A plea: let the evil empire be evil

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 already saw in the films that the Empire's leadership apparently considered of white, human males who all spoke in RP voices. This hinted at a certain type of culture. Certainly, the fact that these films were made in the late '70s and early '80s (and the scenes in question were filmed in England) played a role. But we could still see that the Rebels were a more diverse bunch, including dozens of species— whereas the Empire seemed to be 'humans only'.

In the EU, this was quickly formalised: human supremacy was canonised as a core tenet of the Empire's political ideology. Not only that, but the Empire was also structurally sexist, elitist, and simply bigoted across the board. Women in positions of authority were very rare; non-humans even moreso. And while "ordinary" racism (of the variety found among humans) was not really referenced explicitly, nobody could fail to note that the Empire's leadership was almost entirely white. There were a few characters whose features might appear ambiguously East Asian, but I can't recall a single black officer in the Empire's forces. There was no mention of gay characters anywhere in Star Wars, but the Empire was canonically depicted as culturally conservative, and the Rebels/Republic as progressive and open-minded. It seems pretty obvious which one of the two would be rigidly heteronormative.

This changed dramatically after the Disney purchase. New LucasFilm boss Kathleen Kennedy made explicit reference to her desire to make the franchise "inclusive". Now, the mere mention of that word can incite flame wars in some corners of the internet.  I'll attempt to side-step all of that, because this isn't some "anti-inclusivity" screed, nor is that the actual topic here. Even the fairly questionable way in which large corporations like Disney tend to pay superficial, clearly fake lip service to certain progressive notions is not the matter I wish to talk about. We'll take the aim of "making representation in Star Wars more diverse" as a given, and refrain from further comment on that. Instead, we'll talk about the way that they set about it.

What they did was quite simple: add more women, more non-white people, and more non-straight people. (The latter mostly in EU works, and otherwise limit to a blink-and-you miss it kiss in the background... which they edited out for several foreign markets.) The problem, at least in my opinion, arises from the fact that they did it across the board. So the Space Nazis are now also ethnically diverse, employ women in positions of authority without quibbles, and have openly gay (and married!) fighter aces in their ranks. The Empire is authoritarian, and bigoted against non-humans, but otherwise seems just as inclusive and tolerant as the good guys.

I think that's an extremely bad idea. For starters: most audience members are human. The anti-alien bigotry is much more of an abstract notion than the a directly relatable form of bigotry, such as structural sexism or racism. What's more: if the Empire is fine with women, and blacks, and gays... but not with aliens... then you may start to think to yourself: why is this otherwise tolerant regime so anti-alien, specifically? They're okay with everybody else. Is it possible that the aliens really are causing a problem, somehow? At the very least, it would be much easier for Empire apologists to argue along those lines. So from the perspective of messaging, making the Empire more tolerant is an iffy premise: it basically causes you to pretend that fascism is far more tolerant than it actually is.

The idea has been raised that the Disney approach is somehow "more realistic", because there would be no reason for the humans running a Galactic polity to still be racist or bigoted to other humans. The belief there is that they'd just "scale up" their bigotry, and apply it only to the "outsiders" on a galactic scale: non-humans. But that premise treats bigotry as if it plays by logical rules, somehow. And it really doesn't. Yeah, it would be silly for the Empire to be bigoted towards gays or blacks. But guess what? All bigotry is stupid like that. Bigots don't think logically. If they did, they'd stop being such bigots. If you have bad guys whose whole ideology is rooted in a mindset of bigotry and oppression, then that mindset should (in my view) permeate the entire culture they create.

My whole point is that bigotry is an attitude that informs one's entire character. So it's not like the bigot has some kind of actually logical reason to hate a specific group, does that, but is otherwise essentially decent to all others. No. The bigot's attitude is one that seeks targets, and inevitably finds them everywhere. If there's a factor that can easily differentiate groups of people, it will be used to differentiate people. Things like skin colour tend to be quite visible distinctions. There is little doubt that a regime like Palpatine's would use it to classify and 'rank' people in a social hierarchy— whether it makes a lick of sense or not.

The Galactic Empire is a lot like Nazi Germany, and often quite intentionally so. This means that there can sure be exceptions to all sorts of insane, hateful policies, as there indeed were and are in every oppressive regime— but those are going to be few and far between. The argument that "oh, they're still bad, but they just hate non-humans" rather ignores the mindset of fascism. I think it's very realistic to depict an Empire that is run by smirking bigots who apply their bigotry to a whole array of "others". Conversely, depicting an Empire that is ultra-bigoted towards non-humans, but somehow totally okay with gay people, women in command positions, et cetera... that strikes me as very unrealistic. Regimes rooted in systemic bigotry don't tend to be so selective about applying their bigotry.

So, long story short: there may be individual Imperials who are not very bigoted, or selective in it, and there will inevitably exceptions who are promoted in spite of belonging to a group that's usually discriminated against, but overall, a regime like the Empire is bound to be just like every other bigoted regime we've ever seen: structural in its bigotry. I feel that when one tries to depict the Empire as more "innocent" than that, one fundamentally under-estimates and mis-represents the way bigotry actually works.

There's the additional argument that, out-of-universe, I don't think that diluting the distinction between the heroes and the villains is a good idea. Both narratively and regarding the message it sends, it goes awry. If accepting all sorts of people is a good thing, then it's something the heroes should do and that the villains should not do. If being a sexist and a racist and a homophobe is a bad thing, then that's something the villains should do. Because it shows what they really are, and what kind of society they really stand for. Want to add more diversity? Great. Add it on the Rebel/Republic side. Then it actually plays up the meaningful cultural divide between the Empire and the Rebellion, and the vastly different visions they have for the galaxy. Removing this difference between good and evil actually renders the conflict less meaningful.

The argument that a conflict of good versus evil lacks nuance is missing the point. You can tell many stories that have plenty of nuance, without mellowing out the Empire's structurally hateful attitudes. In fact, several interesting stories could be told using those attitudes as their premise. Particularly: there's plenty of room for character studies. Why would people who are themselves not (entirely) evil willingly serve a tyrant like Emperor Palpatine? Why would someone who is actually targeted by the regime's bigotry still seek to serve that regime?

You can get a lot of interesting psychology out of that, and without making the Empire less hateful. We sort of got that in the old EU with Thrawn, although I really think that's actually more a case of Timothy Zahn loving his favourite creation more and more, and wanting to kind of re-imagine him into an anti-hero. But I'd love to have seen a well-written novel shedding light on Daala's actual motivations, for instance. She's determined to serve the Empire, even after it's already fallen, despite the fact that the Empire's institutional bigotry hurt her personally. What motivates her? (And I think that's more complex and interesting than asking what motivates, say, Rae Sloane in the new continuity, who serves a different interpretation of the Empire; one which doesn't automatically target her for being a woman and/or being black.)

There is plenty of room for other stories like that. A story that explicitly calls Thrawn out on his self-serving arguments for joining Palpatine would be very interesting. It could show us how a supposedly "well-intentioned" Imperial commander is still all too willing to knowingly serve a sadistic, genocidal monster. Or how about a story told from the perspective of a social climber who still affects an RP accent (this being the "Coruscanti accent" in-universe) to sound like "one of us" to the social elite? Someone who is willing to ignore the Empires evils—up to a point?—to advance in society. Not to mention the fact that there's going to be loads of rank-and-file soldiers who just see no other way to get a career other than via the military. You can easily explore an evil, thoroughly rotten regime from the ground up: from the perspective of someone who doesn't care or even know about the politics, but just enlisted to get two square meals a day.

Ultimately, there is simply no good reason to "humanise" the Empire itself. There are only drawbacks. The evil empire works best, on every level, if it can be itself. This is true for Star Wars, but it's equally true for any setting that features such a thoroughly rotten regime. Attempting to humanise a despotic regime is simply a mistake. Far better is to show such regimes for what they are, and how they really function. To me, that means showing the mechanisms of senseless oppression, and —yes—demonstrating the illogical lack of efficiency that follows when hateful policies are allowed to over-ride good sense. Let the evil empire be evil. That's what it's for. If you make it less evil, you detract from its core purpose and ultimately weaken your own story and setting.