This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
anowack: Removed, because it doesn't really seem to fit the trope: A Dark messiah is often the figurehead, confusing heroes with good intentions and evil actions.
Henry Hankovich: Aztek human sacrifice is "called into question"? Not hardly. The historical research tends to revise descriptions of human sacrifice from ridiculous levels to the merely obscene (84000 versus 2000, is still a whole lot). And regardless of whether they found people willing to be sacrificed for certain rituals, the fact remains that prisoners of war were still the sacrifice of choice most of the time. History is getting an increasingly nuanced picture of Aztek sacrifice, but its brutality and frequency isn't really in question.
anowack: Removed some extraneous discussion not really relevant to the trope:
- Yeah, but they're elves. As long as they're white as bread, elves have the right to be downright lawful-evil and still be counted as chaotic-good. See the history of Myth Drannor in the Forgotten Realms, full of murders and pogroms all in the name of old traditions and strong prejudices, all committed by the High Elves. (Who are also responsible for genocide and the use of magical WMD in the Crown Wars of the same setting; but it's the Dark Elves who are punished by the gods for wickedness...)
- And still on the topic of elves being good when they're evil, the comparison between the combat tactics of the elves and the goblins in the Monster Manual
is always amusing...
Nornagest: Cut —
- *We can't forget the Religion of Evil that everybody has heard of: Those Wacky Nazis
Nazism was an ideology, but it was not a religion, and it did have pretensions of being other than evil; fairly thin pretensions from the modern perspective and with the benefit of hindsight, yes, but remember that its worst excesses were not made public back in the Thirties. It also evolved in a political environment where totalitarianism was not seen as evil in itself, and was even seen as a vigorous alternative to the old democratic and aristocratic systems (which were starting to look a little shaky in light of the Great Depression). History proved Nazism wrong, but let's remember it for what it was: a poisonous and more-than-slightly unhinged political ideology built on nationalism and Hitler's weird charisma, not a cartoon evil empire. lockhead: It is also extensively flame wared whether Hitler was religious during the Nazi regime. Sure he had the religious message to make Nazism look better, but it could be argued that this was because he wanted to control the church and religion, rather than any religious beliefs he may have. Best guess is Hitler's religious beliefs were the ones that suited Hitler...one day he might be a devout Catholic, the next a hardcore atheist, the dude was crazy, you really cannot accurately pin down what beliefs he may have honestly had.
