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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StreamOfTheSky" data-source="post: 4997786" data-attributes="member: 35909">They try...First off, they have a scale that they use for the grading.  All the typical things you would consider evil work against (or for?) the person, while they also try to find redeeming qualities or historical bias.  In Attila's case, redeeming qualities included being a caring family man apprently, and historical bias in the sense that only Romans -- his sworn enemy -- have written contemporary accounts of him, so it is quite reasonable to question if he was given fair treatment.They also have a separate metric called "creativity."  Without definition, I thought creativity in the sense of "new and uniquely cruel actions done," but they defined it as what the person created, legacy left behind, etc...  Since Attila left...nothing, that probably hurt his score a lot.  The show may have been most harsh on his impaling of traitors and a few cases where he massacred innocent women and children.  I don't think that's terribly fair for as you said, the historical context.  Romans killed innocent people all the time.  They destroyed my peoples' great temple and scattered us across the known world in a little thing known as the "Diaspora."  After fighting Carthage, they were quite spiteful in how they ravaged the land.  They watched human slaves fight and die and called it amusement.  And Attila's largest slaughter of innocents was under Rome's payroll, and they were pleased with his work.  So yeah, they do seem to have problems occasionally with taking the times into account.  Attila seemed barely worse if at all worse than the Romans to me.Yeah, I get that.  But over the years, I've kind of shifted more to the perspective that the story is much about overcoming a challenge with brute force than it is thinking outside the box.  But I understand the argument.To compare, I watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon as a kid.  One of the only parts I distinctly remember to this day was one episode where their sensei was having them practice fighting against some mechanical enemy, trying to defeat it.  They were doing badly.  Then, Raphael (my favorite turtle) coems in, calmly walks around it to the power outlet it's attached to, and unplugs it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />That's a better example of thinking outside of the box, IMHO.</blockquote>

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