Something that's bothering me is when there's a story in which a group does genocide, and there's characters reacting to it. A thing that sours me on a story is when a story contrasts "good" genocide victims and "bad" genocide victims.
Particularly because of some of the narratives I've encountered tend to make the "good" genocide victims accepting of their fate and willing to just die with their supposed moral purity intact, and the "bad" genocide victims seeking to kill the people who are trying to exterminate them.
There's a rather insidious aspect to how the narrative shifts the burden of the evil away from the actual evil onto their victims. Somehow, the genocidaires are just a force of nature, that it somehow cannot be helped that they're trying to exterminate a whole group of people, but their victims have the choice in how they act, and the "right" choice is... lie down and die.
The "good" genocide victims are silent, they accept that they shouldn't exist anymore, they don't make any demands for justice, for whoever killed them to actually reckon with the crimes they've committed. The "good" victims mourn that their time is about to end, and are horrified that the "bad" genocide victims want to fight. The "bad" genocide victims make a fuss, they fight, they refuse to bow to the "natural order" of the genocidaires, and they can come back to menace the genocidaires. And the "bad" genocide victims end up coming back to menace the genocidaires and their descendants. And this is treated as them wanting to do genocide themselves. But, somehow, this genocide is the evil one, the one actually framed by the narrative as needing to be stopped and the heroes fight back and how that's good that they're fighting back.
There's an almost colonial anxiety aspect if you strip away the pretenses. The fear that, if the victimized groups are not fully extirpated and instead ever rise up again, that they'll slaughter the colonialists or their descendants in their beds.
This is in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, but it also shows up with GRRM's work. (At this point, given how much he took with minimal changes, and some of the more specific details being so close, I'm extremely leery of GRRM's work and I'm going to need to do some digging and some reading…)
There's also a whole thing where some fantasy works have doing "forbidden" magic to fight back as being somehow worse than committing genocide or similarly horrific large-scale war crimes, which is in MST and ASOIAF, but it's also in Twilight Princess of all things, with the Twili creating the Fused Shadows. And, the thing is, the "forbidden" magic items aren't even like a fantasy nuke, they're something that's a magical version of a nonmagical analogue that's treated as unremarkable in the narrative's framing. The "forbidden" magic is fully a stand-in for an army or a weapon wielded by an individual or what have you.
And then that gets into how the narrative implications are about the "forbidden" magic being magic that doesn't follow the Christian-analogue's "goodness" imagery. To strip that pretense away, it's like the writers are writing expressing a fear of a repeat of the Haitian revolution and how they called upon loa. There’s a similar undercurrent of colonial anxiety in Christianity and its goal to upend other religions and its proselytizing.
It's also why I'm not wholly negative toward Cameron's Avatar series, despite my issues with it. He doesn't do that shit! The Na'vi fighting back and the humans siding with the Na'vi to protect Pandora is treated as the correct thing to do, instead of pearl-clutching about how the Na'vi should just lie down and die. He also avoids demonizing the Na'vi religion and the religion is legitimate (though his understanding of non-Christian religions is just a mess and kinda bad).
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