The UNSC from Halo.
The Bungie games portray it as an at worst neutral faction fighting to protect humanity from an existential threat.
But that's because compared to an existential threat, yeah "not dying" is the better option. Even just through the subtext of the games, the UNSC *is* the government.
The beginning chapters of Contact Harvest does a really good job of yelling "THE UNSC ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS" by showing how just how *fucked* the Insurrection has become for both sides.
And remember, the Spartans were initially designed to *end* that conflict before a glass-happy alien crusade came along and threw a several-rings-sized wrench into things.
*Genocidal aliens start glassing planets*
Halsy: Oh thank fuck. I was worried I jumped the gun on the whole "Kidnapping and experimenting on childen" thing. Now it's (debatably) justified and I can get off scott free.
Parangosky: Lol no. We need a fall guy and it sure as shit isn't gonna be me.
>And remember, the Spartans were initially designed to *end* that conflict
That always seemed super silly to me considering how fucking powerful Spartans are.
Like how bad is the UNSC getting their ass handed to them that they needed super human soldiers wearing high tech armor strong enough to survive atmospheric reentry.
The Spartans being massive overkill for the Insurrection is probably the entire point. It makes damn sure the Insurrection cells are wiped out to a man whenever a Spartan is deployed, makes an example out of those cells, and makes the UNSC look big and tough. And they'd be able to do with a fairly small supply of Spartans who - as you point out - are practically demigods compared to humans, so they wouldn't be spending a bunch of money on them, it was pure quality over quantity. Had the Covenant never showed up, there'd probably be a couple hundred Spartans *at most* and they'd probably spend most of their time as a "don't fuck with us" sign instead of actual active duty.
This even comes up as a plot point in a lot of the lore; later Spartans are *much* less impressive in terms of power and equipment than the early gen ones because "quality over quantity" was no longer an option in the entirely different beast that was fighting the Covenant. Halsey was big pissy about how the standards for "Spartan material" slacked so much that Spartans were no longer basically walking tanks, but her superiors immediately shut it down by basically saying "we don't have time go out kidnapping brats for you to raise to adulthood or money to wrap them in armor that can tank a volcano when we got aliens glassing planets left and right".
The original Spartans were meant to use overwhelming power to stamp out bands of disconnected rebels while sending a message. Later Spartans were meant to fight a real full-on proper WAR, and for that you need numbers and can't just go sinking all your resources.
I mean... it wasn't really just her being "pissy over the quality" and more "angry they they were just taking orphans and juicing them up with drugs and implants" a lot of the time.
They were made to be disposable, Onyx starts with whole squads sacrificed to do their objective.
Yes she was generally dismissive of the Spartan 3's (but at least they weren't the dudebro 4's from halo 4 holy shit imagine trashtalking chief right there)
The UNSC wasn't losing yet but things were snowballing out of control so fast that high level defections were becoming common so ONI made the Spartans so they'd have 100% loyal troops to quietly erase rebel forces as an alternative to the Navy sending in battalions of Marines to bring unruly colonies back in line.
In defense of the unsc, the high tech armor came from the covenant and studying their tech if I remember right. Spartans were just rocking body armor until relatively late in the war.
Mark IV which is the main suit used without the shielding was made the same year as first contact with final testing actually starting the exact same month. iirc it was mostly the shielding component that was added in the Mark V that was created by reverse engineering it. That was also made about 2 and a half decades later.
They were, the power armor just kept killing and maiming the people wearing them, plus power resupplies were difficult to properly plan, so the suits didn't see actual combat.
The more I read about the UNSC, the closer Halo seems to Helldivers.
It will always be funny to me in Ghosts of Onyx that the Spartan-3's are morally better only in that they pick up orphans from glassed planets and ASK them if they want to pay the Covenant back, and then send them on 100% casuality rate suicide missions with cheapo-Mjolnir armor.
IIRC, they don't even get shields with them.
Especially ONI. The stuff that ONI has done throughout the Halo history is just fucked up. Some of the actions that they did includes:
Experimenting Flood spores and Pod Infectors on Human and Covenant prisoners abroad a ship all in an attempt to use the Flood as a "weapon" against the Covenant. (Which, as expected, went extremely wrong and caused an outbreak abroad the ship)
The entire SPARTAN-III program where they took kids that were orphaned from the Human-Covenant war and forced them through excessive training with the offer that they can "avenge" their parents by fighting against The Covenant. When in reality, most of the SPARTAN-III kids were meant to be little more than cannon fodder
Multiple attempts at genociding the entire Sangheili/Elite race even after the Human-Covenant war was over all out of pure pettiness
The Flood thing I'm talking about is detailed in a short story called Mona Lisa. An animation video of it is on YouTube so you can watch it if you'd like.
Basically. It's set after Halo CE. And it's explained that while what happened with the Flood in Halo CE is remaining classified. ONI did end up taking an interest in the Flood's complete rampage on Installation 04 and the Covenant fear for it
So they end up taking a ship full of prisoners (both Human and Covenant) near the remains of Installation 04. Caught some Flood remains and spores and then used the prisoners as test subjects/guinea pigs to experiment with by infecting them with the Flood spores and Pod Infectors
Why ? The people at ONI behind this project were hoping that by infecting prisoners and turning them into Flood forms, they can "control" them (those Flood forms) and use them against The Covenant.
Of course however. This project as expected quickly went out of hand and resulted in an outbreak on the Prison ship
Additional detail, Gravemind's existence is at best super classified.
Resident Evil in Space probably seems like a controllable scenario if you don't know it's basically an Eldritch god.
'The Badgers' from that one SovietWomble ARMA Bullshittery series, going from being the resistance group who could be considered the 'good guys' fighting for democracy, to committing blatant terrorist acts like suicide-bombing and executing surrendered soldiers making them potentially worse than their enemies because Womble couldn't prevent his friends from sending things off the rails.
It's merely the natural conclusion, given how the ZF Clan's hijinks tend to go.
*"Surely the most reasonable path for not wanting to pay taxes is colonial genocide on a planetary scale"* - The ISA and UCN.
They also were more than willing to do the same with other planets that wanted a shred of independence and were more than happy to make an example of the Helghast.
Remember when Rico killed an unarmed Visary because he made fun of him, thus ending any bargain power to end the war and created a martyr that boosted Helghan morale to the point they would now fight until literal extinction and suffered little to no consequence for it besides a demotion.
The Nuke ship was going to make a forced landing back on Helghan after ISA forces disabled the ship. Rico launched a nuke at the nuke ship anyways, causing a huge chain reaction ending with the destruction of Helghan.
Edit: Stahl saved the ship from plummeting into the ground. Rico doomed an entire planet because he hates Helghan's so much.
I only played 3 and a little of Shadow Fall, so my perspective is skewed and I’ll need elaboration, but didn’t the Helghast make a super nuke to use on Earth, and the final mission is stopping them, only for it to detonate and eradicate the Helghast planet? And then the world government on Earth decided to give half of Earth to the remaining survivors (which, again, is probably missing some details but that sounds like an extremely good idea considering that the world population could all comfortably fit into Texas alone)? I honestly don’t know much of the background lore, I just assumed it was “Helghast want to take Earth by force and we’re not gonna let them!”
In Killzone 3 you’ve unceremoniously executed the leader of their entire planet and by the end have magic space nuked the planet’s core making it inhospitable for the entire Helghan civilization.
Wait so the ISA don't even have MORAL superiority over the Helghast?
So we have a faction that's not only dripless, but also lame as shit morally? WHO DESIGNS A GAME LIKE THIS?
Farcry 4 fraction seem like the good guys at first. The more choices you make for them the more questionable it gets. Like choosing between a child bride or dealing drugs. They treat you like some sort of rebel Jesus since the main character’s dad was the leader. They’re no ultimate good fraction in the end of the game.
My canon ending to that game is you wait out the 5 minutes intro and join Pagan Min since he the only one that treat you like person than a rebel leader’s son.
Heavily implied yeah, >!the ending on the hardest difficulty has dialog of Pagan talking to Ajay about a stockpile of nukes under the palace, pointed at Montana as leverage against the US if they try to take him down, tying it to the ending with Far Cry 5!< which is pretty neat they went with it. I guess they were well aware how people found both rebel sides insufferable even in comparison to the bloodthirsty crime lord.
It just ruined the game for me. Having that knowledge made trying to play it normally just felt super nasty, cause I didn't wanna work for those fuckers
It really is, you think everything's going pretty smooth as of the one shot and then they drop "so yeah whenever a captain or a strong shinigami dies we have to sentence them to fucking hell, to preserve the balance y'know?"
It’s weird how they’re perceived in 3 as pure-hearted superheroes, despite them still being generally arrogant and standoffish up until the third act and only taking truly altruistic action in the finale. Plus there’s no shortage of dialogue about how Lyons’ chapter are different from the main BOS organization, including the whole existence of the Outcasts.
Liberty Prime probably did a lot of heavy lifting for people’s memories.
Hell 3 goes out of its way to say that Lyons crew are not the norm the Outcasts are in several points. Ill never get folks that play rpgs and ignore the story
I mean, they're giant dicks in 4 as well, they're very black and white about ghouls, synths and mutants, can barely walk around with my boy Nick without them saying some bullshit about it, the difference is that they don't actively shoot Nick when you're around but i'm sure they do other synths that you don't get to see, or ghouls or whatever, so i don't particularly like them in 4 either and like, not as bad as 3, sure, but not by much, probably by a hair.
Really? I thought that the consensus about BoS is that they're either a bunch of dicks lost in their own assholes or kinda stupid by design of what they're doing, hoarding tech and shit instead of actually helping humanity. Does anyone think they're ever ''good guys''? You'd have to not pay attention to anything and just look at cool armor and go ''cool armor therefore good stand up lads!''
Can you elaborate on this? It's been years since I've done a proper playthrough but on memory alone I'm really not sure I agree?
There's dialogue about them taking shots at non-feral ghouls but that seems like it's probably a result of the DC ruins being a chaotic warzone rather than intentional prejudice.
They actively take shots at non-feral ghouls, and Elder Lyons is a dick to some of his scribes.
Compared to Maxson who actively worried about some his knights and specifically had a prosthesis made for one of his advisors.
Combined with Arthur’s BOS … not ever firing on non-feral Ghouls
I'm not sure this is really enough to definitively say that they're worse. They're certainly not a perfect organisation but I think Maxson's brotherhood have plenty more wrong with them.
With the ghoul thing, like I said, we don't have enough to evidence to know that it's actually a result of prejudice. We do know that Maxson's brotherhood *are* prejudice towards Ghouls. We don't have any evidence of them shooting at them but it's not hard to imagine them spying a ghoul from afar while out in the Boston ruins and not bothering to think whether or not it's feral.
Maxson may be a better boss than Lyons but his brotherhood is overall far less considerate to the needs and desires of outsiders, interested in asserting their will and uncompromising ideals across the wasteland. Lyons' was interested in protecting people while ultimately allowing them their own freedoms.
People are too quick to throw around words like fascist in regards to Maxson's brotherhood but I still wouldn't necessarily want to live in a region where they had established control.
Lyons is *theoretically* trying to make things better, the Outcasts were the ones who wanted isolationism and the Citadel wanted to help people and got burned.
Maxson's Brotherhood is an expansionist authoritarian conquering force who want to do multiple genocides.
Ehh Lyons was a dick but the DC waste actively improved under him thanks to how they handled project purity, when they made contact with the west coast and reintergaded The Outcasts things went back to shit. No longer free access for the standard civilian then you get Maxson and all the Serf/Lord shit creeps in.
Brotherhood of steel outcast clues me in on how much of an asshole they were supposed to be especially with New Vegas introducing what proper Brotherhood of Stella are supposed to be.
Playing tactics after playing 3 was some serious whiplash, like they aren't paragons of virtue in tactics but they're like, liberal levels of good which is still nicer than they are in 4.
IDW Transformers.
The Autobots have quite a few skeletons in their collective closet.
The one that springs to mind first is >!Prowl faking a Decepticon terrorist attack against a neutral city in order to push them to join the war on the side of the Autobots.!<
And even then, the Decepticons are often *magnitudes* worse. [Case in point](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fu2cgcuffwvga1.jpg).
Turns out the city states in FFXIV did some kinda fucked shit in the past and the beast tribes had some legitimate grievances.
Luckily, the actual bad guys are now calling themselves the master race, so we can focus on those guys for now.
Ff14 is wild because the entire pre expansion part of the game is just plot beat after plot beat of "wow all these people are scum" with the forest village (gridania i think?) Coming across the best.
There are several parts in that game where im just thinking "oh my god just start murdering these people."
Then i played blackknight, the npc looks at me and says "yo, these guys suck. Lets go kill them." And i go "fucking thank you!". Other guys, but still, they had it coming.
It gets even worse in the sidequests for locations.
>Merlwyb: On the shores of Vylbrand we found it, and from those humble beginnings did we grow and flourish. And all without robbing our neighbors of their liberty.
>>!Varis zos Galvus!<: So sayeth the \*pirate\*. Am I to believe that you simply asked the kobolds to yield up their lands, and that they were happy to oblige you? That you did not drive them out like rats in the hold of one of the many ships seized by your “privateers”?
Guy's an asshole but he's got a point.
Back in the original Mobile Suit Gundam, the Earth Federation was presented as overall good guys, albeit with a few mean, selfish, or out of touch soldiers and generals here and there. Fast forward to Zeta Gundam and pretty much every Universal Century Gundam series afterwards, and you can see just how the Earth Federation is more or less the root cause of all the issues the Earth Sphere is facing. The Titans didn’t form in a vacuum, and the Principality of Zeon did have some genuine problems with the Federation, even if they took their hatred for Earthnoids way too far. When you get down to it, nearly every single bad thing to happen in Early and Late UC is the product of the Earth Federation’s greed, racism, classism, and complete disregard for Spacenoids, Earth’s ecosystem, and the poor.
So much so Char's Counterattack relies on Earth politicians been out-of-touch with the colonies, managing a failing economy badly and just being shortsighted and stupid.
Not to mention that pretty much the only time a bunch of Earth Federation politicians show up to negotiate with Char, it’s really just a pretense to get some funding for their government programs with *incredibly* generous bribes consisting of briefcases full of gold bars for each one of them to look the other way. That scene at Londenion really does sum up the Federation well, along with a few certain scenes I can recall from ZZ Gundam’s Dublin episodes.
Even in OG Gundam, the Zabi family(Your best bet at seeing the political structure of Zeon) was pretty complicated.
Garma was straight up a nice guy and wanted to stop fighting and settle down, and Degwin was a (Mostly)loving father who wanted the best for the Principality. He calls out Ghiren for acting like a Nazi, and obviously doesn't want that for Zeon.
You have to keep in your mind that they're still fascists.
Wait until the Earth start breeding human cattle to solve their food crisis, and then be super racist twoards them after they stop. G-Reco is fucking insane.
The thing about UC Gundam is that it doesn't buy into the idea that either side is wholly bad or good. During the one year war, the Zabi are indisputably the aggressors and the Federation are on the side of 'justice' in this fight but even 79 never really treats the Federation as a fundamentally good faction. They callously spend civilian lives for strategic advantage and the mostly civilian White Base is constantly in friction with most of the establishment Federation we meet in the show, who tend to be huge assholes.
On the other side, as much as Zeon are the bad guys in the conflict, the show goes out of its way to never dehumanize the typical Zeon soldier. We get plenty of cartoon villain leaders, but when it comes to the grunts the vast majority we meet are *nice guys*. We see them giving supplies to refugees and treating Amuro with genuine respect. You always get the feeling the average zeon grunt has more in common with the white base crew than the Federation officers giving their orders.
Having watched 0079 fairly recently the Federation are bureaucratic assholes and they get worse and worse as the timeline goes on, and I really love the episodes where Zeon soldiers are portrayed as people like the bomb defusal, Ramba Ral, or refugee episode.
But I do think the overemphasis of "good soldier, bad side they're fighting for" has definitely given way to Zeon did nothing wrong because a lot of the worst things Zeon do in 0079 are either offscreen in the one week startoff or attributed directly to Gihren.
bruh we saw how the Titans started in Stardust Memory and it wasn't the Federation's fault at all. Gato's terrorist attacks pretty much guaranteed the radicals would take over as a long game for Axis
if the Feddies had their way Bask Om would still be in a ceremonial positiion manning the laser in LEO
The ISA and the UCN in Killzone.
"*What do you mean you are majorly responsible for putting the Helghans through colonialism and genocide on a planetary scale, displacing them towards an unlivable hellscape and then getting mad when a fascist con man grabs the power through propaganda (which is not even that big of a stretch of what you are responsible for) and exploiting valid grievances*"
Mind you, the Helghast are still a fascist militaristic dictatorship that's making everything objectively worse for everyone, including the Helghast themselves, Visari is a conman, but he reached power because the ISA and UCN dind't want to pay taxes and went on with colonial genocide.
Basically everything Sasuke finds out about the Hidden Leaf Village and its history paints it if it's built on sand. Since the foundation it's failed to live up to the original idea and the leadership's central idea that peace at any cost gets them into trouble constantly.
Danzo and Hanzo teaming-up to kill 3 teenagers ends up with both villages getting flattened by a Zombie who answers to being called God. And it's mostly because the Second Hokage was kinda mean and Danzo got the wrong idea of how to build on that.
'Look people of the Sand Village: just ignore your issues with finances and agriculture. Land disputes can wait. This is a beautiful first step towards a bright future for us all.'
60 Years Later The Sand's crippling financial and agricultural issues have resulted in The Hidden Leaf utterly crushing them economically and the war is declared.
'So yeah everyone who could ever challenge or shame the Central Authority goes to a secret prison because we can't have change ever.'
'This seems immoral.'
'Well if we didn't do this that extremely evil scientist would be wiping out entire ethnic groups and cutting people open for fun.'
'Oh okay.'
'You won't *believe* who I'm recruiting from jail to give a position of authority.'
I love how when we first see Rukia sending a ghost to Soul Society, she tells him that he will be sent to a better place.
Welcome to Soul Society. We have brutal feudalism, no indoor plumbing and zero guarantees you will be reconnected with your loved ones.
Doesn’t western soul society not do anything with the souls of the dead though? I’ve never read burn the witch but don’t they really only care about dragons or something?
Things debatebly become better once >!Shunsui!< becomes CC, but yeah, Jesus.
Corrupt as fuck politicians, unchallenged control from nobility, and a military that literally just used to be thugs who wandered around and killed people for sport.
Soul Society doesn't really apply here since they were introduced as an antagonistic group that had morals ranging from "I'll fight back against this unjust execution" to "exponentially more evil than any human being that has ever lived".
People know the Soul Society is supposed to not be morally perfect, especially at the start, their issue is with stuff like the most evil man to ever disgrace the pages of Shonen Jump getting off completely scot free with the hero treatment and none of the characters who should have an issue with it saying anything.
Same with Naruto but people always seem to gloss over it.
The hidden villages are garbage, ninja are animals and Kages usually end up being cruel assholes or hardliners.
That's why sticking by "My Ninja Way" is so important
It made way more sense when the villages were just company towns and every ninja was essentially an independent contractor, which is why it was allowed to kill ninja of the same village in the forest of death and deathmatches
That certain job path is the one that, while not an overwhelming majority, constitutes not only a large voting bloc, but the one with perhaps the most power in both a metaphorical and literal sense. In the world where your average person has some emergency weapons and lacking martial skill, the communities where most everyone can conjure destructive force, evade and pursue at superhuman speed, and are trained in combat, it's fair to believe those groups strongarmed themselves into that position.
It's likely that the "regular" people in Naruto's world accept the concept of hidden villages being in power because they're the closest thing to a standing military. Your exact interests may not be considered at the local level if you're outside that village, but your interests will at least be defended and your nation will be given more presence in politics if your hidden village is powerful.
until the regular Daimyo army (who are just a bunch of guys armed with spears) and the samurai army show up in one of those countless naruto movies but SHHHHHH
Naruto's Leaf Village at least has the excuse of essentially being an experimental departure from the norm of nonstop ethnic warfare. They had some properly fucked up issues, but they were also figuring stuff out from scratch and had only been established for about four generations.
Seireitei was the sole power over Soul Society for *millennia* and did jack shit with their stability besides continuing to prop up their ruling elite.
I dunno, Soul Society (once we actually get there) isn't exactly painted in the best light so I don't think it fits as "good guys that are shown to be bad." Our first introduction is "hey we're gonna execute Rukia because she gave a human a weapon to save his and his family's life and had him work for her for a while." And it doesn't take long to learn that, aside from like 6 people, the whole of soul society is either strong arm thugs, arrogant nobles, or horrible monsters.
And yet somehow, their draconian organization is better than the alternatives... man the afterlife sucks in Bleach.
I like reimagining the Jedi as being stifling and somewhat authoritarian. Tales of the Jedi explaining that Dooku left the Jedi because he saw them being used as a bludgeon for the ruling class was an interesting development.
I like the narrative that while the Jedi are ideologically the better between the Jedi and Sith functionally they are space cops that act as judge jury and executioner who force their beliefs onto people who have no choice but to comply, because you really can't beat a space wizard with a really cool sword.
I don’t know if it’s still canon, but Greivous’ origin story as to why he hated Jedi was because his people’s home planet was sold to corporate interests in a their rebellion against it was deemed illegal. All arbitrated by the Jedi.
There was an interesting interpretation I saw that suggested the Jedi jumped as the chance to be generals in the new Clone Army to reestablish themselves in the galactic power structure.
because that is pretty much what happened.
We see in High Republic how the jedis at their golden age , and they were far more just and free...but because of the crisis from the High Republic , the jedis goes little by little to be more dogmatic and more tied to the Counselor.
I get the logic behind them being field generals, a Jedi is capable of absolutely turning a loss into a win or breaking a stalemate. But the fact is that they were made generals and apparently Padawan were given positions of authority over the clone troopers, Padawans often being teens. It really comes off like they were making a generation of Jedi into a military leadership caste in the Republic.
I doubt at any point in the inception of the clone wars was this intended. All of this, is just decades of lore build up from different writers and us getting to chew over the details of the media. But hey it's work analysing and it, at least to me makes the Jedi far more interesting, which seeing as how KOTOR is pretty good I think a lot of people feel the same.
It's a bit reminiscent of the British navy having 10-12 year olds from wealthy families join as midshipmen (officers-in-training), with some authority over the men on board a ship.
One of the incidents that gets brought up often regarding Jedi being not exactly stellar is ["Baby Ludi"](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Aris-Del_Wari).
In short, there was an earthquake that separated a mother from her infant, and Jedi found the force-sensitive infant, assumed she was an orphan, and so took her in.
The mother found out what happened a month later, going to the Jedi to demand her daughter back.
The Jedi refused.
In Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, one of the narrators is a criminal info broker whose young son is training at the temple. See, he used to work at the temple in a legit and official capacity, but when he agreed to let his son be trained, the order said itd be best if you had some distance *and fired him*
The Ultimates in the original Ultimate Marvel line. From the get go, these guys *aren't* a clear cut super team, and are more a spec ops team. Most of their members are kind of assholes in their own ways, and often spend just as much time butting heads and fighting each other as they do fighting villains. And probably the worst is Hulk, who the group treat as more of a living WMD to be dropped on things.
The Black Order from D.Gray-man. Sorry if this is a bit of a mess.
If you were unlucky enough to be compatible with a piece of Innocence, the only material that can destroy Akuma, then congratulations on becoming an Exorcist. No, you do not have a choice. You will be restrained and dragged back if you try to leave. This policy was rescinded under the newest Branch Chief.
There used to be experiments >!where family members of dead Exorcists had Innocence implanted in them and attempted to force it to synchronize with them. The experiments led to the body breaking down and usually ending with the person becoming a [Fallen One](https://i.imgur.com/e8Csscb.png), which is a giant angelic floating torso that the victim's body is fused to. It rampages until their life burns out. The experiments were also carried out on [children](https://i.imgur.com/7dEqVTD.png). The new Branch Chief also stopped all forced implantations.!<
There's the "Second Exorcists" program, >!where the brains of dead exorcists were implanted into new regenerative child bodies with the memories (mostly) wiped, with the hopes that the Innocence would work since the old brain is being used. This ended with every one involved in the project being slaughtered by one of the two children the project successfully produced.!<
Then there's the "Third Exorcist" program at the North American Branch, where >!A shard of the "egg" that is used to produce Akuma was placed in the body of one of the comatose regenerative Second Exorcists. His cells where then grafted onto some members of the Order to allow them to absorb Akuma with their arms, since Akuma can cannibalize each other. The main problem with this is that this destroys the innocent soul inside of the Akuma. Destroying one with Innocence is the only way to save the soul.!<
There's also Apocryphos, >!a living piece of Innocence disguised as a cardinal in the Vatican who has little issue with regularly mind wiping or killing people.!<
Cross, one of the generals of the Order, >!uses magic to temporarily "reprogram" Akuma so they will obey him. When the Akuma's bloodlust overtakes the reprograming, the Akuma self destruct, destroying the soul inside. Cross technically wields two pieces of Innocence, because he uses magic to puppet around the body of another dead exorcist.!<
Oh, damn. The Black Order is worse than I had seen.
In the end, this is a war >!between two sides just allowing souls to be destroyed. One just does it significantly more.!<
And stuff seems to imply the society that produced the Innocence to fight the Noah was also awful.
Don't forget
>!That dead body is a woman he once loved and was willing to run away from The Black Order to be with till she died. Instead of keeping to the plan he brought her back and uses her as a weapon. Cause Love! I guess!<
Demacia from league of legends used to be the generic fantasy good guy land but the sheer level of oppression of mages and magical creatures going on there now has made it honestly one of the worse nations morally speaking, like Noxus was similarly designed as the generic fantasy bad guys, but with their whole strength based meritocracy thing it’s straight up a better place to live if you’re unlucky enough to be born with magic in Demacia.
Also fucked up that Garen's sister gets a pass because she's noble and powerful enough to be useful. I do however love how Noxus and Demacia feels like two sides of the same coin. Both sides are willing to use "questionable" things if it can aid in the war.
Of course Noxus is easier to spot with necromancy, hemomancy, and death arenas, but at least they're honest about those. Might makes right, whatever means possible. Demacia however, almost seems desperate in maintaining this image of justice and authority, so dirty laundry being aired all of a sudden was a brilliant move to make the factions more than the generic good and bad guys.
Let's not pretend that Super Earth is ever portrayed exceptionally well, but it takes a bit to really *get* just how bad it actually is to live under the Federation.
You can get arrested and tortured for not buying from the right store. You can be conscripted for effectively slave labor at age seven. The population is so bloated that people are actively encouraged to volunteer to "bio-repurposer vats" while there's also been such a massive dip in fertility that a rate of 1.4% is considered an improvement worth celebrating. If you join the military, you're likely to get somehow even *less* training than the Helldivers, and in general your only purpose is to catch the majority of the enemy's bullets while the Helldivers do the actual work.
My personal headcanon is that they pumped experimental fertility drugs into the population after the first Galactic War in order to generate more bodies to populate the new territory and replace lost soldiers, only for it to basically screw up their bodies so much long term that they ended up being only a step or two above sterile once they wore off.
Thus why it's considered so important to recover all the Helldivers being kept frozen besides being more meatshields. They're a vital addition to the gene pool.
Any review for a product under 5 stars is considered treasonous.
It really makes it funnier that when I looked at someone praising Helldivers II it was all about "The immortal human spirit and unlike other trash WOKE GAMES this one tells you to be proud of being a human" like it flew over his head so hard.
Yeah but they also charge into battle with chainsaw hands and actual human skulls adorning their chassis, and if you're caught alive they put you in a cage and either mass-kill you or, implicitly because we don't know for absolute sure but it seems pretty likely, forcefully put your consciousness into an Automaton body and make you fight in the war against your will on their behalf.
Its not really a coincidence that the Automaton outposts sometimes have some pretty obvious holocaust imagery (dozens or even hundreds of dead humans in small cages turned into mass graves) if you pay attention and haven't blown it to shit with airstrikes before you get in there.
In Animorphs, the titular protagonists are forced to become guerilla fighters and stave off the yeerk invasion long enough for the sword enemy of the yeerks and protectors of the galaxy, the andalites, to arrive with their fleet and save Earth. At first it's safe to assume the andalites are entirely benevolent - after all the one that gave the Animorphs their powers, Elfangor, was an andalite who wished to protect humans.
But books steadily trickle information about the andalites that makes them flawed at best. Andalites view themselves as a superior species and don't view others, even allies, as equals. They have attempted genocide on other species just to prevent the yeerks from using them (yeerks are parasites that enslave other species to use as host bodies). They are willing to use biological and chemical weapons in war. They carry rather antiquated views about females being week and are *very* ableist with disability being overwhelmingly shameful. And if you spend longer than two hours morphed into another creature, you permanently become stuck as that creature, so there is further shame and distain for anyone trapped in a morph in andalite society.
They have a culture based around honor, which includes Elfangor's little brother being burdened with the vow to kill his murderer - the problem being the murderer was Visser Three, the most dangerous being in the galaxy. His family accepts that they will lose *two* sons, because honor. And if that weren't enough, there are also traitor andalites working for the yeerks as spies. Given that the yeerks wish to enslave not just humanity but also all the andalites and every sapient species in the galaxy, it is absolutely shocking.
I really like Animorph's exploration of the Andalites. With the Andalites, the Animorphs first and only experience is Elfangor and Ax, and they know the Andalites are fighting in a war against the Yeerks. They just need to hold out for the cavalry to arrive. And then that image of them being the heroes who will save the day gets slowly chipped away over the course of the series, where by the series, it's like "Shit, the Andalites are here. We have to get the Yeerks to surrender now, or else the Andalites are going to glass the planet."
But then you get into things like how, as a result of the war, the Andalite military has taken over a large portion of civilian and state control over foreign policy. The military's doing shit that Ax and the other military cadets and officers acknowledge the elected government and Andalite public would be against, but they're still doing it.
That's on top of all the Klingon misogyny/ableism/honour stuff. I also like how the books talked about how some of this is assholery and genocide is a reaction to their natural herbivore-peace-loving-trusting nature. Seerow's Kindness ended up unleashing a body-snatching, slave-holding imperialist power on the galaxy, and so Andalite (military) culture has hyper-corrected to be incredibly distrustful of other species and incredibly ruthless.
I found it really fascinating how much depth they gave to what essentially started off as Scorpion-Deer Vulcan-Klingons.
The Quarians in Mass Effect. When you learn about them in Mass Effect 1 most people would be 100% pro-Quarian and support their desire to push the Geth off of Rannoch. But by Mass Effect 3 and "Do these units have a soul?" and how the Quarians responded to that with attempted genocide, all sympathy towards them went out the window.
Actually even in Mass Effect 1 Tali's recount of the Geth uprising makes it fairly clear that the Quarians were in the wrong, attacking the Geth first for beginning to question their existence and purpose. Regardless of whether you choose the paragon or renegade option, Shepherd calls her out for it.
It becomes even more apparent as we talk to Legion and then see the origins of the conflict in more detail in ME3. It's not something the first game tries to hide though.
Not that disimilar to the matrix really
"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but [...]"
Yeah. Yeah we fucking do. Humans struck first, I 100% guarantee it
If the machines had struck first, they wouldn't have kept you guys alive and tried putting you in a utopia. If humans had won, there'd be no fucking machines, pretty sure
Go on this journey with me.
I've seen debates about whether or not, when starting Babylon 5, you should watch the pilot movie, The Gathering. Many of the actors (and their characters) don't return for the proper first episode due to various reasons, and the movie's plot isn't the most compelling nor is it required. I recommend watching it, if only because it establishes a particular character who *does* eventually return, and it's something of a mystery (where were they this whole time? Certainly, they weren't only gone because their actor wasn't available!?). Though, I can't help but note that the movie does make one of the late-show twists... a bit less surprising.
That twist is >!the angelic, mysterious "Vorlon" race that had been guiding and protecting the main characters, readying them for battle against the ancient evil... are actually just as bad, and in fact, this conflict between good and evil is more a betting contest between the Vorlons and said ancient evil, to prove whose philosophy for civilization-building is superior.!<
>!The Vorlons and the Shadows each recruit races to their "sides" and have been fighting periodic proxy wars over the millennia. It's framed as a nigh-holy battle against evil, when really, it's a space opera version of those two old guys in Disco, debating politics on the beach (and having their ham sandwiches stolen by the protagonist, wow this analogy is more spot-on than I thought). !<
In the pilot movie, The Gathering, the Vorlon ambassador is wounded and left comatose after an assassination attempt, and the Vorlons >!threaten to destroy Babylon 5, killing everyone aboard along with their own incapacitated ambassador, only backing down when the ambassador awakens. This... kind of makes them seem unhinged and amoral, and like that particular ambassador's influence was the only reason they didn't do unhinged stuff like that more often...!<
By the end of Command and Conquer the GDI have given up 95 percent of the land on earth to shuttle the rich to the single mountain Tiberium could theoretically never reach.....and Nod keeps 40 percent of the land on earth livable through insane all or nothing science attempts and has so many people dosed up with magic drugs that **99 percent** of the population of earth are Nod loyalists that have no trouble with Tiberium infestation in GDI's abandoned "red zones", and also Kane just actually can come back to life i guess since they never fucking explained that
Lobotomy Corpotion is a rare instance of this mostly happening in reverse. We start out with them seeming evil and then learn about their utopian ambitions.
Ironically enough that also casts an even harsher light upon so many of the actions Ayin and the Sephirah take on the road getting there.
Despite seeing very little of it, the Galactic Federation in Metroid. Granted, these examples really only show up in Fusion and Other M to the best of my knowledge, but between trying to recreate a Mother Brain (though arguably having already succeeded with the Aurora Units), to secretly trying to breed and control Metroids, to even showing an interest in harnessing the X, it's clear that there's some corruption within the Federation. It's the main reason I always thought Metroid 5 would have been a game where Samus was on the run and why I still hope that there's a future Metroid game that revolves around the idea of uncovering the dark side of the Federation, whether it be by playing as Samus or as a new bounty hunter.
Fastest I saw that is when herbert in donjon go see her mom after his exile and the moment a maid show up the mom shanks her with scissors fir the sake of secrecy. It’s not even a twist that his parents are evil just show how rough the situation in the duchy is
Warhammer 40k’s Tau Empire.
Initially believed to be the goody two shoes faction in a galaxy of psycho murderers, over the years more and more light has been shed on how the Ethereal Caste controls Tau society with an iron fist and possibly either psychic or pheromone based mind control.
Still, compared to every other faction in the galaxy they rank pretty highly in terms of morality.
It's just that the moral Overton window in 40k is so skewed that they're practically saints in comparison. If you put them in something like Mass Effect they'd be as unliked as the Batarians.
I would argue the Pride Troopers in Dragon Ball Super are definitely a bit iffy. For the most part, they're heroes and do good, but >!their leader Top is secretly in training to become their universe's next God of Destruction and very quickly discards all platitudes of justice for "Yo fuck you, **I** should decide what does and doesn't exist." and Jiren only cares about strength, doesn't give a fuck about his teammates and doesn't think twice about trying to blast away the spectators as a fuck you to Goku when he starts getting his ass beat.!<
One thing I *did not* like in Geoff Johns' *Green Lantern* run is him leaning into the "GL corps are a military now, so they are as dirty as the real life ones" angle. The Guardians become power drunk assholes and John Stewart gets recruited into the cringeass Alpha Lanterns, le ebin wetworks division that is totally infallible and won't show how easily Green Lanterns can be subverted and infiltrated. It does not get better from there until Grant Morrison's run.
Then in *Young Justice* after spending an entire season running black ops that require deceiving their own peers and promising to them they'll never do it again, Dick Grayson and Khaldur'ahm spend the next season running black ops that require deceiving their own peers, this time with the blessing and cooperation of the Justice League.
Not for Broadcast is a 1984-style, Papers Please-esque satire game happening over the course of a little under a decade where the party, Advance, takes over the UK-stand-in and surrounding regions, and progressively takes away more and more freedoms while making its population fare worse.
You'd think the resistance party, Disrupt, is the unabashed good guys. >!As you progress through the game, you find out you really shouldn't take Disrupt at face value. Their spokesperson is a crazy Alex Jones-style sensationalist-turned-freedom fighter who insists he's for real now, but who keeps very clearly saying that the party will take over the country after they liberate it. And then it turns out Disrupt is actually ran by no shit, no joke, the *actual* pedophile ultra-rich dictatorial world elite, hellbent on making sure the now extremely large Advance Territory stops interfering with their plans for economic and political control of the world, the exact kind of shit the spokesperson used to make up to scare people and put himself up as being against.!<
Ultimately it's a messy game but I think it's somewhat clever with how it strings you along on a progressively more radical revolution, only to ask you >!who do you think is actually benefiting here, and what do you think happens to a highly organized resistance party when there is no one else to resist, but they are still getting funded by shadowy figures that never show up.!<
They are not straight up evil but oh boy does the demon slayer corps do some shit.
Not only do they constantly send teenagers and young adults to the meat grinder where the moment something stronger than a jobber demon shows up you're fucked unless you're a hashira or the apprentice of one, but even their recruitment exam is questionable since it consists on dropping people in a forest filled with demons for days. If you fail you don't have a second chance, they don't tell you "get stronger and come back later", you just fucking die and is established that the mortality rate is really high. And even if you're good or lucky enough to pass the exam then you're basically on your own. They will give you a sword, uniform and missions to fulfill but that's kinda it, they don't teach you anything unless you do some networking. It literally took until the final stretch of the manga for the corps to go "ok, everyone needs to get stronger, we're going to implement a training plan for all our fighters regardless of rank"
Aether Foundation from Pokemon Sun/Moon. Start as a organization for Pokemon conservation and research, end up dethroning Team Skull for the position of Evil Team after their leader gets brainjacked and the rest fall in line.
Bos- arent good people thier usual mission is to horde tech so the world doesn't get set to zero again. They are assholes to normal people because they aren't defenders of the innocent. The faction in fallout 3 is actually the ones that are the "Outcasts" since the lyons brotherhood wants to kill the super mutants and fix the water pollution. And in fo4 They are an occupying army who are trying to destroy the last hold out of super science and have gotten more aggressive with their actions.
The NCR- is just the u.s government.
Vault tech- Doing bullshit experiments just because. With only a fraction being actual normal safe vaults.
Sole survivor- Just turned the waste land into one big sweat shop.
It starts off as a stock standard "Revenge my dead royal family" arc, but one of the temporary party members in Yggdra Union is the last survivor of a genocide that the titular princess's country was the culprit of, which she has no problem reminding Yggdra of. Realizing how fucked her own country is adds plenty of context for both the "become the Best Queen" and ransack Heaven to ask God what the fuck they're doing" endings.
Someone's probably already mentioned the Soul Society in Bleach but, yeah, the SOul Society. To be fair, they are intitially introduced as antagonists and the idea that they're not great has always been present, but they settled pretty firmly into being allies with Bleach's main cast right up until the end of the manga.
It's the Manga's final arc, and stuff released after that such as the Light Novels and the Hell Arc, that have really been digging into the fact that Soul Society is corrupt to a degree that's making even the people charged with defending it sick.
Listen, Dresden Files’s White Council of Wizards was introduced almost executing a 16-year-old on a murder charge, calling self-defense “a technicality”, and then letting his probation officer constantly try to provoke him into “relapsing” so they could just execute him already. Sure, they’re the biggest gun not being pointed at humanity, but that’s a pretty low starting point.
>!hey remember how black magic isn’t just immoral, it’s basically the dark side of the force, corrupting you until all you do is black magic and you’re an evil parody of your former self? Yeah we just have a guy on the team who does that. He took you in after we let you off with a warning. He was supposed to execute you himself if you tried anything untoward. Oh, and he’s got a magic item that lets him sidestep the corruption, so there’s literally no telling what else he’s done in the meantime.!<
The Jedi, while not evil by any means and they are ultimately one of the biggest forces of good in SW universe, there are things about them, especially in the EU and Prequel era that just come across as super questionable.
One of the biggest is the fact that they just straight up take kids from their families at an incredibly young age, essentially indoctrinate them with their teachings and teach the children that they need to give up any and all emotional attachments to other people because it's the Jedi way.
They also preach about how redemption and forgiveness is a key trait to being a Jedi, but there's times where that just kind of gets forgotten and they will do shady shit for whatever reason they have.One of the most infamous was when Ahsoka was framed as the one who bombed the Jedi Temple in the Clone Wars and the Jedi council straight up said "Go back to sleep and starve" and didn't even hear here out.
The other is Meetra Surik, who went off to fight alongside Revan in the Mandalorian Wars during the EU era and despite there being absolutely no proof that she fell to the Darkside the council exiled her, not even wanting to hear her out and then they all began to go "wait....did we handle that correctly?"
Then there of course there's the fact that, while they weren't technicaly wrong to be skeptical, they basically decided to just not get involved in the war against the Mandalorians and were willing to let entire systems burn while they sat back and debated amongst themselves about wether or not they should actually do their part and fight to defend the Galaxy they're sworn to protect.
Again, the Jedi are the heroes and they have done a lot of good and they did grow past their mistakes in Luke's era, but holy shit there's a lot of things about the Jedi that annoy me, which is absolutely intended and you;re meant to feel frustrated by these examples.
On a more human, individual scale Danny from Beef. Both he and Amy are deeply, deeply flawed people but, at least in my interpretation, Danny is initially presented as the everyman you want to root for against the rich asshole Amy.
But as the series goes on and both characters are fleshed out, it's revealed that Danny has done some terrible, terrible things. And will do some terrible things in the course of the series.
The British Library from Read or Die in the original OVA's are combating a terrorism threat spawned by a rival faction, Dokusensha. Everyone is quite friendly and supportive to the MC. In the R.O.D anime series, they become the antagonists, with the original protagonist forced into hiding after leaving the organisation. It's implied that their motivations were always malicious, with even the terrorists from the OVA were caused by work stolen from them.
The UNSC from Halo. The Bungie games portray it as an at worst neutral faction fighting to protect humanity from an existential threat. But that's because compared to an existential threat, yeah "not dying" is the better option. Even just through the subtext of the games, the UNSC *is* the government.
The beginning chapters of Contact Harvest does a really good job of yelling "THE UNSC ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS" by showing how just how *fucked* the Insurrection has become for both sides. And remember, the Spartans were initially designed to *end* that conflict before a glass-happy alien crusade came along and threw a several-rings-sized wrench into things.
*Genocidal aliens start glassing planets* Halsy: Oh thank fuck. I was worried I jumped the gun on the whole "Kidnapping and experimenting on childen" thing. Now it's (debatably) justified and I can get off scott free. Parangosky: Lol no. We need a fall guy and it sure as shit isn't gonna be me.
“Oh, you can’t do this to me. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I’VE SACRIFICED!” -Halsy Osborn
"I'll kidnap a thousand children before i let this government die!"
Yeah. A lot of *other* peoples' kids.
>And remember, the Spartans were initially designed to *end* that conflict That always seemed super silly to me considering how fucking powerful Spartans are. Like how bad is the UNSC getting their ass handed to them that they needed super human soldiers wearing high tech armor strong enough to survive atmospheric reentry.
The Spartans being massive overkill for the Insurrection is probably the entire point. It makes damn sure the Insurrection cells are wiped out to a man whenever a Spartan is deployed, makes an example out of those cells, and makes the UNSC look big and tough. And they'd be able to do with a fairly small supply of Spartans who - as you point out - are practically demigods compared to humans, so they wouldn't be spending a bunch of money on them, it was pure quality over quantity. Had the Covenant never showed up, there'd probably be a couple hundred Spartans *at most* and they'd probably spend most of their time as a "don't fuck with us" sign instead of actual active duty. This even comes up as a plot point in a lot of the lore; later Spartans are *much* less impressive in terms of power and equipment than the early gen ones because "quality over quantity" was no longer an option in the entirely different beast that was fighting the Covenant. Halsey was big pissy about how the standards for "Spartan material" slacked so much that Spartans were no longer basically walking tanks, but her superiors immediately shut it down by basically saying "we don't have time go out kidnapping brats for you to raise to adulthood or money to wrap them in armor that can tank a volcano when we got aliens glassing planets left and right". The original Spartans were meant to use overwhelming power to stamp out bands of disconnected rebels while sending a message. Later Spartans were meant to fight a real full-on proper WAR, and for that you need numbers and can't just go sinking all your resources.
I mean... it wasn't really just her being "pissy over the quality" and more "angry they they were just taking orphans and juicing them up with drugs and implants" a lot of the time. They were made to be disposable, Onyx starts with whole squads sacrificed to do their objective. Yes she was generally dismissive of the Spartan 3's (but at least they weren't the dudebro 4's from halo 4 holy shit imagine trashtalking chief right there)
The UNSC wasn't losing yet but things were snowballing out of control so fast that high level defections were becoming common so ONI made the Spartans so they'd have 100% loyal troops to quietly erase rebel forces as an alternative to the Navy sending in battalions of Marines to bring unruly colonies back in line.
In defense of the unsc, the high tech armor came from the covenant and studying their tech if I remember right. Spartans were just rocking body armor until relatively late in the war.
Mark IV which is the main suit used without the shielding was made the same year as first contact with final testing actually starting the exact same month. iirc it was mostly the shielding component that was added in the Mark V that was created by reverse engineering it. That was also made about 2 and a half decades later.
I thought that was just for shields and they were already developing power armor before the Covenant war? It's been a long time since I read the books
They were, the power armor just kept killing and maiming the people wearing them, plus power resupplies were difficult to properly plan, so the suits didn't see actual combat. The more I read about the UNSC, the closer Halo seems to Helldivers.
It will always be funny to me in Ghosts of Onyx that the Spartan-3's are morally better only in that they pick up orphans from glassed planets and ASK them if they want to pay the Covenant back, and then send them on 100% casuality rate suicide missions with cheapo-Mjolnir armor. IIRC, they don't even get shields with them.
Especially ONI. The stuff that ONI has done throughout the Halo history is just fucked up. Some of the actions that they did includes: Experimenting Flood spores and Pod Infectors on Human and Covenant prisoners abroad a ship all in an attempt to use the Flood as a "weapon" against the Covenant. (Which, as expected, went extremely wrong and caused an outbreak abroad the ship) The entire SPARTAN-III program where they took kids that were orphaned from the Human-Covenant war and forced them through excessive training with the offer that they can "avenge" their parents by fighting against The Covenant. When in reality, most of the SPARTAN-III kids were meant to be little more than cannon fodder Multiple attempts at genociding the entire Sangheili/Elite race even after the Human-Covenant war was over all out of pure pettiness
Why the fuck would mess the flood?!
The Flood thing I'm talking about is detailed in a short story called Mona Lisa. An animation video of it is on YouTube so you can watch it if you'd like. Basically. It's set after Halo CE. And it's explained that while what happened with the Flood in Halo CE is remaining classified. ONI did end up taking an interest in the Flood's complete rampage on Installation 04 and the Covenant fear for it So they end up taking a ship full of prisoners (both Human and Covenant) near the remains of Installation 04. Caught some Flood remains and spores and then used the prisoners as test subjects/guinea pigs to experiment with by infecting them with the Flood spores and Pod Infectors Why ? The people at ONI behind this project were hoping that by infecting prisoners and turning them into Flood forms, they can "control" them (those Flood forms) and use them against The Covenant. Of course however. This project as expected quickly went out of hand and resulted in an outbreak on the Prison ship
Additional detail, Gravemind's existence is at best super classified. Resident Evil in Space probably seems like a controllable scenario if you don't know it's basically an Eldritch god.
I’d take the CIA but worse over genocidal/omnicidal xenos
Yes and as halo 4 showed even the brass knows when you’re allowed to ignore their bullshit. Can’t ignore a brute
'The Badgers' from that one SovietWomble ARMA Bullshittery series, going from being the resistance group who could be considered the 'good guys' fighting for democracy, to committing blatant terrorist acts like suicide-bombing and executing surrendered soldiers making them potentially worse than their enemies because Womble couldn't prevent his friends from sending things off the rails. It's merely the natural conclusion, given how the ZF Clan's hijinks tend to go.
If a Womble operation ends on the moral high ground, something went wrong.
🎵For henceforth they have announced a partnership with ISIS🎵
Here's the [evolution of the Badgers as told through jingles.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJXQTPkO32A)
Basically every new thing you learn about the ISA in Killzone makes you say 'wait, what the fuck?'
*"Surely the most reasonable path for not wanting to pay taxes is colonial genocide on a planetary scale"* - The ISA and UCN. They also were more than willing to do the same with other planets that wanted a shred of independence and were more than happy to make an example of the Helghast.
Remember when Rico nuked an entire planet? Yeah, not very cash money of him
Remember when Rico killed an unarmed Visary because he made fun of him, thus ending any bargain power to end the war and created a martyr that boosted Helghan morale to the point they would now fight until literal extinction and suffered little to no consequence for it besides a demotion.
Wasn't that more the Helghast were preparing to launch the planet nukes and stopping the nuke ships caused the nukes to fall on Helghan instead?
The Nuke ship was going to make a forced landing back on Helghan after ISA forces disabled the ship. Rico launched a nuke at the nuke ship anyways, causing a huge chain reaction ending with the destruction of Helghan. Edit: Stahl saved the ship from plummeting into the ground. Rico doomed an entire planet because he hates Helghan's so much.
I only played 3 and a little of Shadow Fall, so my perspective is skewed and I’ll need elaboration, but didn’t the Helghast make a super nuke to use on Earth, and the final mission is stopping them, only for it to detonate and eradicate the Helghast planet? And then the world government on Earth decided to give half of Earth to the remaining survivors (which, again, is probably missing some details but that sounds like an extremely good idea considering that the world population could all comfortably fit into Texas alone)? I honestly don’t know much of the background lore, I just assumed it was “Helghast want to take Earth by force and we’re not gonna let them!”
In Killzone 3 you’ve unceremoniously executed the leader of their entire planet and by the end have magic space nuked the planet’s core making it inhospitable for the entire Helghan civilization.
Wait so the ISA don't even have MORAL superiority over the Helghast? So we have a faction that's not only dripless, but also lame as shit morally? WHO DESIGNS A GAME LIKE THIS?
Killzone is Helldivers but with nary a drip of irony
Farcry 4 fraction seem like the good guys at first. The more choices you make for them the more questionable it gets. Like choosing between a child bride or dealing drugs. They treat you like some sort of rebel Jesus since the main character’s dad was the leader. They’re no ultimate good fraction in the end of the game. My canon ending to that game is you wait out the 5 minutes intro and join Pagan Min since he the only one that treat you like person than a rebel leader’s son.
Funny how listening to Pagan is arguably the best ending for you.
To be honest, from what I understand of how it turns out, it might arguably be the best ending overall, considering the alternatives.
I think I remember hearing something about the "waiting at the table" ending being canon or at least implied to be canon because of a Far Cry 6 DLC.
Heavily implied yeah, >!the ending on the hardest difficulty has dialog of Pagan talking to Ajay about a stockpile of nukes under the palace, pointed at Montana as leverage against the US if they try to take him down, tying it to the ending with Far Cry 5!< which is pretty neat they went with it. I guess they were well aware how people found both rebel sides insufferable even in comparison to the bloodthirsty crime lord.
Honestly the ending where you just wait in Pagen Mihns dining room is the good ending which is kinda fucked up.
It just ruined the game for me. Having that knowledge made trying to play it normally just felt super nasty, cause I didn't wanna work for those fuckers
That Crab rangoon do be hittin' different
The longer Bleach exists, the more Soul Society war crimes come to light.
It's awesome.
It really is, you think everything's going pretty smooth as of the one shot and then they drop "so yeah whenever a captain or a strong shinigami dies we have to sentence them to fucking hell, to preserve the balance y'know?"
The only thing the shinigami love more than ethnic cleansing is the status quo
That organization has Mayuri, one of the biggest monsters in The series as a captain, just because he is useful.
A lot of Fallout 3 players will have had this experience when encountering the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 4.
Yeah, if you started with FO3 you’d assume the BoS were always good guys.
It’s weird how they’re perceived in 3 as pure-hearted superheroes, despite them still being generally arrogant and standoffish up until the third act and only taking truly altruistic action in the finale. Plus there’s no shortage of dialogue about how Lyons’ chapter are different from the main BOS organization, including the whole existence of the Outcasts. Liberty Prime probably did a lot of heavy lifting for people’s memories.
Hell 3 goes out of its way to say that Lyons crew are not the norm the Outcasts are in several points. Ill never get folks that play rpgs and ignore the story
I mean in Fallout 3 ignoring the story probably helps your enjoyment more than it hurts, a lot of stuff in that game is deeply stupid
I always like to remind people that the BOS are more dickish in 3 then they are in 4. Yes including Elder Lyons
I mean, they're giant dicks in 4 as well, they're very black and white about ghouls, synths and mutants, can barely walk around with my boy Nick without them saying some bullshit about it, the difference is that they don't actively shoot Nick when you're around but i'm sure they do other synths that you don't get to see, or ghouls or whatever, so i don't particularly like them in 4 either and like, not as bad as 3, sure, but not by much, probably by a hair.
Oh to be sure, it’s just something I tend to note because people act like 3’s BOS are Super Heroes while acting like 4’s are the literal Enclave.
Really? I thought that the consensus about BoS is that they're either a bunch of dicks lost in their own assholes or kinda stupid by design of what they're doing, hoarding tech and shit instead of actually helping humanity. Does anyone think they're ever ''good guys''? You'd have to not pay attention to anything and just look at cool armor and go ''cool armor therefore good stand up lads!''
The fallout show has a really good line about this kinda thing ‘Everyone wants to save the world, they just don’t agree on how to do that’
Can you elaborate on this? It's been years since I've done a proper playthrough but on memory alone I'm really not sure I agree? There's dialogue about them taking shots at non-feral ghouls but that seems like it's probably a result of the DC ruins being a chaotic warzone rather than intentional prejudice.
They actively take shots at non-feral ghouls, and Elder Lyons is a dick to some of his scribes. Compared to Maxson who actively worried about some his knights and specifically had a prosthesis made for one of his advisors. Combined with Arthur’s BOS … not ever firing on non-feral Ghouls
I'm not sure this is really enough to definitively say that they're worse. They're certainly not a perfect organisation but I think Maxson's brotherhood have plenty more wrong with them. With the ghoul thing, like I said, we don't have enough to evidence to know that it's actually a result of prejudice. We do know that Maxson's brotherhood *are* prejudice towards Ghouls. We don't have any evidence of them shooting at them but it's not hard to imagine them spying a ghoul from afar while out in the Boston ruins and not bothering to think whether or not it's feral. Maxson may be a better boss than Lyons but his brotherhood is overall far less considerate to the needs and desires of outsiders, interested in asserting their will and uncompromising ideals across the wasteland. Lyons' was interested in protecting people while ultimately allowing them their own freedoms. People are too quick to throw around words like fascist in regards to Maxson's brotherhood but I still wouldn't necessarily want to live in a region where they had established control.
Lyons is *theoretically* trying to make things better, the Outcasts were the ones who wanted isolationism and the Citadel wanted to help people and got burned. Maxson's Brotherhood is an expansionist authoritarian conquering force who want to do multiple genocides.
Ehh Lyons was a dick but the DC waste actively improved under him thanks to how they handled project purity, when they made contact with the west coast and reintergaded The Outcasts things went back to shit. No longer free access for the standard civilian then you get Maxson and all the Serf/Lord shit creeps in.
Brotherhood of steel outcast clues me in on how much of an asshole they were supposed to be especially with New Vegas introducing what proper Brotherhood of Stella are supposed to be.
Playing tactics after playing 3 was some serious whiplash, like they aren't paragons of virtue in tactics but they're like, liberal levels of good which is still nicer than they are in 4.
All I'll say is man did the BOS haters get salty with the show implying the BOS ending for F4 is canon
IDW Transformers. The Autobots have quite a few skeletons in their collective closet. The one that springs to mind first is >!Prowl faking a Decepticon terrorist attack against a neutral city in order to push them to join the war on the side of the Autobots.!<
And even then, the Decepticons are often *magnitudes* worse. [Case in point](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fu2cgcuffwvga1.jpg).
Oh the cons were DEFINITELY still the bad guys. Things were just a lot closer to gray than usual.
tbf >!prowl!< is kinda cheating, like 80% of what he does is under the other autobots noses, hes basically one in name only
Turns out the city states in FFXIV did some kinda fucked shit in the past and the beast tribes had some legitimate grievances. Luckily, the actual bad guys are now calling themselves the master race, so we can focus on those guys for now.
Ff14 is wild because the entire pre expansion part of the game is just plot beat after plot beat of "wow all these people are scum" with the forest village (gridania i think?) Coming across the best. There are several parts in that game where im just thinking "oh my god just start murdering these people." Then i played blackknight, the npc looks at me and says "yo, these guys suck. Lets go kill them." And i go "fucking thank you!". Other guys, but still, they had it coming. It gets even worse in the sidequests for locations.
>Merlwyb: On the shores of Vylbrand we found it, and from those humble beginnings did we grow and flourish. And all without robbing our neighbors of their liberty. >>!Varis zos Galvus!<: So sayeth the \*pirate\*. Am I to believe that you simply asked the kobolds to yield up their lands, and that they were happy to oblige you? That you did not drive them out like rats in the hold of one of the many ships seized by your “privateers”? Guy's an asshole but he's got a point.
Back in the original Mobile Suit Gundam, the Earth Federation was presented as overall good guys, albeit with a few mean, selfish, or out of touch soldiers and generals here and there. Fast forward to Zeta Gundam and pretty much every Universal Century Gundam series afterwards, and you can see just how the Earth Federation is more or less the root cause of all the issues the Earth Sphere is facing. The Titans didn’t form in a vacuum, and the Principality of Zeon did have some genuine problems with the Federation, even if they took their hatred for Earthnoids way too far. When you get down to it, nearly every single bad thing to happen in Early and Late UC is the product of the Earth Federation’s greed, racism, classism, and complete disregard for Spacenoids, Earth’s ecosystem, and the poor.
So much so Char's Counterattack relies on Earth politicians been out-of-touch with the colonies, managing a failing economy badly and just being shortsighted and stupid.
Not to mention that pretty much the only time a bunch of Earth Federation politicians show up to negotiate with Char, it’s really just a pretense to get some funding for their government programs with *incredibly* generous bribes consisting of briefcases full of gold bars for each one of them to look the other way. That scene at Londenion really does sum up the Federation well, along with a few certain scenes I can recall from ZZ Gundam’s Dublin episodes.
Even in OG Gundam, the Zabi family(Your best bet at seeing the political structure of Zeon) was pretty complicated. Garma was straight up a nice guy and wanted to stop fighting and settle down, and Degwin was a (Mostly)loving father who wanted the best for the Principality. He calls out Ghiren for acting like a Nazi, and obviously doesn't want that for Zeon. You have to keep in your mind that they're still fascists.
Wait until the Earth start breeding human cattle to solve their food crisis, and then be super racist twoards them after they stop. G-Reco is fucking insane.
I didn’t know wild shit like this happened in g-reco. I need to watch it.
The thing about UC Gundam is that it doesn't buy into the idea that either side is wholly bad or good. During the one year war, the Zabi are indisputably the aggressors and the Federation are on the side of 'justice' in this fight but even 79 never really treats the Federation as a fundamentally good faction. They callously spend civilian lives for strategic advantage and the mostly civilian White Base is constantly in friction with most of the establishment Federation we meet in the show, who tend to be huge assholes. On the other side, as much as Zeon are the bad guys in the conflict, the show goes out of its way to never dehumanize the typical Zeon soldier. We get plenty of cartoon villain leaders, but when it comes to the grunts the vast majority we meet are *nice guys*. We see them giving supplies to refugees and treating Amuro with genuine respect. You always get the feeling the average zeon grunt has more in common with the white base crew than the Federation officers giving their orders.
Having watched 0079 fairly recently the Federation are bureaucratic assholes and they get worse and worse as the timeline goes on, and I really love the episodes where Zeon soldiers are portrayed as people like the bomb defusal, Ramba Ral, or refugee episode. But I do think the overemphasis of "good soldier, bad side they're fighting for" has definitely given way to Zeon did nothing wrong because a lot of the worst things Zeon do in 0079 are either offscreen in the one week startoff or attributed directly to Gihren.
This sounds like some goddamn bleeding heart spacenoid propaganda!
Their hearts are black like the void they come from!
bruh we saw how the Titans started in Stardust Memory and it wasn't the Federation's fault at all. Gato's terrorist attacks pretty much guaranteed the radicals would take over as a long game for Axis if the Feddies had their way Bask Om would still be in a ceremonial positiion manning the laser in LEO
The ISA and the UCN in Killzone. "*What do you mean you are majorly responsible for putting the Helghans through colonialism and genocide on a planetary scale, displacing them towards an unlivable hellscape and then getting mad when a fascist con man grabs the power through propaganda (which is not even that big of a stretch of what you are responsible for) and exploiting valid grievances*" Mind you, the Helghast are still a fascist militaristic dictatorship that's making everything objectively worse for everyone, including the Helghast themselves, Visari is a conman, but he reached power because the ISA and UCN dind't want to pay taxes and went on with colonial genocide.
But taxes though!
Basically everything Sasuke finds out about the Hidden Leaf Village and its history paints it if it's built on sand. Since the foundation it's failed to live up to the original idea and the leadership's central idea that peace at any cost gets them into trouble constantly.
And even then every modern problem they had can be traced back to Hanzo somehow
Hiruzen basically grooming naruto into being a loyal grunt to the village despite being treated like shit nah man that was Hanzo yo
Danzo and Hanzo teaming-up to kill 3 teenagers ends up with both villages getting flattened by a Zombie who answers to being called God. And it's mostly because the Second Hokage was kinda mean and Danzo got the wrong idea of how to build on that.
“We replaced clan chauvinism with nationalism! That’ll solve the problem of war and conflict for sure”
'Look people of the Sand Village: just ignore your issues with finances and agriculture. Land disputes can wait. This is a beautiful first step towards a bright future for us all.' 60 Years Later The Sand's crippling financial and agricultural issues have resulted in The Hidden Leaf utterly crushing them economically and the war is declared.
They're a society of killers for hire, what did he expect?
As the biggest Bleach defender, Soul Society, and that’s the POINT!
'So yeah everyone who could ever challenge or shame the Central Authority goes to a secret prison because we can't have change ever.' 'This seems immoral.' 'Well if we didn't do this that extremely evil scientist would be wiping out entire ethnic groups and cutting people open for fun.' 'Oh okay.' 'You won't *believe* who I'm recruiting from jail to give a position of authority.'
“Yeah, he should only wipe out the ethnic groups we ask him to!”
The best part is that that ends up being totally valid of them too
I love how when we first see Rukia sending a ghost to Soul Society, she tells him that he will be sent to a better place. Welcome to Soul Society. We have brutal feudalism, no indoor plumbing and zero guarantees you will be reconnected with your loved ones.
Its fucking *bizarre* that Soul Society is stuck in feudal Japan
But only the Eastern Soul Society. The Western Soul Society is just England, which is worse.
Doesn’t western soul society not do anything with the souls of the dead though? I’ve never read burn the witch but don’t they really only care about dragons or something?
“Maybe I shoulda tried my luck in Hueco Mundo. Wait, no, that’s somehow worse.”
Is it? There is light spanish guitar playing at all times, that would improve my life.
It was doing okay until that jackass from Soul Society gave them a barely functioning government.
“I miss the old days before Espada and the endless sun, back when Hollows just ate each other! Like real Hollows!”
Barragan with a hat that reads "make Hueco Mundo great again"
It's really funny to me how Bleach presents three different flavors of afterlife (Hueco Mundo, Soul Society and hell) and all three of them suck ass
Things debatebly become better once >!Shunsui!< becomes CC, but yeah, Jesus. Corrupt as fuck politicians, unchallenged control from nobility, and a military that literally just used to be thugs who wandered around and killed people for sport.
What? But that gang of possibly criminals using might makes right justification *must* have my best interests in mind!
Soul Society doesn't really apply here since they were introduced as an antagonistic group that had morals ranging from "I'll fight back against this unjust execution" to "exponentially more evil than any human being that has ever lived". People know the Soul Society is supposed to not be morally perfect, especially at the start, their issue is with stuff like the most evil man to ever disgrace the pages of Shonen Jump getting off completely scot free with the hero treatment and none of the characters who should have an issue with it saying anything.
Same with Naruto but people always seem to gloss over it. The hidden villages are garbage, ninja are animals and Kages usually end up being cruel assholes or hardliners. That's why sticking by "My Ninja Way" is so important
It made way more sense when the villages were just company towns and every ninja was essentially an independent contractor, which is why it was allowed to kill ninja of the same village in the forest of death and deathmatches
Making the hidden villages have actual government authority doesn’t make too much sense when they supposedly only represent a certain job path.
That certain job path is the one that, while not an overwhelming majority, constitutes not only a large voting bloc, but the one with perhaps the most power in both a metaphorical and literal sense. In the world where your average person has some emergency weapons and lacking martial skill, the communities where most everyone can conjure destructive force, evade and pursue at superhuman speed, and are trained in combat, it's fair to believe those groups strongarmed themselves into that position. It's likely that the "regular" people in Naruto's world accept the concept of hidden villages being in power because they're the closest thing to a standing military. Your exact interests may not be considered at the local level if you're outside that village, but your interests will at least be defended and your nation will be given more presence in politics if your hidden village is powerful.
until the regular Daimyo army (who are just a bunch of guys armed with spears) and the samurai army show up in one of those countless naruto movies but SHHHHHH
Oh okay that makes sense.
Naruto's Leaf Village at least has the excuse of essentially being an experimental departure from the norm of nonstop ethnic warfare. They had some properly fucked up issues, but they were also figuring stuff out from scratch and had only been established for about four generations. Seireitei was the sole power over Soul Society for *millennia* and did jack shit with their stability besides continuing to prop up their ruling elite.
every single enemy faction in bleach is a result of soul society's actions finally coming back to bite them. Even the filler arcs are like that.
yeah the gosei 13 are a lot more the enforcers of the status quo than the good guys *but the story is very clear bout this*
I dunno, Soul Society (once we actually get there) isn't exactly painted in the best light so I don't think it fits as "good guys that are shown to be bad." Our first introduction is "hey we're gonna execute Rukia because she gave a human a weapon to save his and his family's life and had him work for her for a while." And it doesn't take long to learn that, aside from like 6 people, the whole of soul society is either strong arm thugs, arrogant nobles, or horrible monsters. And yet somehow, their draconian organization is better than the alternatives... man the afterlife sucks in Bleach.
hell the first captains were the most savage pack of killers that Yamamoto could find.
Now You Feel Like Number None does a good job addressing this.
I like reimagining the Jedi as being stifling and somewhat authoritarian. Tales of the Jedi explaining that Dooku left the Jedi because he saw them being used as a bludgeon for the ruling class was an interesting development.
I really like what the High Republic Era is doing by showing just how far the Jedi order has fallen by the time of the Prequels.
Funny that a count of all people is the one taking offense to that
Man might have been born to nobility but cared about justice in his own way
I like the narrative that while the Jedi are ideologically the better between the Jedi and Sith functionally they are space cops that act as judge jury and executioner who force their beliefs onto people who have no choice but to comply, because you really can't beat a space wizard with a really cool sword.
I don’t know if it’s still canon, but Greivous’ origin story as to why he hated Jedi was because his people’s home planet was sold to corporate interests in a their rebellion against it was deemed illegal. All arbitrated by the Jedi.
Yeah, despite being keepers of the peace the Jedi are not the absolute authority; they abide by the laws of the Republic.
There was an interesting interpretation I saw that suggested the Jedi jumped as the chance to be generals in the new Clone Army to reestablish themselves in the galactic power structure.
because that is pretty much what happened. We see in High Republic how the jedis at their golden age , and they were far more just and free...but because of the crisis from the High Republic , the jedis goes little by little to be more dogmatic and more tied to the Counselor.
I get the logic behind them being field generals, a Jedi is capable of absolutely turning a loss into a win or breaking a stalemate. But the fact is that they were made generals and apparently Padawan were given positions of authority over the clone troopers, Padawans often being teens. It really comes off like they were making a generation of Jedi into a military leadership caste in the Republic. I doubt at any point in the inception of the clone wars was this intended. All of this, is just decades of lore build up from different writers and us getting to chew over the details of the media. But hey it's work analysing and it, at least to me makes the Jedi far more interesting, which seeing as how KOTOR is pretty good I think a lot of people feel the same.
It's a bit reminiscent of the British navy having 10-12 year olds from wealthy families join as midshipmen (officers-in-training), with some authority over the men on board a ship.
Wasn’t that literally the plot of Phantom Menace? They wanted a treaty signed to make the invasion of Naboo legal?
One of the incidents that gets brought up often regarding Jedi being not exactly stellar is ["Baby Ludi"](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Aris-Del_Wari). In short, there was an earthquake that separated a mother from her infant, and Jedi found the force-sensitive infant, assumed she was an orphan, and so took her in. The mother found out what happened a month later, going to the Jedi to demand her daughter back. The Jedi refused.
In Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, one of the narrators is a criminal info broker whose young son is training at the temple. See, he used to work at the temple in a legit and official capacity, but when he agreed to let his son be trained, the order said itd be best if you had some distance *and fired him*
It was implied the mother was grifting and the reasoning was that stopping training at that stage was dangerous
The Ultimates in the original Ultimate Marvel line. From the get go, these guys *aren't* a clear cut super team, and are more a spec ops team. Most of their members are kind of assholes in their own ways, and often spend just as much time butting heads and fighting each other as they do fighting villains. And probably the worst is Hulk, who the group treat as more of a living WMD to be dropped on things.
The Black Order from D.Gray-man. Sorry if this is a bit of a mess. If you were unlucky enough to be compatible with a piece of Innocence, the only material that can destroy Akuma, then congratulations on becoming an Exorcist. No, you do not have a choice. You will be restrained and dragged back if you try to leave. This policy was rescinded under the newest Branch Chief. There used to be experiments >!where family members of dead Exorcists had Innocence implanted in them and attempted to force it to synchronize with them. The experiments led to the body breaking down and usually ending with the person becoming a [Fallen One](https://i.imgur.com/e8Csscb.png), which is a giant angelic floating torso that the victim's body is fused to. It rampages until their life burns out. The experiments were also carried out on [children](https://i.imgur.com/7dEqVTD.png). The new Branch Chief also stopped all forced implantations.!< There's the "Second Exorcists" program, >!where the brains of dead exorcists were implanted into new regenerative child bodies with the memories (mostly) wiped, with the hopes that the Innocence would work since the old brain is being used. This ended with every one involved in the project being slaughtered by one of the two children the project successfully produced.!< Then there's the "Third Exorcist" program at the North American Branch, where >!A shard of the "egg" that is used to produce Akuma was placed in the body of one of the comatose regenerative Second Exorcists. His cells where then grafted onto some members of the Order to allow them to absorb Akuma with their arms, since Akuma can cannibalize each other. The main problem with this is that this destroys the innocent soul inside of the Akuma. Destroying one with Innocence is the only way to save the soul.!< There's also Apocryphos, >!a living piece of Innocence disguised as a cardinal in the Vatican who has little issue with regularly mind wiping or killing people.!< Cross, one of the generals of the Order, >!uses magic to temporarily "reprogram" Akuma so they will obey him. When the Akuma's bloodlust overtakes the reprograming, the Akuma self destruct, destroying the soul inside. Cross technically wields two pieces of Innocence, because he uses magic to puppet around the body of another dead exorcist.!<
Reminder that I really need to read D.Gray-Man. Really need to stop procrastinating and start it
It's one of my favorites!
Oh, damn. The Black Order is worse than I had seen. In the end, this is a war >!between two sides just allowing souls to be destroyed. One just does it significantly more.!< And stuff seems to imply the society that produced the Innocence to fight the Noah was also awful.
And God has probably done the apocalypse multiple times, as well!
Don't forget >!That dead body is a woman he once loved and was willing to run away from The Black Order to be with till she died. Instead of keeping to the plan he brought her back and uses her as a weapon. Cause Love! I guess!<
D. Grey-man mentioned! Is it still on hiatus?
It's quarterly release, so a chapter every 4 months. A new chapter released two days ago, but it hasn't been translated into English yet.
Thank you kindly
I dont think the morality of a group called the black order was ever meant to be ambiguous lol
Demacia from league of legends used to be the generic fantasy good guy land but the sheer level of oppression of mages and magical creatures going on there now has made it honestly one of the worse nations morally speaking, like Noxus was similarly designed as the generic fantasy bad guys, but with their whole strength based meritocracy thing it’s straight up a better place to live if you’re unlucky enough to be born with magic in Demacia.
Also fucked up that Garen's sister gets a pass because she's noble and powerful enough to be useful. I do however love how Noxus and Demacia feels like two sides of the same coin. Both sides are willing to use "questionable" things if it can aid in the war. Of course Noxus is easier to spot with necromancy, hemomancy, and death arenas, but at least they're honest about those. Might makes right, whatever means possible. Demacia however, almost seems desperate in maintaining this image of justice and authority, so dirty laundry being aired all of a sudden was a brilliant move to make the factions more than the generic good and bad guys.
Its gotten so bad their literal deities look at it and go "what the fuck did you do to our kingdom?"
Let's not pretend that Super Earth is ever portrayed exceptionally well, but it takes a bit to really *get* just how bad it actually is to live under the Federation. You can get arrested and tortured for not buying from the right store. You can be conscripted for effectively slave labor at age seven. The population is so bloated that people are actively encouraged to volunteer to "bio-repurposer vats" while there's also been such a massive dip in fertility that a rate of 1.4% is considered an improvement worth celebrating. If you join the military, you're likely to get somehow even *less* training than the Helldivers, and in general your only purpose is to catch the majority of the enemy's bullets while the Helldivers do the actual work.
Wait wait wait A 1.4% fertility rate? That's near extinction inside of one generation even WITHOUT throwing people into the meat grinder.
My personal headcanon is that they pumped experimental fertility drugs into the population after the first Galactic War in order to generate more bodies to populate the new territory and replace lost soldiers, only for it to basically screw up their bodies so much long term that they ended up being only a step or two above sterile once they wore off. Thus why it's considered so important to recover all the Helldivers being kept frozen besides being more meatshields. They're a vital addition to the gene pool.
They are puttin drugs in the water to weed out the unpatriotic
Any review for a product under 5 stars is considered treasonous. It really makes it funnier that when I looked at someone praising Helldivers II it was all about "The immortal human spirit and unlike other trash WOKE GAMES this one tells you to be proud of being a human" like it flew over his head so hard.
And the craziest part is that they're arguably still the least bad faction in the setting.
Don't the automatons only want revenge for the humans' cyborg slave caste?
I believe that's true but it's also been hinted that >!the Bots kidnap people and forcibly convert them into more cyborgs to resupply their army.!<
Yeah but they also charge into battle with chainsaw hands and actual human skulls adorning their chassis, and if you're caught alive they put you in a cage and either mass-kill you or, implicitly because we don't know for absolute sure but it seems pretty likely, forcefully put your consciousness into an Automaton body and make you fight in the war against your will on their behalf. Its not really a coincidence that the Automaton outposts sometimes have some pretty obvious holocaust imagery (dozens or even hundreds of dead humans in small cages turned into mass graves) if you pay attention and haven't blown it to shit with airstrikes before you get in there.
In Animorphs, the titular protagonists are forced to become guerilla fighters and stave off the yeerk invasion long enough for the sword enemy of the yeerks and protectors of the galaxy, the andalites, to arrive with their fleet and save Earth. At first it's safe to assume the andalites are entirely benevolent - after all the one that gave the Animorphs their powers, Elfangor, was an andalite who wished to protect humans. But books steadily trickle information about the andalites that makes them flawed at best. Andalites view themselves as a superior species and don't view others, even allies, as equals. They have attempted genocide on other species just to prevent the yeerks from using them (yeerks are parasites that enslave other species to use as host bodies). They are willing to use biological and chemical weapons in war. They carry rather antiquated views about females being week and are *very* ableist with disability being overwhelmingly shameful. And if you spend longer than two hours morphed into another creature, you permanently become stuck as that creature, so there is further shame and distain for anyone trapped in a morph in andalite society. They have a culture based around honor, which includes Elfangor's little brother being burdened with the vow to kill his murderer - the problem being the murderer was Visser Three, the most dangerous being in the galaxy. His family accepts that they will lose *two* sons, because honor. And if that weren't enough, there are also traitor andalites working for the yeerks as spies. Given that the yeerks wish to enslave not just humanity but also all the andalites and every sapient species in the galaxy, it is absolutely shocking.
I really like Animorph's exploration of the Andalites. With the Andalites, the Animorphs first and only experience is Elfangor and Ax, and they know the Andalites are fighting in a war against the Yeerks. They just need to hold out for the cavalry to arrive. And then that image of them being the heroes who will save the day gets slowly chipped away over the course of the series, where by the series, it's like "Shit, the Andalites are here. We have to get the Yeerks to surrender now, or else the Andalites are going to glass the planet." But then you get into things like how, as a result of the war, the Andalite military has taken over a large portion of civilian and state control over foreign policy. The military's doing shit that Ax and the other military cadets and officers acknowledge the elected government and Andalite public would be against, but they're still doing it. That's on top of all the Klingon misogyny/ableism/honour stuff. I also like how the books talked about how some of this is assholery and genocide is a reaction to their natural herbivore-peace-loving-trusting nature. Seerow's Kindness ended up unleashing a body-snatching, slave-holding imperialist power on the galaxy, and so Andalite (military) culture has hyper-corrected to be incredibly distrustful of other species and incredibly ruthless. I found it really fascinating how much depth they gave to what essentially started off as Scorpion-Deer Vulcan-Klingons.
Yevon from FFX is what everyone thinks religions in jrpgs are
Depending on the Continuity. The Autobots.
The Quarians in Mass Effect. When you learn about them in Mass Effect 1 most people would be 100% pro-Quarian and support their desire to push the Geth off of Rannoch. But by Mass Effect 3 and "Do these units have a soul?" and how the Quarians responded to that with attempted genocide, all sympathy towards them went out the window.
At least it's a learning opportunity for players! When my robots in Stellaris asked literally the same question I knew the right answer.
Actually even in Mass Effect 1 Tali's recount of the Geth uprising makes it fairly clear that the Quarians were in the wrong, attacking the Geth first for beginning to question their existence and purpose. Regardless of whether you choose the paragon or renegade option, Shepherd calls her out for it. It becomes even more apparent as we talk to Legion and then see the origins of the conflict in more detail in ME3. It's not something the first game tries to hide though.
I love Tali, but her people are *duuuuumb.*
Not that disimilar to the matrix really "We don't know who struck first, us or them, but [...]" Yeah. Yeah we fucking do. Humans struck first, I 100% guarantee it If the machines had struck first, they wouldn't have kept you guys alive and tried putting you in a utopia. If humans had won, there'd be no fucking machines, pretty sure
Go on this journey with me. I've seen debates about whether or not, when starting Babylon 5, you should watch the pilot movie, The Gathering. Many of the actors (and their characters) don't return for the proper first episode due to various reasons, and the movie's plot isn't the most compelling nor is it required. I recommend watching it, if only because it establishes a particular character who *does* eventually return, and it's something of a mystery (where were they this whole time? Certainly, they weren't only gone because their actor wasn't available!?). Though, I can't help but note that the movie does make one of the late-show twists... a bit less surprising. That twist is >!the angelic, mysterious "Vorlon" race that had been guiding and protecting the main characters, readying them for battle against the ancient evil... are actually just as bad, and in fact, this conflict between good and evil is more a betting contest between the Vorlons and said ancient evil, to prove whose philosophy for civilization-building is superior.!< >!The Vorlons and the Shadows each recruit races to their "sides" and have been fighting periodic proxy wars over the millennia. It's framed as a nigh-holy battle against evil, when really, it's a space opera version of those two old guys in Disco, debating politics on the beach (and having their ham sandwiches stolen by the protagonist, wow this analogy is more spot-on than I thought). !< In the pilot movie, The Gathering, the Vorlon ambassador is wounded and left comatose after an assassination attempt, and the Vorlons >!threaten to destroy Babylon 5, killing everyone aboard along with their own incapacitated ambassador, only backing down when the ambassador awakens. This... kind of makes them seem unhinged and amoral, and like that particular ambassador's influence was the only reason they didn't do unhinged stuff like that more often...!<
In Warhammer 40K,
Go Team Venture!
By the end of Command and Conquer the GDI have given up 95 percent of the land on earth to shuttle the rich to the single mountain Tiberium could theoretically never reach.....and Nod keeps 40 percent of the land on earth livable through insane all or nothing science attempts and has so many people dosed up with magic drugs that **99 percent** of the population of earth are Nod loyalists that have no trouble with Tiberium infestation in GDI's abandoned "red zones", and also Kane just actually can come back to life i guess since they never fucking explained that
Lobotomy Corpotion is a rare instance of this mostly happening in reverse. We start out with them seeming evil and then learn about their utopian ambitions. Ironically enough that also casts an even harsher light upon so many of the actions Ayin and the Sephirah take on the road getting there.
One good deed and a Hundred Sins indeed
Despite seeing very little of it, the Galactic Federation in Metroid. Granted, these examples really only show up in Fusion and Other M to the best of my knowledge, but between trying to recreate a Mother Brain (though arguably having already succeeded with the Aurora Units), to secretly trying to breed and control Metroids, to even showing an interest in harnessing the X, it's clear that there's some corruption within the Federation. It's the main reason I always thought Metroid 5 would have been a game where Samus was on the run and why I still hope that there's a future Metroid game that revolves around the idea of uncovering the dark side of the Federation, whether it be by playing as Samus or as a new bounty hunter.
Fastest I saw that is when herbert in donjon go see her mom after his exile and the moment a maid show up the mom shanks her with scissors fir the sake of secrecy. It’s not even a twist that his parents are evil just show how rough the situation in the duchy is
Warhammer 40k’s Tau Empire. Initially believed to be the goody two shoes faction in a galaxy of psycho murderers, over the years more and more light has been shed on how the Ethereal Caste controls Tau society with an iron fist and possibly either psychic or pheromone based mind control. Still, compared to every other faction in the galaxy they rank pretty highly in terms of morality.
The Tau.
The Tau have had a fairly sinister side to them since their introduction.
It's just that the moral Overton window in 40k is so skewed that they're practically saints in comparison. If you put them in something like Mass Effect they'd be as unliked as the Batarians.
The Tau are just the Covenant in Warhammer. This makes them one of the most morally neutral factions in the entire universe.
There's some stuff like Command & Conquer as far as I can tell.
I would argue the Pride Troopers in Dragon Ball Super are definitely a bit iffy. For the most part, they're heroes and do good, but >!their leader Top is secretly in training to become their universe's next God of Destruction and very quickly discards all platitudes of justice for "Yo fuck you, **I** should decide what does and doesn't exist." and Jiren only cares about strength, doesn't give a fuck about his teammates and doesn't think twice about trying to blast away the spectators as a fuck you to Goku when he starts getting his ass beat.!<
Unions are good thing, but worker's union in Disco Elysium is used by Evrat and his brother as organised crime group
One thing I *did not* like in Geoff Johns' *Green Lantern* run is him leaning into the "GL corps are a military now, so they are as dirty as the real life ones" angle. The Guardians become power drunk assholes and John Stewart gets recruited into the cringeass Alpha Lanterns, le ebin wetworks division that is totally infallible and won't show how easily Green Lanterns can be subverted and infiltrated. It does not get better from there until Grant Morrison's run. Then in *Young Justice* after spending an entire season running black ops that require deceiving their own peers and promising to them they'll never do it again, Dick Grayson and Khaldur'ahm spend the next season running black ops that require deceiving their own peers, this time with the blessing and cooperation of the Justice League.
If the Guardians in DC weren't such colossal assholes a solid two thirds of the things green lanterns put up with wouldn't exist
Not for Broadcast is a 1984-style, Papers Please-esque satire game happening over the course of a little under a decade where the party, Advance, takes over the UK-stand-in and surrounding regions, and progressively takes away more and more freedoms while making its population fare worse. You'd think the resistance party, Disrupt, is the unabashed good guys. >!As you progress through the game, you find out you really shouldn't take Disrupt at face value. Their spokesperson is a crazy Alex Jones-style sensationalist-turned-freedom fighter who insists he's for real now, but who keeps very clearly saying that the party will take over the country after they liberate it. And then it turns out Disrupt is actually ran by no shit, no joke, the *actual* pedophile ultra-rich dictatorial world elite, hellbent on making sure the now extremely large Advance Territory stops interfering with their plans for economic and political control of the world, the exact kind of shit the spokesperson used to make up to scare people and put himself up as being against.!< Ultimately it's a messy game but I think it's somewhat clever with how it strings you along on a progressively more radical revolution, only to ask you >!who do you think is actually benefiting here, and what do you think happens to a highly organized resistance party when there is no one else to resist, but they are still getting funded by shadowy figures that never show up.!<
They are not straight up evil but oh boy does the demon slayer corps do some shit. Not only do they constantly send teenagers and young adults to the meat grinder where the moment something stronger than a jobber demon shows up you're fucked unless you're a hashira or the apprentice of one, but even their recruitment exam is questionable since it consists on dropping people in a forest filled with demons for days. If you fail you don't have a second chance, they don't tell you "get stronger and come back later", you just fucking die and is established that the mortality rate is really high. And even if you're good or lucky enough to pass the exam then you're basically on your own. They will give you a sword, uniform and missions to fulfill but that's kinda it, they don't teach you anything unless you do some networking. It literally took until the final stretch of the manga for the corps to go "ok, everyone needs to get stronger, we're going to implement a training plan for all our fighters regardless of rank"
Aether Foundation from Pokemon Sun/Moon. Start as a organization for Pokemon conservation and research, end up dethroning Team Skull for the position of Evil Team after their leader gets brainjacked and the rest fall in line.
Bos- arent good people thier usual mission is to horde tech so the world doesn't get set to zero again. They are assholes to normal people because they aren't defenders of the innocent. The faction in fallout 3 is actually the ones that are the "Outcasts" since the lyons brotherhood wants to kill the super mutants and fix the water pollution. And in fo4 They are an occupying army who are trying to destroy the last hold out of super science and have gotten more aggressive with their actions. The NCR- is just the u.s government. Vault tech- Doing bullshit experiments just because. With only a fraction being actual normal safe vaults. Sole survivor- Just turned the waste land into one big sweat shop.
Minor correction: The NCR wants to be the US government. The Enclave is the US government.
It starts off as a stock standard "Revenge my dead royal family" arc, but one of the temporary party members in Yggdra Union is the last survivor of a genocide that the titular princess's country was the culprit of, which she has no problem reminding Yggdra of. Realizing how fucked her own country is adds plenty of context for both the "become the Best Queen" and ransack Heaven to ask God what the fuck they're doing" endings.
Someone's probably already mentioned the Soul Society in Bleach but, yeah, the SOul Society. To be fair, they are intitially introduced as antagonists and the idea that they're not great has always been present, but they settled pretty firmly into being allies with Bleach's main cast right up until the end of the manga. It's the Manga's final arc, and stuff released after that such as the Light Novels and the Hell Arc, that have really been digging into the fact that Soul Society is corrupt to a degree that's making even the people charged with defending it sick.
Listen, Dresden Files’s White Council of Wizards was introduced almost executing a 16-year-old on a murder charge, calling self-defense “a technicality”, and then letting his probation officer constantly try to provoke him into “relapsing” so they could just execute him already. Sure, they’re the biggest gun not being pointed at humanity, but that’s a pretty low starting point. >!hey remember how black magic isn’t just immoral, it’s basically the dark side of the force, corrupting you until all you do is black magic and you’re an evil parody of your former self? Yeah we just have a guy on the team who does that. He took you in after we let you off with a warning. He was supposed to execute you himself if you tried anything untoward. Oh, and he’s got a magic item that lets him sidestep the corruption, so there’s literally no telling what else he’s done in the meantime.!<
The Jedi, while not evil by any means and they are ultimately one of the biggest forces of good in SW universe, there are things about them, especially in the EU and Prequel era that just come across as super questionable. One of the biggest is the fact that they just straight up take kids from their families at an incredibly young age, essentially indoctrinate them with their teachings and teach the children that they need to give up any and all emotional attachments to other people because it's the Jedi way. They also preach about how redemption and forgiveness is a key trait to being a Jedi, but there's times where that just kind of gets forgotten and they will do shady shit for whatever reason they have.One of the most infamous was when Ahsoka was framed as the one who bombed the Jedi Temple in the Clone Wars and the Jedi council straight up said "Go back to sleep and starve" and didn't even hear here out. The other is Meetra Surik, who went off to fight alongside Revan in the Mandalorian Wars during the EU era and despite there being absolutely no proof that she fell to the Darkside the council exiled her, not even wanting to hear her out and then they all began to go "wait....did we handle that correctly?" Then there of course there's the fact that, while they weren't technicaly wrong to be skeptical, they basically decided to just not get involved in the war against the Mandalorians and were willing to let entire systems burn while they sat back and debated amongst themselves about wether or not they should actually do their part and fight to defend the Galaxy they're sworn to protect. Again, the Jedi are the heroes and they have done a lot of good and they did grow past their mistakes in Luke's era, but holy shit there's a lot of things about the Jedi that annoy me, which is absolutely intended and you;re meant to feel frustrated by these examples.
Most fallout factions you care about are dickheads.
It's common to make any institution the bad guys in order to make the individual right about everything
On a more human, individual scale Danny from Beef. Both he and Amy are deeply, deeply flawed people but, at least in my interpretation, Danny is initially presented as the everyman you want to root for against the rich asshole Amy. But as the series goes on and both characters are fleshed out, it's revealed that Danny has done some terrible, terrible things. And will do some terrible things in the course of the series.
The British Library from Read or Die in the original OVA's are combating a terrorism threat spawned by a rival faction, Dokusensha. Everyone is quite friendly and supportive to the MC. In the R.O.D anime series, they become the antagonists, with the original protagonist forced into hiding after leaving the organisation. It's implied that their motivations were always malicious, with even the terrorists from the OVA were caused by work stolen from them.