Why Are Fictional Empires Always Evil? (And How to Build Better Ones)

Grey uniforms. Massive fleets. A plucky band of rebels fighting for freedom against impossible odds.

Sound familiar? If you've spent any time with science fiction or fantasy, you've met this story before, probably dozens of times. But why does the Evil Empire keep showing up as fiction's go-to villain? Is it good storytelling, a reflection of history, or something deeper? And more importantly, if you're a worldbuilder, how do you create an empire that doesn't feel like a Star Wars knockoff?

Let's dig in.

The Trope: Why Star Wars Set the Template

It's almost impossible to talk about fictional evil empires without starting with Star Wars, for good reason. For nearly fifty years, George Lucas's Galactic Empire has dominated the cultural imagination so thoroughly that it's become the default template.

Part of that is simply excellent visual branding. The Empire is coded as evil: starched grey-and-black uniforms with uncomfortable collars, rigid symmetry, the overwhelming, inhuman scale of Star Destroyers and Coruscant (a planet-sized city that is, essentially, the world's worst commute). Every visual choice communicates joyless uniformity and the total erasure of individuality and freedom. It's something anyone who's ever suffered through a corporate open-plan office can immediately hate.

The Rebels, meanwhile, wear natural fibers and earth tones. One of them is a mostly-naked Sasquatch. They are visually-coded as Space Hippies. We are meant to root for them, and we do.

But Star Wars didn't become a fifty-year franchise purely on the strength of good set and costume design. There's a deeper cultural reason we're primed to side with the scrappy underdog against the faceless empire.

The Rise of the Rebel Hero

To understand why modern audiences reflexively root for rebels, you have to go back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when individualism became a popular cultural value following the Enlightenment. Artists shifted from being guild-trained craftspeople working within tradition to being celebrated as individual geniuses. Personal freedom, self-expression, and self-realisation began to outweigh community and conformity in the cultural imagination.

Then came the revolutions. Several of them. But one in particular — a colonial rebellion against a distant imperial power — became the founding myth of the United States. That story, endlessly recycled as political rhetoric and popular mythology, spread through Hollywood and then across the world.

The result: the scrappy rebel fighting an overwhelmingly powerful empire became not just a compelling narrative, but a cultural default. The underdog story is baked into how we consume fiction, especially anglophone fiction shaped by Hollywood. The empire has to be evil, because the rebel has to be the hero.

But Rebels Aren't Always the Good Guys

The rebel-as-hero is a modern bias, not a universal truth. To see that, you simply have to look at classic fiction, especially novels that pre-date Hollywood.

Consider A Tale of Two Cities or The Scarlet Pimpernel, where the French Revolution is portrayed as destructive chaos rather than righteous liberation. More recently, novels like Heartless Hunter by Kristen Ciccarelli and The Embroidered Book by Kate Heartfield explore revolutions from perspectives that complicate the heroic narrative. Including, in the latter case, the viewpoint of Marie Antoinette and her sister.

When rebels are framed as the bad guys, the thematic clash usually shifts from freedom vs. tyranny to order vs. chaos. Because even well-intentioned rebels overthrow the status quo, and most real rebellions are messy, violent, and costly to innocent people who just wanted to get on with their lives.

There's also the theological angle: in worlds where gods are real and have literally appointed a ruler, overthrowing the divinely-sanctioned emperor isn't heroic. It might be catastrophic. If the gods actually smite people in your fantasy or scifi setting, regicide hits very differently and the consequences can be terrible.

Were Real Empires Actually Evil?

Before we get to worldbuilding advice, it's worth asking: were historical empires as morally clear-cut as fiction suggests?

The honest answer is that empires can't really be morally good, but they can be morally interesting.

The structural problems are real. Empires generally operate without the consent of the governed. They involve inherently unequal power relationships between rulers and ruled. And they are, by nature, extractive, meaning, they take things: taxes, tribute, resources, labour, sometimes children (the Ottoman devshirme system, for instance, conscripted boys from subject populations for military and administrative service).

Many empires were also conversionist, deliberately suppressing indigenous cultures, languages, and religions to enforce their own.

And yet, some empires were genuinely more complicated than that. Some granted religious autonomy, preserved local laws and governance, and even extended protections unavailable elsewhere.

Take the Achaemenid Empire (the Persian Empire of Cyrus and Darius). When Persian administrators discovered that a Jewish settlement under their rule wasn't observing Passover correctly, they sent a letter. Not to ban the practice, but to insist it be followed properly. They believed every people had their own gods, and that those gods needed to be properly worshipped or things would go badly for everyone. The non-Jewish empire was worried their Jews weren't being Jewish enough.

The Achaemenids also, notably, banned slavery: something many supposedly more "civilised" empires failed to do for centuries afterwards.

How to Actually Worldbuild an Empire

So how do you build an empire that isn't just the Galactic Empire in a different hat? Start from the inside out.

How Does the Empire See Itself?

No empire sets out to be evil. Every empire has an internal justification; a story it tells itself about why it does what it does. That might be glory, divine mandate, or the very pragmatic logic of "we keep getting invaded, so we decided to control the border regions." In Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man genuinely believes it is the only alternative to humanity's extinction, which explains (though doesn't justify) its extraordinary brutality.

Start with your empire's morals and values. What do the people on the ground believe they're fighting for? They need some alignment with the empire's mission in order to function. "Doing evil" is not a functional institutional value.

How Does the Empire Present Itself?

Once you know the motivation, think about how the empire projects that identity outward: motto, insignia, uniforms, architecture. They don't have to be grey. The Mughal Empire and the British Empire both used vivid, elaborate regalia to convey wealth, power, and even a certain holiness communicated through colour and spectacle. Symbols carry meaning, and your empire's visual language should too.

How Does the Empire Act?

Some empires presented themselves as liberators (Alexander the Great famously "freed" Greek cities from Persian rule, before absorbing them into his own Macedonian empire). Others positioned themselves as a civilising force, building schools and spreading their culture, however condescendingly. Others, like the Achaemenids, deliberately preserved local religion, law, and culture.

Who Gets Rights and Who Doesn't?

This is where your empire becomes truly specific. What protections and freedoms exist within the empire, and crucially, who do they apply to?

The Ottoman Empire classified citizens by religion, granting rights accordingly. Skin colour and ethnicity were largely irrelevant. Ancient Athens, that celebrated "democracy," had four tiers of citizenship, and non-citizens including foreigners, women, and enslaved people had minimal legal protection.

In fiction, these distinctions can be even more imaginative. In Dragon Age, mages are heavily controlled regardless of their origin. In the Murderbot Diaries, constructs have no legal personhood in the Corporation Rim. These distinctions tell us immediately what the empire values, fears, and considers human.

Member Benefits (And Hidden Costs)

Living inside an empire wasn't always miserable, and good worldbuilding acknowledges the genuine benefits alongside the exploitation.

Empires were typically good at security: garrisons at the borders, roads connecting distant territories, the transformation of old enemies into fellow imperial subjects. This did tend to reduce local conflicts. They brought infrastructure: standardised currency, roads, aqueducts, irrigation, postal systems. Sometimes the empire's moral standards actually improved on what came before. The Achaemenids, again, with their slavery ban.

But these benefits came at a price. Protection racket logic applies: we defend you from raiders, you fund our army, and if that army ever turns toward you, well, you should have been a better imperial citizen.

Taxes could be unsupportable, indifferent to crop failure or local catastrophe. Citizens might end up funding wars fought thousands of miles away against people who posed them no threat. And for many conquered peoples, the deepest cost wasn't material at all. It was the potential erasure of language, culture, faith, and identity. It's hard to put a price on that, and it's the kind of loss that reverberates through generations.

Building an Empire That's Actually Interesting

Here's the bottom line: empires in fiction are almost always coded as evil because modern audiences distrust centralised power and instinctively root for individualistic underdogs. That's a cultural bias worth understanding and, if you're a worldbuilder, worth pushing against.

A wholly benevolent, selfless empire is probably not believable. But an empire that is genuinely complicated? One that offers real benefits and real freedoms to some people, while extracting real costs from others, and which believes with utter sincerity in its own righteousness? That is far more interesting than another grey-uniformed monolith.

Use the levers available to you: motivation, benefits, costs, who gets protected and who gets exploited. Give your empire a vivid identity with distinctive aesthetics, a deeply held mythology, and a history that makes its current form make sense. Look at the specific elements of your world like the species, religions, magic systems and think about how your empire would respond to each of them.

The result won't be a Star Wars clone. It'll be something your readers haven't quite seen before. And that's the whole point.