YMMV / The Draka

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• Accidental Aesop: Considering the common consensus that the Draka Take Over the World because the rest of the world passes up every possible opportunity to stop them, the adage that "evil prevails when good men fail to act" can be applied in full force here. Unfortunately it kinda falls flat here on account on how implausibly it is applied; no nation however how move or inattentive would completely overlook malevolence as blatant as that.
• Depraved Bisexual: The death of Yolande Ingolffsson's girlfriend Myfwany Venders sets her on a lifelong path of destruction, up to and including starting World War III, and most but not all of her sexual partners are female. She does have later Friends with Benefits situation going on with a male officer named Teller, whom she tells that she 60-40 prefers women to men.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • In part out of a desire to see the Draka get their just desserts, there's a pretty decently large amount of fanfic out there show the Draka fighting against other factions across fiction (i.e., the Borg, the Daleks and/or Time Lords, the Culture, and et cetera).
  • Or simply alternate-alternate-history stories such as Proof Through The Night in which the Draka are defeated by the ordinary military powers of their own time and place.
  • There's also several fanfics giving more insight into how the Draka conquered Africa and how the rest of the world had been affected by the Draka's rise in power.
• Fridge Horror: With nothing more than strategic autarky, complete security and control over the working class serfs, nuclear weapons with global reach, and a tech advancement rate identical to our own, the Draka would never fall. Unlike the Soviet Union, the Draka never had any pretense of fighting for equality, and for the masses it never mattered if the outside world had a better standard of living. For comparison, look at North Korea IOTL. They do not have strategic autarky; their nuclear deterrent is laughable, possibly non-existent; and they could be crushed and annihilated in a historical instant, were it not for their alliance with China— and yet they still exist and continue to hold their people in the grip of a totalitarian dictatorship. If the OTL South Africa had a nuclear deterrent of the French scale by 1979, Apartheid might still be going on.
  • South Africa wasn't invaded from outside. Would a nuclear deterrent have acted to preserve Apartheid?
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Given the large amount of similarities between them (right down to everyone being bi), the trolls from Homestuck could easily be interpreted as a parody of the Draka, but this is almost certainly unintentional.
• Misaimed Fandom: Disturbingly enough, there are some far-right extremists who consider the Draka to be an example of a utopian society.
• Moment of Awesome: When Humanity's fleet from Alpha Centauri warp in above Earth in Drakon and get a hair's width away from defeating them once and for all. Unfortunately, we don't see it happen.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Draka refine this in quantities enough to fill oceans with. You know it's bad when they make you legitimately root for the Nazis when they face off against the Draka.
  • The scenes where Stone Dogs infected personnel slowly raging to death with torn mouths after chewing their own tongue and crushed their teeth with jaw pressure can overcome the Too Bleak, Stopped Caring factor. On camera. Transmitting to the Alliance fleet. Said disease is made after experiments on children and their mothers!
  • In Marching Through Georgia Standartenfuhrer Felix Hoth, a fanatic Nazi war criminal who was canonically a rapist and mass murderer, still tempts the reader to root for him because at least he's not the Draka.
  • The middle book, Under the Yoke, includes descriptions of how Draka treat slaves. It's appropriately hellish.
  • A Human Empire with an alien morality invades Europe and the rest of the world, reduces everyone into Roman style slaves, serf women can be raped anytime and are regularly raped, and every last La Résistance is prevented by massacres on spot, and after World War 3, the serfs are genetically modified to accept slavery meekly, and despise "ferals", humans who resist the Draka. Every effort of human resistance is forever forgotten on Earth.
• Rooting for the Empire:
  • One reason why S.M. Stirling wrote this series in the first place was because he wanted a story in which the Evil Empire completely dominates the good guys. However, (and perhaps ironically enough) This trope is generally averted due to how utterly depraved The Draka themselves are.
  • The Draka are so vile, in fact, that many have said that the series may be one of the few works of fiction that makes people unironically root for the Nazis.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: When the entire point of the series is The Bad Guy Wins, and said bad guys are so over-the-top evil that the Nazis are the good guys in the fight against them, this is basically inevitable.

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