Board Thread:Series general discussion/@comment-28601337-20160602221928/@comment-18014300-20170727185639

I have to be honest. I fear that many fans are lured by "contrarianism". That is, they subconsciously want to avert siding with the popular, mainstream, and protagonistic faction and so must try to find ways of justifying their support of the antagonists, even if they would not support them in reality. This phenomenon can be seen throughout many franchises, most notably in Star Wars, where polls usually show that more fans support the Galactic Empire than the Alliance to Restore the Republic in spite of the fact that the Empire is literally intended to be space-Nazis and are responsible for wholesale genocide of trillions of people.

Fans still get into heated debates about how "it's a matter of perspective" and if the rebels were not the protagonists, we would see them as terrorists on the order of the Taliban or al-Qaeda who threaten the order of society. This is in spite of the fact that the Rebel Alliance were founded by Republic loyalists, led by the least corrupt senators of the Galactic Republic and refrained from targeting civilians, and the leader of the Empire orchestrated a galactic civil war that killed trillions of lives to seize power and exterminate the Jedi Order.

Case in point, fans are too often contrarian, and they also fall victim to the Golden Mean Fallacy. When presented with two factions, they think they're being open-minded by taking the "middle way", assuming that it must always be the most correct by virtue of balance and perspectivism. But that is not correct. When presented with two factions, they may appear to be extremes, when in reality, their values might correspond to say, 1 and 10 rather than -10 and 10, where the midpoint is 5, not 0. (We see this problem especially in American politics, where Americans don't realize that the United States Democrat Party is actually not an extreme left but a moderate right faction compared to most of the world).

While certainly not all Templars are evil and not all Assassins are benevolent, and there are extremists in both factions, in general, the core Assassin ethos is the concept of personal fallibility (i.e. being able to admit you're wrong), respect for human rights and diversity, and refraining from ever harming innocent people. In contrast, the Templars' primary goal is that they are the only ones in the world enlightened enough to shepherd society, and while individual Templars, like Haytham and Shay may disagree with whether or not innocents constitute acceptable sacrifices for this dream of world domination, the Templar expressly does not have it codified that this is forbidden.