So I've gone through a number of past threads and current ones and there is a common trend of hate for the aliens that were out to slaughter Humanity. The Minbari being a particular one, which have been the focal points of alot of stories. The Cylons being a close second. but I noticed a lack of that particular hatered for the Covenent. Am I off base? Or are the Minbari and Cylons just that much more dickish than the Covenent?
The Covenant are kinda boring. They have a religious philosophy which doesn't pass the sniff test (activate the rings, we all go on a "journey" aka DEATH!) and the Elites, who should be awesome, have just become religious extremists for the Prophets to manipulate. They seem to really lack a depth to them. And I think the minbari get so much hate because they were the originals. And their destruction of humanity was a bit more personal. The Prophets were doing it due to philosophy and fear, the minbari were doing it because one person got killed and Delenn decided to be a bitch.
I think with the Minbari at least its mostly the difference in mtoive. The Covenant may have been slaughtering mankind for a lot longer (and I assume killed a whole lot more, I forget the numbers though) but they - at least most of them - were doing it because the few dicks in charge had them believing it was literally the will of the gods. The Prophets were dicks though. The Minbari decided to genocide humanity because of one death, that was pretty clearly partly their fault. And then when their leaders realise they may have over reacted they can't stop it because the whole race is so mad with bloodlust. (And of course they are then portrayed as(mostly)good guys afterwards). The Centauri are just dickish in general, they do less bad stuff than the Covenant but they don't have any self justification. The Covenant are wrong but at least they're doing it for what they think is a good reason. The Elites and grunts anyway, sicne they were manipulated by the shitheads in charge. The Brutes just wanted power and iirc the kig-yar were pretty vicious. Add to that we never really learn much about the covenant until Halo 2, where the wole 'Propets are dicks' thing comes out and the Elites are portrayed much more sympathetically. Hell you don't just ally with one, you play as one. Before that they were evil, but we knew nothing really.
It's because they're the enemies in a videogame franchise, an shooter in particular. By default, they're initially perceived as faceless hordes just good for shootin'. It's just more accepted that they're out to destroy humanity, nobody much minds.
I think part of it is how straight forward the Covenants genocide was. There was no plot induced stupidity that triggered the war or idiot balls handed out that caused humanity to lose. It was all pretty simple. More advanced aliens show up and stomp humanity in space. Plus the UNSC as a whole was just a generic Space America that no one really cared about. The Chief on the other hand was worshipped as badass incarnate. Most didn't really noticed or care the UNSC was losing badly when the Chief was destroying everything everywhere he went.
To expand on what has been said, while elements within the Covenant deserve the same hate-dom, other elements actively protested the actions of the whole. The Elites, from the very start of the war, wanted mankind brought into the Covenant, seeing them as worthy adversaries. Basically, they may have been committing xenocide, but for many of them, they were being damn respectful about it.
Also, the Covenant never whined about getting shot at for exterminating a species. They expected humanity to fight back with everything in all possible ways, and took their casualties as the price of doing business. Hell, a decent chunk of them respected humanity for the magnitude of the resistance. The Minbari whined like babies about one of their cruisers getting nuked into oblivion while chasing distress signals. With that being their only "defeat" in the entire war. Basically, the Minbari are gigantic, whiny hypocrites about it, and the Covenant are not.
Covenant are so mind numbingly incompetent we Space Battlers can't bring ourselves to feel actual hatred. Laughter is a common response to the Covenant around here.
The Covenant's motivations are straight forward. The rank and file pay lip service to the religious motivation, while the die hard believers and the most invested members of their religious-political system kept them in line through fairly conventional means. Their leaders, the crippled flying Hobbits Prophets, were on the whole hypocritical dicks. However, when the prophets in charge of everyone else found out that a mistranslation invalidated a good portion of their political system, they got everyone else in a war frenzy to keep the status quo. They eventually tried to replace the Elites, who they suspected of being disloyal, with the much more fanatical Brutes, and then the Covenant Civil War started as a perfectly rational response to attempted genocide within their own ranks. All and all, since we're able to look at it objectively instead of being on the dying end of an intergalactic genocide campaign, it's all pretty much a combination of authoritarian and theocratic boilerplate, personal incompetence, and unintended consequences. We have those sorts of states in this world, and they're called Saudi Arabia, Iran and North Korea. They're much more zany and interesting to watch then a video game enemy that the developers took the time and effort to make two dimensional, instead of simply one dimensional.
Really, it's mostly the elites and the ones that followed them that let any part of the covenant get a neutral rap. When push came to shove and they found out how badly they'd been fucking up, they dropped everything and pretty immediately allied with us against the common threat. And they treated it as business, extremely equitable business and considered us their equals or betters in many ways. Another point in their favor. Oh, and the fact that the UNSC has been dicking them over after the war instead of allying with the one alien race that likes us helps out as well.
This, the Covenant are really kinda boring inept imbeciles. Hell, the reason they achieve as much as they do seems to be ENTIRELY based on their navies technological advantages. On every single other observed point the Covenant are inept morons little better than the signs aliens
I'd say because they got their comeuppance. Its not like Chaos or the Draka. The Covenant tried to exterminate humanity, failed (barely) and in comeuppance its political leadership got dead and the entity fractured.
hey thats a lie... Atleast the covenant don't drop into a world made of fucking instant-death-on-contact-acid bare ass naked with no weapons. That and they use weapons at all makes them many orders of magnitude better than the signs aliens......
Yeah, you have to hand it to the Covenant, at least they remember to put their pants on in the morning.
Because nobody's written an epic-length fanfic detailing a long, bloody drawn-out war between humanity and them where they are unambiguously portrayed as universally on the morally wrong side of the conflict. Usually their rank-and-file wind up being sympathetic, if not outright teaming up with the humans. The Minbari-hate is largely, IMO, due to "A Thin Veneer", one of this forum's biggest and longest-running fanfics. There isn't quite an equivalent for the Cylons, but they don't need it as much; it's much easier to get into the "PURGE THEM ALL" mindset from the source material there.
Yeah, this has quite a bit to do with it, for me: the Covenant don't whine about humanity somehow "cheating" when we get licks in against them, effectively treating it as "c'est le guerre". The Minbari, on the other hand, whine like small children over what is honestly a fairly mild sting, and are still hideously butt-hurt about it more than a decade later.
Yeah I mean the Minbari and their "Star KILLER!" thing was pretty pathetic...and then when one of their own cruisers went renegade and destroyed itself after a loyal cruiser disabled it they BLAMED HUMANITY.....more specifically they blamed "Star Killer" Sheridan. They were pretty pathetic, they didn't even attempt to make reparations with humanity or provide any tech to make up for what they had done, nope they just ended the war before genocide and went "That's good enough".
You know, my knowledge of Babylon 5 and the Minbari started with fics like Skeet's A Thin Veneer and others, and when actually start watching the series, I never understood how the Minbari are accepted by humans without any overt hostility despite nearly wiping out humanity barely twenty years before. We've held intense bloody grudges over much much less.
Maybe on Earth they're almost completely reviled by the civilian populace? Personnel assigned to Babylon 5 and other places where interaction with Minbari is required could probably be selected for those postings based on their ability to not let their grudges cause them to act rashly, at the very least. The few "let bygones be bygones" bleeding heart types would as such be more likely assigned to such postings as well.
For me, the Minbari are the biggest God Damn whingers in the universe. They bore equal responsibility for starting the war, grossly overreacted and refused to back down. Even Delen didn't have the courage to do more then tinker at the edges rather then take a stand. They also, while ruthlessly exploting every advantage they had to make the fight as easy as possible and risk free as possible on their side of the ledger, went utterly insane when their opponents fought just as dirty as they did, to the point that ten years later they STILL glare at Sheriden and call him Starkiller for DARING to use their own tactics against them. The Covenant may have been religious zealets, but they were mislead entirely by their leadership. There were also some number of Covenant Elites well before the scisim who had developed a grudging respect for humanity and were downright mystified that the Prophets refused to allow an honorable surrender and membership in the Covenant as had always been the custom in the past. And when the truth of the Prophets incredible duplicity came out, the Elites by in large broke fully from the Covenant and willingly joined with the humans to fight their common foe. The Minbari only stopped because of some religious BS and their warrior cast were clearly...pissed...at being told to stop, to the point that their rage bubbled over into the proximate cause of their civil war. The Covenant may have killed a LOT more people and been doing their very best to commit genocide, but they were not cowards, nor did they cry like 2 year old children when the humans played dirty against them; they accepted the losses as being inflicted by a worthy foe and kept on going. Very much "Nothing personal, just business". The Minbari OTOH, it was very much pleasure to them and when it was disrupted, well...they screamed. Very very loudly. A Thin Vennier didn't do anything to give me this impression of them, honestly, the TV series had long driven me in a huge dislike for them as a culture.
