I wonder if part of the problem is that there doesn't appear to be very much in the way of positive PF for the Gallente. I've read all the chronicles now, and TEA (but not TBL), and I can't recall seeing a piece of narrative PF (as opposed to "This is Egonics, they make excitement") in which the Gallente aren't potrayed either as (a) evil or (b) losing. Everyone gets portrayed as evil (hey, EVE!) but all the other factions get to win occasionally.
As a result, it's kind of difficult to find positive Gallente things to get behind.
Can anyone correct me?
This is an ironic quote, really, and highlights a lot of the problems with the Gallente. I think one of the problems with the Gallente faction is, if you read the initial PF and backstory regarding the factions, they made the Gallente the unabashed heroes of the EVE universe. Everyone dogs TonyG for his portrayal, but from what Ive seen, TonyGs vision is actually fairly true to the initial views of EVE, its just that his views seem quite outdated to modern EVE eyes. I dont believe EVE's backstory was very nuanced at the genesis. Fortunately that changed.
If you read the initial PF, it flat out states that the Gallente are the defenders of liberty and liberalism, even explicitly stating that they have more scruples ( i.e. higher moral standards) than the Caldari. They were the closest thing EVE had to "the good guys".
Well, eventually, it seems that such one sided and simplistic portrayals really limited the appeal of all the races really, so PF tried to make the Gallente more "realistic", in effect started trying to give them flaws and cracks behind the democratic hero image. But, it ended up that the "moral pull back" became the only new information regarding the Galllente that was put out there. The corrections became the message.
But I dont think thats the fundamental issue people have with the Gallente. Its basically this.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
And the vast majority of people who are reading this are either citizens in a liberal, western-style democracy, or at least are very familiar with them.
The vast majority of the players who play EVE easy identify and recognize Gallente democracy, and thus they know how to critique it. Internet culture itself is generally skewed against such concepts as patriotism and nationalism, at least as it applies to western style democracy. For many players, Its easy to critique the Gallente fed IC, simply copy/paste whatever anti-US/Britian/Western democracy rhetoric you find in editorials and news stories in real life, change some details, and suddenly you have very realistic and dense RP that resonates with the majority of the RP audience. We're used to looking at democracies flaws and ugly facets, because we see them every day.
Nothing wrong with this at all, as I said, it makes for very dense and weighty RP. The problem is that, when looking at the Gallente traditional opponents, the Caldari society is much, much fuzzier and not very well-understood to the EVE RP community, because its quite different from anything in real life today. Because Caldari culture and society is so relatively alien, its easier to over-identify with, to idolize, and to sweep the faults under the RP rug so to speak, or to simply overlook them. Ive seen it portrayed many, many ways, as clans or tribes with Corporate names, to Ayn Rand-like capitalistic utopias, to whatever.
As far as I can tell, the Caldari society is a relentless one, thats quite brutal and merciless to even its citizens, let alone those outside of it. Caldari have very little loyalty between individuals (after all, even your own
family will disown you if you cant take the grind of Caldari corporate life), the society "grinds its own people to dust" (almost an exact quite from the Burning Life, my copy is packed up somewhere), and the State generates homeless and poverty at a rate unequaled to any other faction (more homeless there than anywhere else, even more shocking since theyre a commercial power, they have the resources to help their fellow citizens, they just dont care, its not in their mindset).
In short, the Caldari (and the Amarr and Minmatar for that matter) have a lot of faults, but those faults are many times subjective and open to debate, because its all "make believe", a lot of them are conjecture and/or require a lot of research and digging into EVE's PF (this goes for the Minmatar and Amarrians as well). But, when looking at the Gallente, we already know all their faults, cus we seem them in the world around us, and we're trained to look for them by our own media.
If you would like Lara, I could give you some of Gottii's/Minmatar-centric views on the Gallente people. He has a fairly positive one (i tried to create one, since it jived with the general universe). But I would rather RP it I guess, makes for good scenes