Why you can't trust Arthur Maxson (spoiler warning)

[ReaperDragon4]

âThis is an Op/Ed rough draft about why Arthur Maxson is such a poor leader of the Brotherhood of Steel. Its a rough draft, and I have a couple more essays criticizing the depiction/leadership of fallout 4's factions that I may want to write. Because trust me, even though I love the railroad, I can still make a great argument for Desdemona being a weak leader, and Shaun isn't the only leader at the Institute who's blameless in terms of how his faction's business is handled.

 

I'm going to start with the one that bugs me but is the least wacky of the two that bug the hell out of me, the Brotherhood of steel.

 

I have to admit to being new to the Fallout franchise, and I hope that Sarah Lyons is much smarter when I get to Fallout 3 and get to see the bulldogish terror as an awkward teenager. I am referring of course to Arthur Maxson, who's mistakes are so glaringly obvious that I have repeatedly nominated him for the darwin awards in conversations on discord.

 

Although it doesn't seem like it at first, the Brotherhood of steel in Fallout 4 is as topheavy as the Minutemen are as an organization. This on its own wouldn't be a problem if Maxson were a less one sided character. I'm going to hold Hitler up as an example of how this can ruin an army's chances at victory. I know he's often compared to Adolf Hitler, and I didn't want to make this comparison. However, its the best example I can think of of how a leader calling all the shots can work against an army as a whole.

 

Adolf Hitler had operations all over western Europe and north Africa. This wasn't the age of the internet, where a group of distant installations can view satilite images of a battlefield in real time. Command installations had to use a map and different pins or figures, and meticulous notes, to keep track of a battle and convert all the radio communication chatter into a visual the commander could understand. It basically took a whole room full of people back then to do the same job that a computer does now.

 

Hitler had made his command structure too broad beneath him and made it so that his subordinate generals had to okay every move they made on the battlefield. Because only one person could be in charge, it meant that the generals had to wait for orders. This not only cost the north African campaign dearly (and with it resources the Nazis needed if they wanted to win) it also caused the loss of multiple warships operating in the atlantic ocean.

 

Just like the Third Reich, Arthur Maxson is a very dominating presence on the Prydwyn. Normally the proctors under an elder could potentially offset an overly aggressive and intolerant commander, add in that you have two of those proctors being much older than Arthur Maxson and the brotherhood of steel should have survived both against the Institute /and/ against the Railroad.

 

Just like Shaun/Father, Maxson takes an "its my way or the highway" form of leadership. The reason why we accept and respect Shaun and let him die naturally (most of the time) while we end up butting heads with Maxson as the General of the Minutemen or fighting the institute with the railroad is because of the form this attitude takes. Maxson reminds me so strongly of a bulldog that I'm tempted to make that his official nickname should I get heavily into writing fanfiction. By contrast, being older than Maxson and raised in an environment that emphasizes careful planning as part of leadership, Shaun has the same black and white attitude but is much quieter and charismatic about it.

 

I'd argue that although having Proctor Quinlan and Proctor Teagan along on the Prydwyn SHOULD offset Maxson's aggression, that his intimidating behavior is actually hampering their ability to interfere if Maxson's fervor gets out of hand. What, for example, does it gain Maxson destroying Acadia in the Far Harbor DLC? There's no institute people out there the institute doesn't even know Acadia is there and Acadia's leadership has been out of the loop in the commonwealth for over a century. There's literally nothing for the Brotherhood there in terms of tactical gain.

 

Yet despite this, Maxson would presumably have to approve a strike on Acadia first. That's how an army's chain of command works. Captain Kells can't just turn around and say "hey send some guys to kill these synths" because he's not the most senior officer of the brotherhood contingent in the commonwealth. Although Maxson would presumably have to allow some latitude to his commanders, the rate that the commonwealth's hazards take down vertibirds make diverting to Acadia tactically unrealistic. If all it takes to shoot one down is X6-88 and a bunch of angry raiders (and I did see this happen while trying to complete Synth retention for the first time) then the Brotherhood is clearly going to lose a lot of them. Every downed vertibird is resources they have to justify back to the elders in the council back west.

 

Likewise, the brotherhood had a vested interest in sending a recon party to Nuka World to see what could be gotten out of the raiders there in terms of technology. Bradburton, the CEO of Nuka Cola had multiple contracts with the United States Military. These weren't supply contracts, these were defense contracts. So Nuka world as a whole is a good target for the brotherhood to try and take over or at least control a section of. Not only would nobody in the commonwealth care about him attacking the raiders there (why do you think Pickmen got away with his murders for so long? Because he killed raiders, not settlers.) For more or less the same reason, the institute COULD have gotten away with stripping Nuka world bare. Resources, robots, a machine that could speed up their research into synth animals tenfold, grateful locals that if freed might be persuaded into joining them, and tons of nuka cola and nuka quantum induced mutations for bioscience to study.

 

But it doesn't stop there, I'd argue that the breaking and mutinying point for the brotherhood of steel is when they find out Paladin Danse is a synth. This is their crisis moment, in the original game the sole survivor could use this moment to take control of the brotherhood of steel forces and change the way they interact with the outside.

 

Every faction has a moment where the Sole survivor can turn things around. Its not just the brotherhood of steel that does this. The railroad has one, the institute has one and so do the Minutemen. Even though Danse /could/ be construed as a security risk, this doesn't really hold up when compared to more realistic consequences Danse's execution COULD have had.

 

Maxson basically proves in executing Paladin Danse that he can't be trusted by any of his men, ever, and its all in how he reacted and how he ordered the sole survivor to kill Danse. He turned on Danse so fast my head was spinning and I actually felt tempted to use the sarcastic speech options here, even when I normally wouldn't. And although Maxson couldn't be sure Danse was a synth without killing him, and killing him bears out the veracity of the holotape he got his intel on, only the player gets the benefit of hindsight or foresight in this case.

 

Stop and think about it, if all it takes for a Brotherhood of steel paladin to be executed is a holotape and a DNA match showing he's a synth then no member of the Brotherhood of steel is safe.

 

The primary reason why Maxson should have tried to get more corroborating evidence against Danse is because of how long Danse has been in the commonwealth. He and his squad had plenty of battle there, and its not inconceivable that the SRB might want to collect his DNA from a battle site and try to figure out how to use that as a way to hurt the Brotherhood of Steel. Maxson had no proof that the sole survivor wasn't unwittingly duped into making him execute his own soldiers. What he should have done was search that file for a possible control, someone in the data who was labeled to have been an escaped synth, who's DNA they had on file or could obtain fairly easily, and in fact with the sole survivor's help they could have done just that. The Brotherhood of steel COULD have used Sturges.

 

Lemme back up and explain. If that holotape really contained the SRB's list of escaped synths, and included Paladin Danse who's been with the Brotherhood of steel for years, then it must go back a long way, back to before ya know, the Quincy massacre. There's no evidence for him being involved with the institute or having been helped by the railroad, but if you kill Sturges there is a synth component on his corpse. Quincy was more chaotic than most events in the commonwealth, politicallyh destabilizing a huge section of the southeastern part of the map. It was the perfect opportunity for someone to be replaced or if Sturges was helped by the railroad for them to have lost track of him. And if Sturges was helped by the railroad there's every chance Doctor Amari wiped his mind before he left to join the settlement at Quincy. Either way, odds are very good Sturges has a file on that Holotape.

 

The Minutemen under the sole survivor are a lot more impartial than Arthur Maxson is with his Brotherhood of steel and have no stake in the institute's survival or the brotherhood of steel or railroad's survival either. So as a technician working for you, the sole survivor, he should be amenable to trying to validate or invalidate Quinlan's results. He has no stake in the brotherhood being destroyed, none. And they have no stake or claim to insisting he be executed, Sturges isn't their officer. He doesn't have access to Brotherhood intel or facilities. So they should be willing to trust any test results that come from comparing Sturges DNA to the DNA on the infamous Holotape.

 

If Blind betrayal had proceeded this way, we could have overlooked it as Maxson protecting his assets. Its showing that Maxson can use his head, that he can avoid letting his passionate hatred of the Institute and the synths get to his head. Likewise, what he did with that intel COULD have made for two or three more really great quests digging around for more of the institute's dirty laundry. Maxson instead went with his knee jerk reaction and ordered Danse to die. You know who did something similar if he even smelled betrayal? Alexander the Great.

 

Alexander the Great was a mean drunk, and by 'mean' I mean 'murderous'. Even the son of his best general wasn't immune from being killed in a drunken rage when he suggested during one of Alexander's binges that his father was responsible for Alexander's prowess, and that Alexander shouldn't be lamenting his father's murder because he claimed to be the son of a God and therefore had disowned ties to his father. Alexander also famously burned down the Palace of the enemy kingdom on an underling's drunken suggestion. All of this meant, later proven on the march home by the route Alexander took, that it wouldn't take much for Alexander to kill a subordinate.

 

Because he doesn't think of the possible consequences or evaluate the credibility of the evidence, Maxson executing Danse just begs for a mutiny. When Danse and Maxson confront each other, Maxson further shows how poor his judgement is by responding to Danse and the sole survivor's pleas with more dogma. This is despite the fact that its obvious to anyone with a brain and/or heart (aka most of your companions) that the intel can't be trusted and Danse is in emotional turmoil.

 

Finally there's the method of execution. If you fail to convince Maxson to spare Danse, he kills Danse with a KNIFE. A lot of murders are with guns rather than knives because knives require you to look your victim in the eye. In most cases, a person's sense of empathy and self control kicks in and they can't go through with it. Knife killings are personal, real personal. If Maxson is able to execute a loyal soldier pleading for his life with a knife, then clearly he doesn't feel remorse for killing Danse or putting the sole survivor in the position of being Danse's executioner.

 

A lack of remorse means that he has no problem whatsoever with murder, so who's next? A proctor who doesn't agree with how he runs things? The sole survivor for helping the Minutemen/Railroad and trying to defend Danse? What about a settler who refuses to tithe an entire year's harvest to the Brotherhood for supplies? I give similar reasons here as to why Pickman should die, because there's no guarantee its going to stop with their current victim type. There's no guarantee Danse will be the last brotherhood member executed on suspicion of being a Synth, the same way there's no guarantee Pickman will continue to kill and dismember only raiders.

 

Then there's the intelligence aspect. Faking Danse's death makes him a perfect candidate for becoming a double agent. If the Brotherhood of Steel thinks Danse is dead and only Arthur Maxson and the sole survivor knows he isn't, then Danse could get away with going anywhere and doing anything the Brotherhood of Steel needed him to do and they could claim it wasn't their doing. He could infiltrate the Institute for example, and execute the Director and/or one of the Department heads. Double points in my book if he's named for Courser Training, because training as a Courser Danse has guaranteed access to the SRB's systems and is able to expose a ton of their operations. He also has access to supplemental training to add to his Brotherhood of Steel combat training, and might even benefit tactically from Justin Ayo's experience. Plus you have a guaranteed way to keep track of Ayo if you're looking for an opening to perform an assassination of him.

 

Danse isn't alone in being wanted by the Brotherhood but also being in a position to help them, Brian Virgil also shouldn't have been singled out by Arthur Maxson as a person of interest. For the Brotherhood of steel no cause is more personal than the use of the FEV. Protesting it lead to their being founded, and Arthur Maxson, being the descendant of that founder, Roger Maxson, can't possibly NOT have heard that story.

 

Curing the FEV therefore should be a personal goal of Arthur Maxson during his leadership as Elder, as far as long term ambitions go. He would finally be righting the wrongs Roger Maxson, his ancestor, mutinied to fight. It could have been the crowning achievement of the entire Brotherhood of Steel, even surpassing Project Purity.

 

Instead of ordering you to recruit or interrogate Virgil, you're ordered to kill him, the only person who ever cured/recovered from infection by the FEV. Not only is a cure likely to secure Maxson's fame in the Brotherhood and beyond for centuries, its a cause that everyone can get behind, (except Strong, because Strong only really likes murder.)

 

Despite Virgil's serum being only effective on one strain of FEV, with the resources, transport technology and communications technology the Brotherhood of steel has at their disposal, Virgil could potentially speed up his research enormously and learn to include multiple strains in his serum. He'd have a small army of researchers and assistants in the Brotherhood Scribes, all the resources, samples and equipment he could ask for, the benefit of both the Citidel's entire library and the library of congress to consult, and potentially the companionship of ex Institute members like Madison Li or X6-88 when things get lonely (I'd even argue that when you get him to idol status, X6 could be loyal to whatever the sole survivor decides. So if the sole survivor wants to take Virgil's research and use Brotherhood resources to expand it into a full fledged cure, I can't see him ratting on Virgil for quite awhile, definitely giving him time to escape to the Capitol Wasteland and the intellectual and historical resources the Brotherhood can give him there. In fact I'd argue Virgil is more useful to the Brotherhood alive than he is to the sole survivor or the railroad.

 

And yet, you are ordered to kill the custodian of something so valuable as a method by which to make a cure for the FEV. If killing the Railroad weren't stupid enough as it is, Maxson basically doomed every human ever infected or who will ever be infected with the FEV simply by not snapping up Virgil and his research. Likewise if you the sole survivor don't come to Virgil's defense, you're as complicit as Arthur maxson.

 

Further, even if Maxson didn't see the use, Quinlan would have if he were allowed the latitude to conduct independent investigations separate from the rest of the Brotherhood's leadership. Nobody wants to see a lawyer, until they need one. Likewise the Brotherhood needs someone who's older and wiser to be their ethical policer, except that if anyone who defies or challenges Maxson's authority is libel to being killed. This is as bad as the tight leash the Insitute keeps on their Coursers. You don't want to neuter a factor that can secure or restrain you if you are about to make a mistake.

 

If I were one of the writers for Bathesda, I would argue for Proctor Quinlan taking a greater leadership role within the Prydwyn's staff. Because his personality is quieter, more educated and more controlled, even if he would have made some of the same bad decisions as Arthur Maxson, he probably wouldn't have been as fast to order someone's death as Arthur Maxson would be. He'd still likely order Danse killed or into exile, but not without respectfully turning Danse's newly discovered inhumanity into a positive for the Brotherhood, a sacrifice that would have made Danse a hero rather than a disgrace and a rallying cry against the Brotherhood. Quinlan would also probably have investigated both Brian Virgil, the Railroad and Acadia in person if he'd had the staff and the latitude and been quiet and polite, ruffling much fewer feathers and getting more of the people that the Brotherhood normally would have bypassed as potential allies on their side. If you were Desdemona, who would you be more likely to trust? A kindly old man or a bullish, rhetoric spouting lunatic? It also would have made killing and/or finding the railroad and/or Acadia much easier.

 

After actually playing with the Brotherhood for a bit instead of bashing them, I started to realize that on tactics alone I can bash Arthur Maxson, and anything he can do Quinlan can do better, less obnoxiously, and more efficiently. I also made this entire argument, deliberately leaving the debate on synth personhood /and/ Liberty Prime out of the picture. I wanted to do this because these two sticking points are the primary reason why most people who don't like Maxson don't like him. In fact synth personhood is my initial reason for just plain hating this character, so I'd prefer comments make these two reasons a secondary concern rather than a real one.

 

âSo, just think of this as a rough draft Op/Ed piece on why Arthur Maxson is a bad commander. And let me know what you think of the other ideas I had...

 

âWhy the Railroad is always in Crisis

âWhy the Institute is Unsustainable

âGuns Germs and Steel; Fallout 4 Edition

âCollapse why Factions choose to fail or succeed

 

âThe latter two have to do with work done by Professor Jared Diamond on why the world's countries are divided into rich and poor and why the United States could collapse as a world superpower in our lifetimes. I would like to see if applying the rules laid down I them to Fallout 4 will yield insights not covered by youtubers like Shoddycast, Oxhorn, Game Theorist, ect. Although resource wars are an important part of Fallout's lore, I feel that the resource and tactical aspects of running a faction and the errors the major factions in Fallout 4 make aren't covered or discussed. In fact besides Liberty Prime and what we can learn about him from Hannibal's crossing the Italian alps with his elephants, I actually left out another sore sticking point of the Prydwyn's day to day management, human factors and how they make a railroad victory possible in the first place.

 

âYours,

Reap

 

[jcdenton2012]

My only regret is that should you side against the Brotherhood of Steel following Danse execution... that there isn't an option for when you blow up The Prydwen to confront Maxson and tell him to his face exactly why you betrayed him. I wanted to see that look in his eyes more than anything. That look of fear, 'I f##ked up real bad!' He comes off as being prideful, but it's hard to be prideful when one of your most trusted knights burns down everything you love... and it was all 'your' fault.

[sinlessorrow]

You should play Fallout 3.

 

It'll explain the Danse thing better.

 

A lot of your issues really boil down to Bethesda's poor writing in Fallout 4 which is a universal issue imo, that and gameplay balance in regards to the vertibirds.

Edited August 8, 2017 by sinlessorrow

[TheSpaceShuttleChallenger]

I think it's worth mentioning that the Brotherhood questline is basically unfinished, and based on what remains of unused voice lines and quest stages, I'm pretty sure Bethesda actually meant for Maxon to be a terrible, egomaniac leader because they also intended for you to be able to overthrow him--considering that there are voice lines pertaining to fighting and killing Maxon over the matter of Danse's execution, and considering that Brotherhood quests are all coded so that you don't actually have to talk to Maxon following Blind Betrayal. I'm honestly pretty miffed that those options were removed, because even in a dedicated Brotherhood Guy playthrough it's really hard to justify following Maxon's leadership when so much of his leadership violates Brotherhood ideals and goes against the best interest of the Brotherhood. A good Brotherhood knight would shoot Maxon in the face, jussayin.

[TheMightyArchaon]

I don't understand why Maxson souldn't be trusted, he is very clearly doing to danse what he preaches from the beginning. And as you can convince him to spare Paladin Danse's life, Maxson has some good left in him. He is just very committed to the crusade.

[drach]

(...) because even in a dedicated Brotherhood Guy playthrough it's really hard to justify following Maxon's leadership when so much of his leadership violates Brotherhood ideals and goes against the best interest of the Brotherhood. A good Brotherhood knight would shoot Maxon in the face, jussayin.

 

Maxon in embodiment of BoS ideas, only total renegade like Lyons would oppose his course of action

[Yaguer]

Only thing I will criticize is the part about North Africa and Hitler. Rommel really had it on his own despite orders and encouragements from the top, he had no issue disregarding orders himself, from past history in France has shown.

Also, North Africa wasn't really that important, and its loss there didn't mean the end of the Third Reich. It was an unnecessary side-show and waste of men and materials that should've been kept in Europe, specifically, Eastern Europe, but not earth-ending.

[spinspider]

Play the first two Fallout games and you'll get a better understanding of all this - that's how the Brotherhood always was, for the most part, before Lyons.

 

However, I think Maxson is such an unbelievably hot guy that I don't really care either way

[Moksha8088]

It would be fun to have Maxon and MacCready finally settle a score from their childhood in DC, over the tastiness of cave mold, and be allowed to have a grudge cage match near Lexington. Of course, Maxon would lose and the banished Danse would take his place running the BoS.

[Deleted40542685User]

BOS=Cult of personalty