Markup View

Author: Bobchillingworth

May 9th 2013 at 12:11:32 AM

While I'm thinking about it, the text of the trope as written propounds several unfounded or outright inaccurate assertions.  There are and have been plenty of "evil" (or highly morally ambiguous) nations which have had schools, roads and police stations.  North Korea, for example.  Or Nazi Germany, if you want to go Godwin.  Conversely, a lack of physical infrastructure =/= "evil".  The second paragraph in particular has a number of problems.  The sentence mentioning capitalism and communism doesn't make sense (what does "This" refer to, the trope itself?  Why would anyone think economic systems were relevant?).  Very few actual nations ''deliberately'' keep people underemployed and impoverished, fewer still could be unequivocally labeled as "evil", and of those remaining the trope ''still'' doesn't apply- Kim Jong Un is personally far more wealthy than most of his "good" contemporaries, regardless of what his tax base looks like.  Dictators by the very nature of their unfettered power are almost universally fabulously wealthy.  And concerning the final assertion, historically many nations have successfully increased their power / resources through unprovoked military aggression.

Honestly I'm not sure why so much of the trope description is dedicated to nation-states, considering how subjective applying black-and-white morality to entire countries is.  Given that most of your examples are going to come from videogames where the positive karma options give better rewards than the evil ones, I'd rewrite and refocus the introduction.