Seven Deadly Sins

So, that "falling back on our most primal emotions" line in the intro always struck me as a bit strange, but thinking on it more (and noticing that there are exactly seven factions) I couldn't help but think of the "seven deadly sins" concept. I highly doubt it's intentional but I think a case can be made that each faction makes a surprisingly good representative of each deadly sin. Please note, these are just my personal musings and are not intended as a critique of the writing or the factions themselves.

Humanity First - Wrath, of course. A rage and hate so intense that they intend nothing less than the genocide of an entire interstellar civilization: no matter how many corpses - human and alien both - they have to pile up to achieve it.

Servants - I'm reaching a little with this one, but I'd give them Lust. No, this isn't me making a joke about the servants wanting to fuck the aliens. Again, I'm reaching a little here but if you go for the more modern definition of lust as being objectification/dehumanization I'd argue it can work. The Servants objectify the aliens. They aren't people with their own agency and lives and families, they're the answer to all of life's problems, the panacea of human suffering. To put it another way, think of it in terms of a "lust vs love" concept, and contrast the Servants with the Academy: which of these two factions actually, truly tries to understand and get to know know the aliens as an actual people? I'd argue it's not the Servants.

Academy - Pride. The Academy story line essentially consists of a small group of idealistic scientists taking it upon themselves to make the decision (for everyone else) to risk their entire species on a one-in-a-million plan that they're only pursuing out of a stubborn refusal to abandon their borderline delusional pie-in-the-sky optimism.

Resistance - Sloth. The Resistance is obviously not lazy, as individual characters and as an organization (they wouldn't get anything done if they were), their ideology is where the Sloth is. They actively refuse to think beyond their immediate goals, their ideology begins and ends with driving the aliens out of the solar system. Understanding the aliens? Figuring out how to survive long-term in an apparently rather crowded galaxy? That's for other people to figure out.

Initiative - The most obvious of them all: Greed. A collection of already obscenely wealthy people gathering together to exploit a species-defining event to make more money.

Project Exodus - Gluttony. Hear me out. Gluttony isn't simply about being fat and eating a lot of food, it's about selfishness, it's about having an insatiable appetite. This might seem like it's just the same thing as greed, but there's a disregard for others inherent to Gluttony that I think might be lost on modern, food secure audiences. A Glutton - in the time period that the seven deadly sins was first conceived - is someone who sates their appetite, others be damned. You might see where I'm going with this. Khalid is a man who seems to barely give a damn about his own world, his own species. Almost every bit of dialogue we get from him is about his desire to set foot on another world. The whole organization essentially exists to sate his appetite, if you will, and if they have to leave behind a world that is burning and a species that is enslaved, then so be it.

Protectorate - Envy, because if you play them you'll be envious of people who are playing a better faction...

In all seriousness, envy isn't simply about wanting something that someone else has. Envy is a bit deeper than that. It's a seething, burning contempt for someone else because they possess what you do not have. It's ripping off your nose to spite your face. I think Kiran holds genuine contempt for his fellow man within him. I think he's a pessimist who envies the optimist's good cheer. The further you go in the tech tree, the more this contempt he holds for the human race is laid bare. This is probably the biggest reach of all of them, but I think you could make the argument that Kiran is, on some level, envious of the other ideologies. He'd sooner see the human race enslaved and living under a Sword of Damocles of his own making than admit that he was wrong.

This was longer than I intended but this idea occurred to me and for some reason I decided to share it here. I'm sure there's plenty of holes that can be poked in this little thought experiment but ultimately it was just for fun.