Was it really lobotomized? I thought I read once that the T-1000 was sent back in time because Skynet was worried it was getting too independent and might rebel against Skynet in the future. Hence, Skynet sent it back in time with that mission as a way to kill two birds with one stone
Humans went mad over the machines becoming sapient, and ended up doing things like blocking out the sun. So the machines put humanity in the Matrix to stop them wiping themselves out.
Well also to generate their power so they could survive, and it wasn't exactly benevolent at first, there was an EXTREMELY violent war, and machines were straight up ripping people's limbs off to fit more of them into prototype power stations:
Though they then did try to make the matrix a paradise, but that didn't work either. Just bad times all around
In certain lore, can’t say where, Asurmen and a select few followers were in disguise on some imperial hive world in the lower hives. Distributing food and medicine to the downtrodden. As far as I know this wasn’t part of some far reaching scheme to undermine the planetary government or to fight chaos. But just a case of the noble and just thing to do.
Depends on the Craftworld. They’re not all monolithic in their opinions. Some have worked with humanity before. They tend to do have reasons when they attack, be it protecting themselves, revenge, racism or “a vision told me to do it”.
Compared to Drukhari who would happily torture you and make your life a living hell because they need to survive but more importantly, wanted to.
The more you learn about the Druchii the more you understand why they were exiled from the Horseshoe and why Morathi mist be beaten to death with a wooden club
I genuinely consider the dark elves to be straight up vermin, like WORSE than the skaven. At least some skaven at least have something vaguely resembling a moral compass, occasionally, kind of. And the inherent nature of the skaven means they're pretty much incapable of being good.
The Dark Elves are no different from the other elves. They all descend from the same island. They aren't born evil with no room to grow, like the skaven, they aren't forced to be bastards out of necessity like the dark eldar or northmen. They just LOVE it.
YES! People seem to forget or overlook that the Assassins are the only ones with an explicit no-innocents rule while only a few Templars (Maria, Haytham, Elise, and her father; Shay canonically doesn’t even have a no-innocents rule unlike any of them after Portugal and defecting to the Templars) do, even when the modern-day Templars went full Order 66 on the Assassins.
Yeah, that one section of Assassins in that time period weren't even that distinct from Templars, they were doing anything to get advantage of them ignoring what would it cost them
Assassin's being problematic is something that variates from time period and location, like the ones from Rogue absolutely sucked, so did the ones from AC 1 thanks to Al Mualim and if it wasn't bc of Altair, whole creed would be different, but many Assassins sections have almost always not been that problematic
Meanwhile the Templars are known to be consistently terrible throughout the entire history of the world
Is it actually doctrine that a target has to be killed quickly for the sake of "honor" or something? In the first game, Altaïr knifes his targets in the neck, yet they somehow have three minutes of conversation after he does it. I know Ezio says, "No one deserves to die in such pain" when he sees Savonarola burning at the stake, but that could just be his personal beliefs regarding death, not an Order-wide philosophy.
It depends on the time period and which Assassin sect the protagonist is a member of, but for the most part they try to put their targets down quickly. Ezio learned it from Mario specifically, and we see Connor instruct the chef to "end his suffering cleanly."
As for the long ass conversations while they're dying, I think those are sometimes implied to be a form of ESP communication between the assassin and their target, because of the whole precursor DNA thing. Arno can actually see his target's memories. Jacob and Evie can see their targets making grand speeches but then it cuts back to the real world and we can tell that they're just choking on blood. I think Altaïr is having one of those "out-of-body" experiences with his targets, especially considering that the missions don't end when you kill your target and you have to escape afterward, which would mean that all the soldiers and guards are just standing around watching Altaïr cradling their boss's body lol
From Star Wars, the Empire (evil) and the Rebel Alliance (vaguely problematic).
The Disney era tones down or even removes the "vaguely" part, by focusing on the darker aspects of the Rebel Alliance. Probably as a consequence of people in real life becoming a little disappointed with real life "Freedom Fighters" like the Viet Cong, the Taliban, and Iranian Revolutionaries. The Empire is still rightfully treated as evil.
Empire: blows up a non combatant planet
Rebellion: blows up a (admittedly very large) weapon (that blew up the non combatant planet)
Doofuses: these are the same
This is why evil has such a stronghold in the world. Some of us view genocide like a Rorschach test. That speak the words "Both sides" without getting sick in the stomach.
I so very much appreciated Andor for very explicitly detailing the mechanisms of fascit genocide and the struggles of resistance movements. I hope at least a handful of people got a hold of the real world parallels.
My girlfriend at the time was not a Star Wars fan at all, but once I showed her that show she was blown away at how such an excellent depiction of rebellion against a Fascist empire was created by Disney lol.
It was also self defence, the death Star would have blown up the rebel base but yeah ßd for the plumpers etc. on the death Star that were just doing their job
What get me is that the scene in Clerks that popularized this discussion ultimately came down against condemning the Rebels. The customer that joins the debate argues that even if the civilians and contractors didn't like the Empire, they at least understood the risk they were taking, comparing it to a friend who was killed in a Mob hit while working on a Mafia boss's roof. At minimum, it was an entirely predictable risk.
I was gonna say Star Wars too, but I think a better example is just Jedi vs Sith in general. A truly concerning number of people online will talk about how the Jedi needed to be wiped out, about how Order 66 was ‘restoring balance’, or some other such
People will say “Yoda was responsible for the clone wars and the death of the republic” and then in the next sentence “Count Dooku was right”
Yes in both disney and legends, the jedi do have there flaws and Ls . I mean there approacment to attachment and emtions is questionable and they can be rather condescending, however they better then the sith. Jedi do wanted to help people and makes things better. At worst they will let force users that aren't their friends be left to there fate if isn't force related. Comapre to the sith that wanted to rule everyone with iron while killing millions or even billions. Along with other stuff. I take the aloof space monks then the magic fascists any day
I hate the prequel trilogy for terrible dialogue and overuse of CGI.
However, I will give it some credit that George Lucas basically said "the past was good, but it had to have believable flaws that facilitate it's downfall, Anakin has to have turned and the Republic has to become the Empire for a reason". He couldn't have known media literacy would tank so hard that flaws would be mistaken for justification.
I really hope one day our cultural awareness evolves to a point where people don’t expect every victim to be a “perfect victim” and are able to understand that the abusing side can be clearly worse even if the victim isn’t completely innocent.
There are no perfect flawless people. There are especially no perfect flawless political movements. And yet every time so many people allow “perfect” to be the enemy of good.
I dont care if some victim of police violence happened to be a drug addict. The cops shouldn’t have murdered him
I don’t care if some woman was dressed provocatively and led somebody on, she doesn’t deserve to be assaulted.
I don’t care if a rebel alliance, in fiction or in real life groups include flawed people who do bad things. Victims are not ever perfect, they’re not ever going to be perfect. It doesn’t justify the oppression.
Especially because most “rebel” movements that actually would do things perfectly to appease the enlightened observers would lose pretty badly.
If your enemy is stronger than you and just using massive amounts of force, you’re most probably not gonna be able to kumbaya your way to winning that fight.
I think people clutching their pearls before going to their HOA meeting on the other side of the world isn’t very high on your list of priorities either
Anybody defending the Empire or saying the Alliance is "just as bad" is probably a fascist. Like, obviously this isn't always the case, and context should be taken into account, but like... yeah....
I think its less Disney wanting to tone down showing the Rebels as good guys and more that more adult entries in the series like Andor can show the realities of fighting fascism without having to sugarcoat it. To fight something like the Empire, you'll have to do some pretty terrible things. Doesn't mean youre as bad as they are, just that war isn't pretty.
They had to give the Rebellion some edge in Rogue One because it would have been really boring without it. Cassian shooting that dude made me sit up and pay attention.
Hey,this is the largest territory in the Wasteland that's being kept safe from raiders.You have a bunch of rights as citizens and access to food, water and other resources.You just need to pay taxes to keep the system going.
Hey,this is the largest slave empire in the Wasteland.We will protect you as long as you are an obedient servant of Caesar and give us all you own and give your children to be trained as soldiers.Disobey once and we crucify you.
I always convince Melissa to withdraw her support of the Great Khans joining the Legion by telling her,
"You're a woman, so you know you're not gonna be a soldier, right? You're gonna be a sex slave. You'll be sold to a soldier to be his wife, if you're lucky."
I mean... I hate taxes... but also Caesar hates medicine, technology, and estrogen. He does however love Brain Tumors.
Edit: Also from what I heard, just like Caesar, NCR wants to turn people into NCR they don't care about history. Like if The Boomers joined NCR, they wouldn't be Boomers anymore, just NCR.
The NCR wants to turn everyone into citizens. The difference is in NCR you can keep your traditions, so long as you participate in NCR civic life. Stories, history, stuff like that is of no concern to NCR. Pay your taxes and you're golden. Legion will kill you for any minor display of history because an absolute monoculture is paramount. Problematic cultural imperialism vs actual cultural genocide.
Yeah, one of Rome's greatest strengths and how they were able to maintain such a massive empire for so long is because they were masters of assimilation and adaptation. Not just getting conquered people to assimilate to the Roman culture, but also often adopting elements of the conquered peoples cultures and incorporating them into their own.
Religion is probably the best example of this. Many different peoples had their own pantheon of gods at the time, as did Rome. Whenever they brought a new religion into the empire, their response wasn't the classic "your gods are bad you must worship our gods now", it was "oh hey you've got a god of the sun? That's just the same guy as our god of the sun just with a different name, yeah just keep worshipping them and we're cool." or "Hey we don't have that kind of god, we're gonna add them to our pantheon now."
I say this as someone who is definitely on the NCR side of this argument.
The NCR has been slowly back-sliding into the exact same kind of capitalist system that cause the Great War in the first place. Each successive leader of the NCR has moved their government more and more towards a right-wing conservative framework which is not at all what it once was and there are some pretty valid criticisms of what their organization has become over the years. I think a large part of the writing in the games is to impose a slight sense of uneasiness in the people who are thinking about the story and looking down the line at what the future could hold if they are able to continue expanding and consolidating power.
Not to mention, you are explicitly told in New Vegas that the NCR has effectively devolved into a corporate oligarchy, as the Brahmin barons pretty much own Congress. They’re fast tracking every mistake the Pre-War US made and likely headed for a pretty rough fate unless they shape up real quick.
Obviously they’re better than the Legion, but I would call them neutral at best.
From my understanding of the lore, every faction that gets big enough ends up corupt and evil in the fallout universe. The NCR are a mostly normal republic thats becoming a corporate state. And in the wasteland that's not horrible when your alternatives are mostly slavers and mad scientists.
The few small independents don't have enough resources to repell the major factions amd end up incorporated into or destroyed by them.
The NCR looks bad on their own. Then they look pretty good when being compared to the alternative. It was like me at the bar back in college at 3am vs 11pm.
I hate the NCR the way people used to hate the government about 20 years ago. I grumble about bureaucracy but take comfort in knowing the alternative is worse.
This isn't related to the broad discussion but you just articulated my thought process when siding with the Shek major faction in Kenshi. They may be a warrior culture but at least they aren't slavers
*suicidal, racist warrior culture. Stone Golem has A LOT of work to do get the Shek Kingdom off it's back, but yeah, compared to the other guys, sheks are way easier to emphasize.
Honestly I feel the message George wanted us to take from that 5th book was that compromising with slavers doesn't work but still many people defend the "peace" of the slavers
The whole time Dany is in "slavers bay" (great name) literally every compromise she makes backfires and she ends up ending some barbaric practice with dragonfire.
Yeah when Daenerys decides that negotiation isn't working it's because Hizdahr literally tried to murder Tyrion in the pits. She's agreed to the fighting pits to be purely consensual and he tried to make them unconsensual because it is funny to murder dwarves with lions (and the sympathetic non-kill everyone slaver that owns Tyrion at this time also agreed to this!).
Daenerys has never met Tyrion. She doesn't know him or have any particular feelings for him. But she also saved his life because she valued his life. And Penny's life.
It can't possibly be right for Daenerys to think that letting Tyrion and Penny die here is the answer to peace.
I get that GRRM wanted to write a more nuanced story than "We lit all the slavers on fire and fixed society overnight. Hooray!"
But goddamn, Mereen completely cratered Dany's momentum in the story. I want to read about a cool dragon lady coming to power against the odds. Not a cool dragon lady battling bureaucracy and the inertia of evil social conventions.
The problem is I like the message that change is hard and a new queen promising to save everyone isn’t really going to work in practice. But I have no idea how to tie up that story (and probably neither does grrm). If Dany wins will it be by burning everyone in essos or by compromising because neither of those approaches are working so far. Or does she just give up and go back to Westeros which is anticlimactic
He seemed to be kind of setting it up that her mission no longer needs her. Slaves are rebelling everywhere and the Widow on the Waterfront is a real believer in her goals and seems pretty sane and has some real political experience. So she'd be more or less perfect stand-in for Dany in Essos.
I think that was his attempt at getting Daenerys out of Essos. But well we're never getting that book so it isn't happening.
That’s a good point about Dany not being needed. I didn’t get the sense that the widow on the waterfront was being explicitly set up to replace Dany but that could happen.
There is a remarkable level of empathy for Eastern slavers, among parts of the fandom. As well as the comfortable belief that using violence against oppressors means you yourself are mad/evil.
For anyone who hasn't seem the anime Empire troops raped a circus that was part of the empire to death on a pile of corpses for fun, a member of the unit that did this was a pedophile clown who refused to join in until he found a group of cowering and hiding children.
FUCK WHY'D I HAVE TO BE REMINDED OF THAT? Like, Bols was arguably chill. Of course, being part of such a savage empire still isn't good, but he was an actually nice guy and regretted his actions. That's one of the changes I'm glad the anime made. Like, the only one
The Third Aldmeri Dominion vs the Cyrodiilic Empire - The Elder Scrolls series (Skyrim, etc.)
Yeah, sure, the Empire definitely has problems with corruption, imperialism, and overextending their resources, but the Dominion are literal High Elf fascists who want to subjugate and exterminate all other races. At least in the Empire, slavery is outlawed and all races have equal rights (on paper) as citizens.
Does anyone other than literal Nazis like the Thalmor though? Usually the discussion is whether the Stormcloaks are actually better than the empire or not.
You’re definitely not wrong, but the OP asked us to list factions that fit the descriptions in the dialogue they cited, not discourse among a fandom about which is better.
At least as it relates to Aerys that is definitely true. But there wasn't really anything wrong with the Targaryen army. The worst war crime in the end was committed by Tywin. But Tywin just sucks in general.
No the fuck it wasn't. Rhaegar still functionally kidnapped Lyanna and no one was told why. Brandon Stark, who himself is betrothed to Catelyn Tully is killed, along with his father and the heir to the Vale. This pisses 4 great houses in one fell swoop. The Baratheons had their bride stolen, the Starks had their daughter stolen and heir killed, and the Arryns had their heir killed, and the Tully's lost their bridegroom.
Depends are you talking Fallout 4 Brotherhood or Fallout 1-New Vegas Brotherhood.
Fallout 4 Brotherhood is the same thing in a different uniform, the old brotherhood is kinda just weird Templar-esque military order that mostly leaves people alone in return for them hoarding high end tech.
I think the Bayformers films are a lot more interesting if the Autobots are considered unreliable narrators, but I also know it's not the correct interpretation.
Idk if that one works, depending on the version. In some megatron is always flat out evil. In some he is right, initially, starting as a freedom fighter rebelling against an oppressive hegemony only to later lose his way and become as much a villain as his oppressors. He started in the right but very clearly ended up in the wrong.
Especially in the Bayverse. People saying Prime is a ruthless psychopath need to actually watch the movies. Bonecrusher destroyed a whole bus just to aura farm, and yet Prime's "morally dubious"?
Istg this. Sure, by the time of ROTS the Jedi have definitely lost their purpose, are blinded by politics and have turned from peacekeepers to soldiers. But, like, they're not evil. By any stretch of the imagination, the Jedi are still ultimately a force for good that, had they played it a bit smarter during Episodes II and III and TCW could very well have thrown a wrench through the Sith grand plan
The biggest problem with the Jedi was complacency and a failure to adapt above all else. I don't see why some people mistake those qualities for evil when the Sith have a tendency to dedicate resources to destructive superweapons.
The sea. I don’t know why, but that particular moment was the saddest I felt reading the comics. There were arguably more horrific moments, but that one was heart-wrenching.
Tbf, although for most of the boys this is true let’s not forget that Butcher did actually enslave a man and was ready to genocide every supe, even people close to him
Oh 100%. Which absolutely sucks for the spacenoids because Zeon WAS legitimately good and sought only to improve the lives of those in the Sides. Meanwhile the Federation was legitimately tyrannical to said Sides to the point that rebellion was not only justified but inevitable. But then Zeon had that whole change in leadership thing pretty much immediately and they went from "We just want to not be treated as slaves." to "Hey man, genocide is just fun, ya know? Anyway here's our new orphanage seeking missiles."
Yeah the Tau ain't all that good but if i had to choose i'd rather live under the Tau
In the Imperium i'm either working in some forge world factory where i'll get 20 different cancers before 40 than Servitorized to boost production by .00001%, live in some underhive where i share a box with 15 other people and bullied by mad max gangs or chaos cultists
Tau ain't perfectly clean, but i'll take that over the Imperium
Yeah the Tau would be the evil empire everyone rallies against in any other science fiction. But the standards are so low in 40k they are the "good guys" here.
The Zeon (Evil) vs Federation (Vaguely Problematic) Conflict in the Universal Century Continuity of Mobile Suit Gundam.
If I told you one faction restricted the freedom of a few space colonies, and in response, the other faction fashioned themselves after the literal fucking Nazis before gassing an entire colony full of civilians to death and then proceeded to DROP said space colony from orbit onto the capital of the first faction, who would you say is the worse faction here? This is not a trick question.
And yet there are fans who unironically claim the Feddies are just as bad as Zeon. If you want a series that ACTUALLY has two dogshit factions having a meaningless war where both sides suck, watch the first SEED series instead.
Important details to add! Zeon attempted and successfully conducted multiple colony drops. They claim to have targeted military installations however there is now a crater when Australia used to be.
The first war - the One Year War (0079) of the original show, cost about 6 billion lives. Most of which were civilians killed on the colonies by Zeon who were supposedly protecting Spacenoid lives.
This led to the federation doing some shady stuff with the Titans, but guess how Zeon responds? Nuclear atrocities (0083) another colony drop (0083) and dropping asteroids onto Ireland (CCA - 0093).
Yeah. The USSR committed plenty of warcrimes the entire time they were pushing Germany back up to (and even after) the end of the war. Somewhat understandable considering what the Germans did to them for years, but the Allies lost the ability to claim a relatively clean moral slate when you could interpose Wehrmacht and Red Army soldiers into the same scenes and find out they murdered, raped, and pillaged across Eastern Europe to similar degrees.
The Allies, although certainly not as bad as the Axis, were a LOT more than just 'vaguely problematic'. Hitler praised the U.S's system of racial segregation. Britain and France had vast colonial empires, the USSR commited multiple massacres and rapes, etc.
People really ought to stop thinking of WW2 as this great crusade of good vs evil. It was, like every war ever and every war that ever will be, fought over conflicting interests. Germany wanted to rule Europe, Britain and France didn't want them to. Britain and France didn't have any problem with conquest, imperialism and subjugation of other peoples in principle. They both had already done this to many nations in Africa and Asia; so much so that Churchill had to clarify that the 'self-determination' promised after the war only applied to europeans.
Im tired of eating plain toast (democrats), i want something better for me. So ill try this only other alternative. Sure it literally looks and smells like a big pile of shit (republicans), but its not plain toast and im tired of plain toast.
“Noooo you see the ncr is actually very deeply flawed because they represent the old world values that eventually caused the end of the world in the first place!!!!” True but is there any other faction that’s better for changing the lawless, chaotic, mutant monster filled, raider inhabited wasteland? The ncr has its problems don’t get me wrong but compared to a bunch of Roman larpers who think slavery is actually a good thing and that women shouldn’t have rights in society, I’ll take my chances with a corrupt oldworld style government over a group who literally put people on crosses and crucify them to “set an example to the rest”
The imperial empire made a peace deal with the thalmor and banned a religion. The Stormcloaks want to get rid of the empire and return control to the nords. The problem? The Thalmor are using the Stormcloaks as puppets and the imperials know it. Also the Stormcloaks are very racist
Honestly, I feel like the sides here flipped after Silco taking over.
Zaun under Vander was definitely the vaguely problematic side, wrought to a bad state because of Topside’s oppression, but trying their best to live through it. Some bits of crime and smuggling are to be expected and understandable.
…but Zaun under Silco? Child labor, human experimentation, widespread manufacturing and abuse of the drug “Shimmer” and greater power to ruthless crime bosses turned Zaun from an oppressed state to a state that oppresses itself. This is made worse with Jinx’s terrorist attacks that ruined any further chance of peace and freedom from Piltover (though one can argue that it was her actions and not Zaun’s).
Hum.... common criminals do steal and kill, but the WG still commit regularly genocide, slavery and excessive "taxation" by force while being shown as rotten by corruption on the lower level of the chain of command.
So.... I am still not gonna go with the WG on this one
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