It's not really that we're alright with Asur nonsense. We obviously would prefer the Asur become competent at foreign policy and stop their shenanigans, just as we would prefer the Dwarves not rate their grudges higher than life and sanity itself.
I, however, personally am bewildered by the outright antipathy towards the Asur and the corresponding sympathy (!!!!) to their direct rivals, especially when we're BFFs with the Dwarves. Mathilde is far more a dwarf friend than an elf friend, definitely, but for us OOC, both the Asur and the Dawi are great forces of Good (although the Asur globally, the Dawi regionally), and both have their flaws. Hence, I see a double standard between how the elder races are portrayed here- if the strange and inhuman Dawi can be our good friends, why do we (again, the players, who have setting knowledge) disdain the faction who lay down their lives by the thousands to defend the world?
Edit: Or, even worse, why favourable mentions to the nihilistic, enslaving, genocidal, warp-dealing sadists directly contributing to ending it???
Edit: I don't mind us liking the elder races either. I'd love to be their friends, they're both awesome, and their also being flawed I don't hold against them (too much). The juxtaposition bewilders me, though.
Well, the Dawi are our friends because, despite their flaws, they're the Empire's strongest ally and have marched to its defence; even when it comes at ruinous cost to the Karaz Ankor. Recall that they marched to defend the Old World and got hammered, to the point that until very recently it seemed like it was a death knell for their entire race, and if another Everchosen popped up tomorrow
they'd do it again.
They're proud, condescending, grudge-holding perfectionists, and they'll throw their entire race into a suicidal fight to uphold their alliances. No matter how disappointed they've been by the Empire, they've never realpoliticked their way into betraying it, and the one real pain point (the obsessive holding of grudges) is pretty much definitionally "fair", or at least debatably defensible as such.
Meanwhile, when Asavar Kul came South to end the world, the Asur sent 3 people. Or had 3 people show up of their own initiative, it's not clear.
Base canon, IIRC correctly, holds true that the Asur defend the Vortex, defend the Waystones, and wage a never ending oceanic crusade against the Norscans and the DE, even though by all rights they would clealry be better served spending more time, at home, raising kids and not going extinct.
So yes. They are rightfully the Shield of Civilisation for their heroism in the Vortex alone, even if they're utterly incompetent at… having any allies whatsoever.
The Asur defend the Vortex which rests at the centre of their homeland; it's practically an accident of geography. Literally any order-aligned race would do the same in their position, even if they had no idea what the Vortex was. It is a matter of personal survival, and while it's very nice that they do so, it doesn't actually say much about their character.
The Asur have never once, to my knowledge, actually marched to defend a Waystone in the Old World. Perhaps you have a source for that?
Their ocean crusade against the Norscans and Dark Elves isn't some grand charity to the rest of the world, they're defending their ocean dominance that allows them to maintain a fabulously wealthy maritime empire; it'd be their trade ships getting looted more than anyone's.
They are not in any meaningful sense "The Shield of Civilisation" except in how it furthers their own interests to be so. And that's fine! It's not reasonable to expect them to be sacrificing themselves on behalf of the other races! But if you are specifically comparing them to the dwarves, the comparison certainly falls short.
But putting aside this out-of-character reasoning, the fact is that we are playing a character from an Empire with an extremely strong alliance with the dwarves, a great deal of personal time spent with dwarves, and comparing them to a group that we've spoken to exactly 2 members of, that our Empire specifically has a not-unreasonable bone to pick with. It'd be really weird not to favour the dwarves.
EDIT: I got ninja'd! Sorry
@Shine, didn't mean to pile on after other people.
