[philwelch]

Much like pirates and gangsters, Vikings are cool if you consider them from an aesthetic as opposed to moralistic perspective. Everyone has evil ancestors, but some of them were cool.

[scottyah]

Ninjas, samurai, Native Americans in war paint, etc. It's like every culture (that has survived) has reverence for their own group.

[philwelch]

The samurai didn’t survive the Satsuma Rebellion but they were admired and respected even by many of the people who fought against them in the following decades. You don’t even have to be Japanese to think samurai are cool, they just are, even if, in practice, you wouldn’t want to actually live in a society with them.

[lo_zamoyski]

It's one thing to find a culture fascinating, but this "aesthetic" is generally a construct of the imagination cobbled out of stereotypes.

[conductr]

American's like to romanticize outlaw types of all origins

[poooka]

One of our big exports. Germans were obsessed with American outlaws (Karl May). And I am of the opinion that this is what the Nazi's were thinking when they invaded Poland and Russia. They wanted to create and settle their own variation of the "wild west". Hard to explain to people in 2025 how captivating the American frontier was to a European in 1910.