It's when you have your evil inner evil empire, remember that there's going to be a system that rewards evil acts. It's not just going to be everybody being evil because it's so much fun. It's there's getting a benefit. They're getting a reward for doing what they're doing. There is incentivizations for this behavior. One good example of this. And we keep coming back to Rome because it is just the prototypical empire in the Western mind. It is when Julius Caesar went out and conquered all of Gaul, it wasn't because he was sitting there going like, I'm evil. I'm Julius Caesar. I'm evil. I'm going to kill all the Gauls. He was thinking, Oh, geez, I owe a lot of people a lot of money and I need to get them off my back. I'm going to go off on like a 10 year expedition, conquer all captures and slaves and win the adoration of the crowd. Now that's still evil, but

it's not evil for evil's sake. Yeah, it's kind of

the difference between realistic evil or mundane evil or whatever you want to call it versus like the super villain evil, which also really annoys me in literature, fantasy, science fiction, or otherwise. Maybe if you have some gods who are like, I'm the god of chaos in the end times. Okay, maybe you can have a villain that's like, I just want to do evil and giggle and wring my hands and end the world. In most cases, that doesn't make sense like there should be for a purpose or like a reward like you're saying, like there's

a goal and it's just it happens to be ruthless or abuse someone else's lesser and it treats them as such a means to an end instead. On a personal note, I love writing like violent, hedonistically, gleefully evil characters, but I never put them in charge of anything. Yeah. It's like your local, you know, tax man, the local guy in charge of, you know, the aqueducts and stuff, the local bureaucrat, government official probably isn't going to be the guy that's just, you know, drinking blood on his lunch break. How would he ever get his work done?