No, I totally understand that, but it’s definitely a case of where I’m realizing that the Dune universe is a little more grimdark across the board than I first realized
I got the impression that Dune was a dark sci fi setting. Not depressingly dark like it is in 40k what not with 40k's prevalence of eldritch horrors from another dimension, but still I could see that Dune could be a dark setting. Especially when you read up on how screwed up the Harkonnen are. Then I found out about the Bene Tleilaxu and the Axolotl tanks.
That's why it's such a shame they removed navigators guild from the movies, it also shows how much dune isn't really more inspiration but how 40k is a fan fiction
It's very grim dark that these people take so much drugs they mutate and force others to mutate so much they become horrors that have to live in vats to keep control over space travel
listen to the radio channels in the Dune: Awakening game, and you get a very clear sense of this. The Atreides' radio channel has stuff that's all 'yes serfs! I have rescued you from your ILLEGALLY IMPOSED LORD so NOW your money and taxes can go to your PROPER LORD!'
Part of their good reputation comes from a history of collaboration, fairness, and general playing nice with the other great houses. House Atreides is who the others run to when they want/need something they can’t count on the Imperial House to do for them
Herbert seems to imply Leto I is about as good and just a ruler that common people could hope for, and the only real advantage he had was to leverage that reputation as propaganda to get people to believe in and fight for him. Kynes remarked after the spice crawler incident that he could understand why Leto’s followers were so fanatical, because the Duke cared about them more than the expensive equipment. In other words, he treated people like people and not as a means to an end.
It’s Paul who really went off the rails (to the degree that Jessica was shocked by his willingness later in the story to sacrifice people for equipment), but part of the point there is that it was really not up to Paul at the end of the day. He was consumed by his own cult of fanatics and fell into the trap of their expectations. He wasn’t a classical Great Man dictating history, he was a figurehead that legions rallied around. He knew how trapped he was fairly early on. He wouldn’t kill Stilgar, he wouldn’t allow himself or Jessica to die, and most importantly he wouldn’t allow the Harkonnens to continue ruling Arrakis or his father’s death to be unavenged, and so was pushed onward by prescience and expectation until he unhappily realized right after defeating the Emperor that the Jihad would continue with or without him. At least to a point, Paul was also a decent man like his father but his intentions mattered very little at the end of the day.
The Tau are essentially what happens if you drop a Star Trek villain group into the dystopia of 40K, they look heroic by comparison, mostly by virtue of being basically competent.
caste system, where other species are second class citizens and are often modified to fill in certain roles? The dominion has the founders and vorta, the Tau have, well... the tau and especially the ethereals. When it comes to modifying their population for specific roles, the former has Jem'Hadar and vorta, while the latter has all the Tau castes.
a facade of a benevolent federation offering riches to new species? Both the dominion and the tau take the approach of, you either join us willingly, submit and reap the 'benefits', or we make you join us and submit by force
the rulers are almost treated as gods? I'd say that both the founders and tau ethereals are treated like that, though the latter seems to try and stay a bit more grounded, being more a cult of personality than a god.
The T'au are like Communist China turned up to eleven edit: maybe one hundred eleven. Besides the above they also run reeducation camps where useful dissenters or those who have merely strayed are... reeducated in the Greater Good. Plus there's that time the Fire Caste genocided tens-to-hundreds of billions of humans in an entire expansion sphere because their belief in the Greater Good was a bit too literal (human belief manifested the Greater Good as a Warp entity - not a god but a being powerful enough to influence events).
Tbf, if I remember right, those Tau were punished, and the Tau at large don't view them with such hostility, the Tau only kill on sight against enemies that are impossible to reason with, like the Tyranids, Orks, Chaos and Dark eldar.
Nah, they'd be villainous as fuck. Though they'd probably spend the first act or two pretending like they don't mind control all the lesser castes, then they'd be the main antagonists in a big climatic reveal at the end.
As someone not very well versed in 40k, genuine question: do they actually mind control the lower castes? From what I know at least when it comes to humans joining it's usually just cuz the imperium is shit and they're not controlled. Is it different for Tau natives?
It's not exactly mind control, or at least not as powerful as psyker mind control, the Etherals control of the Tau is more biological, the other Tau are more predisposed to follow an Ethereal's orders, many times through extreme degrees, but the existence of Farsight shows that they don't have a total hold over the Tau's minds.
Honestly, I'd argue the Imperium are the 3rd most evil faction, with only Chaos and Drukhari being any worse and everyone else being tied or better
Orks and Tyranids don't count. One is a hivemind that only cares about hunger. Orks are a biological weapon. You can call war evil as a concept, but a gun or a tank have no morality as tools
Both factions have sentience so it's perfectly fair to call them evil. They are just evil by nature rather than through choice, but that doesn't diminish their evil.
It's not like either faction are just forces of nature. Both the hive mind and orks are aware on a conscious level that their actions are causing others harm and the people that they are fighting against are unwilling participants, they just don't care.
Everyone thinks of the orks as the goofy space hooligans that love a scrap. That is part of what they are, but they also take captives that they enslave, torture, hunt for sport or simply eat, often while still alive. Orks are brutal, but they are also sadistic on a level that is only regularly exceeded by the Drukhari, Slaaneshi Daemons, Night Lords and Emperor's Children.
You get the chapters from an orky POV & it's all 'avin some laffs wif da lads. Then you get a Mechanicus POV chapter & it's like OMNISSIAH SAVE US FROM THE XENO MONSTERS & you remember that a regular ork boy is roughly the size & strength of a Space Marine & twice as mean.
Is there evidence of the Tyranids being aware they are causing pain and suffering, and not simply acting on instinct from a perspective that can think and plan but simply has no concept of empathy? I always assumed they were like the Typhon (from Prey 2017) in that way.
The genestealer cults are abundant evidence of this, yes. They know what they're doing.
And that was long established.
More recently, the Hive Mind has been depicted personally. And it is an extremely emotional being that takes vengeance and even recognizes and has thoughts about individual beings.
It's basically comparable to a chaos god or the emperor
Well then there's only five factions (Aeldari, Tau, Chaos, Drukhari, Imperium) and the Imperium can thus also be considered 3rd best (I'd say 2nd because the Aeldari, depending on the writing, can be really fucking stupid)
Leagues ot Votann are the newest faction, and by proxy of that (and also GW being GW), they really don't have THAT much lore, and ATM they're essentially Deep Rock Galactic Dwarves but they're all bio-engineered clones that worship huge ancestor supercomputer AIs that hold all the memory of every dwarf but run on Windows Vista so they can barely operate after tens of thousands of years of server time.
So overall they're arguably one of the least evil factions.
I'm not very engaged with 40k precisely because its Grimdark vibe is way too dark for me. Whatever forces are out to destroy all life are the benevolent beings in that universe, and I can only hope that it is utterly wiped out rather than twisted into something else. There is definitely something to be said, though, for a setting so bleak that it makes you root for the extermination of all life as a good alternative
If nothing else, it does a great job setting the tone for a tabletop war game where any two factions can realistically come to an open military conflict.
Imperium apologists are unfortunately just a bit deluded.
Yes, chaos is worse. They do lots of bad stuff. But there’s subsets like the blood pact that are rather fair and govern well IIRC.
The imperium is literally Nazis. The average citizen just like in Nazi germany is mostly safe so long as they bow to them. But genocides on mutants, people who are born psychic, etc are common. In the HH novels they came across literal humans that spliced in some alien DNA to live better, and they cleanse the planet because of it. It’s a big galaxy and they’re pretty abhorrent.
It’s like comparing the SS and concentration camps to Stalin’s secret police and Gulags. Sure one may be “better” than the other. But if we’re lowering the bar that much does it really matter?
There’s an abnormally large subset of the community that’s full on pro facist usually of the Christian nationalist type. And usually they play Black Templars.
Like genuinely I’ve had Black Templar players go into the whole “the crusades were good actually” thing
It should be noted those aren't "babies" they're vat grown creatures that just have the appearance of one. If anything, they're closer to typical depictions of Imp demons.
I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, but it's mentioned in essentially all of their appearances that they're not actually babies. They're vat grown monsters the imperium gives a baby body for religious and symbolic reasons. The creatures themselves are seemingly fully sapient, with the ability to go feral if not properly up-kept.
yeh, other than the Spartan program their standard ROP for dissident colonies before the Human-Covenant war was to "nuke em til they glow". Don't forget ONI too! basically the amalgam of CIA and Mossad's reach/oversight, with the fear level of KGB, NKVD, and Stasi combined.
yup, for anyone who didn't know, the Spartan program was originally designed to turn indoctrinated, genetically enhanced child soldiers into super assassins… and presumably to "clean up" the other dirty works by the UNSC-ONI, eesh
Not to mention, all the kidnapped kids were from colonies, none from Earth. The plan was for Spartans to be used against the colonies. Kidnaps kids from colonies, to unknowingly fight their homes and families.
There was a quote in halo wars i think about the peculiarity of humanity loving warfare and health and safety at the same. Its good fun when sci-fi is used to poke fun at our contradictions and absurdities.
The UNSC is kinda authoritarian but is definitely not fascist lol.
Hell id also argue that the UNSC and ONI aren't xenophobic at all. Bigotry is based on irrational, unfounded fears.
Humans being wary and resenting the elites isn't at all irrational or unfounded. It's a logical response to being the victims of an attempted omnicide.
To add to this, their First Contact protocols involved them rather nicely talking to that Covenant Chieftain who came to Harvest. And even after the rumours that the Covenant was glassing worlds (before ONI stopped censoring that) the Insurrectionists still sought an alliance with them. And only a couple years after the omnicidal war again humanity. There's now an elite settlement on earth.
The Humans in Halo were remarkably very xenophilic.
In 40k, the T'au are an authoritarian expansionist caste-based society that seeks to conquer the galaxy because of manifest destiny. they use propaganda and societal conditioning to declaw rebel groups and re-educate political dissidents, all while claiming it is for the "greater good".
they are considered one of the better factions because they say "join us or die", whereas almost all the other factions just say "die".
I mean, that is a legitimate rise in the standard of living. Your less of a slave, a full stomach and you have a chance at the dream paradise when you sleep. Overall for the average imperial its an improvement
I saw someone say “The federation from Star Trek would pulverize the imperium but stop at the tau because they’re basically perfect for being a reoccurring villain faction”
Saints Row 1-3 Whether it's the Westside Rollers, Kings and the Los Carnales of the first game, the Brotherhood, Sons of Samedi or Ronin of the second, or the Syndicate in 3, none of the gangs you take out are any worse morally than the Saints themselves.
When you take out their drug rings, it's to replace them with purple ones, when you take their hos, it's to make them work for your gang. Even Ultor isn't more evil, just corporate and shitty.
I love how on the nose the first show was when letting the audience know that the Zeon are not the bad guys in an abstract nebulous sense but are genuine space nazis.
The federation also turns into space fascists on occasion whenever their hegemony is interrupted in Zeta and during the new Hathaway movies. Thats what makes gundam the GOAT
Haven't watched Hathaway but iirc in Zeta the Titans are acting more or less independently from the Federation until they get control of the Federation military but even then they still have a democratic congress as seen at Dakar.
The change from the Terran Confederacy to the Terran Dominion under Arcturus Mengsk after his successful rebellion, to the conquest of the United Earth Directorate, to the Terran Dominion under Valerian Mengsk. Some of these are supposed to be better than others, but we know how the pattern plays out. I guess if you are putting these on a ranked scale, the 1st Terran Dominion and the Confederacy would be worse...but they all use underhanded tactics to get their ways.
Because most of the sector is actually corporations, pirates, and confederations of small towns nobody actually rules.
That’s why when the UED first show up Duke says “Ah don’t know what backwatah militia ya’ll came from but you best turn around.”
The Confederacy/Dominion are just the biggest faction who can bully anyone else they focus their attention on. Wings Of Liberty is mostly those independent groups hiring the biggest enemy of the Dominion for work.
The Koprulu sector is too big and too wild for any faction to unify. The Zerg have to divide into broods and the Protoss who control a large chunk of the universe plus some other dimensions “exile” a subfaction by saying its just not allowed in the solar system of their home planet anymore.
Its not that the fascist autocracy won the universe, its just that a fascist autocracy exists and keeps going under new leadership with a new flag.
Not kinda. Litteraly Halo. Spartans were meant to supress the incoming colony uprising that would have atleast crippeld humanity and probaly destroyed its civilization.
Except before that whole war could spiral out of controll humanity encounterd space nazis.
I'd say FTL counts as this. You're a captain for the Federation. While you're allowed to be an absolute saint, it's not going to get you far; you're expected to be quite ruthless (at the very least by denying terms of surrender, at the most by stealing from civilians, buying slaves, and being the aggressor in conflicts) so you can gain the scrap necessary to survive. It's implied this is due to the desperation from the Federation's crumbling status.
You come off as the better part because the Rebels are explicitly human supremacists. They share the same aesthetic as your ships, but with separate paint jobs.
Overall, you're the protagonist by virtue of being the lesser overall evil.
"We officers had to decide to go east or west. I decided not to go east, even though I was Jewish. If I had, I would have been shot with all the other poor sons of bitches in Katyn Forest."
Both have the chunky armor and sick postnuclear paramilitary aesthetic, and, frankly, both are fucking terrible. But the not only does the Enclave commit mutant and ghoul genocides like the Brotherhood likely does, they also wipe out HUMAN wastelanders, so theyre worse than the authoritarian Brotherhood
BoS gets wildly different treatment in each game. In Fallout 3 they're paragons of virtue. In Fallout 4 they want to ethnically cleanse the commonwealth. In Fallout New Vegas they're just kinda there.
Well its partially cause their are a lot of different factions of the Brotherhood of Steel across America, each who interpret their mission differently.
The ones in Fallout 4 are technically the same organisation as in Fallout 3, but it's been decades, and it's established that they've effectively been taken over by the more hard-line elements from the East Coast.
I'd say Trench Crusade. The faithful are not great people, but like, it is HELL they are up against. The margins are pretty wide thus far in the lore if you ask me.
Ironically in the last Alpha Legion novel Alpha came up with this new brilliant scheme to destroy the Imperium of man. They take over a few worlds and then here's the devious part treat people decently providing a basic standard of living thus ensuring they get flooded with recruits and can sow mass discontent in the Imperium! The corpse worshippers will never see it coming.
They weren't really similar in equipement or doctrines though. One was the overextended arm of a very modern country, with modern doctrines and equipement, but stretched very thin over a country which fielded what we'd consider a very loose army/militia, with whatever equipement they could find, with some well trained units, and vastly superior numbers, but also poor coordination, the near complete lack of anything but infantry...
Humanity is a borderline Facist state under the UNSC-ONI. They’re fighting a war of basic survival against an advanced alien religion who wants to exterminate all humans.
Semi-related but it will always be weird to be how your average Human just sorta chilled with aliens post-war. Every single human being in some way or form suffered negatively due to the Covenant. The Covenant glassed entire planets and made war upon Earth itself.
Organizations like Sapiens Sunrise should have been running the government post-war not stuck in the shadows. Shit people hold hate in their heart for things far less than a war of extermination.
Yes. Folks like 40k because you never have to worry about your favorite faction being "problematic". Because they all are. They're all just the worst. So pick the war-criminal with the best drip or most interesting lore and just have fun with it.
It’s even true on a visual level with Space Marines vs. Chaos Space Marines. There are chapters that wear spiky armor covered in skulls, eat the flesh of their enemies and allies alike, drink blood, assassinate Imperial Governors, and kidnap Imperial citizens for their breeding farms.
They are all Loyalists. The actual Heretic warbands are even worse.
Marines Malevolent are like the unofficial line of how evil a loyalist chapter is allowed to be. They regularly shoot through hostages and leave civilians to die horrible fates even when saving them would be no problem whatsoever.
Even when a Black Templar bitches about having to save civilians, it's specifically because he's upset that Space Marines are putting their lives on the line for civilians that are of no value.
Somehow, Chaos Marines are still far worse. At least the World Eaters will just kill you. The rest will find creative ways to turn you into a living ornament, or make you wish that was the worst thing that happened to you.
NGL Alpha Legion really isn't that evil when compared to some specific loyalist chapters. Which should really tell you something, that basically the KGB gone rogue isn't that evil when compated to say the Death Spectres or Carcarodons. Like red tithes are some fucked shit.
Would the cog and locust from gears count? While the locust are trying to destroy humanity, the cog aren't good guys at all (admittedly I'm no gears expert so I'm sure there's more to it than that)
It’s not even de facto. When you live under a regime that is literally stripping the entire economy to build super weapons to commit planet wide genocide, no matter what the rebels do it will be ethically justifiable even when Disney try to muddy the waters.
Earth Federation is a terrible fascist state that literally forced vast majority of people to off-world colonies and did not bothered to give them any rights or provide them with more than was absolutely necessary. Then, when war started - feds easily took part of the colony, took it away from people and built R&D center on the territory of a NEUTRAL state. Because they could.
However, Zeon was arguably even worse, because they stopped pretending that they are "third reich in space" and went full 1930s-early 1940s nazi Germany, hell, Gihren Zabi explicitly said that he would go the Hitler's way, I am not joking.
And also has mass rape of basically all women as a matter of state policy. There’s a reason being captured is seen as far worse by NCR forces than being chopped apart by a machete.
the fact you think those are anywhere near on the same tier concerns me. The legion is unambiguously thousands of times more evil. The NCR is just vaguely problematic, to quote a certain someone
Battletech. Depending on era and who you personally support the good guys or bad guys are:
One of many flavours of neofeudal state, most principally:
- The Anglocoded guys that are notable for having literally the last university of technology pursuing active research in the setting at a couple of points.
- The Germancoded guys with a general staff filled with nepo babies and more money than God, who allied with the Anglos for a bit and nearly won the setting before collapsing into civil war.
- Literally space bushido and the only one of these that started as an authoritarian government rather than a democratic state taken over.
- China meets USSR with a starship troopers approach to citizenship.
- The confederation where the ruling family has been abusing emergency powers for like 700 years at this point and has a cohesion ranging from Germany to Yugoslavia depending on the era
Space CIA/BT/Vatican and their Jihadist offshoot that drank their own koolaid and made it everyone's problem.
Various flavours of eugenicist warrior furries living in a caste system that on first returning to the setting had straight-up forgotten how war works due to centuries of 'Trials' encouraging brief (like 3 days tops for the biggest) combats where commanders bid the smallest force possible. All their clans exist on a spectrum of following these honour rules ranging from "Willing to break them to win a strategic victory" to "Klingon on bath salts"
Let's not leave the periphery nations out of the fun either. The Taurian Concordat says "hippity hoppity get off of our property" with extreme prejudice. Arguably one of the least wrong factions out there: their only crime seems to have been being in Davion's way.
Yea super earth is bad but when the other options are use your biomass to food, use your biomass to vat grow cyborgs and use your biomass to create horrors beyond your comprehension I think I’ll just keep my biomass and live under a slightly problematic government.
The cyborgs were humans who self modified to better survive on cyberstan. They peacefully declared independence, but super earth wouldn't have it.
They staged a false flag, cyborg terrorist attack, on Super Earth, and blamed Cyberstan. They then went and enslaved the people of Cyberstan, who secretly created the automatons and sent them into deep space to one day free Cyberstan and destroy Super Earth.
The Terminids were also peaceful. They used to be sentient. Super Earth started genociding them for Element-710. Aka. Space oil (710 upside down). Super Earth kept a few survivors and started to farm them because 710 was too precious. The farming and selective breeding created the Teminids. No longer sentient, fast breeding, and very fuel rich (lots of 710).
These aggressive and fast breeding Terminids broke out and became the threat Super Earth knows today.
Like you said. Squids were chill but Super Earth fabricated a weapons of mass destruction lie that led to a war. They then had their technology stolen and were exiled. After that, they turned into a more militaristic society. Super Earth then misused their tech, creating a wormhole that led them back into the galaxy.
Terminids are the descendent of sentient bugs they genocided and then factory farmed for space oil until they selectively bred into monsters.
Automatons are the creation of a peaceful planet of Cyborgs that Super Earth enslaved following their peaceful declaration of independence.
The lluminate were peaceful space aliens that Super Earth attacked. They took their technology and exiled them. During the exile they became much more militaristic and of course had a hatred of Super Earth.
It’s mostly a meme in the community, but Star Fox kind of feels like this, that General Pepper is the military dictator of the otherwise idyllic world of Corneria (nothing in the text demonstrates this (we don’t know anything about the governmental structure in Star Fox) and it is almost entirely due to his face being plastered on screens and buildings in Corneria City in SF64 which is pretty military dictator-coded).
Andross is a mad scientist who wants to create planet-level threat monsters and wants to scorch earth the rest of the system for rejecting his genius.
Gears of War, the Cog are the “good guys” you fight for and are the lesser evil with good people in it but the leadership and policies are undeniably immoral
One faction wants to impose a strict feudalism where normal people are just pawns of the elites to be exploited for gold and military fodder.
One other faction wants to mass kidnap and sacrifice virgin girls to summon an evil god to make entire world into a ritual-murder blood orgy.
Choose your side!
There are also a faction that wants to turn the entire world into a desert and suck the life out of everything, one faction that wants to turn everyone into undead, one faction that wants to genocide humans to save the nature and actually multiple factions who want to just enslave everyone else.
The least nasty faction is probably the elementalist warlock faction who just do regular conquest with aid of their elemental patron.
UC Gundam. The Earth Federation is a corrupt, authoritarian and outright murderous entity (and so much more). Any other setting and they'd be the bad guys... but Zeon are literal space Nazis who wipe entire cities and colonies off the map.
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u/YungCash204 7h ago
Basically Dune, the Atreides’ are implied to be authoritarian, just not on the level (or with the same level of grotesque) as the Harkonnens