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)
GW has forgotten about most things to be fair. Attention given to the blueberries and overpriced plastic toys are the only two constant in the life of this company.
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.
The Votann only really resemble the squats in name, form, and basic lore. Since 40k was just Warhammer Fantasy in Space, the Squats were really just the wacky Sci-Fi take on Fantasy's Dwarfs that quickly fell behind as 40k quickly became much more independent from Fantasy.
Just take a quick comparison at the 40k Squat models and the modern Votann models, there's a very clear difference.
That's kind of my point. Pushes the Imperium more towards the evil end (not that the Necrons aren't also an empire xenociding the galaxy, they're just older).
the hive mind is actually aware of what it does, think its in valedor or its accompanying short story wraithflight. but it feels concepts like hate & desire for revenge, its well aware of what it does & how much suffering it inflicts. it wants to torture the main character & make them relive thousands of agonizing deaths for daring to combat it when it was about to feed on a human world.
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u/Curious-Research-559 10h ago
The closest a can think is 40k, but everyone is bad in that setting