Skallagrim's ramblings

In my opinion, it's a bad idea to make villain factions "less evil" in all sorts of tiny little ways. This tendency is perhaps supposed to add nuance, but remarkably often misfires and instead just gives fodder to a certain type of fan; the type that wants to be able to say " See, the fascist dictatorship isn't so bad after all! " Naturally, there are settings in which various factions and sides exist, on a scale of grey-tones, and all or most are neither wholly good nor wholly evil. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about conscious attempt to "humanise" otherwise unambiguously evil factions. This is technically a general argument, but those who know me won't be at all surprised that I'll be using Star Wars as my main point of reference here. In the old Expanded Universe, before Disney purchased LucasFilm and shunted all of that off into a separate continuity, the Galactic Empire was as evil as anything can possibly be. We