Are Nazis the perfect bad guys?

...

Man, im getting tired of /pol/ getting everywhere. Aren't they tired of roleplaying nazis all day? do they know no one takes them seriously?

>Led by a moron
>Killed 10 million people
>Left their country a smoking ruin

>Everything is fine .jpeg

The wailing of an edgelord.

>can be killed by the boatload without repercussion or controversy
That is because the German government are fucking eunuchs. Thinking people are pissed off at this situation.

Hahaha 10/10

It's pretty fucking pathetic that this website has got to a state that we can't even agree on a basic precept like "Nazis are bad" without being shitposted into oblivion.
/pol/ was a mistake.

Nobody asked whether or not the Nazis are bad you fucking abortion. OP asked whether or not they're the ultimate bad guys.

That is what happens when you don't punch your local nazis frequently only know that they are popular.

>/pol/ was a mistake.
>Implying meme timeline isn't best timeline

I always thought Metro 2033's iteration of Nazis was the most fascinating in a creepy or bone-chilling sort of way. It also felt like a very natural portrayal too.

Then again I love every thing about the metro series

>we've had this thread 3.2e15 times before meme

Really though, they kind of are - for a couple of big reasons, and a load of little ones.

The biggest reason is that WWII had a fucking enormous impact on the world and the people in it - authors artists and directors have always drawn from history, and WWII is the biggest and most widely talked-about war ever - it's a never-ending font of inspiration.

The other big reason I'd say is that one of the things the Nazis were best at was propaganda and image management - Hitler, after all, was an artist, and the Nazis made sure they looked good - which meant the allies working against them had to make them look bad. Nazi directors pioneered a fair few film techniques, and these were copied later to use against them, but the salient point is that there's a lot of media about them, both trying to make them look good and look evil. This then goes back to point one.

The third big point is that the Nazis lost, which makes them the best villains - stories where the bad guys win can be good, sure, but they work because in most stories the bad guys lose.

There's a host of other things: the warcrimes, the wunderwaffe, the notably dynamic characters, the interest in the occult, the uniforms, the separate super-political troops who got to be a second army, the internal defectors, the guys just doing their job, the slave labour, the medical stuff, their generally high technology, the general course of the war and how close they appeared to get, etc., etc. but overall the Nazis make great bad guys for 3 reasons.

They changed the world
You know who they are immediately
They lost in the end

> Credible threat, taking over all of western Europe in a matter of months against the odds.
> Superiority complex to make up for the previous lost war and economic collapse that followed.
> Uses a convenient excuse to steal vast amounts of wealth and commit genocide because "it was the Jews fault for everything".
> Bites more than it can chew, invades former ally and gets as far as Moscow.
> Proceeds to get double timed from both sides and loses the war worse off than the last one they lost.
> Ideology survives even after such a bad track record.
I mean for such a good start, you gotta had it the Nazi's for being such great sore losers. Makes them even better punching bags as this user said.

Only if you like playing with small children.

reddit thread

daily reminder capitalism and communism allied to stamp out the third alternative and politicians in the west can wave about mao's red book in government buildings and not be ostracized, unlike if they waved mein kampf

why do commies think they're revolutionary? maybe before the flower power boomer era, not anymore

I've always found it to be extremely bad written pulp fantasy.

> Credible threat, taking over all of western Europe in a matter of months against the odds.
Except odd where in their favor for first half of war

I guess it's not for everyone. The writing does hiccup in places. I never read the books either but I hear they're more grounded in reality than the games and the Nazis in them are more of the Neo-Nazi variety rather than the more stylistic fourth reich

Not really - people forget that taking France was a shocking victory that no-one really expected at the time.
Taking out all of Western Europe with Blitzkreig shocked the world, but to us it seems the logical way for it to have gone with hindsight and historical knowledge

>do they know no one takes them seriously?

Sadly untrue. Plenty of people seem to take them dangerously seriously, which is the entire fucking problem.

>invades former ally and gets as far as Moscow.
i want this meme to end, germany and russia were never allies
the non-aggression pact was a statement that they'd give eachother some time to build up before they started to fight, there was no goodwill in it whatsoever

>implying that would've happened pre-/pol/
No, Nazi's are technically sapient and can reason and be used as possibly sympathetic characters. The best bad guy, by what I assume to be your metric of "can be killed without remorse" would be a non-sapient life destroying race.
>can be killed by the boatload without repercussion
If this was about the Jewish, you'd be crying Nazi at the top of your lungs. Please stop being a hypocrite.

this is not inaccurate

Although good and bad is subjective, they did some really brutal stuff from slave labor to mass murder which can be considered "evil" by the rest of the world.
One thing that is true is that a man who kills another man/women/child for just the reason that they exist can be labold as mentally unstable.

To sum this up. No they are not the perfect bad guy because it seems like the GM was trying too hard with Nazi's.
A good bad guy is one the players can relate to and didn't start out as a bat shit insane person, in my opinion.

Of course

>bad guys need to be well written and sympathetic

Can this literal meme fucking die already please? The antagonist is literally the least important member of the main cast of a narrative. It's why man eating sharks, tornadoes, volcanoes, tidal waves and icebergs have made acceptable antagonists. As long as you have a good main cast of well written characters you're golden. Literally the only necessary part of writing fiction, there are even theatrical plays that zero narrative thrust where nothing happens and is just two characters playing off each other that work because of good characters

I blame Star Wars for this cancerous mindset of "he was just a good guy who lost his way" shit that springs up everywhere now.

To be fair, Nazi grunts can have that covered (Heer, anyway, SS usual won't).
And the odd noble officer type as well.

There's a Nazi for pretty much any bad guy need

Nah mate French were set to win it with Brits coming in as backup. Their army was the largest, they had more advanced (if oddly designed) tanks and the Maginot line was the wall that would keep the dirty Nazi's out.
They didn't realise the Germans had been training since the Spanish Civil War with their new combined warfare tactics known as Blitzkrieg, which was the Nazi ace that would trump the French and have them surrendering in 6 weeks. Considering some of their tank divisions were using tourist maps to get around, you have to give them credit for doing in a month and a bit what they failed to do in over the 4 years of the first world war 2 decades ago.

I did an Elf Nazis from another dimension story once. They consolidated the native Elven peoples, exterminated the Drow, and then started steamrolling the forces of Righteousness with Wizard Tanks and shit.

Battle of France is perfect example of odd being with them.
Not only Germans were free to do what they want until that point (building up, anecting more territories and finally invading other countries while Allies did nothing to oppose them), they had tech and equipment from overtaken countries (Czech tanks for example), had practice (first just peacefully taking over countries, later actual war) what made them able to fix mistakes and gain experience. French and British learned wrong lessons from WWI, they developed and used tanks in wrong way and their doctrines were not for mobile war like others but static war like Western front from WWI (what was only front like that in entire war). Even that gambit with way they attacked and outflanked allied armies were risky and could easy turn in disaster (thats why generals were sceptical about this). Not to mention Allies (especially French) weren't really that into war unlike previous world war.

Sure an antagonist can be a charecter no one knows too much and/or is sycophantic and can and still be a good antagonist. It all depends in the end on the GM or writer.
>I blame Star Wars
You shouldn't. Darth Sidious was the perfect example for a good unsympathetic bad guy

>you will never hug a cute camp survivor

Why even war Against Fascism?

Maybe not allies per se, but they were damn friendly when cutting up Eastern Europe in addition to all the raw material the Russians were sending over to Germany for the war effort right up until Hitler broke the treaty.

Nah, they have strong contenders in:
Commies
Terrorists
Americans
The british empire
and
Giant insects

All of these things are amazing enemies. Or allies. Really, they will improve the story if you add them in any way.

>British Empire
>Americans
>bad guys

I can literally not even name one thing where the Americans or the Brits are the bad guys

the brits usually turn out to be more neutral guys with corrupt guys up top that are individual villains, strangely.
And eagle-land is a great bad guy. All guns and stars and flare and bombing you.

> What is the American War for Independence?
> What is the American War/Vietnam War?

But those are your opinions and not a movie

Not to mention that they did straight up evil science just because they could and tried pretty damn hard to use evil magic even though they couldn't.

Like for fuck's sake there were skulls in some of their uniform designs. They knew damn well that they were evil and they decided fill their role with german efficiency.

Not your personal army, fucking faggot

No, but they are the perfect good guys.

>Americans are bad guys
Green Zone, other gulf war films
>Brits are bad guys
A whole lot of movies made in Hollywood of the 00's had them as the bad guys.

the brits are evil in jumanji, user.

Communists killed many more people than Nazis an as such are more evil.

Prove me wrong.

see, it's all about evil per person.
Commies had more people, so the evil gets watered down between them.
meanwhile, the germans, efficient people that they are, managed to fit a massive amount of evildoing into a very small timeframe and small amount of people.
This made the nazis a much more concentrated and visibly greater evil compared to the commies diffuse and incompetent evil.

>there were skulls in some of their uniform designs
That's a traditional prussian thing they co-opted.

I mean, skull uniforms are never going to be the mark of anyone who's really nice, at best you're looking at a "warrior tradition" or fatalistic badass, but it's not necessarily pure evil

Still, Imma post the sketch
youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU

What's special about them?

>mfw commies are so inefficient they can't even evil right

Hitler did nothing wrong
Jews are best bad guys
Nazi's are best bad goys

>Hitler did nothing wrong
Hitler killed Hitler. :^)

Nazis vs Jews was like Aliens vs Predator, whoever wins we lose.

The jews won and it's quite clear today that we indeed lost.

Don't forget
>european so you can dehumanize them as much as you want without people accusing you of being racists

did they though ? number of people killed by soviet union generally include the death from famine. if those numbers are included they killed more than the nazi; if not, less.

before you decide that famine should be included, I'd like to point out that the british empire killed more people with organised famine than both of them.

people often cite the whole "they used skulls in their uniforms" as an accusation that they're obviously the bad guys, but was the use of skulls in military uniforms always seen as being a bad guy trait or were the nazis the originator of this mindset? Were skulls historically seen as an evil thing to use in military gear?

Prussia deserved better

>It's pretty fucking pathetic that this website has got to a state that we can't even agree on a basic precept like "Nazis are bad
Get over yourself. Veeky Forums has always fucking been like this. Its called counter-culture you insufferable moron. Get the fuck back to whatever site you came from.

>Aren't they tired of roleplaying nazis all day?
You should ask this of the 40k crowd

The books are far darker and less pulp adventure-y. Even there there are some weird spots in the writing but over all they provide a more sober and mature experience than the games.

Interesting antagonists lead to complex moral decisions and more complications for the protagonist and main cast. You're right in that they're not always required, but they do improve stories when their intricacies play off of the protag's

No, user, that is called contrarianism.
Get it right, we like the Imperium, but entirely recognize all of it's faults and do not make excuses for how shit it is. We just recognize that the 40k setting is so far down the shitter that the awfulness of the Imperium is the only way they know how to cope; miserable existence is better than extinction.
>except for the traitor primarch apologists
>fuck you idiots, we accept the Imperium is shit, don't try to deflect the shitlord traitor primarches as though they weren't ultimately responsible for their own lot

> I can literally not name one THING where the Americans or the Brits are the bad guys.

Well if we need to go to something simpler than historical conflicts that shaped nations:
> What is The Patriot?
> What is Braveheart?

> What is Apocolypse Now?
> What is Iron Sky?

> WHAT IS DR STRANGELOVE?

There is a difference between being interesting and trying to make it seem like the antagonist is somehow justified in what they are doing and the protags are wrong to stop them.
Nox was an interesting antagonist; you could commiserate with his plight, yes, but it didn't excuse him causing wholesale genocide for 200 years. He was a bad guy, and nothing made it less so.

>> WHAT IS DR STRANGELOVE?
Well I didn't need my sides today, thank you user for starting my day with a good laugh.

Makes you wonder if it's ignorance or irony that Trump is re-imagined as the god emperor all the time...

I didn't even read the post you responded to at first, I just did and I agree just because the Nazi's were irrevocably evil doesn't make them poor villains. "Like the GM is trying too hard" is bullshit. It'd be trying too hard if he tried giving them all sympathetic backstories.

To be fair they never actually reached Moscow. Got really damn close though.

Both, because classically, Big E had godlike power and intellect, but was brought low by the small human foibles we are all wont to despite it all.
He also genuinely had humanity's best interests at heart, but was willing to do whatever it took to get there, believing the ends would justify the means at the end of it all, and humanity would be free to enter a new golden age without the mistakes of the past looming upon it.

They got there bust lost the battle to take it because of General Winter and "Welp, guess the Japs aren't attacking, better move shit from Siberia to Moscow".

Like I said, I draw the line when people act like a villain needs to be entirely justified and the protags are basically "wrong" to stop them.

This. British empire is the epitome of evil
>literally razed to the ground entire civilizations, burning cities (like Kongo) and destroying ancient marvels (like wall of Benin)
>enslaved a good portion of the world's population
>completely destroyed India's economy that had probably the highest standard of life at the time to the point where almost 100 years later they still poo in the loo
>hooked China on opium
>genocided entire nations
>and at the same time all those riches they've sucked from their colonies went only to the richest, leaving British workers in a state not much better than those in India
>they had goddamn window tax
But hey, history is written by the victors. And they had stylish caps and moustaches.

Mhm, its winter's fault for you not packing warm clothes. At least you can eat all those horses that are carrying the supplies for your super modern army while the soviets roll around in brand new Studebakers.

>>completely destroyed India's economy that had probably the highest standard of life at the time to the point where almost 100 years later they still poo in the loo
Didn't India also kinda destroy itself because of dat high population?

Considering the chaos that's erupting from his weeks old presidency, I can only imagine it'll get even madder when Horus shows up.

>Have decent agriculture to support own population
>You there! Now you plant cotton!
>And you! Tea plantation!
>Food riots?! Those damn barbarians, open fire!
>Rule Britannia!
Yeah, totally India fault...

But... how did so many reach adulthood and reproduce some more if they didn't have enough food?

Because the Brits suddenly switched the production completely disregarding needs of the local population?

They HAD enough food, you dumb faggot. Until their fields were forcefully converted into cotton plantations and all spare food shipped to sell in Europe, for the trader's profit.
Jesus, why /pol/ is stupid on purpose?

Well it's either them or Soviet-era Communists. You have to look at the upsides and drawbacks of each.

Nazis
Pros:
God-Tier Aesthetics
German sounds scary
Prone to inventing crazy shit and being into the occult, good for horror or even fantasy plots
Had sick hardware, everyone wants to jack an Stg-44, good loot
Sympathizing with Nazis is a cultural no-no unless you're from India so nobody feels bad about shooting them

Cons:
None

Communists:
Pros:
High-Tier Aesthetics
Russian sounds scary
Prone to building huge, monstrous tanks and lots of them, also space, good for Space plots
Had clunky but idiosyncratic hardware, AK-47s for everybody
Famous for being inept but having overwhelming numbers--the ultimate expendable villains

Cons:
They won WWII so some people actually like them. Fetishizing violence against communists requires you to either be a satire of red-blooded 80s Cold War Democratic bravado, or a Nazi.

I don't think they aren't the same people.

Deluded, Paranoid, and/or Cowed into obedience.
If you want an enemy whose start of darkness was being born into humiliation and poverty, or a cog in an inescapable Lawful Evil engine, sure.
Now, if you want someone more willfully and obnoxiously evil, look to their successors, neo-nazis have all the negative traits with few of the reasons.

Clear off.

Oh yeah what are ya gonna do about it?

*teleports behind you*

/pol/ was a mistake.

>frogposting /pol/fags show up to ruin threads
This is why frogposters are hated in these parts.

Are you are least aware that the same winter was affecting Russians? And the same lack of roads was affecting Russians?

BBEG in MW2 is american

They come across as kind of sad in my opinion, all their puffed up declarations and pride is covering for the fact that they're a deeply broken people who know their days are numbered and are becoming more fanatical and desperate in their waning days.

They still do some really bad things but they're far from alone in that regard down in the Metro and they're nowhere near as powerful as they want to think they are.

This is great, thanks for posting it

YES.....followed second by Trump and his Trumpettes

>Man, im getting tired of /pol/ getting everywhere. Aren't they tired of roleplaying nazis all day? do they know no one takes them seriously?

See, back in the old days of classic Veeky Forums, almost everyone posting on Veeky Forums was already a veteran of /b/, so when someone made a thread about Nazis as good antagonistic fodder in RPGs and someone came into the thread trying to troll, they got a quick "Fuck off, nigger" and everyone ignored them, because it wasn't anything novel.

Ten years later, a plurality of this board's posters have never even been on /b/, so when they see a troll post, they don't understand that they're being trolled, and think they need to expend time and thread space replying to trolls.

This is why I never report threads on Veeky Forums anymore. The quality of posters is never going to improve unless natural selection is allowed to take place, and the mods coddling triggered babies (on either side of the spectrum) runs counter to this.