There is this thing I see people do sometimes where they start from a position of interrogating the unacknowledged humanity and internality and material circumstances and so on of the mooks that the good guys kick to pieces during the big action sequences, but they then overcorrect and come out the other side with something that basically just sounds to me like “those poor death camp guards were just trying to feed their families ”
I remember an issue of Morrison’s The Invisibles that actually threaded this needle pretty well: going blow-by-blow on how one of the faceless fascist guards that was killed in the previous issue grew up and became a member of the organization. It didn’t make him look good, he was some asshole who beats his wife and doesn’t know or care what he’s fighting for. But it made him look like a guy you probably know, rather than a cardboard target dummy. The highschool star quarterback whose life went to shit, bleeding out on the floor of some secret hideout.
