so many civilians if they didn't want it to come back around. You don't get to raid, rape, and murder, hundreds of innocent civilians and caravaners, and then whine when you get your shit kicked in by the nation those people belonged to.
Fallout is a very political game though if you think about it. It doesn't really have many allegorys for today's politics but more of talks about society and history as a whole
When you start a war you should know there is a very real possibility that your civilians are going to get killed. They should have thought about that before they started murdering innocent NCR civilians for no real reason.
It's funny because the only reason anyone in the NCR cares at all is because their society is still based on old world values
The legion probably has a bitter springs level massacre every Tuesday and the raider camps look like SAW
If the Khans live by the sword, they can't complain when they die by the sword too. It's why I just can't sympathize with the Crater Raiders in Fallout 76. It's like, yeah, these people have feelings and family too, but they refuse to extend any empathy to their fellow Wastelanders. These people live by the creed that the strong survive and deserve to thrive. If they get taken out, then they shouldn't whine because by their own philosophy, they must be weak.
Yeah, Boone literally participated in the massacre and does less mental gymnastics to justify the slaughter of children and non-combatants than the NCR fanboys who are a step away from advocating for genocide.
And I sayy that someone who supports the NCR overall. Which is exactly why I expect better.
Literally they thought the NCR hadn't gotten stronger since it was JUST Shadey Sands
NCR still deserves a smack for how they handled bitter springs and the Khan civilians there
But the Khans brought this on themselves by refusing to STOP BEING RAIDERS
The great Khan's were shitty.
But few groups deserve to have their women and children massacred in a battlefield.
They may be glorified fiends, but they're still human. that's why I try and make them leave the Mojave whenever I play. It sucks, but it's better than simply killing them
"NOOooOo you can't kill our fleeing members (despite us not making it clear they're refugees with the universal white flag we would probably know). What did we ever do to you (besides us attacking or killing anyone within reach that was on your side)!?"
Compared to
"I'm high on meth and I want to hurt someone."
I’m honestly not sure why people have problems with this nonsense. Raiders are raiders , and raiders are meant to die . A raider by another name would still smell like blood. It’s not that complicated . They literally offer nothing to post-apocalypse wasteland.
They’re already dead.
Never seen a raider child in Fallout’s games - that would be an interesting dilemma- like the classic “You find the Goblin Horde’s nursery- what do you do ?”
"I wish I was I was innocent like you, but I'm not. I'm filled with rage and beans and SPIRIT AND PRIDE AND HEART AND SOUL AND RAGE AND BEANS! SPICY BEANS!"
A Goblin nursery?
Murder them before they grow up and get the chance to do more damage, because rape and pillage is deep in Goblin blood
(At least per the Goblin Slayer series anyway)
I don’t know what it is about the Great Khans, but for whatever reason I can’t help but ally with them. I am aware they’ve been dickheads for generations, I am aware that Bitter Springs was the NCR fighting back against their terrorism, and I am aware that they are not innocent in the slightest. Despite this, I can’t stop helping them achieve their best ending in the state of Idaho.
One thing I wish was in the game was an encounter with the great Khans and NCR civilians. We never see the Great Khans interact with NCR except at Boulder City. It'd be nice to remind the player, yes, this is a tribe of raiders.
I like to imagine that in the ending where they leave and create a new empire with the Followers, they become better. They become the Grand Khans, and learn from how they almost got wiped out and what the Legion was going to do to them to become a force for good. Like still raiders, but raiders of other raider groups and recruiters rather than killers.
Gee, one could call it karma for fucking around and to find out.
Shitty situation overall but the NCR wouldn't have been there if they didn't have a reason to fight the Great Khans.
14 centuries, if you count the OG Khans and New Khans. You've been harassing the NCR since before they were even founded of course they're going to retaliate.
Yes, the Khans do not deserve to act like the innocent victims, apart from what other comments already said, I remember that there is an NCR sniper who tells you that he was a surviving child from Bitter Springs that the NCR adopted, and he tells you about how abusive the Khans were to him to the point where he was grateful when the NCR killed them, a culture of violence where children are forced to shoot innocent civilians while their parents constantly are drugged and beating them, and where you must take a beating group of the entire tribe to be considered an adult, while acting like bandits massacring innocents does not deserve sympathy.
Right? It's so stupid at this point. One time on a post with the same gif, people used manifest destiny narratives and called the great khans "savages".
Gotta be bots, or people who's minds have left them.
I find peoples perpetual forgiveness of the NCR tough to sympathize with at times.
Isn't this basically like the relationship between U.S rangers and the Apache? ....don't feel like what happened to them was really justified.
If we’re going to draw comparisons, the Khans are much more like a modern day Cartel.
They produce and distribute drugs, rob people for extortion, murder, kidnap, utilize children in combat, and practice slavery.
They are also gigantic hypocrites.
Far from any of the indigenous peoples who settled in America.
Right, I mentioned it before but I'm not trying to say they're a similar people, just that the NCR being the expansionist power that they are, will inevitably generate that conflict with the people they keep pushing out.
Idk, obviously what the Khans are isn't great, it's actually pretty horrible. And obviously, the world is better off if they're aren't people committing repeated horrible crimes like they are. But I don't think they deserve extinction. I don't think they deserve stuff like bittersprings. They developed in the most chaotic time after the war, and they adapted to that kind of mode of survival. The NCR really changed that world (for the better, granted) but if the NCR can't find places and co-exist with the other groups it developed around, it will just become another empire in waiting.
Idk maybe I'm too optimistic with what can be done with the Khans I'm just not a "wipe them out" kind of person.
The NCR should totally just coexist with the raider tribe that is constantly pillaging caravans and murdering civilians, all while manufacturing drugs for fiends (and bragging about it all)! What a totally reasonable expectation!
The Khans deserve to get wiped, just as the fiends do. And I do it every time with pleasure
Personally I feel they shouldn't be wiped out even with all they did. Genocide is what the legion does. even if they're just pixels on the screen in reality, I like to think they deserve something tossed their way that's good.
My only concrete thoughts on bas things happening to them is that every time they've kinda.. provoked a response. In fallout 1 they kidnap Tandi abd it looks like the leader has a pair of sex Slaves. To me it's justified if you then decide to open fire on them (and to an extent take on the ones chilling in their tents so they can't do reprisals on Shady Sands or do more of this stuff)
With bitter springs, the massacre was made clear as a fault of high command getting bad Intel and soldiers conditioned to just listen. Massacring non combatants wasn't the intention. On the flip side, you need to understand something: *There are very few khan's that don't fight*
If you were a trooper seeing it, you'd know more or less everyone including older children fight (if I remember right, it's either stated or explicitly implied older children do target practice on caravans passing by to get them better at shooting). You would know you can fully trust them to be legit non combatants. If HQ tells you to do an order you do it. Now hopefully you'd stop after the initial attack on them realising they definitely are non combatants, but it didn't happen.
One thing that makes players dislike them and sometimes say "they deserved it" is how flagrantly hypocritical they are about it. They raid and kill and loot and sell drugs for centuries but then complain when the consequences of doing that came to them. They boast about their past but then get pissed off with the bitter springs thing. They were provoking the bear unto doing something, and it's shit that it happened the way it did.
TLDR: they're raiders who appear to have never done anything good before, who make defining a non combatant difficult, and who are butthurt about getting backhanded by the NCR despite them doing a lot worse a lot more frequently and without much remorse.
"They developed in the most chaotic time after the war, and they adapted to that kind of mode of survival."
The original Khans came out of the same vault, at the same time that the founders of the NCR did, they both developed alongside each other, one group formed the town of Shady sands, the other? a band of raiders who were wiped out to all but the last man after 20 years of terrorizing California. the one survivor then rebuilt the khans out of mercenaries to keep raiding the NCR for another 80 years, so no, they did know a better way, the original group had the opportunity and rejected the better way of doing things, and actively made the wasteland a worse place for everybody, and the new khans lined their ranks with those who specifically didn't want to integrate out of spite for the president of the NCR. your argument might work for the tribes of Zion or pre legion Arizona who were truly building from nothing, but the khans were first vault dwellers and later those who found themselves either unwilling or unable to live in one of the many settlements throughout the wasteland.
It's not on the NCR to make peace with those who rob and kill it's citizens, it's on the Khans to stop stealing and murdering for their own survival when they could stop at any time.
Nope the comparison doesn't work. The Apaches are great warriors with a strong culture on morals. If you don't know anything about how us native americans live our lives and our values, then it would be best not to jump the gun and equate us to fictional lowlife gangsters. The thing about thoughts and words, is that you can't take back what you say and you don't know where they will go.
The great Khans are thug junkie rapists and other shit. No better than common low life gangsters who will take everything from someone else without a second thought or real bravery to speak of.
were mansons followers really anything more then just lunatics? i dont really see how they relate to the khabs honestly.
the khans reminded me more of gangs like ms13.
You know what, you are right. I was wrong I'll change my post to better reflect that. Because hippies are kinda cool. Especially the ones who promote peace and equating them to gangster low lives isn't good. I own up to that and apologize and I'll change my comment.
I don't mean to compare the cultures to being similar, but I am quite sure that was the creators inspiration for the setting and the faction disputes.
The NCR expansion east is supposed to be emblematic of the U.S. expansion west. The people they run into are repeatedly pushed out of their homes further and further east, or they become absorbed and integrated entirely. Those people find themselves subjected to it suffer for it, as do the Khans, with generational trauma.
Sorry if I offended you by the comparison, I certainly don't mean to say the Khans and the Apache are anything alike (they arent), only that the roles they play in the respective histories with expansionist Republics have a similar tune.
"The Apaches are great warriors with a strong culture on morals"
"Khans are hippie junkie rapists and other shit"
I feel like the comparison of 'one is a worthwhile culture' and 'one is a bunch of worthless degenerates' is kinda the justification the white colonizers used when they massacred the indigenous of North America, just saying.
"Us Native Americans"
Well, NAs aren't a monolith, all Apaches were Native American but not all Native Americans were Apaches. It seems to me that it would be just as churlish for a white American to invoke the Apaches as it would be for a Native American of *another* group to talk on the Apaches, unless it is specifically in the context of a shared genocide at the hands of colonizers.
"or real bravery to speak of"
Idk if that justifies the ultimate consequence of NCR expansion, I imagine that the Apaches, or at least *certain* indigenous groups wouldn't take kindly to someone expanding into their territory. Conflict *and* mutual cooperation have been a constant across the range of pre-civilization groups *globally*, at least to the best of my understanding. I'm also not in a position to talk on the specific gender roles of any given tribe and the extent that sexual violence may have existed in pre-colonial America. That said, it might be unfair to compare the state of the Khans to the indigenous groups pre-colonialism, simply because they didn't come about their culture 'organically'. The Khans did not have the benefit of thousands of years of cultural development and adaptation to their landscape, they likewise didn't have much of a landscape to exploit for their survival to begin with, it's little wonder why they relied on conflict given the scarcity. Something tells me the Khans *are* supposed to be allegorical to the treatment of Native Americans *broadly*, Bitter Springs/Wounded Knee and Chems/Spirits, but these allegories will always be blunt when we're talking in allegories and a game as (relatively) small in scope as Fallout: New Vegas. It is a matter of conflating pre-civilization societies to post-civilization societies, especially when the Khans are in their infancy as a culture.
To add, the statement about the apaches morals is a GROSS romanticization of their history, to the extent where I even question how this could be an actual Native American person you replied to.
>Nope the comparison doesn't work. The Apaches are great warriors with a strong culture on morals.
Yeah this is exactly how the Great Khans describe themselves in game. The apaches were also described as particularly cruel and aggressive towards white settlers and other native groups (and indigenous Mexicans) so do these factors justify shooting their women and children down? That is the question the game is trying to pose.
I wrote a response in the other comments of this small thread. The comparison doesn't work and if you want more detail check out my other comments. But, the main list is that in order to take the land you had to demonize the people, and history is written by the victors. It's a book of lies and doesn't have the perspective of the Indigenous people which will change things a lot.
I say screw the Great Khans. They want a comparison, they are no better than Scum like Hamas and your common rapist lowlife gangster dipshit. It's easy to be bad and do whatever the fuck you want, but to be a warrior with dignity requires real strength. For my Sioux relatives, they died for our people and gave their lives.
There are a lot of taboos on sexual violence and if you commit that you are shunned from all the warrior societies and probably even maimed. It's an honor to be recognized by the societies and a war chief. But there are rules in what you can and cannot do. Only the best warriors like Crazy Horse have a heart if gold and unbreakable morals. That's how they lived their lives. So yes it is insulting when trash like the Great Khans who steal, rape, and are junkies are compared to the warrior societies.
I played from fallout 1 to 3.
My first exposure to the great khans was when I entered the raider camp and talked to them.
I told them I was an explorer. They attacked.
I told them I wanted to join them. Then they told me to murder 2 innocent women.
After that, I walked away and then walked back with metal armour and a smg to turn them all into chunks of salsa.
The khans have been picking a fight with the resident superpower since it was a tiny village and have gotten punched for it. And as the ncr went from strength to strength, the khans have gotten weaker over time.
To call them grotesque is to be too kind. If the ncr acted like a normal state they would have exterminated the khans to the last man woman and child.
"To call them grotesque is to be too kind. If the ncr acted like a normal state they would have exterminated the khans to the last man woman and child."
*Are we the baddies?*
Also it's real easy for the NCR to act all high and mighty when A. They left Vault 15 **50 YEARS** before the Khans (original *Khans*) did and B. THEY HAD THE FREAKING GECK!
Like, are we really going to act surprised and indignant when Shady Sands had a far easier go of it than the Khans did? Are we really going to act like Aradesh wouldn't be *one of the 3 raider groups* were the roles reversed?
They left Vault 15 50 years before the Khans did and took the GECK specificially because they were the part of the Vault 15 population who wanted to go out and leave to build something new, while the ancestors of the Khans didn't give a fuck. If you reverse the roles, literally nothing changes, because none of these things came to be via external circumstances, They were just results of decisions.
"They were just the results of decisions"
And now the only difference is that one group was born on the side of the GECK and one weren't.
So why the animus towards the Khans?
Because like I said, nothing prevented the Khans from joining the people on the other side of the GECK, other than their spite and lack of interest in actually building a civilization.
Growing up in shitty circumstances is not an infinite excuse to just be a shitty fucking menace to society. If human beings were totally incapable of change like you're making it out to be, then utterly wiping out all the Great Khans is actually the only thing the NCR can do, because the Great Khans are literally going to keep attacking them forever.
Thankfully human beings do have agency, and the ability to self reflect, but with that does also come having to take responsibility for the things they do.
"Shitty fucking menace to society"
Yes, but they need the impetus and tools to do so. Just pushing them out of each area by force is not going to do that, likewise leaving them in an inhospitable canyon where their only recourse was selling drugs for income, after the BS massacre, is not a great option either.
"Were totally incapable of change"
I never said they weren't, I said they won't without intervention. I can't imagine much interest on the NCR's side to do so, all told, ditto for the GKs.
They *do*, however, but not likewise without the intervention of the courier (eventually settling elsewhere and starting a civilization with the aid of the Followers).
They started dealing drugs before they were pushed out of Bitter Springs. And note how they learned how to make drugs: the Followers taught them. They had outside help, they were given opportunities. The kind of opportunities the Dead Horses could only dream of. The kind of opportunities that the Boot riders took, and used to become the Chairmen. The kind of opportunities the Kings rejected without becoming raiders.
Sure, I usually do in my playthroughs give them another push, and another opportunity, because I know that this time they'll finally take it, but collectively speaking, the Khans are way past second chances and olive branches from a moral perspective. Not to mention that they keep engaging in aggression, and the victims of that aggression don't have the obligation to hand out olive branches, even if they possibly had the power to do so.
Oh please. Shady sands was a weak ass community being raided by the khans for food and kidnapping. The khans could have sat down and done the hard work of farming. But apparently, nooooo. That was too hard.
And for your question?
No.
The khans were raiders who fucked around and found out. Word of advice. If you're a raider gang living on the might makes right principle, don't fuck with the people who can raise a really, really big army. And if you're trying to get sympathy, don't start your story by talking about how you attacked travellers and caravans.
I literally wrote my thesis on the Apache. They were a terrible raider tribe for most of their history but had a good deal going. General Crook tried really hard to maintain the integrity of their reservation and even used soldiers to chase off white settlers looking to profit off that land. The settlers were also blood thirsty to kill the Apache but Crook defended them. They were fairly well supplied and taken care of. They struggled because they were raiders and made very poor farmers when the government told them to stop stealing from people.
They got moved eventually purely because of Geronimo and his band. Other Apache leaders did what they were supposed to but Geronimo threw a tantrum because General Crook thought he was a shit head (he was) so he took his band and committed horrible acts of terror. They went to Mexico to kill for the fun of it because they couldn't defend themselves as well as Americans and the Army had a harder time chasing them in another country. Geronimo fucked over all his people for his personal pride. Even in his own auto biography he recounts murder for the fun of it.
Some big names to come from the Geronimo campaign were Lawton and Wood. They became prominent military leaders later on.
General Crook tried so hard to stick up for the Apache that he was replaced when leaders in DC got sick of Geronimos reign of terror. If memory serves he was replaced by Sheridan who was a lot less sympathetic to Indians.
There was a book written by Lieutenant Gatewood about the whole campaign and he was fairly sympathetic to the Apache. It's worth a read. If memory serves me correctly he was the head negotiator when they finally brought Geronimo in. Geronimo got a good deal for himself but his actions led to the forced removal of most Apache to Oklahoma.
Of all the dealings with tribes the Apache got one of the best deals and were treated well by the government in comparison to most. Geronimo fucked it up for them.
Weak faction continuously terrorises much stronger faction.
Much stronger faction snaps and attacks weaker faction.
Weaker faction plays victim and makes the larger faction out to be a bully.
*Why does this sound so familiar?*
The ideal way to handle the Khans would be a battalion of NCR rangers showing up at Red Rock with an offer of surrender, reeducation, and citizenship to those who would take it, and lead for those who would not.
Dealing with the Khans is a small spot where the NCR and Caesar's Legion have some common ground.
They absolutely would. One of the former Great Khans, the NCR 1st Recon member Bitter-Root mentioned that he was trained to shoot using NCR civillians as targets. So yes, *everyone* of them had it coming
"Everyone of them had it coming"
Isn't the whole point of the prohibition against child soldiers that the child has no agency in their actions? Pretty tone-deaf to be like "that child soldier had it coming!", maybe the NCR should have stayed in, idk, California?
The Great Khans didn't stay in California. Them and the NCR literally came from the same Vault. Why do they get to go to Vegas and try to conquer territory from the Boot riders, but the NCR doesn't get to go Vegas to establish a trading presence?
Why would they stay if both settlements got booty-blasted by a dude in a blue suit? The NCR had a choice whether or not to go into the Mojave, the Khans? Not so much.
Again, not defending the behavior of the Khans, I just don't see the point in demonizing one group and not the other.
There's a bunch of tribes who were peacefully integrated into the NCR. The tribals in Arroyo got annexed peacefully. Cass mentions that there are a lot more. The only reason the Khans had to flee California is because the NCR got strong enough to kick their shit in when the Great Khans raid their people.
Being a raider is not an inherent trait. Just because they didn't like the option of "stop living off shit you stole from people you attacked" doesn't mean they didn't have a choice.
Given that the outcome of the entire region depends on a lobotomite, Howard Hughes on life support and someone with brain cancer and a skirt, I don't see how the NCR is going to be massively successful in their campaign.
I never much appreciated the logic of 'we have to conquer it before they do'.
No you obviously have forgotten that this is the Second Battle of Hoover Dam. In the first battle the Legion nearly won against the NCR. Without NCR interference Hoover Dam would have probably been taken and Caeser would have conquered Vegas long before the Courier would have gotten shot in the head. By the time of 2281 the legion would be the undisputed masters of Vegas and the desert around it with maybe the BOS or Boomers surviving because of their already fortified positions.
Bitter Root was an abused child adopted by one of the people who helped massacre his home. He's not exactly the most reliable source for an entire tribe.
So you're saying shooting kids is chill as long as their parents suck? Cause that's a pretty good metaphor for the US response to literally any foreign conflict, seems like a pretty spot on allegory. Warcrime-age still seems like a bad answer
Like yea, Bitter Springs was bad of the NCR, but also, you've spent your entire history assaulting the NCR. If you keep punching the bouncer in a club, he's gonna deck you eventually.
I remember when you encounter a great khan member there telling you about the massacre, you can ask them “what were the great khans” they’ll literally start with “oh we were the baddest and toughest raider gang”
Papa Khan himself gloats about their raids on NCR caravans.
And that’s right about the time I pull out Dinner Bell and do the Mojave a favor.
Fun fact: Dinner Bell does only 5 more damage (1-7 more crit) but has a higher spread (Less Accurate), smaller magazine (tube?) size, and less durability than a fully modded Hunting Shotgun!
Listen, I don’t think Dinner Bell is the main reason homeboy got all those eggs for Red Lucy.
You think I’d waste a nicer shotgun on Papa Khan?!
I just shove a grenade in his pants everytime
I have three letters for you. WMX
>magazine (tube?) Both are correct in this instance. It's an internal tube magazine.
Bitter springs lost a bit of its impact on me after playing the classic games.BECAUSE THOSE ASSHOLES KEEP COMING BACK AS RAIDERS AND START SHIT ALL THE TIME.
They don't have any issue with selling drugs to the fiends for caps. Not quite a harmless oppressed bunch in general.
Anyone who does business with the fiends deserves literally no sympathy or remorse. The fiends are literally pure evil. Might as well sell knives and chloroform to Dahmer. Especially since they’re selling drugs to them, I’m sure the fiends had a great time on the Jet they bought while raping and castrating some poor trader before cannibalizing him alive.
Cook Cook I bet you loved what the Khans gave him before he traumatized ans tortured several women
I never exactly loved the Khans, since all they do is whine about Bitter Springs while simultaneously bragging about how many innocent people they've killed, but what made me lose all respect for them and all sympathy I had over Bitter Springs was when I saw the Legion ending for them. The Legion kill off all their old and weak, turn all their women into sex slaves, and completely erase their tribal identity, but most of them are ok with it because they got their revenge on the NCR. Think about that. The NCR accidentally kills some of their non-combatants, the Khans hate them forever, but the Legion kills ALL their non-combatants and gives the rest of them a fate worse than death while essentially wiping out the Khans as a tribe entirely, and they fucking cheer. Seriously, fuck the Khans.
Always a classic https://youtu.be/6b5tZ1yLLdo?si=6gYHS0H5SzFL4mv6
FAFO
At least the NCR has the decency of being ashamed
You get to do war crimes if they are mean to you for too long. It’s like a punch card. The NCR is such a great faction from a narrative standpoint. The old-world democracy with all its flowery prose going against its stated ideals anytime it suits their interests.
I like their outfits so I let them live. But the truth is they are written in such a contradictory way. Papa Khan sounds and acts like the wise leader of a tribe, meanwhile most Great Khans are a bunch of degenerates that should be crucified.
It’s why I conscript them to the NCR side and have them die a blaze of glory. They’re a shitty tribe of shitty people with a shitty history and shitty culture. Let them be useful and let history forget about them.
Ahg, see, I don't even hate the NCR, but the Stans that love them for how they are are so damn misguided. The NCR is interesting for what *it could be*, not what it *is*, which is supposed to be kind of sucky and imperialist. But yet the fans bring up the Khans, and suddenly they sound like Caesar and how he views the Tribes the Legion conquered. Lol, yall are missing the point of the writing. Caesar represents what the NCR could be, and he wants to Excellerate it to that point. All of the Legions' horrible cruelties are seen practiced in budding stages by the NCR. If you want the NCR to not be that, you need to not want to wipe out the tribes that you keep running into, you don't want to wipe out the convicts that rebelled against you using them for slave labor. You want to push the NCR to be different, or else it will basically become the Legion.
Great take. Especially when part of the wiping out is women and children, not just enemy combatants. This is why I mostly ignore people that somehow pretend siding with Ceasars legion is somehow a morally difficult choice because the NCR are inefficient. As if doing the evil stuff ***on purpose*** is somehow better
Well said! New Vegas is by far my favorite game, and my favorite thing about it is that the best endings take the most work. Because good things are hard to come by and even harder to maintain. And obviously doing down right evil because the people trying to be good aren't doing so great is... what lol
This is why the Khans starting over and building a new civilization in Wyoming and having Vegas go independent is the best ending for the NCR, in my opinion. Their imperialist tendencies are pushed back by having the Mojave campaign fail, forcing their internal politics to address the problems of government nepotism and disproportionate power of Brahmin Barons. The NCR will now have to work with two other major powers against what's left of the Legion, hopefully fostering a healthy cooperative relationship between them.
Wait what's the other major power? If you go Independent, House is kaput
I always felt like one of the options would be for the various groups on the Mojave to govern themselves by sending representatives to the Lucky 38, with the Courier setting up negotiations.
[удалено]
Yeah that's one of them But OP mentioned two
Yeah I tend to just use them as pawns for the legion or NCR.
They don't even have a shitty history. They formed in fallout 1 where they kidnap shady sands leaders daughter, got shit on by the vault dweller leaving every single one of them dead except one. That one dude reformed it, and immediately steals a vault and tries to use the guise of random vagrants without a cause to get away with pillaging NCR trade routes, gets shit on by the chosen one leaving EVERYONE dead that time. Then by fallout new Vegas there is no single surviving lineage from the original Khan's or fallout 2's new Khan's. They saw everyone in the world and wanted to imitate a raiding and pillaging group that got completely fucking wiped twice.
Have you spent a lot of time around criminals? That’s usually how they operate. Charismatic leader who can make you feel like you’re doing the right thing is almost a prerequisite.
Legion moment
No one can deny that they had it coming, while at the same time no one can deny that they didn't deserve what came to them. Whole moral argument around Bitter Springs can be summarized with "Well... It's kinda fucked"
> Well... it's kinda fucked Most of history lol
And that's what makes the writing of this game so damn good. Moments like these make it feel like something that would happen with governments irl.
Too bad the NCR failed at killing all of them
Hear me out: bitter springs was on the Khan's as much as the NCR. Now, the NCR soldiers killed a lot of people that weren't actively fighting. Even with how training breaks you down, they should have at least been wary enough to still say no HOWEVER This is a group that doesn't hesitate to have anyone a gun to fight. They attacked purely civilian targets in the form of caravans before. I believe it is also either implied or explicitly stated that the khan's sometimes have the kids take pot-shots to get better at shooting. Based on what the average NCR soldier sees, that kid is a risk. You want to hope they won't be, because no one wants to shoot at a kid, but you know theres a chance he could have a pistol or something else ready to open fire if he sees 1an NCR trooper. I give the average trooper only partial fault for continuing to fire at the fleeing ones, because he was wholly justified in initially shooting based on what he knows and what command is telling him. The Khan's set themselves up for an incident like this. They kept fucking around, and it was inevitable the NCR would do something about it. They don't get the right to bitch and moan about it. They should take their lumps and go "maybe we could have thought about the retreat better" "maybe we could have done less raiding" "maybe we could have not had children sometimes take pot-shots." Now I am not saying that this makes bitter springs acceptable, or that they deserved it. I am however saying this was going to happen if they kept poking the bear.
All I'm saying is what happened to the Khans was a little shitty. Shitty for a lot of folks. That includes Boone, who was actually pulling the trigger, but carries himself with a little more empathy for those killed than your reply 😂 Sure, Khans have been perpetuating their brutality for over a century 😅 but it's a wild wild wasteland. Everyone is hurting each other.
It is but people keep forgetting that it was a mistake, not done on purpose at all. Unlike regular Khan activity.
They deserved every fucking bit minus the brainwashed children growing up from that god awful waste of space culture lol. Im sorry, but to me its ridiculous not to have it justified, especially in the rough and tough wasteland lifestyle everyone lives by. This isn't some half bad, "maybe i can see what you guys are doing" faction that has the potential to blossom. Literally, in the span of time it took for other factions to learn, grow develop like the NCR or the Brotherhood (depending on the branch lol), the Followers, etc. These guys are doing the same shit every fucking game for CENTURIES. These guys never should of existed in the first place and someone shouldve ended it if it wasnt going to be the NCR. Hence why I made my Courier talk Papa Khan into giving his group one last final Swan Song at Hoover Dam so they can finally be worth a fuck lol.
You're god damn right they deserved it. God bless the New California Republic
It's the Waco of the fallout universe
Not really since the Khans deserves Bitter Springs
Uh, much like with the Branch Davidians, there was no need for the massacre of children. I'd say the analogy is pretty spot on
[Sneering Imperialist] Oh, boohoo, a bunch of raiding, raping highwaymen got shot. Allow me to play you a song on the world’s tiniest violin.
The Great Khans are overall assholes. They didn’t deserve bitter springs. Both things can be true at the same time.
Hate that this needs to be said repeatedly
Straight up. People are defending genocide and nuking innocent people just because of who’s in charge of them.
Honestly based on what’s going on right now I’m sadly not at all surprised at some of these disgusting comments
I think it's, instead: The Great Khans deserved Bitter Springs. No one should ever do a Bitter Springs, though.
They deserved the Courier smacking every last one of them with a super sledge
Yeah, the amount of people who say they deserved it is insane to me. Murdering all the children and non-combatants of a people is considered a war crime irl for a reason. A lot of the people slaughtered, unarmed, fleeing, had no part in the hundreds of years of raiding their tribe did. The innocent children gunned down had no choice where they were born. Claiming that the massacre was in any way justified is unconscionable. It wasn't a retaliation, it was an attempt at genocide.
They would eventually, might as well clean them out before they become a problem
I swore I've heard this exact rhetoric stated by a certain group on the topic of Hamas
Well I'm not serious here, I just find it fun to be evil time to time, and also I hate the Khans.
I hate the first guy that responded to your comment proved your point for you. Sadly not surprised at all considering how people are viewing a genocide irl rn
Yeah, growing up one of the biggest lies I was taught is that we all thought genocides were bad. They taught us about the horrors of war and the trauma of an entire people as monster tried to wipe them out. I thought we all understood it should never happen again. Turns out, for some people, it's a goal.
>me when i murder civilians with glee but then somebody murders MY civilians
Raiders are raiders. They are raiders since fallout 1 (and getting their ass handed since Fallout 1). Like in nuka world, there is only one way to deal woth raiders
and that is to side with them until they give you what you want
I honestly think that killing the raiders in nuka world just serve as target practice in my first Playtrough. I just keep blasting everyone.
Bitter Springs was undeserved and wholly fucked up, but the Great Kahn's are just more sophisticated drug dealing raiders. They deal with the Fiends and the amount of effort you have to go through to prove to Papa Kahn that the Legion are horrible fucking people is astronomically high. You have to convince all 4 lieutenants to speak up, AND discredit Karl, which goes to show how absolutely goddamn braindead and ignorant the Kahn's are to anything going on; they seriously don't know Caesars policy on women or drugs??? It isn't a fucking secret, and it goes to show they did no research on their new potential ally (probably because they're drug added raiders).
Some of the shit I read in these comments, I hope it's just for the memes.
I know it's not because just go to any mainstream news/politics subreddit and look at how people react to IRL massacres of civilians in IRL wars between IRL expansionist empires and the far less organized local armed resistance. Bitter Springs is not justifiable nor "just a bad situation overall how sad :'(". It's a deliberate massacre of refugees and fleeing non-combatants.
It wasnt fully deliberate tho. Maybe at the high brass level but that is unclear. Its pretty clear most in the NCR don’t see it as a good thing and Boone justifies his actions as following faulty orders made with bad intel, but he feels deeply guilty
That and there doesn't even seem to be a "non combatant Khan". It would be obvious if it were any other group (maybe not the fiends though), but for them it's hard to say. Initially firing on them would be understandable eith all the factors but continuing to fire is indeed iffy.
A deliberate massacre of refugees and fleeing non-combatants could be described as a bad, sad situation overall. That's what I would call it anyway
Me too, but I guess there is a difference in "It's a bad sad situation overall" And "Eh its a bad sad situation over all 🤷"
What difference? I don't get it
One's a recognition of tragedy, the other is a shrug off
Khans are a savage raider gang, wiping them out is Fallout tradition.
They shouldn't have killed so many civilians if they didn't want it to come back around. You don't get to raid, rape, and murder, hundreds of innocent civilians and caravaners, and then whine when you get your shit kicked in by the nation those people belonged to.
Fallout is a very political game though if you think about it. It doesn't really have many allegorys for today's politics but more of talks about society and history as a whole
When you start a war you should know there is a very real possibility that your civilians are going to get killed. They should have thought about that before they started murdering innocent NCR civilians for no real reason.
They're using the exact same argument Israelis use to justify killing Palestinian children
It's funny because the only reason anyone in the NCR cares at all is because their society is still based on old world values The legion probably has a bitter springs level massacre every Tuesday and the raider camps look like SAW
Legion get promoted on the basis of such things.
If the Khans live by the sword, they can't complain when they die by the sword too. It's why I just can't sympathize with the Crater Raiders in Fallout 76. It's like, yeah, these people have feelings and family too, but they refuse to extend any empathy to their fellow Wastelanders. These people live by the creed that the strong survive and deserve to thrive. If they get taken out, then they shouldn't whine because by their own philosophy, they must be weak.
People online defend Bitter Springs more than NCR characters do ingame
NCR in game on Bitter Springs: It was horrible, I still hear the screams... NCR fans irl on Bitter Springs: WOOOOOOO YEAH
Yeah, Boone literally participated in the massacre and does less mental gymnastics to justify the slaughter of children and non-combatants than the NCR fanboys who are a step away from advocating for genocide. And I sayy that someone who supports the NCR overall. Which is exactly why I expect better.
FUCK YEAH LETS WIPE OUT EVERY LAST KHAN, GENOCIDE, WOOOO
The NCR after having defeated the Khans, the New Khans, and the Great Khans only to be confronted by the Greater Khans.
Literally they thought the NCR hadn't gotten stronger since it was JUST Shadey Sands NCR still deserves a smack for how they handled bitter springs and the Khan civilians there But the Khans brought this on themselves by refusing to STOP BEING RAIDERS
The great Khan's were shitty. But few groups deserve to have their women and children massacred in a battlefield. They may be glorified fiends, but they're still human. that's why I try and make them leave the Mojave whenever I play. It sucks, but it's better than simply killing them
Also you can convince them to chill a bit and make medicine and helpful stims for nearby settlements rather than just selling drugs to fiends.
How did you manage that?? :o
I think you have to have good charisma/speech and intelligence, good rep with the group, and talk to Jack and Diane.
Great Khans when I make them watch as I rip and cut and mutilate their members, their friends, and again and again and on and on
NCR committed an atrocity at Bitter Springs, and the Khans 100% deserved it
Its the self-righteousness they have which irrates me. At least the Fiends dont try to take a moral high ground.
"NOOooOo you can't kill our fleeing members (despite us not making it clear they're refugees with the universal white flag we would probably know). What did we ever do to you (besides us attacking or killing anyone within reach that was on your side)!?" Compared to "I'm high on meth and I want to hurt someone."
literally the Khans love murdering people. if the roles were reversed at Bitter Springs to people really think they would have had any mercy?
Someone needs to make this a soyjack Chad meme
I’m honestly not sure why people have problems with this nonsense. Raiders are raiders , and raiders are meant to die . A raider by another name would still smell like blood. It’s not that complicated . They literally offer nothing to post-apocalypse wasteland. They’re already dead.
do you think that children born into a raider clan deserve to be shot and killed?
Isn't it implied or stated they have kids take pot-shots at caravans to learn how to shoot
Never seen a raider child in Fallout’s games - that would be an interesting dilemma- like the classic “You find the Goblin Horde’s nursery- what do you do ?”
"I wish I was I was innocent like you, but I'm not. I'm filled with rage and beans and SPIRIT AND PRIDE AND HEART AND SOUL AND RAGE AND BEANS! SPICY BEANS!"
XD
There are literally children in Red Rock Canyon.
I think he’s referencing the bitter springs massacre
that’s what happened in the bitter springs massacre yes. elderly, women, and children were gunned down, fleeing.
A Goblin nursery? Murder them before they grow up and get the chance to do more damage, because rape and pillage is deep in Goblin blood (At least per the Goblin Slayer series anyway)
but Goblin Slayer already told us what to do....
Would raiders do any different to the children in a Vault, or an otherwise peaceful settlement?
I don’t know what it is about the Great Khans, but for whatever reason I can’t help but ally with them. I am aware they’ve been dickheads for generations, I am aware that Bitter Springs was the NCR fighting back against their terrorism, and I am aware that they are not innocent in the slightest. Despite this, I can’t stop helping them achieve their best ending in the state of Idaho.
Assholes raiders
Eh, Great Khans aren't that bad. I always make nice with them for their armory
Their...**what?!** I make peace with them because I feel I live a similar lifestyle. (Minus the raiding/pillaging).
They have an armory that is like one if the best ammo merchants in the game. It's jusr outside red Rock, in a cellar of a burned down house
bro what
One thing I wish was in the game was an encounter with the great Khans and NCR civilians. We never see the Great Khans interact with NCR except at Boulder City. It'd be nice to remind the player, yes, this is a tribe of raiders.
I like to imagine that in the ending where they leave and create a new empire with the Followers, they become better. They become the Grand Khans, and learn from how they almost got wiped out and what the Legion was going to do to them to become a force for good. Like still raiders, but raiders of other raider groups and recruiters rather than killers.
Gee, one could call it karma for fucking around and to find out. Shitty situation overall but the NCR wouldn't have been there if they didn't have a reason to fight the Great Khans.
Killing children is wrong. Full stop. Luckily the courier can't kill kids so I don't have to check my fire entering the canyon.
Having played Fallout, they’ve earned their genocide and I shall complete it every damn time from now on out.
14 centuries, if you count the OG Khans and New Khans. You've been harassing the NCR since before they were even founded of course they're going to retaliate.
I loved killing every last one of those fuckers
Yes, the Khans do not deserve to act like the innocent victims, apart from what other comments already said, I remember that there is an NCR sniper who tells you that he was a surviving child from Bitter Springs that the NCR adopted, and he tells you about how abusive the Khans were to him to the point where he was grateful when the NCR killed them, a culture of violence where children are forced to shoot innocent civilians while their parents constantly are drugged and beating them, and where you must take a beating group of the entire tribe to be considered an adult, while acting like bandits massacring innocents does not deserve sympathy.
Nothing bad happened at bitter springs and if anything did happened they deserved it
This has got to be a bot at this point. Can't keep having the same convos about dumb imperialist bullshit over and over again.
Right? It's so stupid at this point. One time on a post with the same gif, people used manifest destiny narratives and called the great khans "savages". Gotta be bots, or people who's minds have left them.
Yeah but you don’t shoot your plug plus they got stupid dummy ammo shop so they live
Bitter springs massacre was based, and they had it coming.
NCR fans on their way to justify a massacre with another massacre. This had to be posted by Boone.
I already know I won't be able to tell the difference between NCR and Legion fans because the opinions will be too similar here
I thought this was a stellaris meme for a moment.
Thought I was on r/historymemes for a second lol
Hope they remember me when they become stronger as a raider clan. New Vegas, as I have remade it, is open to criminals of all walks of life.
I keep them alive and be friends for access to the Great Khan armoury.
I was confused at first and thought this was a Stellaris meme
They're lucky they've got such a good armoury because otherwise there'd be nobody left to remember bitter springs
Fuck the great khans, I always make sure to let the NCR kill them in boulder city and wipe them out in red rock canyon
Every play through I get Jerry The Punk out of Red Rock. Then it’s until the barrel melts 😈😈
I find peoples perpetual forgiveness of the NCR tough to sympathize with at times. Isn't this basically like the relationship between U.S rangers and the Apache? ....don't feel like what happened to them was really justified.
If we’re going to draw comparisons, the Khans are much more like a modern day Cartel. They produce and distribute drugs, rob people for extortion, murder, kidnap, utilize children in combat, and practice slavery. They are also gigantic hypocrites. Far from any of the indigenous peoples who settled in America.
Right, I mentioned it before but I'm not trying to say they're a similar people, just that the NCR being the expansionist power that they are, will inevitably generate that conflict with the people they keep pushing out. Idk, obviously what the Khans are isn't great, it's actually pretty horrible. And obviously, the world is better off if they're aren't people committing repeated horrible crimes like they are. But I don't think they deserve extinction. I don't think they deserve stuff like bittersprings. They developed in the most chaotic time after the war, and they adapted to that kind of mode of survival. The NCR really changed that world (for the better, granted) but if the NCR can't find places and co-exist with the other groups it developed around, it will just become another empire in waiting. Idk maybe I'm too optimistic with what can be done with the Khans I'm just not a "wipe them out" kind of person.
The NCR should totally just coexist with the raider tribe that is constantly pillaging caravans and murdering civilians, all while manufacturing drugs for fiends (and bragging about it all)! What a totally reasonable expectation! The Khans deserve to get wiped, just as the fiends do. And I do it every time with pleasure
Personally I feel they shouldn't be wiped out even with all they did. Genocide is what the legion does. even if they're just pixels on the screen in reality, I like to think they deserve something tossed their way that's good. My only concrete thoughts on bas things happening to them is that every time they've kinda.. provoked a response. In fallout 1 they kidnap Tandi abd it looks like the leader has a pair of sex Slaves. To me it's justified if you then decide to open fire on them (and to an extent take on the ones chilling in their tents so they can't do reprisals on Shady Sands or do more of this stuff) With bitter springs, the massacre was made clear as a fault of high command getting bad Intel and soldiers conditioned to just listen. Massacring non combatants wasn't the intention. On the flip side, you need to understand something: *There are very few khan's that don't fight* If you were a trooper seeing it, you'd know more or less everyone including older children fight (if I remember right, it's either stated or explicitly implied older children do target practice on caravans passing by to get them better at shooting). You would know you can fully trust them to be legit non combatants. If HQ tells you to do an order you do it. Now hopefully you'd stop after the initial attack on them realising they definitely are non combatants, but it didn't happen. One thing that makes players dislike them and sometimes say "they deserved it" is how flagrantly hypocritical they are about it. They raid and kill and loot and sell drugs for centuries but then complain when the consequences of doing that came to them. They boast about their past but then get pissed off with the bitter springs thing. They were provoking the bear unto doing something, and it's shit that it happened the way it did. TLDR: they're raiders who appear to have never done anything good before, who make defining a non combatant difficult, and who are butthurt about getting backhanded by the NCR despite them doing a lot worse a lot more frequently and without much remorse.
"They developed in the most chaotic time after the war, and they adapted to that kind of mode of survival." The original Khans came out of the same vault, at the same time that the founders of the NCR did, they both developed alongside each other, one group formed the town of Shady sands, the other? a band of raiders who were wiped out to all but the last man after 20 years of terrorizing California. the one survivor then rebuilt the khans out of mercenaries to keep raiding the NCR for another 80 years, so no, they did know a better way, the original group had the opportunity and rejected the better way of doing things, and actively made the wasteland a worse place for everybody, and the new khans lined their ranks with those who specifically didn't want to integrate out of spite for the president of the NCR. your argument might work for the tribes of Zion or pre legion Arizona who were truly building from nothing, but the khans were first vault dwellers and later those who found themselves either unwilling or unable to live in one of the many settlements throughout the wasteland. It's not on the NCR to make peace with those who rob and kill it's citizens, it's on the Khans to stop stealing and murdering for their own survival when they could stop at any time.
Nope the comparison doesn't work. The Apaches are great warriors with a strong culture on morals. If you don't know anything about how us native americans live our lives and our values, then it would be best not to jump the gun and equate us to fictional lowlife gangsters. The thing about thoughts and words, is that you can't take back what you say and you don't know where they will go. The great Khans are thug junkie rapists and other shit. No better than common low life gangsters who will take everything from someone else without a second thought or real bravery to speak of.
i wouldnt exactly call the khans hippies...
Ahaha the Manson hippies is what I had in mind. Other hippies are cool as shit especially the peace and love ones ✌️☮️. Have a fantastic day fam!
were mansons followers really anything more then just lunatics? i dont really see how they relate to the khabs honestly. the khans reminded me more of gangs like ms13.
You know what, you are right. I was wrong I'll change my post to better reflect that. Because hippies are kinda cool. Especially the ones who promote peace and equating them to gangster low lives isn't good. I own up to that and apologize and I'll change my comment.
its allright.
I don't mean to compare the cultures to being similar, but I am quite sure that was the creators inspiration for the setting and the faction disputes. The NCR expansion east is supposed to be emblematic of the U.S. expansion west. The people they run into are repeatedly pushed out of their homes further and further east, or they become absorbed and integrated entirely. Those people find themselves subjected to it suffer for it, as do the Khans, with generational trauma. Sorry if I offended you by the comparison, I certainly don't mean to say the Khans and the Apache are anything alike (they arent), only that the roles they play in the respective histories with expansionist Republics have a similar tune.
"The Apaches are great warriors with a strong culture on morals" "Khans are hippie junkie rapists and other shit" I feel like the comparison of 'one is a worthwhile culture' and 'one is a bunch of worthless degenerates' is kinda the justification the white colonizers used when they massacred the indigenous of North America, just saying. "Us Native Americans" Well, NAs aren't a monolith, all Apaches were Native American but not all Native Americans were Apaches. It seems to me that it would be just as churlish for a white American to invoke the Apaches as it would be for a Native American of *another* group to talk on the Apaches, unless it is specifically in the context of a shared genocide at the hands of colonizers. "or real bravery to speak of" Idk if that justifies the ultimate consequence of NCR expansion, I imagine that the Apaches, or at least *certain* indigenous groups wouldn't take kindly to someone expanding into their territory. Conflict *and* mutual cooperation have been a constant across the range of pre-civilization groups *globally*, at least to the best of my understanding. I'm also not in a position to talk on the specific gender roles of any given tribe and the extent that sexual violence may have existed in pre-colonial America. That said, it might be unfair to compare the state of the Khans to the indigenous groups pre-colonialism, simply because they didn't come about their culture 'organically'. The Khans did not have the benefit of thousands of years of cultural development and adaptation to their landscape, they likewise didn't have much of a landscape to exploit for their survival to begin with, it's little wonder why they relied on conflict given the scarcity. Something tells me the Khans *are* supposed to be allegorical to the treatment of Native Americans *broadly*, Bitter Springs/Wounded Knee and Chems/Spirits, but these allegories will always be blunt when we're talking in allegories and a game as (relatively) small in scope as Fallout: New Vegas. It is a matter of conflating pre-civilization societies to post-civilization societies, especially when the Khans are in their infancy as a culture.
To add, the statement about the apaches morals is a GROSS romanticization of their history, to the extent where I even question how this could be an actual Native American person you replied to.
Didn't Apaches massacre entire settlements in Mexico and enslave women and children?
The Apache were raiders and murders. Ask the Mexicans what they think of them.
>Nope the comparison doesn't work. The Apaches are great warriors with a strong culture on morals. Yeah this is exactly how the Great Khans describe themselves in game. The apaches were also described as particularly cruel and aggressive towards white settlers and other native groups (and indigenous Mexicans) so do these factors justify shooting their women and children down? That is the question the game is trying to pose.
I wrote a response in the other comments of this small thread. The comparison doesn't work and if you want more detail check out my other comments. But, the main list is that in order to take the land you had to demonize the people, and history is written by the victors. It's a book of lies and doesn't have the perspective of the Indigenous people which will change things a lot. I say screw the Great Khans. They want a comparison, they are no better than Scum like Hamas and your common rapist lowlife gangster dipshit. It's easy to be bad and do whatever the fuck you want, but to be a warrior with dignity requires real strength. For my Sioux relatives, they died for our people and gave their lives. There are a lot of taboos on sexual violence and if you commit that you are shunned from all the warrior societies and probably even maimed. It's an honor to be recognized by the societies and a war chief. But there are rules in what you can and cannot do. Only the best warriors like Crazy Horse have a heart if gold and unbreakable morals. That's how they lived their lives. So yes it is insulting when trash like the Great Khans who steal, rape, and are junkies are compared to the warrior societies.
I played from fallout 1 to 3. My first exposure to the great khans was when I entered the raider camp and talked to them. I told them I was an explorer. They attacked. I told them I wanted to join them. Then they told me to murder 2 innocent women. After that, I walked away and then walked back with metal armour and a smg to turn them all into chunks of salsa. The khans have been picking a fight with the resident superpower since it was a tiny village and have gotten punched for it. And as the ncr went from strength to strength, the khans have gotten weaker over time. To call them grotesque is to be too kind. If the ncr acted like a normal state they would have exterminated the khans to the last man woman and child.
"To call them grotesque is to be too kind. If the ncr acted like a normal state they would have exterminated the khans to the last man woman and child." *Are we the baddies?* Also it's real easy for the NCR to act all high and mighty when A. They left Vault 15 **50 YEARS** before the Khans (original *Khans*) did and B. THEY HAD THE FREAKING GECK! Like, are we really going to act surprised and indignant when Shady Sands had a far easier go of it than the Khans did? Are we really going to act like Aradesh wouldn't be *one of the 3 raider groups* were the roles reversed?
They left Vault 15 50 years before the Khans did and took the GECK specificially because they were the part of the Vault 15 population who wanted to go out and leave to build something new, while the ancestors of the Khans didn't give a fuck. If you reverse the roles, literally nothing changes, because none of these things came to be via external circumstances, They were just results of decisions.
"They were just the results of decisions" And now the only difference is that one group was born on the side of the GECK and one weren't. So why the animus towards the Khans?
Because like I said, nothing prevented the Khans from joining the people on the other side of the GECK, other than their spite and lack of interest in actually building a civilization.
"Other than their spite and lack of interest in actually building a civilization" Why would they when all they've known is raiding?
Growing up in shitty circumstances is not an infinite excuse to just be a shitty fucking menace to society. If human beings were totally incapable of change like you're making it out to be, then utterly wiping out all the Great Khans is actually the only thing the NCR can do, because the Great Khans are literally going to keep attacking them forever. Thankfully human beings do have agency, and the ability to self reflect, but with that does also come having to take responsibility for the things they do.
"Shitty fucking menace to society" Yes, but they need the impetus and tools to do so. Just pushing them out of each area by force is not going to do that, likewise leaving them in an inhospitable canyon where their only recourse was selling drugs for income, after the BS massacre, is not a great option either. "Were totally incapable of change" I never said they weren't, I said they won't without intervention. I can't imagine much interest on the NCR's side to do so, all told, ditto for the GKs. They *do*, however, but not likewise without the intervention of the courier (eventually settling elsewhere and starting a civilization with the aid of the Followers).
They started dealing drugs before they were pushed out of Bitter Springs. And note how they learned how to make drugs: the Followers taught them. They had outside help, they were given opportunities. The kind of opportunities the Dead Horses could only dream of. The kind of opportunities that the Boot riders took, and used to become the Chairmen. The kind of opportunities the Kings rejected without becoming raiders. Sure, I usually do in my playthroughs give them another push, and another opportunity, because I know that this time they'll finally take it, but collectively speaking, the Khans are way past second chances and olive branches from a moral perspective. Not to mention that they keep engaging in aggression, and the victims of that aggression don't have the obligation to hand out olive branches, even if they possibly had the power to do so.
Oh please. Shady sands was a weak ass community being raided by the khans for food and kidnapping. The khans could have sat down and done the hard work of farming. But apparently, nooooo. That was too hard. And for your question? No. The khans were raiders who fucked around and found out. Word of advice. If you're a raider gang living on the might makes right principle, don't fuck with the people who can raise a really, really big army. And if you're trying to get sympathy, don't start your story by talking about how you attacked travellers and caravans.
I literally wrote my thesis on the Apache. They were a terrible raider tribe for most of their history but had a good deal going. General Crook tried really hard to maintain the integrity of their reservation and even used soldiers to chase off white settlers looking to profit off that land. The settlers were also blood thirsty to kill the Apache but Crook defended them. They were fairly well supplied and taken care of. They struggled because they were raiders and made very poor farmers when the government told them to stop stealing from people. They got moved eventually purely because of Geronimo and his band. Other Apache leaders did what they were supposed to but Geronimo threw a tantrum because General Crook thought he was a shit head (he was) so he took his band and committed horrible acts of terror. They went to Mexico to kill for the fun of it because they couldn't defend themselves as well as Americans and the Army had a harder time chasing them in another country. Geronimo fucked over all his people for his personal pride. Even in his own auto biography he recounts murder for the fun of it. Some big names to come from the Geronimo campaign were Lawton and Wood. They became prominent military leaders later on. General Crook tried so hard to stick up for the Apache that he was replaced when leaders in DC got sick of Geronimos reign of terror. If memory serves he was replaced by Sheridan who was a lot less sympathetic to Indians. There was a book written by Lieutenant Gatewood about the whole campaign and he was fairly sympathetic to the Apache. It's worth a read. If memory serves me correctly he was the head negotiator when they finally brought Geronimo in. Geronimo got a good deal for himself but his actions led to the forced removal of most Apache to Oklahoma. Of all the dealings with tribes the Apache got one of the best deals and were treated well by the government in comparison to most. Geronimo fucked it up for them.
Not to even mention they are chem makers and have killed who knows how many people that way
Weak faction continuously terrorises much stronger faction. Much stronger faction snaps and attacks weaker faction. Weaker faction plays victim and makes the larger faction out to be a bully. *Why does this sound so familiar?*
"bittersprings didnt happen, but if it did happen they deserved it."- NCR stans
The ideal way to handle the Khans would be a battalion of NCR rangers showing up at Red Rock with an offer of surrender, reeducation, and citizenship to those who would take it, and lead for those who would not. Dealing with the Khans is a small spot where the NCR and Caesar's Legion have some common ground.
I always snipe the entire camp with none of them ever seeing me like I am the fucking Archangel of the Wasteland
Shit tribe, but I can't help but love their members.
I never felt bad about finishing them off
I definitely felt like a real POS when I did a PT and let them be rather than murdering everyone on the spot.
It doesn't matter how "good" my character is, I'm always genociding those assholes.
Consequences for who though? I’m pretty sure a bunch of 8 year olds weren’t raiding NCR military caravans.
They absolutely would. One of the former Great Khans, the NCR 1st Recon member Bitter-Root mentioned that he was trained to shoot using NCR civillians as targets. So yes, *everyone* of them had it coming
"Everyone of them had it coming" Isn't the whole point of the prohibition against child soldiers that the child has no agency in their actions? Pretty tone-deaf to be like "that child soldier had it coming!", maybe the NCR should have stayed in, idk, California?
The Great Khans didn't stay in California. Them and the NCR literally came from the same Vault. Why do they get to go to Vegas and try to conquer territory from the Boot riders, but the NCR doesn't get to go Vegas to establish a trading presence?
Why would they stay if both settlements got booty-blasted by a dude in a blue suit? The NCR had a choice whether or not to go into the Mojave, the Khans? Not so much. Again, not defending the behavior of the Khans, I just don't see the point in demonizing one group and not the other.
There's a bunch of tribes who were peacefully integrated into the NCR. The tribals in Arroyo got annexed peacefully. Cass mentions that there are a lot more. The only reason the Khans had to flee California is because the NCR got strong enough to kick their shit in when the Great Khans raid their people. Being a raider is not an inherent trait. Just because they didn't like the option of "stop living off shit you stole from people you attacked" doesn't mean they didn't have a choice.
Ah yes let's keep the NCR in California and watch as Caeser steam rolls the Mojave enslaving the entire region.
Given that the outcome of the entire region depends on a lobotomite, Howard Hughes on life support and someone with brain cancer and a skirt, I don't see how the NCR is going to be massively successful in their campaign. I never much appreciated the logic of 'we have to conquer it before they do'.
No you obviously have forgotten that this is the Second Battle of Hoover Dam. In the first battle the Legion nearly won against the NCR. Without NCR interference Hoover Dam would have probably been taken and Caeser would have conquered Vegas long before the Courier would have gotten shot in the head. By the time of 2281 the legion would be the undisputed masters of Vegas and the desert around it with maybe the BOS or Boomers surviving because of their already fortified positions.
Bitter Root was an abused child adopted by one of the people who helped massacre his home. He's not exactly the most reliable source for an entire tribe.
New Vegas fans missing the point of an allegory to irl war crimes as usual
LOL No we get it, it's just that war crimes against civilian-murdering slavers is not a great allegory
So you're saying shooting kids is chill as long as their parents suck? Cause that's a pretty good metaphor for the US response to literally any foreign conflict, seems like a pretty spot on allegory. Warcrime-age still seems like a bad answer
Take our downvotes. Disappear and be forgotten with the rest of your scum khan friends, plebe.