How do you create an antagonistic idea that is not le-evil-bogeyman

If you have the time, why not find inspiration in history?

>>9801393
All wars are bankers' wars dude.

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A just war? The protagonists has actually done bad things and the Empire is rightly correct to end all of their enemies.

Why not simple competition for limited resources?

>>9801393
it's going to be impossible to find a completely original idea, so what will matter most is how it is presented.
there could be a war for knowledge. my inspiration for this being a what if scenario as follows: the burning of the library of Alexandria was done intentionally by its inhabitants to prevent the invading army from discovering their secrets.
resource war
trade war
preemptive war

here's another idea. the invaders can't reproduce without x or y that the defenders have.

Empire vs Corporation
>The crown at war with the East India Company, in space!
>Citizens of pullman towns fighting their brothers from both major cities and rural areas where the corporations haven't been able to take hold

I prefer stories with moral ambiguity desu

>>9801393
How about a war caused by a slight? And by slight, I mean a giant snowball that rolled from a slight. The victim and the culprit, they are long since dead, and their peers, the leaders armchairing it all, are living off of hearsay. What they know has been twisted enough that they are unwittingly following lies. Eventually, the truth is revealed through a witness that is brought back [from death, or some other conceptual pit] by the main character who is then pursued by both sides for different purposes.

>>9801393
Do the Empires have to be evil?
If not, Eco-terrorists, radical scientism, libertarianism.

Resource war, where it really is one or the other. If they try to just get along they will die from starvation or whatever.

Facism obviously, seeking uniformity of thought vs Muh Freedoms but that has been done to death.
Try the opposite. Hard but interesting. Enforced anarchy, and rather than war the hero has to actually fucking build rather than destroy.
If you're going sci-fi, temporal war, where the fascistic government is literally trying to rewrite the past.

>>9803103
I prefer stories where one side has to be right, and one has to be wrong, but depending on your perspective, it could be either. None of this "maybe they both are right" or "the truth lies somewhere in the middle" bullshit

>>9801393
Here it goes: two friends have different values. They grow out from one and another, and organicaly die as rivals.

>>9801393
Have a wholly good idea with good intentions and remove an important aspect from it, see where it leads you.
You can also recreate Stirner.

>>9803317
By moral ambiguity I was referring more to situations where the protagonist becomes aware of his own immorality or that of the cause he is defending

>>9803317
>tfw you read a story with a clear-cut "antagonist" but as his motivations are expounded upon you become highly sympathetic to his cause and start viewing the protagonist as the shitdisturbing invader
It's not really as simple as you think. People's politics will cause them to interpret your "bad guy" in different ways, sometimes positively as I outlined, thus flipping the paradigm on its head. For that reason you should just attempt to make nuanced and motivated characters and leave it up to the reader's discretion, since that is what will ultimately happen anyway, as right now you're really just boxing yourself in.

>>9801393
read about jewish influence on colonialism and use that