Character Study of the Week: Caleb Davion
Who: Caleb Davion
Aka Caleb Hasek-Sandoval-Davion
What: First Prince of the Federated Suns
When: 3099 – 25 June 3144
Weapon of Choice: Marksman Tank
The Dark Age has produced a diverse range of leaders, mostly ambitious, generally conniving, and some with surprising competencies. And some are Caleb Davion.
The only offspring of Harrison Davion and his wife Isabella Hasek, he is the merger of the three major ruling bloodlines of the Federated Suns, not that this matters to anyone since the March seats already have their own distinctive lines which have proudly thumbed their noses at New Avalon for Caleb’s entire lifetime.
The difficulty in conceiving him resulted in his mother showering him with attention, something Harrison was uncomfortable with but with only the one heir he did not feel he could force the issue.
First the obvious must be stated: Caleb Davion was a bad Prince.
Crazy was one thing, and will be addressed, but it caused him to be paranoid, untrusting, micromanaging at a time when communications are massively delayed, jealous, and, well, basically a walking list of the worst human personality traits. And unlike a lot of other insane characters, mostly Liao, he had no qualities that made him capable or even mildly competent as a leader, civilian or military. He had no obsession, drive, cunning, intellect or anything the least bit useful for the position of First Prince.
Harrison Davion weakened the Federated Suns by buying whole heartedly into Devlin Stone’s disarmament program, he can be forgiven somewhat since he was a believer and it was ostensibly peacetime. Out of all of the leaders there had to be one naïve fool. However it was Caleb who crippled the nation though bad decisions and leadership in wartime.
Of course Caleb was also a bad human being as well. Rape is one of the few universally reviled crimes amongst humans, due to the absence of subjectiveness around the act, and while Caleb, delusional nut that he is, perceives Danai as a willing participant the simple fact is he is a rapist and therefore an evil character.
Patricide is almost as bad but after raping Danai pushing his father off a balcony in an angry impulse pales. However it is another important act by the character, showing how carelessly destructive he can be and how utterly unaware of things like consequences he is. Even though this act secures him the throne by removing his father before Julian can be made heir these were not Caleb’s motivations, he was just angry and acted.
Sadly, of the short list of people who know what actually happened in these cases none are going to make it public, and so within the setting Caleb is not publicly known as being this sort of evil.
Incompetent, certainly, that much would have very quickly become obvious to what fiction and sourcebooks show to be an already befuddled military, and would have soon pressed itself upon a public struggling to keep up with the border changes.
And of course the crazy has to be mentioned in more detail, for while some Houses are famous for it and more than one Federated Suns ruler has been slightly off-kilter Caleb took that to new extremes for the entire setting, being literal doing-what-an-imaginary-friend-tells-him-to-do-crazy.
The imaginary friend, Mason Lambert, is a personification for the more violent, disgusting urges Caleb has, his comments urging Caleb on, and isn’t revealed to be imaginary until the end of the novel “Sword of Sedition”. This is a common literary technique for creating suspense and drama. And for a character like Caleb this sort of hallucination provides a sort of short hand for explaining what is going on in his head.
Why must he be like this? For one thing it gives a legitimate reason for the faction to become so badly weakened by 3145. Demobilising, downsizing, and a string of military defeats is not enough, for so much disaster on two fronts something has to be seriously wrong and you can’t go more seriously wrong than a guy who could conceivably appoint thin air as the Prince’s Champion.
It is also another step away from the Federated Suns being the ‘hero’ faction, filled with do gooders, hyper-competent leaders, military geniuses, battlefield terrors and intelligent rulers. While few could lay claim to all of the above or even three at best, Caleb is none and puts his own spin on things.
Arguably the rape does something similar, however there is a small point of difference as that is a personal act, not the act of a leader or ruler authorising mass rape, or something equally vile, so reprehensible that it would likely put people off the Federated Suns as a faction for the future.
Ultimately it does place the Federated Suns where it needs to be: On the ropes. Time and again in Battletech a faction has been brought to this point only to rally and reassert itself, even if it does take a few decades, its good drama, if a little overused, and people love to play the underdog, there’s something innately heroic about it.
His death is, aside from inevitable, as strangely fitting as it was unforeseen: accidentally killed by a frustrated Combine MechWarrior when captured in his tank.
This means that Caleb Davion went down swinging, in proud First Prince tradition, and went down stupidly, in proud First Prince tradition.
In truth he could never have been taken alive, while I’m not sure what any nation’s response to their leader being taken hostage is, if the Federated Suns has no mechanism for removing a dangerous incompetent they have no greater hope of functioning with a hostage Prince. At best he would be ransomed back for the Draconis March, at worst he would be a puppet vassal for whatever was left of the nation.
Did he have to die like that? Well, yes. On the small scale he died either because he refused to surrender and fought to the bitter end or refused to recognise his situation and fought because he still thought he could pull it all out of the fire, assault the Draconis Combine and win.
On the larger scale he died as the result of bad, overly ambitious, egotistical planning being hit by a single betrayal and a superior enemy.
In short Caleb was trying to build the mother of all assault forces under his direct command, with Snow Raven naval assistance to take the fight to the Draconis Combine, attempting to prove to the entire setting he wasn’t Hanse Davion’s great grandson, Hanse Davion was his great granddaddy.
Why did he trust the Ravens? Because he was having an affair with Khan Stirling McKenna, something his father did which he abhorred, however this is an act initiated by Khan McKenna as a part of her long term manipulation of the Federated Suns and shows that both father and son were quite easily manipulated by a charming woman.
While in principle this large scale mobilisation and assault is exactly what needed to happen he made the mistake of putting everything, himself included, on one planet.
Theoretically this could have been done because communications were too poor to coordinate an assault force spread over a distance, however it is more likely because his paranoid, controlling nature prevented him from trusting a simple mission clock as Hanse famously did.
Besides, to his thinking what’s the use of having the mother of all assault forces under his command if he hasn’t gathered them all in a great big pile he can put a chair on top of he can sit in?
It would have looked impressive and may have had a chance if the Ravens hadn’t informed the Combine and kept their fleet at home. This is all the more reason why it had to be ambushed so badly, any success by Caleb Davion lessens his reputation as a bad leader.
Could it have succeeded? Probably not as grandly as Caleb would want, they could have retaken Robinson or maybe made it back to the old border, however Caleb’s command style, which seemed to revolve around deciding which ‘Mech fired what gun when, would have hampered progress severely and made any success extremely slow going. More likely it would have bogged down creating another disputed zone, this time deep within the Draconis March border.
Given the crime perpetrated against her death by Danai would have been cathartic for most readers, and debatably so for Danai, it would actually simply be more of a closing of a circle, not necessarily good story telling, and would be more about Danai than Caleb. She would either find closure or a lack thereof in the act and that would be her story, she had more than enough skills to pull it off if she came close to Caleb again.
Dying in the field as his own poor planning and leadership dooms him and much of the AFFS is much more fitting for Caleb from the perspective of that character, it puts a full stop on just how horrible he was.
And it’s not just in writing either. Looking at the one picture we have of him the impression is of a man highly indignant that his image is being requested or even taken, either because we should know who he is or because he doesn’t like the idea of someone stealing his soul.
There’s no politics about him, he doesn’t look the least bit military despite the uniform, in fact there’s very little that characterises him as being a part of the Battletech setting.
Part of this is because he isn’t a MechWarrior, as most prominent leaders are, somewhat uniquely he commands from a tank, a Marksman in fact, probably the export model but for the heir of a strong ally the Republic may have allowed for it’s more potent version to be used, we are never told for certain.
This has several effects, for one thing it stigmatises Caleb, in and out of the setting, his father never really got used to the fact his son fought from a tank, further souring their tense relationship. Caleb picks up on this and assumes, rightly or wrongly, that everyone else feels the same way, especially compared to hyper-competent cousin Julian Davion.
Arguably this has the effect of exacerbating the crazy, however the crazy is the result of what is essentially brain damage he was born with that also prevented him from accepting a neurohelmet, and therefore piloting a ‘Mech, creating a neat little vicious circle.
So that is Caleb Davion, every bit as crazy as his Liao counterpart but expressed in a different way, and without the slightest redeeming feature or ability. His selfishness and arrogance could have doomed an entire faction, we now wait to see what heroes rally.
Next week: Jeremy Brett, unless a particularly compelling request comes up. ;)
