What would an evil empire whose grand goal is purely to improve the aesthetics of all the lands it conquers be like...

What would an evil empire whose grand goal is purely to improve the aesthetics of all the lands it conquers be like? And what would its Evil Overlord be?

Immortal Lord Trump of 'Great Terraforming Comglamaration of Unites States of Earth'.

France

A genius bard, an artist of legendary skill and taste whose search for beauty lead him down a dark path, heartlessly destroying anything before him that he deemed ugly or foul.

His legions march with a smile, their colours bright, their armour gleaming, purging imperfection from his world. Cities in his domain are bright and clean, full of smiling people in clean clothes, because not smiling or being grubby is punishable by death.

People labour long hours upon artworks and poems as tithe to him, while fields go unworked and people starve, deemed irrelevant to his grand vision of a pure, beautiful world.

Maybe tone down the genocide a bit, but basically this.

Obligatory A E S T H E T I C post

Memes aside, the empire's tactics would probably consist of unbridled total war. If it's going to be demolished and rebuilt anyways, there's no reason to care. Based on that, it's need for population would consist of what it needs to improve the appearance. But the people will certainly want to rebel against a controlling force that obliterates their homes and builds new ones because it thinks they look prettier that way.

Therefore, I'd say the best overlord would be someone with ready access to loyal soldiers and workers. Probably a lich who could keep raising the dead to construct things. There's other possibilities, but there's no way of maintaining control over a populace when you're destroying their land, so I think the empire would also just genocide everyone rather than try to deal with revolts, since all it cares about is the aesthetic of the land, and people might ruin that. With that in mind, a mindless army really is the best choice, as I doubt even the most loyal are going to be alright with genociding every land they come across.

tl;dr Lich who practices total war and genocide, then rebuilds from the ground up to make everything fit his specific tastes.

Making Universe Great Again?

>aesthetics

Surprisingly, the most recent major political movement with a significant eye on the aesthetics would be the Nazis.

Go back to fucking /pol/

no

Scratch that, what would his Evil Lair look like?

So what, do they "iron out the wrinkles"?

You don't "iron" silk!

No no no, you pull it taught across a carefully chiseled and sculpted body, then starch it to make it hold the shape you desire!

The Silken Throne Room is daubed in the most colourful and immense of decorative rugs and tapestries, the floor covered in inch thick shag carpets, and the only entrance a portal that can only be passed through by those with bare clean feet.

>trump
>aesthetics
Not with three cans of hairspray to cover his bald spot

>grand goal is purely to improve the aesthetics of all the lands it conquers
>And what would its Evil Overlord be?

here's my guess. not that it would be miami, but something like this.

that's only correct in the vaguest, most nebulous sense. More its a meme /pol/ repeats to feel good.

>grand goal is purely to improve aesthetics
How is this empire evil?

>fake tan
>ugly toupee
>builds fucking brutalist eyesores
>poorly fitting dull grey suits
Your meme grade understanding of aesthetics makes me puke.

The nazis hated Bauhaus, jazz and surrealism. Their sense of aesthetics was plebe tier retardation.

Comparatively socialism had some of the best writers, architects, playwrights and composers of this century.

Stalin and Mao being fucking nationalist philistines of course killed all that.

I'd imagine it's not the goal, but the means are evil. I honestly love the idea of a Lich commanding a legion of undead, each ornately and beautifully clad in shine and gossamer.

"STOP RESISTING. I SHALL MAKE YOU BEAUTIFUL!"

you do have a point, elitist socialism would probably be a decent model for what Oscar Wild would be like as an evil overlord

aesthetics would likely include things like having purportedly noble objectives, referring to each other as tovarish while seeking to construct "the new man"

>2016
>liking Entartete Kunst
Off to the mandatory beautifying camps you go, vulgarian.

>People labour long hours upon artworks and poems as tithe to him, while fields go unworked and people starve, deemed irrelevant to his grand vision of a pure, beautiful world.

What?! And lose the aesthetically pleasing fields of grain in the fall? or the Cherry, Plum and Peach blossoms in the spring?

Elven.

An elf.

>this bullshit

It's not. You can argue all day about how terrible their sense of aesthetics where, or how retarded their moral philosophy was, or how they based their racial policies off of theories that where considered nebulous even then, but the quality of something being poor does not negate it's existence.

It wasn't good, but it was there and it was defining. You shouldn't call things /pol/ memes because you don't understand what the post said and they mentioned the Nazis.

To the extent that the nazis gave a shit about aesthetics, stalinism also went nuts on trying to make a proper socialist art (socialist realism) and even the liberal democracies of the era tried to use an appeal to aesthetics as a way to promote more production (the new deal included huge subsidies to cultural creation)

They weren't unique or particularly good at it and like most things the nazi did, it had to deal with the fact that the ministries in charge of this shit were always very literally at each other's throats.

Dorian Grey

>Chapter after chapter of aesthetic porn and gay subtext
This

I imagine bards would value narrative too much to go down this path. What point is there in a pretty nation if you become ugly in making it?

For me, the Evil Overlord only suffers people as far as they are useful to him. His obsession with aesthetic compels him to create symmetry and order; think of a Minecraft autist, shaving down a mountain and using the material to fill a valley. While you may be able to deny the beauty of his creations, you must appreciate his refusal to compromise.

>And what would its Evil Overlord be?
Who indeed?

Gay as fuck

Strives for perfection in everything

Gets super twitchy and violent whenever his or her perfect expectations are not met

except they weren't about aesthetics, they just slavicly wanted everything to be "like it was in the olden days" so they stuck neo-classical shit on everything and had that whole weird plan to turn asia in a massive hunting park for their resurrected auroch project.

aesthetics is about aesthetic ideals being more important than some cargo cult attempt to travel back to caveman times with their overcompensating heavy tanks.

Roman statues and neon everywhere

maximum AESTHETIC

...

OP didn't say the evil artistic overlords had to be *right* about art, just obsessed with it.

My vote is the nazis as well. They really saw themselves as ridding the world of hideous things.

David Bowie

Prince with the same sort of female honor guard that Gaddafi had, but in designer uniforms.

"People today feel subconsciously ashamed to build legitimately beautiful things because they have been poisoned by decades of self-hating Marxist propaganda to find anything that isn't self-depreciating to be criminally immoral. Gone entirely is the sense of civic pride that drove men to make things great and wondrous to look upon for their own sake, and gone too is the sense of pride that comes with living in an aesthetic society.

But if we surround them with beauty, with proof that the hands of their people can create beauty, then they will have no recourse but to face head-on the lie that ours is a decadent and evil culture that deserves extinction. We will force open their eyes and make them look, and what they see will be beautiful. And then..."

tehre's a certain irony that that speech was said in the world's ugliest language, spat by an ugly trogolodyke who couldn't handle perspective properly.

It would probably be a wonderful empire to adventure in.
There's a beauty to adventuring, saving towns from wild beasts in the nearby dark forests.
He'd probably have druids working on forming impossibly thick forests for a sense of added mystery in the countryside.

Raised by aristocratic humans.

>/pol/
>when he's saying that Trump in office would be EVIL

...

I guess it is still political.

>world's ugliest language
Just because I wrote it in English doesn't mean it was originally.

In this case it was, of course, because it wasn't a real speech. Hitler would've blamed the kikes, not the Communists.

Hitler believed that the kikes were behind communism which is kinda true, so technically he was also blaming them as well.

People who send others to /pol/ usually really fast to get triggered.

I think tumblr is where he belongs, as do you.

There has been a lot about socialist aesthetics even from the original big three in Russia.

Socialist Realism was no less an aesthetic effort than the nazi party's obvious Romaboo cultural inferiority complex.

Nazi Germany

When Narcissus gazed into the lake, and his likeness reached out to him and swallowed him in its embrace, did he reject it? Did he hate it? Or did he think how beautiful it was, and accepted it as the true ideal?
When Pygmalion created his beloved Galatea, was he uncontent with his creation? Did he seek to improve her? Or did he accept her for the perfection that she was?

When the original Horatio created the first replica of himself, an idea was born.
An idea of a world of beauty, a world of perfection, a world of Horatio. Not just a single being, no - the entire ideal world was finally within reach.

Beauty is mandatory.
All that is not beautiful will be recreated in our likeness.
All that rejects us deserves to perish.
Ugly people shall not be tolerated.
And the entire universe shall turn into the beauty that is Horatio.

That's not how empires work or function.

>That's not how empires work or function.
Literally .

Man, I love Endless Space setting.

>sending some Reddit-cuck liberal to /pol/

Is that why we get flooded with you faggots so often?

>implying pol isn't the reason r/Veeky Forums and their hilarious mejmejs exists

Looks like that Red Dwarf Episode where Rimmer gets stuck alone on a planet for a couple of centuries, and uses a "garden of eden" kit to make the world he's on habitable and to produce a lover... who ends up being an opposite sex clone of himself, and so he makes a few more to try to fix is... and by the time the rest of the crew finds him again there's a roman empire of rimmers and the original rimmer is in a dungeon because a civilisation of himselves is one where everyone is cowardly backstabbers.

Sounds like Rome. Before the Roman empire conquered Europe most of the civilizations around where shit-tier mud dwellers. In fact the only country that actually was considered "civilized" at the time was Britain, which still bent over for them. Also Rome would build a shit ton of roads in the newly conquered areas, and help build ACTUAL cities, not the piles of stone and shit everyone else had at the time.

a gardener

...

Oda Nobunanga

You mean the best flavor of elves of all time? Yes. And they did genocide too.

Personally, I'd have it be without a single Evil Overlord, instead ruled by a Council, to allow for the fact that there are a variety of aesthetics, and to make certain issues less worrisome.

The Minister of Pastoralism, for instance, handles the needs of producing the nation's food, and tending the rolling fields of wheat and properly sheered sheep. His aesthetic is a sense of nature, carefully cultivated. His regions feature warm cottages, simple instruments, with tanned, fit men tending the fields.

Meanwhile, the Minister of Militarism commands the legions of troops, their uniforms efficient, intimidating, and impressive. Their camps and outposts symbols of strength. A strong sense of pride and power infuses his aesthetic, with brass instruments and booming drums, and spartan efficiency.

The Minister of Progress adopts the neo-Gothic aesthetic of Mad Science, with complex instruments like pipe organs and secluded bases wherein terrible experiments reveal terrifying new truths, often perched on lonely mountains, frequently most active during thunderstorms. The brooding but electric feel of menace is his aesthetic.

So on and So forth.

It has the advantage of embracing multiple aesthetics, and allowing newly conquered territories to be divided in administration with something approaching efficiency. It further allows players to try and rile dissent between ministers, providing a sense of political instability.

This is what he looks like.

They hated Bauhaus because it seemed too socialist to their eyes, but they did like their designs and even used them, probably unaware of where they came from

reminds me of someone....

>quest board

MAKE Veeky Forums GREAT AGAIN

right-wing aesthetics > left-wing aesthetics

The evil empire would have to sell this idea to the Masses... the poor and the downtrodden. It would have to have a compelling reason why aesthetics will improve the lot of the underclass, and their evil overlord would look like Chairman Mao looks like in his portraits and paintings.

Evil through sheer ignorance of the realities of ruling a nation, leading to the deaths and suffering of millions.

Imagine if Mao's goal wasn't industrialization, but beautification....
>Entire country's grain yield cut in half because the ugly, less well developed plants are culled.
"Those plants that are not beautiful produce grain that is less wholesome, we must remove these plants that sabotage our health!"
>Tools need to look beautiful; old tools with even a hint of rust are collected for scrap so they can be re-forged.
"The tool that harbors rust deceives its owner; that which works for its owner whilst sharp turns against him when dull!"
>Babies born with defects are deemed unworthy of life
"Strong children will grow up to support a strong country!"
>Tons of government-sponsored beautification projects that have no use other than to make the area look prettier.... think Mt Rushmore-scale projects.
"We shall be the envy of the world! No country will match our Great Works!"

>what would its Evil Overlord be?

The end justifies the means. For an evil (demented) bard all the suffering and dirt would be worth it, since it would be a crucible of filth producing the perfect world.

Bards would make fantastic spin doctors, rewriting a history of tyranny as a heroic epic.

Bards control the bar songs which is basically like controlling the media in our time.

>Mishima
triple kek

Elves of Shadowmoor.Perfect fit.

>The end justifies the means.

Do they? Or do the memes justify the ends?

I have an Enchanter in my game based off Dorian Grey doing this exact thread's topic in my game right now, trying to establish a Pantisocracy form of civilization with him as it's Supreme Curator of Aesthetics.

The Imperium.