One thing annoys about genre fiction is "everybody on evil side is in it for themselves and doesn't give shit about the ideology" thing, at least in war narratives. Yes, people do fight for and use agendas they don't believe in for personal gain, but more often than not, it makes the group just generic bunch of villain cliches and makes whatever they are meant to represent loose meaning. "They stand for being jerks and being jerks is bad!"
Overly Sarcastic Production actually summed it up very well one of the problems with morality in genre fiction, most of it comes out of War Morality, aka
Our Team
vs.
There Team
Everybody else needs to be understood on the grounds of are they helping our team against their team, or if visa versa. Think about a very limited view of WWII, the Axis are the bad guys, and anybody who helps you fight them (Stalin, de Gaul) are the good guys. That example actually works out pretty well because the Axis were some of the worse regimes in human history, but if you take that same narrative and apply it to a less morally straightforward war, like WWI or The Cold War and it gets ugly real fast.
(whoops)
Its morality just whose team is going to win, but with much more world ending consequences. Which sometimes is the right take for a story, like again...WWII or the American Civil War, wars which I think are far more justified than most, though I think of each as Grey vs. black morality than White and Black morality.
The problem is that most genre fiction is still using this moral framework even if they aren’t necessarily aware of it, so the evil characters are kinda...written backwards. Like, they exist to be the antagonists for the heroes and justify the wartime framing of morality, and then to make that framing feel less...creepy you need to then make the other team be evil not just “in the way of our team”. So you give them negative qualities, they are sadistic, they are mass murderers, they oppress women, blah blah blah. So it can be tricky to give them ideologies because...they exist to be antagonists.
The original Star wars does this, its basically just a “our team there team” movie, the Empire’s role in the story is to be the enemy army that the heroes can fight against cause its a war movie. And to make that ok, and not have the audience thinking that war might be an ugly business, we need to make the other team be bad. So they are given fascist imagery, and do war crimes, and have a bunch of British officers being super snobby, but there isn’t really an ideology to the empire beyond “vague order and be massive dicks”
The Dark Side has an ideology in the trilogy, but both Sith seem to view the Empire as a tool.
(....are you the baddies?)
An interesting twist to this Fire Nation from Avatar. In the first Season they are the Star Wars Empire: Imperial Japan Edition, though the show makes a lot more effort to humanize individual Fire Nation people. But as an institution they were the bad guys and Ozai is just a giant black hole of evil and they all have evil boats ect ect.
(I feel like between these and Star Destroyers, there is a whole specific evil empire aesthetic”
Season 2 and early season 3 actually play with this though, by showing us how the Fire Nation justifies their imperialism to their own citizens, which is...remarkably similar to the actual justifications used by real life Imperial Japan, turning the comparison from an aesthetic similarity to an actual commentary on Imperial Japan. Ozai being such a black hole of evil though did undermine it.
(The greater Four Nation Co-Prosperity Sphere)
Also not all good/evil narratives are actually doing wartime morality, even if they are set in a war. Pan’s Labyrinth is a super moralistic movie, with a very clear cut objective bad guy in the character of Captain Vidal, who is contrasted with our protagonist Ophelia. But it isn’t a war movie, its instead a morality focused fairy tale, so Vidal is more a representation of the evils of fascism, and his destruction at the end is tied to the main theme of the movie.
The point i’m getting at here is that there is a difference between the antagonist and therefore have negative traits, vs. people having negative traits and thus being antagonists. The way you can tell the difference is this.
Are the antagonists here so that the hero can have somebody to fight?
or
Are the antagonists there because the story is about the rejection of what they represent?
(cough)