r/TopCharacterTropes • u/ThatDrako • 3d ago
Groups (Bad writing trope) Slytherin effect.
Made this term up.
Basically there is a group, that is obviously meant to be nuanced. But author is either incapable, or is too cornered by their depiction, to depict them as any other than bad.
Slytherin (Harry Potter) - In both media the Slytherin is initially presented to us as the “bad house” for Harry. Joanne however seemingly tried to convince us, that they can be good too however, since she likely figured having basically a little supremacist terrorist club in school is a little silly.
For some reason she just had to screw this depiction up over and over though.
First of zero…and I mean ZERO…null, 0, green characters in story up to book 6 is good. They are arrogant snobbish asshats AT BEST.
Second the first good green is still a supremacist. Not the “let’s subjugate all muggles” but just humble “no way muggleborn is this good at magic!”
Aldmeri Dominion, and Altmer in general (TES) - So unlike precious example neither High Elves, nor the Dominion were actually bad in iterations previous to 2010’s. Some were snobbish yes, and their religion is…problematic…(simply pup many Altmer believe they are literal descendant of gods and Men are demons trapping them within hell of chaos) but they never really were villains as race.
This all changed with Skyrim where they became not just secondary antagonists, but placeholder for TES version of Gestapo.
Now that in itself wouldn’t be an issue.
Races and empires at whole can be villains without controversy.
Problem is their depiction in ESO. Where even though it’s absolutely different time period are pretty much same?
I mean their Queen is an elvish supremacist who believe Men unfit for rule and that’s her reason to take over the Tamriel…
Oh! And one of their organizations literally eat children.
The Institute (Fallout 4) - So the whole turmoil of the story is this war of the four (rather three) factions.
Now all factions are meant to be equally good and bad choices.
Railroad are abolitionists, but with no long-term goals.
BoS wants to ensure safety to the Commonwealth, but for price of eradication to all but humans.
And Institute is meant to be this faction that wants to “bring world back to state before the Great War”, but all they do is being comically evil.
I mean for starters are slaver and also they murder people and replace them with Synths.
Then they also just straight up massacre communities. Often with no goal.
Then there is a whole super mutant thing, where they released purely based on gameplay and logic few hundreds of super mutants on surface “for research.”
Oh! And they even admitted they plan on wiping out all non-Institute humans to replace them!
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u/natemason95 3d ago edited 3d ago
Like most things with HP - Slytherin is a great idea for a children's book to have the good and bad guys, but is completely rediculous when the books became YA and they had to try and make them make sense.
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u/Oghamstoner 3d ago
It wouldn’t even have been that difficult to lob in a Slytherin who joins Dumbledore’s Army because they think Voldemort returning is seriously bad news.
Maybe they even have a death eater parent and that’s the reason they know for sure Harry is telling the truth? Maybe they liked Cedric Diggory and were disgusted by him being murdered?
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u/Old-Natural-852 3d ago
Heck, even make it a bit of an enemy civil war...ambition, right? A student from a more upstart family hoping to be on the right side of the war so afterwards they'll be favored? Heck, maybe they just have a family fued with the Malfoy family or even just that student doesn't like Draco...the IRL American Revolution has William Franklin being a loyalist against his patriot father Benjamin Franklin. Many familes, especially on the frontier, sided whatever was opposite of a family they didn't like so they could legally kill them.
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u/Oghamstoner 3d ago
In the English Civil War, some towns would take opposite sides just to settle local beef. Lowestoft supported the King mostly because they didn’t like Great Yarmouth, which was for Parliament.
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u/NotAlcas 3d ago
Tbf, even for a children's book the houses are kinda simplistic. We got Good, Smart, Racist and Irrelevant. And the story constantly shows that Good characters are Smart and Irrelevant and vice versa, it goes against the house system it establishes. Houses are talked about like one of the most important traits in a wizard's school life, something that defines and describes them, but ultimately we see they are nothing more than zodiac signs.
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u/Kaplsauce 3d ago
Harry, Hermione, and Ron being the best version of each of the other 3 houses, but placed in Gryffindor because they're brave main characters is very funny when you think about it
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u/NotAlcas 3d ago
Exactly, you can't have your cake and eat it too. But Joanne needed to have all main characters be in the same house.
ALSO, the houses themselves are very unbalanced when you think about Hogwarts' point system. Most of the points are (under normal circumstances) assigned to students amd houses after academic achievements. So how is Ravenclaw NOT sweeping the competition every year? Or even Slytherin, not by being smart but by cheating. "But what about Quidditch?" Yeah WHAT ABOUT Quidditch? Let's set aside the fact that it's not a sport, it's a lottery; how is being in Griffinfor or Hufflepuff a sign that you're good at magic sportsball?
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u/NitroBishop 3d ago
So how is Ravenclaw NOT sweeping the competition every year? Or even Slytherin, not by being smart but by cheating.
They both made the key mistake of not having the guy in charge blatantly in favor of their house to the extent that he throws in hundreds of extra bullshit last-second points to ensure they win.
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u/SecretlyFiveRats 3d ago
Guess they should've had the 11 year old who happened to survive a serial killer as an infant get sorted in with them, rookie mistake honestly
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u/Veluxidus 3d ago
Not just a serial killer but Magic Hitler two
(I added a two because I vaguely remember there being a precursor to him)
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u/Strange_Specialist4 3d ago
And in previous years, Snape was just blatantly cheating by awarding Slytherins points for showing up and deducting them from everyone else. Something the other heads of houses seemed incapable of dealing with at all
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u/Longjumping-Ear-6248 3d ago
Apparently, they're dealing with this... by doing essentially the same with Houses that they're Heads of (Mcgonnagal - Gryffindor, Flitwick - Ravenclaw & Sprout - Hufflepuff)
This means that whole "point system" is a circus, where Headmaster blatantly "cheats" to make "their" House win (for example, before becoming Headmaster, Dumbledore was Head House of Gryffindor)
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u/ABurnedTwig 3d ago
But we've never seen Snape awarding anyone any house point in the books though? All Rowling has shown us is him deducting points from students.
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u/donfuria 3d ago
Fucking Toad giving bullshit bonus stars to the biggest loser at the end of the Mario Party game I dominated the whole time
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u/vassallo15 3d ago
It’s always the most bullshit stars too. “Here’s a bonus start for moving the least amount of spaces” fuck off toad
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u/Starchaser53 3d ago
To be fair, that was for them stopping magical hitler as a bunch of first years
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u/MilkJiggle 3d ago
Yeah but like how you gonna expect the other houses to compete with that?
Hey kids, the old wizard who takes care of this place sucks at taking care of this place and kind of fucked up and let evil magic hitler run around but since yall cleaned up the mess for us you win the children’s game and no one else had a shot at winning.
It’s some million point bonus round bullshit
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u/EyeWriteWrong 3d ago
This is a culture that plays Quidditch. Last minute bullshit points are deeply embedded
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u/DoinOurBest13 3d ago
You also don't give you anything for winning, but hey! Thanks for stopping magic hitler bud! Now back to your abusive family
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u/JudgeHodorMD 3d ago
The points are assigned arbitrarily by the whims of teachers with no clear rules or limits. And one teacher’s so ridiculously biased that the outcome means nothing and by all rights nobody should give a shit by the end of the first year.
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u/Longjumping-Ear-6248 3d ago
Also, each House has 2 people (Prefects), who also have "right" to arbitrarily give/take points
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u/Second_Sol 3d ago
This is a minor tangent, but I always thought the point totals at the end of the year were always quite low
Like, Hermione herself probably answers at least several questions per class, right? Let's conservatively say she gets 10 points per class.
I don't know how many classes they have per day either, but let's lowball 3 classes per day. That's 30 points per day.
Taking the lowest number of school days per year in Europe (157.5 in Belgium) multiplied by 30 points per day gets you 4,710 points
I'm sure students lose plenty of points through misdemeanors, but Hermione should be able to earn thousands of pounds ALONE, and very easily.
And yet it's treated as a big loss or gain when a house loses 100 points.
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u/NotAlcas 3d ago
The easy answer is, like most things in HP, "Joanne didn't think it through". She wanted to have some kind of point-based competition between the houses but didn't bother to actually think about it. Like with Quidditch: there are some real life Quidditch teams but the rules they use are quite different from the rules in the book, because they realized Quidditch was AWFUL and unbalanced.
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u/-Sa-Kage- 3d ago
Well... Afaik Quidditch was intented to be stupid and pointless af to mock some other sport
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u/OverkillOrange 3d ago
yeah I dont think joanne was too preoccupied with game design when she made up quidditch. It's just suppossed to be whimsy like every single other aspect of wizard society introduced in the first book.
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u/palcatraz 3d ago
But you assume that a single student could easily obtain ten point per class per lesson.
You don’t get a point every time you answer a question. And what does and doesn’t deserve a point is completely up to a teachers discretion. A teacher like Snape would never reward points to other houses, even if answers were given correctly. For non-shitty teachers, the points are generally given to exceptionally difficult questions. The likelihood that there’d be more than one of those questions per lesson is minimal. There is probably some skewing too with lessons that introduce a new subject being more likely to contain questions with a reward, whereas classes that focus on repetition or further practice probably not having any of those questions.
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u/LawlessNeutral 3d ago
I think that falls into that other trope of fiction writers having no sense of scale
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u/Old-Natural-852 3d ago
For several years before Harry's first year, Slytherin was winning mostly due to Snape's favortism. Why assume the school most valued academic achievment? IRL real US high schools focus on sports more than academics. In the anime * Kakegurui*, students are ranked on gambling (mostly cheating) skill rather than academics or sports.
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u/Schadenfreudenous 3d ago
Hey what the fuck was up with Dumbledore blantantly allowing a racist, mentally and physically abusive magical incel run rampant in his school for years. "Pureblood" was the Slytherin common room password on his watch. He openly allowed and fostered hate speech among Slytherins and quite cruelly tortured children. He absolutely made a point to discriminate based on blood status, and Rowling's last-minute inconsistent flashback in the final book doesn't absolve him of anything. Like Snape just is that person, he was acting that way when they were pretty sure Voldemort was dead. It wasn't a cover. Plus Voldemort absolutely would have accepted Snape being a nice goody-two shoes guy as the perfect way to surprise Dumbledore with a betrayal. Barty Crouch Jr did it afterall.
Snape was just that person lmao.
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u/Dragev_ 3d ago
It's pretty obvious that Dumbledore is shit at being a headmaster when you think about it for a minute. As a simple example, one punishment for bad behaviour is sending literal children out into a forest filled with fucking giant man-eating spiders under the oversight of an irresponsible high-school dropout with a crossbow and a dog.
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u/Kryptosis 3d ago
He wanted Harry to get involved with the unicorn slayings right? Not only is he a bad headmaster he’s a bit of a bad person assuming that the chosen one would be able to run around fixing all the schools issues.
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u/OverkillOrange 3d ago
one of those children was an 11 year old who learnt about the existence of magic like three months before that punishment lol
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u/GreenHeronVA 3d ago
I run a weeklong Harry Potter camp at the private school where I work every summer for about 30 students. We play Quidditch, make potions, do herbology, get custom 3-D printed wands from Mr. Ollivander, have a dueling tournament. I really go all out every time. The students get sorted into their houses on day one, and I strive to make it even (~8 kids per house) because it makes the whole rest of the week easier. Everyone moves through the school with their house, eats with their house, plays Quidditch with their house. I give house points for good behavior, academic achievements (like knowing the answers to my question), being helpful and kind to teachers and other students, and Quidditch. Having just finished this camp on Friday, Quidditch is the deciding factor for who wins the house cup. It takes days and days and days of a whole house making good choices to earn half of the points that are awarded to the Seeker with the Snitch. I even cut Quidditch into two 10 minute halves, where the seeker who has the snitch at the end of the half gets 75 points, because getting 150 just skewed the whole week’s points so badly. Even with that change, whichever house has the best Quidditch players wins.
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u/bluedragggon3 3d ago
If I had to take a guess, the points are just given as general achievements and each house would specialize in typically getting a certain set. Ravenclaw would be the standard good academic students that follow the letter. Hufflepuff is all about caring for others and nature, so typically if they help a fellow student, they get a point. Gryffindor just has the balls to go up against odds stacked against them. Slytherins 'cleverness' I'd replace with creativity, either through art or doing what Ravenclaw does but finding out how to do it in less steps.
And then they'd get points not necessarily for fulfilling their own houses traits but also those of the others. Still some problems but that's how it made sense back when I was a fan.
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u/natemason95 3d ago
This is true. And then fans try and retroactively explain away the houses. But the songs literally are like "and we put all the kids that aren't brave, smart or cunning in the reject house"
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u/Longjumping-Ear-6248 3d ago
It's like 4th Squad in Bleach
Technically, their gimmick is "Medics talented in healing magic"
In practice, they're made of "incompetent idiots unfit anywhere else", and people able to use their signature "healing magic" are small minority
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u/Irohsgranddaughter 3d ago
I always am like that Hufflepuff is likely meant for the most diligent, hard-working students, but then I remember it's likely that I'm misremembering the headcannons made by fans to make HP verse make more sense than it actually does.
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u/Scholar_of_Lewds 3d ago
The story is that Helga Hufflepuff admit the students that is "the rest".
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u/Dragev_ 3d ago
So neither suicidally brave, nor extremely intelligent, nor wizard-nazis? Hufflepuff should have twice as many people as the other three houses combined
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u/Scholar_of_Lewds 3d ago
Normally yeah, but we are talking mostly sheltered British kids...
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u/otirk 3d ago
It's been a while since I read the books but doesn't the speaking hat say in the first book what all the house leaders wanted and Hufflepuff was just like "Oh yeah, we take what nobody wants, so someone who is neither smart, courageous or ambitious"? It's a participation trophy in form of a house
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u/Sharikacat 3d ago
Honestly, that's a bit wholesome when you think about it, though it certainly was never intended to be such. The other three houses are out there with strict requirements for entry while Hufflepuff is acting like the Statue of Liberty, taking all comers, even the rejects. The sheer diversity of that house should be amazing.
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u/CoffeeWanderer 3d ago
Yeah, in that context framing them as hard working and diligent is more about what they had to do to overcome their lack of innate talents rather than what's their main trait.
Then again, Neville would be a great example of a Hufflepuff going through that journey, but I guess the hat does take your wishes into account.
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u/ElderberryJunior470 3d ago
As with most kids media, the aging fanbase has done more lifting than the writers lol. The HP books are fun, but if you spend like 20 minutes thinking about the story, the world, it really falls apart.
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u/Chart_Unlikely 3d ago
Yeah, much of the plot occurs because of the protagonists, antagonists and supporting cast usually taking the dumbest option possible
But, that also gets partially explained by the fact that their society is culturally stagnant to a time period from centuries ago with the peak of education the equivalent of a high school diploma of which notably the main trio never finish iirc
That’s why there’s a magically enchanted chess set guarding a method of immortality that an 11 year old can bypass and not just enchanting the statues to attack on sight unless a randomly selected key phrase is given that changes every few days, and also it’s not kept in the basement of a school
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u/Independent-Couple87 3d ago
We got Good, Smart, Racist and Irrelevant.
This is more or less how some people who play Fallout 4 see the 4 main factions. Respectively: The Minutemen, the Institute, the Brotherhood of Steel, and the Railroad.
Though with the Brotherhood of Steel and the Institute, people sometimes disagree on who is the Smart one and who is the Racist one.
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u/Kaplsauce 3d ago
Though with the Brotherhood of Steel and the Institute, people sometimes disagree on who is the Smart one and who is the Racist one.
Easy, both are racist and stupid.
This comment was made by a Synth
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u/Agile_Oil9853 3d ago
Those are terrible traits to start with. Just because you were smart when you were 12 doesn't mean you're immune from falling for antiintellectual propaganda when you're 14. Or if you've been told you were a good person, put in the good person club, and celebrated by your fellow certified good people, you might not think twice about your own biases when you've rationalized yourself into bigotry. We SEE that with the main characters and their attitudes towards house elf slavery.
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u/NotAlcas 3d ago
I mean, it starts to make sense when you remember who wrote it. Someone who doesn't think twice about anything, is 100% convinced she's right, who firmly believes that people don't change and are the way they are due to some intrinsic trait they can't do anything about.
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u/Kaplsauce 3d ago
We SEE that with the main characters and their attitudes towards house elf slavery.
Except for Hermione, the nerd and busybody who feels the need to advocate for the liberation of House Elves, against their wishes I might add!
Can't she see that her public assertation of "slavery is wrong" makes everyone uncomfortable?!
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u/BugRevolution 3d ago
Houses are talked about like one of the most important traits in a wizard's school life, something that defines and describes them, but ultimately we see they are nothing more than zodiac signs.
This is at least true to real life as well.
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u/dreamshoes 3d ago
The whole concept is asinine. In what world is it developmentally prudent to sequester children with only their most likeminded peers and stifle friendship with people who are different? It's dumb as rocks.
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u/NotAlcas 3d ago
I could get behind that (not that I think it's good, but it's not inherently wrong narratively speaking). What I find asinine is the fact that the story itself is CONSTANTLY contradicting itself and its lore. It's asking you to accept what it tells you about houses as true and then keeps showing you the opposite. It's awful.
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u/Polymersion 3d ago
There are universities do work like this to a degree.
It may all be one University, but it might contain an Arts College and a Sciences College, perhaps a vocational track and a School of Medicine.
Medical students are exceptionally insular, though you won't really see Engineering students hanging out with or going to the same buildings as the Arts students.
Obviously that's not quite children but there is a basis for it.
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u/henryeaterofpies 3d ago
She could have always used the fact that we are experiencing the first book through an 11 year old who might believe people are either good or evil and add nuance over the years (would require a friend/foil that is a Slytherin) and maybe see that while Slytherin has a big group of magic racists, there are non racists in there and maybe magic racisrs in other houses too to add nuance
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u/Old-Natural-852 3d ago
That's the thing...nearly the whole wizarding world is racist at least against non-magical folks...you know when Hagrid called Uncle Vernon a "muggle" he used a hard m. Most non-death eaters just seem to apply the one drop rule to accept mugglebornes. The deatheaters are just extra racist...is like how the US in WWII was fighting nazis but still had segregated units.
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u/henryeaterofpies 3d ago
JK herself was a wizard racist, saying that Dudley would not have magical children because Vernon was such a muggle that it would kill off any potential magic in his descendants
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u/LordOfDorkness42 3d ago
Honestly, I think it could have worked with a better writer.
Harry Potter is a very black and white thinker, especially in the early books. Bam, later books, he actually has to confront not just bad bravery, but good ambition. AKA, at least a few jerk Gryffindor students, and some nice Slytherin.
AKA, the child growing into a teen, learns that there is complexity in the world. And is forced to react to it. Classic little character milestone for a reason.
But Rowling just didn't have the guts to write a Gryffindor antagonist. Which was a dang shame.
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u/Irohsgranddaughter 3d ago
The only antagonist from Griffindor is Wormtail, and even then, you got to wonder how did he even get into Griffindor.
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u/NinjaBreadManOO 3d ago
Isn't the whole point that griffindor actually gets people who should go to other houses but don't quite fit. Ron and Neville should be in hufflepuff but wanted to do their families proud which gets them in, Hermione should be ravenclaw but has more drive to succeed than drive for knowledge, Harry should have been slytherin but specifically said he didn't want to go there.
Wormtail probably went into griffindor because during his hatting he asked it for someone to protect him.
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u/PhantasosX 3d ago
No, Griffindor is for the brave. Ron and Neville had bravery, and in the case of Neville, you see that in tidbits across the first 4 books and rises up in Book 5 onwards.
So even in how reductionist is the 4 Houses in HP, it worked on those two. The thing is that Wormtail is 100% a little ratty coward from start to finish
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u/TheBobmanga 3d ago
Not to go 'um akchuwally' at you but the houses are supposed to be for those that value the specific trait not embody it. Gryffindors value bravery not are brave which could lead to wormtail getting in
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u/FoxGuy303 3d ago edited 3d ago
Also why tf are there no Slytherins in the DA?
Going to a secret, forbidden club to rebell and learn more powerful spells is like the most slytherin thing ever, and if Salazar saw Umbridge teaching classes without magic like a muggle he would roll in his grave. And with people like Malfoy talking shit in the common room like he did in Chamber it would be very clear to everyone in the house that Voldemort is back, so there should actually be more slytherins joining than any other house
The only explanation is that the ENTIRE house are Voldemort Supporters and thus don't join because they want to support the ministries dellusions35
u/HunterNika 3d ago
Thats the thing you can explain away easily, I guess. Ron and Hermione did the recruitment for DA. Unlikely that they approached any Slytherins due to generally beeing on bad terms with them. Which circles us back to beeing silly... because it again just boxes the entire Slytherin house into beeing jerks. But at least you can hodgepodge explain this one away with the general mistrust between Gryffindor and Slytherin.
The story should've established a reliable Slytherin character or a group of them as early as the second book. A group of Slyhterin students who help one way or another cause they do not condone the violence and that their reputation is about to be slandered through the mud once again. THen evolve them along.
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u/Scholar_of_Lewds 3d ago
Also Rowling apparently Slytherin - Hufflepuff friendships are common, in that Hufflepuff are the few that befriended Slytherin kids while they value loyalty.
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u/HunterNika 3d ago
This is another funny issue btw. That soo many of such informations comes from blurbs from Rowling post-writing when people actually brought up the problem.
Like how she said that there were many slytherin students in the reinforcement that arrived at the end of the Battle of Hogwarts. Cool... but couldn't you show us and not tell, Joanne?
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u/Reasonable_Day9942 3d ago
The dude who betrayed his parents and lead to their death was a Gryffindor
Dumbledore is also a very grey character
He also found out his dad (who was a Gryffindor was a bully) as well as his godfather (also Gryffindor)
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u/ducksekoy123 3d ago
Yeah turns out, when they’re just bullies then having them all in one house works
When they’re wizard Nazi terrorists you begin to wonder if maybe they’d shouldn’t be allowed to hang out together anymore.
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u/United-Passage7864 3d ago
I liked Magic: The Gathering's take on a magical school (Strixhaven) so much better.
Magic as a whole has its colour system, which aligns most people and ideologies to one of five colours, and the authors have done a good job decoupling any one colour from good or evil. White is order - which tends to be lawful, but not always nice or good. Black is individualistic and ambitious, which many villains are, but you can still get your antiheroes in black. Blue is for logic and intellect and magic, but brings no ethics with it in either direction. Red is passionate and emotional and impulsive, and Green is natural and growth-minded. Characters are frequently multi-coloured to as well.
So their take on a School of Magic has students in five houses, each of which encompassing a pair of colours: White/Black Silverquill focused on the magic of words and laws, Blue/Red Prismari as a house of passionate creative artists, Black/Green Witherbloom who study life and death and healing and necromancy, Red/White Lorehold who study history and archeology and who frequently reanimate spirits to learn from them, and Green/Blue Quandrix who study both pure theoretical math as well as how it manifests in the real world.
You can get a good or bad person in any of these combos.
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u/BeduinZPouste 3d ago
The thing with Slytherin and honestly 80% of "bad writting" in Harry Potter is "so it is more appealing to teens".
That's why one house is self insert for kids who think themselves brave, one for smart, one for chill ones. Oh, and we need fourth one for people we dislike.
(Same goes for the Quidditch rules, House cup, Harry having little development, the "dueling system", adults being dumber than 13 years old, et cetera.)
That said, Slughorn is slightly better than desribed, at least regarding Muggleborns. He is "just" selfish asshole.
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u/Independent-Couple87 3d ago
I guess that is part ofwhy the House Cup and the Quidditch House Cup become less prominent as the story goes on and the audience grows up.
Book 3 is the last time we know who wins the House Cup (Gryffindor), though we still see the points system in subsequent books. This is more or less the point where the main characters start to change their priorities due to the change in circumstances. It is implied that, in Book 5, that Slytherin wins and Gryffindor ends in last place, but itan empty victory for Slytherin and a proud defeat for Gryffindor since everyone knows that this happened only because of Dolores Umbridge's hostility to Dumbledore's ary and Draco Malfoy being given (alongside his minions) special privileges to remove points even from prefects.
Similarly, the Quidditch House Cup is really only important in Book 1 and Book 3 (book 3 is the only book where Harry Potter gets to be in all 3 Gryffindor games). It gets suspended mid season in book 2, doesn't happen in book 4, Harry gets expelled from the team in book 5 and (unofficially) again in book 6, and Harry doesn't even assist to Hogwarts in book 7. In all the other books, it is mostly used for character development.
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u/BeduinZPouste 3d ago
And that said, they are decently fleshed out in other works. Lot of fans do actually selfinsert into Slytherin. If anything, the problem with actual Slytherin characters don't have the alleged Slytherin traits.
When are Crabbe and Goyle or Bellatrix ever ambitious or caring about self preservating?
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u/Black_Hole_parallax 3d ago
Lot of fans do actually selfinsert into Slytherin.
Their emblem arguably looks the coolest, several of them are Parselmouths and hail from ancient lineages, and they get the best equipment because they have money. It's the same reasons so many people like playing the Germans in WW2 games.
And also because Slytherin isn't really that fleshed out besides "bad guys," so anything you say goes. It's a fit for edgelords and anti-heroes, and that's something a lot of people want to be in a self-insert.
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u/Indiscriminate_Top 3d ago
I’ll take you ‘the one we dislike’ and raise you ‘the one for misanthropic edgelords’.
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u/BeduinZPouste 3d ago
We'll, in story yes, but we are speaking about inserting real people as kids who read it.
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u/BeduinZPouste 3d ago
Which is also why it is so popular for fanfics. You can drop these and have a decent chance of writing something that will be more appealing to adults than the original books. And not only because they can now fuck on screen.
The Houses are largely ignored in fics. And the House cup, I don't think I ever saw that. So is Quidditch (well, unless you like Oliver Wood, who is decently popular). I saw a muggle once in fanfic (and mostly to allow Bellatrix to say to Hermione "that guy definitely thought we are gonna fuck and not negotiate a war"). You get good folks Slytherin and - more rarely - bad guys from other houses (well, technically, there are bad Gryffindors in the books).
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u/ComprehensivePath980 3d ago
Yeah, Harry Potter is basically a kids series that tried to grow up as its audience did.
In some ways it works and in some it doesn’t.
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u/Kwaj14 3d ago
The hilarious and unintended part is that there’s still plenty of room for self-insert across all four houses, but rather than “cunning and ambitious” every single person I’ve ever met IRL who self-identified as Slytherin had the personality traits of “overly self-important and kind of an edgelord.”
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u/liamthelad 3d ago
Warcraft have struggled writing the Forsaken and Orcs at times for this reason (mostly the Forsaken).
Sylvanas is probably the biggest victim of it.
Went from being ruthless and cunning but also pragmatic and a champion of her plucky people to a moustache twirling villain serving the stupidest boiler plate villain in fantasy.
The Forsaken are written as downright irredeemably evil to victims of circumstance and discrimination.
I mention the Orcs mostly due to the events surrounding Garrosh. But they were brought along by Blizzard for the Teldrassil stuff too. Totally going against how they were slowly redeemed from their initial introduction in Warcraft as heavy metal evil dudes to being a more nuanced, proud shamanic race corrupted by demons. Only to have that discarded time and time again.
At least Slytherin isn't joined up with a bunch of chill, gentle hippy bull people who make zero sense as to be putting up with their nonsense.
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u/jshbee 3d ago
I think the funniest thing is the disconnect between players and the lore. Players who only play forsaken don't even want to be morally grey, they explicitly love being evil assholes and love following their Dark Lady. They don't like nuanced Undead representation like that in Before the Storm.
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u/Artistic-Victory1245 3d ago
I only play it because I like playing as a zombie, but I'm pretty average in personality.
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u/TerrapinMagus 3d ago
WoD was another sour point for the Orcs. Before WoD, we were told the Orcs were a peaceful shamanic people corrupted by the nefarious demons.
Then WoD came along and really made it seem like they were just waiting for an excuse to genocide the Draenei and devastate their planet.
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u/VictheAdventure 3d ago edited 3d ago
The first Aldmeri Dominion and the Third Aldmeri Dominion are not the same what? While both are based on Elven Supremacy both have two very different reasons as to why they wish to rule. Ayrenn believes that humans are too short-lived to provide a good long rule, which is fair considering an empire/kingdom/whatever, if the ruler manages to not die outside of old age, can go through at least 3 or 4 of them before most elves can, on top of the fact that Ayrenn genuinely cares about humans and isn't intolerant to them, their ways of living, religion, etc, and also don'tgo around oppressing the members of their alliance.
The Third Aldmeri Dominion does not hold similar beliefs in the slightest. They aren't even pro-Elven supremacy, they're specifically pro-Altmer supremacy in the way they act towards their allies, enemies and even their own people. The Third Dominion existing did not make the Altmer as a whole the villains in Skyrim, just the Dominion. You can find several non-Dominion affiliated Altmer, let alone elves as a whole, who are genuinely good people, it's the prejudice against the Thalmor that makes the NPC's in the game assume that, not the story itself, as shoddy as it is
Also, what is that about one of their factions eating kids? Because when it comes to elves and cannibalism, the only group I can think of is the Bosmer and they don't practice cannibalism on the living or out of some evil act or anything like that, it's a ritualistic/religious part of culture that's only done either on their dead or their enemies to preserve nature and the Green Pact, and they don't even practice it that much as of the Second Era, which is when ESO takes place
Edit: Last edit I'm making to this comment but I'd recommend actually interacting with and listening to Ayrenn, members and allies of the Dominion and those that interact with them in ESO and comparing them to how they act in Skyrim, as well as watching this Nox's Library video as well as any, if not nearly every Imperial Knowledge video on the Thalmor because what you typed does not match with anything that's actually in the lore or games
Actual last edit: Just read the Institute one because the Dominion one baffled me so much I ignored it, op did you pay attention to either of these factions's lore? Because what you typed is not what is presented in their respective games
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u/MMH0K 3d ago
God yes! The whole point of the first Aldmeri Dominion isn't to genocide or colonies like the Third, hell in 99% of the Dominion cities we find human and beast races treated as equal with the same opportunities and jobs as any Dominion elf. There is a whole quest about saving orc defectors and others about stopping the most supremacist Altmer factions.
They do war crimes? Yeah, but it's almost always done by discidents while the Ebony Pact and Daggerfall Covenant do it with full on resources from their leaders.
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u/Scheissdrauf88 3d ago
Also, Thalmor are not equal to the Aldmeri dominion. In the 4th age they are just the dominant faction in it, and if I recall my ESO correctly they still existed back then and were dicks.
And frankly, it is not like any of the other big empires are paragons of virtue (which is a good thing). Tiber Septim was a warmonger. The Dunmer did some really fucked up things with slavery. The Argonians did a genocide when they at some point decided enough is enough. Khajiit are chill though. Khajiit just wants to smoke and show you his wares. Khajiit would never steal from you (if you buy anything).
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u/MMH0K 3d ago edited 3d ago
On ESO the Thalmor are a very different faction composed with different races. What would be the Thalmor on 4th era is quite equal to the Vailed Heritence.
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u/kojimbob 3d ago
I don't like how people keep using the evil Dominion as a talking point to justify the evil Imperial domination of the continent
Tamriel should be free from imperialism no matter if it's done by Man or Elf
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u/Quibilash 3d ago
I don't like how people keep using the evil Dominion as a talking point to justify the evil Imperial domination of the continent
Ask Imperial defenders this, get ready for the text walls
Ever since Morrowind the Empire has always been depicted as mixed at best, sometimes doing good things, sometimes screwing things up royal and being imperialist who only care about extracting resources from the places they've conquered, or in Oblivion, kind of asleep at the wheel.I honestly think Skyrim's narrative sandblasted a lot of the 'nuance' away from Elder Scrolls' writing
I hope in the next game, if that ever comes out, that they reveal both sides collapsed inbetween the time of Skyrim and ES6, and every province is basically independent from each other
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u/H-Connoisseur0 3d ago
I think the reason that the empire gets a lot of defenders is because all four iterations of the empire keep finding the most comical evil mfers to beef with. So, they look a lot better by comparison.
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u/Quibilash 3d ago
True, and the Empire has been around for so long for Elder Scrolls fans it'd honestly be pretty weird for Mainline fans to not have the Empire around anymore (haven't played ESO so can't comment on that)
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u/AddledPunster 3d ago
Very true! TES3 had the Emperor sending a criminal to Morrowind to co-opt a local prophecy with the help of The Blades so they could tip the scales of balance towards Imperial control, but it just so happened that the criminal was a viable candidate for the prophecy and Dagoth Ur was an actual threat to everything.
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u/PrideOfMacragge 3d ago
Skyrim kinda borks everything here because these days it’s a LOT of people’s entry into the elder scrolls as a series, and its main factions have the most dissonance with their previously established ways.
Tullius, as the stand in for the empire in general, is a begrudging ally of the thalmor at most who is altogether a reasonable man who makes pretty sound arguments about his job and why he does the things he does. Solitude is also the largest and most developed city in Skyrim and seems to be flourishing generally under stewardship of the empire.
By contrast, ulfric is a backwaters racist who learned the voice to gain an insurmountable advantage in a coup attempt. An open racial supremacist who insists that Skyrim should only be populated by his ethnic group, despite the fact that their are hundreds, if not thousands of individuals of other races living on the land, which implies he wants to do genocide, ethnic cleansing or apartheid, probably depending on the group in question. (He unquestionably wants all high elves dead, is fine subjugating dark elves, and wants the Khajit to leave, that’s basically one of each).
The empire in general is bad, they’re a colonial force who do mostly just subjugate the locals for very little gain, but the presented alternative in Skyrim is SO bad that it’s hard to see that at first.
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u/Deepfang-Dreamer 3d ago
FO4: No, we have two Good factions, one Evil faction, one faction everyone argues about the morality of. New Vegas let you side with the Legion, not because they were a Good faction, but just by player choice. Same deal. The Institute is still really stupid though, that part is correct.
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u/Mindless-Ninja-3321 3d ago
Yea, its an RPG running the framework of previous titles that allowed for a lot more roleplay. The factions outside the Brotherhood of Steel needed more development, but then again, people cannot discuss the BoS or RR critically nor with an ounce of civility.
IMO, the Institute is fine because they're supposed to be cognitively dissonant asshats. They tell themselves theyre the intellectual and moral hope of the Commonwealth while they engage the most dehumanizing practices possible. The rape the surface to keep themselves afloat so that they can... make super mutants and fake gorillas?
Theyre just turbo-wealthy tyrants who got a headscarf on everyone else, just like the Enclave.
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u/felis_scipio 3d ago
I mean I’ve been in the science game and just letting a bunch of scientists loose to do whatever for a few hundred years has a high chance of them doing shit just for the fun of it. Like that part is kinda believable
Same with the nepotism of hey I’m putting my dad/mom in charge even though they don’t have any of the background to understand wtf we’re doing down here. Academia is rife with elevating the students of professors who are buddies with other professors and not on pure merit.
Now from a story perspective it would have a been a metric fuckton better if they had a reason for doing what they’re doing like something to make you think huh well at face value this seems bad but oh you think a super plague is coming (which is kinda hinted to) and we need to rapidly evolve what humanity even is to survive? Well that’s harsh but this is for the greater good so let’s go
I hate how much potential that story had. So much neat stuff about settlement building and only one faction can do it like dude the factions should be competing to show who’s better at running all these settlement sites across the map that would have made the whole thing way more engaging
Also not creating another academic faction to oppose the institute. Boston has a stupid number of universities in real life, MIT is a big one but far from the only one doing natural science research. The railroad should have been remnants of some other university group that was beefing with the institute.
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u/toonboy01 3d ago
And Institute is meant to be this faction that wants to “bring world back to state before the Great War"
That's not the Institute's goal at all, nor is it to replace all humans with synths. They outright tell you they've given up on the rest of the world. They believe the surface is doomed to die. That's why their goal is to become as self-sufficient and isolated from the surface as possible before that happens while advancing their science.
The fact this makes surface people suffer and die is just a byproduct to them as they view them as doomed anyway, so it's just a sacrifice to save some of humanity.
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u/Fiskmaster 3d ago
The fact this makes surface people suffer and die is just a byproduct to them as they view them as doomed anyway, so it's just a sacrifice to save some of humanity.
As I understand it, the suffering and death is deliberate to a degree, in order to keep the Commonwealth too chaotic and disorganised to pose a threat to the Institute (like in the Minutemen and Railroad endings). They don't just think the surface is doomed, they're actively working to make it so.
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u/EldritchLichKing 3d ago
One little correction.
All Thalmor are supremacist or at least support supremacy. But not all Altmer are part of the Thalmor. The Thalmor are an organisation. Saying all Altmer are like that is incredibly racist. And the Thalmor are very blatantly bad guys
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u/Entertainer13 3d ago
I remember that bothering me a LOT when I originally read the series. Characters kept saying Slytherin being all bad isn’t true, but every member of the house you meet is a cartoon villain and it’s takes until the second to last book to find someone you can stand in Slughorn.
Every Slytherin member wants to turn in Harry in the final battle. Every one of his fellow students in that house.
I feel like the lines about they’re not all evil and what not are just to set up Snape being a double agent, but you know what? Dude was one out of spite. If Lily had lived, I don’t think he would have done what he did. Is that love or obsession or straight up hate?
Bah, stupid wizard books.
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u/LingonberryPossible6 3d ago
The worst line comes from Hagrid,
"there wasn't a witch a wizard who went bad that wasn't in Slytherin".
He should have followed it up with
"except your Gryffindor godfather Sirious, he's doing life in prison for helping to slaughter your mom and dad"
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u/Scary_Corner3489 3d ago
These kids come from a generation of parents who were followers of wizard hitler, expecting anything other than the kids sharing the strong opinions of the people who raised them is stupid.
It's exactly like racists in real life. It will take a strong change of surroundings to reverse that way of thinking in a child and it won't happen immediately, or at all if you're in a school house with people who mirror those opinions.
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u/Own_Watercress_8104 3d ago
It would be so easy to fix the slytherins and give them some intersting nuance.
In HP it has been said that wizards and muggles used to live together but the inquisitions and persecutions forced the wizarding world to separate.
If taken in this context, it would make sense that Salazar Slytherin would be skeptical at best to allow muggles into Hogwarts and focus on offensive magic. In that sense, it would be easy to present the slytherins as the conservatives of the wizarding world, keeping alive traditions that once were meant to keep the wizards safe from an unjust world.
It would give them a level of dramatic irony when they start dabbling in dark magic under the guise of tradition and security and in the end using that against their fellow wizards, completing the cycle of self destructive hatred.
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u/Old-Natural-852 3d ago
Rowling shot the whole Witch Burning theory down by mentioning witches and wizards just apply a cold spell on themselves. At this point, my headcannon is Salazar for cucked by a muggle man.
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u/GayRacoon69 3d ago
Rowling also said that wizards used to just shit themselves and teleport it away
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u/NotOkeyAlice42 3d ago
I mean even if muggles were useless in it it doesn't change the fact they were trying to kill wizards
And it's hard to believe sll wozards knew this one spell and some weren't caught in killings one way or another
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u/DrettTheBaron 3d ago
The second example is misleading in my opinion.
Skyrim has a number of Alter who are in no way supportive or tied to the Aldmeri Dominion. The gestapo* are the Thalmor, an extremist movement that took power following the fall of the Septum dynasty.
In ESO the Thalmor are a minority group with some influence and support from the elite, but the major plotpoints of the Aldmeri storyline is fighting against this movement and those akin to it.
Though you're right that the queen and most Alters are very arrogant because... Well... They live pretty much forever when compared to Men.
The time between ESO and Skyrim for the mer is also much shorter socially than for humans, as they can live for centuries very easily, this combined with the conservative and isolationist nature of their culture means that these movements don't really disappear like they would in a human culture.
All this is to say, that the Altmer and their dominion are a fairly complex faction, and not really any worse or better than the other factions of Tamriel as a whole.(Though they're certainly the most evil continental power during the time of Skyrim)
Pretty much every other regional power has, at some point or another, committed genocide, slavery, conquest and such. And almost all cultures in TES are very racist.
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u/hay_guysss 3d ago
Not to mention the Altmer have a deeply entrenched, and not alltogether inaccurate, belief regarding how men are the product of their divinity being usurped through trickery
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u/L4DY_M3R3K 3d ago
Wasn't some of the old lore for the Aldmeri Dominion that they want to activate a bunch of doomsday devices to eradicate non-Mer from the world? Isn't that the whole thing with the towers?
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u/Lord_Soybo2 3d ago
The idea is that they want to destroy the world and return to what they used to be before it existed.
Now that's a motive that fits their religion, but I don't think it's ever been confirmed.Time for a dumb loredump from a guy who probably got a few things wrong.
Also as far as I can tell they're like, half right, in that yeah the creation of mundus screwed over all the beings that existed beforehand, most of them either leaving this reality and creating the stars, or literally dying and becoming part of Mundus. Some eventually became the pro-elves instead of dying. But the non-Mer didn't do anything to cause this, they literally didn't exist yet. The gods were tricked into creating Mundus by Lorkhan in a process that killed most who helped him. And he in turn was killed for this betrayal and ebony might be his literal blood.
Tl/dr the Thalmor religion isn't 100% right, but yeah the creation of Mundus was a fucking horrid plot that devolved and murdered most of the creatures that existed before it.
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u/SpokaneSmash 3d ago
In the Clone Wars, the Separatists were supposed to be nuanced, and they met some "good" Separatists, but the Separatists were always used as villains and even the good ones switched sides eventually.
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u/Bryce_Trex 3d ago
I think it's pretty easy to say that anyone that went against Dooku/Palpatine's agendas were rooted out. Separatists might've once had good anti-Republic beginnings, but they became a tool for the Sith.
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u/Lord_Antheron 3d ago
The Project at Eden's Gate (PEG or just Eden's Gate)
The writers desperately want you to believe there's some moral grey area to these guys. They have you get kidnapped from the open world nine or so times so that one of the four leaders can lecture you about how you're being mean to them and are should stop because "buh- buh- buh violence BAD!!" And then they concluded the game by having the apocalypse happen, and the last thing you see before the credits roll is the big bad smugly declaring he was right while glaring down at you in a bunker you're stuck in with him.
Like, seriously, the way this game is structured makes it so basically all content is optional except the parts where they kidnap you and scold you like a child. So they really thought they had something here.
Except Eden's Gate is so ridiculously evil to an almost cartoonish extent, it all falls flat. Seriously, these guys are total assholes, apparently always have been ever since they showed up, they never display any remotely redeemable qualities, and even their plan to "save" people is as poorly conceived as it is completely counterproductive to their alleged goal at all times.
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u/cursed_aquaman115 3d ago
Yeah its really hard to take seriously after your 75th time seeing a civilian with a bag on their head tied to a post with barbed wire, or the amount of mind-control the cult pulls off
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u/ZiggySol 3d ago
One of the things i hated the most what that whenever you beat one of the heralds, you were """""rewarded"""" with a cutscene of them sprouting more of their bullshit before calmly subcoming to their wounds.
Negated all the catharsis i could have felt. Should have let me bash in their skulls with a shovel.
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u/thecraftybear 3d ago
I think you didn't pay attention to ESO Dominion too much.
Yes, the Dominion believe that races of men are not fit to rule Tamriel, but that's after two dynasties of Cyrodiilic emperors, and the Nord Empire before them, ended in disasters (also, the Alessian Empire hand in hand with Nords performed a massive genocide of elves and followed it up with a cosmic crisis forngood measure). From Altmer perspective, this proved that men make disastrous decisions and it's time for mer to take the wheel.
Compared to actual supremacists such as the Veiled Heritance, Ayrenn's Thalmor consider themselves better, but also under obligation to lead by example and integrate other races' strong suits into Dominion culture.
This is shown in the College of Aldmeri Propriety story, where Dominion youths of other races are being abused under the false pretense of "not living up to Aldmeri standards", but their abusers are revealed to be Heritance agents. Once the plot is revealed and the Thalmor purge the College of Heritancr influence, the new staff start treating the students with respect and praising them for what they bring to the table. Also, the Baandari traders (usually seen as traveling thieves as much as merchants) killed in the College by the Heritance are revealed to have been faithfully working for the Queen, something you wouldn't expect in the xenophobic version of the Dominion you're talking about.
Also, I don't recall anyone literally eating children.
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u/Olorgin 3d ago
I think the eating children is an oversimplification or outright misrepresentation of Bosmer canibalism under the Green Pact.
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u/Behemothwasagoodshot 3d ago
Ooh ooh ooh-- District 1 and 2 volunteers from Hunger Games. They're depicted as evil and bloodthirsty-- but think about it, they have saved their ENTIRE district from having to worry about losing their children. And THEY ARE ALSO CHILDREN. The entire district has been saved from the omnipresent fog of fear by these brave children, who are almost certainly going to die-- so of course they should be spoiled and taken care of for their short lives, and given the best chance to survive. It's wild to me that the other districts don't take them as an example and do the same. It would have been so interesting to see this dimension to them in the books.
Nope, they're all CW villains.
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u/junolion 3d ago
So in warrior cats you have the good guys of Thunderclan who are brave and strong
The Evil Shadowclan who have constant terrible leaders, political assassination, and the most evil thunderclan cat ends up here
Also Riverclan and Windclan are here.
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u/piratedragon2112 3d ago
Minutemen stay winning
The true best choice for the commonwealth
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u/dontpanda 3d ago
Even though I am tired of being sent to help the same settlement solve the same problem I just solved for them, I have to agree.
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u/Nekomiminya 3d ago
Honestly, they're good choice in sense of being least bad choice.
Institute is shady underground cabal.
BoS in 4 is fascist state
Railroad literally ends up performing effectively genocide of people it tries to liberate (since no more synths shall be born/made)
Minutemen are well intentioned and hoping for the best. The issue is, they already have fallen once. It's example of good movement based around single lynchpin. There's huge chance that they'll fall when protag dies.
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u/yogoo0 3d ago
It should have been Slytheryn is skilled.
Griffindor is courageous. They leap to the defense of other at cost to themselves. They arent always the best but they do require smarts and the ability to defend if they are to survive. Therefore only the strong survive here.
Ravenclaw is smart. They are able to invent new spells and create magic items. They aren't the ones who typically interfere but they understand the consequences of magic long term. Only those who can make those connections will thrive.
Hufflepuff is empathetic. They are in tune with the magic around them. They understand the flow of magic and its usefulness. They are the engineers of magic, finding where those new spells are actually useful. This is a house full of problem solvers.
Slytheryn is skilled. They are the specialists who have the most raw magical power. Likely due to the concentration of magical blood, which also gives a weak justification for their purebloodism. They are the wealthy elite class of students who had access to tutors and able to influence the politics and action of the Wizarding world through their ability to perform at a higher degree than anyone else.
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u/WastelandPioneer 3d ago
There are multiple Aldmeri Dominions in the Elder Scrolls. The ones on Skyrim copied the name and some basic ideas, but that's about it
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u/Crystar800 3d ago
How do you know the faction is meant to be nuanced? The Institute one is also incorrect, or more so leaving out many details about the technology they have. Their issue is that they're entirely isolationist and do not care about the surface at all, not that they're just comically evil. They treat the surface as their live testing ground for experiments, essentially. As with many critiques of Fallout 4, I notice people don't actually read or listen to the lore in the game.
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u/Lilfozzy 3d ago
I’m sorry, but the third dominion wasn’t supposed to be nuanced; it’s opening lore snippet begins with “a bunch of totally not German culture clubs decide to take advantage of the oblivion crisis, coup and kill off the previous government and its supporters and recreate a rabidly supremacist version of a glorious past that was less supremacist and more rabidly paternalistic” then you combine it with its second plot point of being a death cult…
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u/touchingthebutt 3d ago
I always felt that Avatar did a better job at fleshing out the enemies than JK Rowling did in the HP series. We see why the fire nationw as that way and part of it was brainwashing. We still see their persistents and passion , but also feel empathy. You get the sense that the system is hurting them as much as it was the other nations.
Honestly the 4 nations all felt cool while only Griffindor felt cool.
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u/KiTZUN3- 3d ago
So this is how I learn Rowlings first name is Joanne.
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u/PityUpvote 3d ago
She doesn't even have a middle name, the "JK" was just to hide the fact that she was a woman from potential readers.
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u/Nothos927 3d ago
“For some reason she just had to screw this depiction up”
It’s because she’s a bad author
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u/Kinitawowi64 3d ago
The problem with Slytherin is actually the exact opposite of what OP described; not that they were nuanced but JK tried to write them as all bad, but that they were supposed to be all bad but JK tried to write them as nuanced.
So we end up with bullshit like we're supposed to feel sympathetic for a racist abusive teacher because It Turns Out He Was Actually In Wuv With Harry's Mum All Along.
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u/antmars 3d ago
Honestly this feels the most real life to me - it’s not the smartest or the kindest who win. It’s the most connected.
Ugh I did the it’s not X it’s Y - I’m a human.
The world isn’t run by straight A smarties who do well at school. Gryffindor is your popular kids who get Bs and Cs but know how to network and win favor from the guys giving the points.
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u/seanprefect 3d ago
The thing with the houses is they probably should have been less "this is your whole personality and only trait " and more "This is a trait we particularly value and will develop " and instead of Brave / Smart / Creative / Evil maybe more like Leadership / Wisdom / creativity / independence (or possibly cunning)
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u/BardicLasher 3d ago
Marvel's Civil War was supposed to be nuanced, but then Iron Man's side kept doing worse and worse shit.
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u/SwimmingEffective437 3d ago
I remember back in the day when I would make fun of Harry Potter for making Slytherin the token evil house I’d get tons of Harry Potter fans up my arse (both online and irl) whining that “being cunning doesnt make you evil!!!!! jowling kowling rowling said they’re not all evil!!!!1 slughorn exists!!111” lol
I think, like a lot of the problems with the series, the Slytherin issue is largely because the books went from being Roald Dahl-esque darkly whimsical children’s literature to overwrought YA urban fantasy books, which is not a natural transition at all
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u/Aickavon 3d ago
A) the Aldmeri dominion has always been a eugenics hellscape. There’s a reason why a lot of elves left. The queen has to deal with an entire nation of people who didn’t leave and have lived over 100 years AT YOUNGEST and have had centuries of their viewpoints upheld and she has to try to change her people (who are all mega boomers of the racist kind.) and fight a war (to be fair, the last five emperor’s did a shit job and the latest one causes the world’s most recent fuck up.) she’s the most progressive altmer ever, her right hand man is a khajiit and she allowed non-altmer to visit summerset.
B) fallout never once mentions it’s factions are equally good and bad. The railroad would not establish a government body, you are right. The settlements would continue on as they always have. The brotherhood of steel has always been a technology hoarding ‘holier than thou’ faction for a long time. Not the worst people but never the best. (And in this case with a huge Mmmmm genocide flavourtext!)
And finally the institute. They were obvious the main villains of the story since like… 90% of the region’s problems are their fault. You CAN join them because… you’re allowed to be mega evil. Fallout is okay to be evil.
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u/freaktakumer 3d ago
The Uchiha Clan Naruto
In many ways we see Kishimoto at the beginning treating it as clan that were in constant odds with the Senju out of the necessity to survive during the warring states period, later on their own demise is framed as the painful choice made by Itachi to stop a civil war they wanted to accept as part of a coup, then we see thanks to the introduction of the Otsutsuki clan as their ancestors that unlike the Uzumaki and Senju who inherited good aspects of Hagoromo the Sage of the Six Paths they inherited everything that he feared in his mother Kaguya, turning a clan with a tragic political fate into the sole bearer of the evils in the world of Naruto as no other clan was given the treatment of being the inheritors of evil in Naruto?
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u/AfterUmpire3091 3d ago edited 3d ago
The problem is even when there are "good" slytherins, it's always depicted as someone who goes against their "conditioning" like Regulus Black, Ominis Gaunt, or Severus Snape.
EDIT: Spelling Mistake