Been hearing a lot of rumblings from normal people in the warhammer community they are tired of fascists worshipping the imperium of man in their community.
is it like a human supremacist group in the lore or something like the empire in Star Wars?
Been hearing a lot of rumblings from normal people in the warhammer community they are tired of fascists worshipping the imperium of man in their community.
is it like a human supremacist group in the lore or something like the empire in Star Wars?
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/11/19/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not/
Jesus Christ.
The difference between the empire in Star Wars and the Imperium is that the Imperium is essentially inescapable.
It has endured for 10,000 years, it has a million worlds. Non-human intelligence is mistrusted at absolute best. Separatism is not tolerated, Alderon was just Tuesday morning, and probably literally a quadrillion people thought they deserved it anyway. Communications and travel can take hundreds of years depending on the conditions, so a response fleet might not even arrive in your lifetime, or your children's lifetime, but it will come, and even a low estimate of the Imperiums levy would mean they command around a trillion soldiers.
Basically the Imperium of Man is a suffocating, unstoppable, grinding hate machine.
It is human society twisted into eternal, nightmarish, inescapable horror.
Luckily almost all the major xeno and chaos empires also suck majorly and are evil machines. The only major redeemable ones are Tau, who are lawful good (also based, prob better than modern humanity irl) & Orcs who are chaotic neutral and just vibing. Everyone else is evil evil evil.
Torture elves. God enslaving undead machines. Universe consuming biomass swarms. Filth demons. Chaos Demons. War demons. Sex demons are less cool than they sound. Imperium men but possessed by demons and even more evil than before somehow.
Also something that’s implied but never really mentioned in the Warhammer 40k universe: the warp is evil, and there is no good warp to counteract it. It’s built into the fabric of the world to be evil. The truth of reality is evil. Very lovecraftian hellworld, fighting against the truth and being good requires you to be naive.
The Tau are the only good guys and they basically have no warp connection at all, they only believe in science and their collective good. They censor and ignore a portion of reality, their society and ideology requires it.
It’s what would happen if you took a DnD universe and magic system but then just removed all the good planes and all the good gods, even the neutral ones too. A cursed, doomed world that hopefully is not prophetic.
Necrons hate the warp and have the technology to close it.
Sincerely, a Necron player
Close it then already
When the stars are right
In one of the PC games that's the Necron faction's ending! They totally pull it off!
It's Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 :chefs-kiss:
So many WH40k games, but unfortunately mostly war games and I hate war games. I'm tempted to force myself to play the first two dawn of wars but it's only for the story, I really hate war games (RTSes and 4Xers).
EDIT: Also worse than RTSes and 4Xers, almost purely (if not purely) vehicle based war games blech
The Tau sound based
Some allege they do mind control but they are liars! They say it works through pheromones from the ruling caste, but everyone from all species still works together when none are around. It’s imperial lies, they can’t fathom a group of different species working together for their common good. Some will say they have a caste system but they are all divergent species with different traits and specializations. There are instances of caste movement when one species swaps to another task, it’s just not that common because people like being helpful in their roles and they have short lifespans.
Being a member of the Tau empire is definitely the highest quality of life for a mortal in this universe. High rights and protections and decent conditions. The downside is you have high social obligations and rigidity.
They definitely tried to reinforce the grimdarkness of the tone after inventing the Tau lol, can't have a bright point of light with gue'vesa living happy lives gotta have mind control and fire caste supremacy in the ranks. For what it's worth, for most humans there probably isn't much difference to living under the Imperium or under the Tau Greater Good, the Imperium doesn't care what government you run so long as you pay your taxes and your levy and pay at least lip service to the God-Emperor - the galaxy is huge and the emperor is far away and all. The Tau are just too small and too under-equipped to bring about real education and social welfare to any newly
conqueredliberated former Imperial planets. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few global communist agrarian worlds in the lore that just quietly have relatively happy humans doing their thing with just the yearly Imperial tax collectors swooping in and swiftly fucking off. So long as there are no mutants and no chaos worshipping the Imperium would probably never bother checking in.Nooooo, an environment that's a little miserable and uncomfortable is necessary, just look at Rophanon.
It was an idyllic planet, then the Imperium found out and they were like 'Hey, maybe we should turn this into our own personal four seasons hotel', and so the administratum (name?) turned the planet into their own resort and made the populace be subservient to them. The people were like 'Ey, life's gotten kind of harder and less rewarding since these guys came here' and organized a violent revolt. Unfortunately for them a space marine leader (Inquisitor? Commisar? I only saw a breakdown of what happened, so I've no idea what they were specifically) was taking his break there too, and so the planet was stuck in violent war for several years. A tyranid hive fleet was passing near the system, and so the commander decided to entice the hive fleet into finding the planet (because if the imperium can't beat the native populace, then no one was going to have this planet) and then took his troops off-planet and after the tyranids spent some time planetside causing havoc and killing tons of people, the commander ordered an exterminatus to utterly destroy the planet.
And of course the moral failings of the imperium, and how they exploited and then genocided their own people was lost on fascist fans of the game, it was just a cool bit of world building.
Personally, I think even the concept of the good Tau is grimdark. Like, the universe is so bleak, the only good guys have absolutely no chance of beating the huge empire, and if the Imperium decided to focus all their fire on the Tau, they'd be gone quickly, so even though they're good, they can never get too big.
The warp wasn't inherently evil, I thought, it's just the swirling manifestation of conscious and sentient thought. It wasn't so bad until the Eldar orgied themselves a deamon god into existence and then the other three came from humans, apparently, doing so much evil they spawned chaos gods too. It's been bad for so long that it's become self-reinforcing, but the God-Emperor had some kind of plan to reset it or something I dunno.
All the Chaos Gods have an inverse "good" aspect to their portfolios too, Tzeentch isn't just betrayal and evil plans but also Hope, Nurgle isn't just pestilence and death but also Love, Slaneesh isn't just lust and hedonism but Beauty and I think Khorne was supposed to have Courage or something. The more "good" parts could be cultivated but the galaxy has been broken for so long that it's hard to say if anything good could ever come of the warp and if they're not better off just having the Tyranids eat everything and wipe the slate clean.
i always liked this representation
im losing my mind at lust and hedonism being considered an equivalent evil to rotting to death and eternal war
I had an idea. What if the Dark Eldar went Monsters Inc and made everyone laugh to save their owns souls from Slaanesh?
Did I just noblebright the Dark Eldar?
it litreally makes no sense they cause pain and are sadistic. it is so stupid. being a satanist by torturing people and shit makes no tactical sense considering the hordes of enemies it would make because you torture their cousin or whatever
I also had an idea, that in a way, might be even darker. They still do the torture thing, but they don't enjoy it. It's just their 9-5 grind, working at the torture factory. And also could be a decent imperialist satire.
that would actually be clever and could open up the possibility for a sympathetic Dark Eldaar protagonist (maybe even one which becomes a chaos cultist and stays sympathetic oh jesus) which would require putting effort into writing
And also removes the plothole of them making too many enemies, by them JITing the torture. Like, there's this entire corporate bureaucracy through torture, but instead of "line goes up", it's "Slaanesh is pleased".
I think you're looking at it on a grand scale; instead look at it as personal, moral failings. Khorne is definitely a macro scale evil, with wars and such, but Dark Eldar aren't conducting torture for military purposes, to them torture is just a hobby like binge gaming or binge watching netflix. Plus what hordes of enemies? Orks don't care, the Eldar are already on the warpath against them and the imperium treats people as toilet paper. Tyranids probably can't be tortured and if you did the other tyranids don't care, and genestealers are more concerned with infiltrating societies for the sake of the Tyranid and probably accepted that this was a possibility ages ago (also I'm not sure if they care if their members are taken for torture purposes).
Theoretically, the Dark Eldar torture to save themselves from having their souls eternally tortured by Slaanesh, but that motive is kind of obfuscated by the fact they enjoy it so much. I'd like to see the Dark Eldar not enjoy it, but also not hate it, like it's a 9-5 job for them, as I mentioned elsewhere here. It could be a parody of capitalism and work culture as well.
It's underselling it, lol, the sensuasness is turned up to 11 (like the pink chaos space marines using loud rock and roll music as weapons, lmao). The lust and hedonism is more like Little St James, not just a nice bubble bath and glass of wine while listening to your favorite album getting or giving top as appropriate.
The Eldar orgy didn't help the the whole Slannesh thing, but it was the war in heaven that created the initial three powers of chaos.
Oh alright, maybe I mixed it up with Warhammer Fantasy then. I swear the lore in the 2000s was that humans were the source of the 3. I always thought that was kinda dumb though if it was true, lol, the Eldar and Orks had way more fights to spawn Khorne at least.
No I think they always existed, but it was the pain and suffering of the War in Heaven that made them evil. As I understand the lore they gain their power now from the collective minds of all sentient beings, and since humanity are the main ones in the galaxy that means mostly humans.
The other three have arguably existed since sentience itself, Nature (Nurgle), Thought (Tzeetch), and Conflict (Khorne). Slaneesh is a special being because they were born of post-scarcity excess, this creating a new peril that threw the other three into an arms races against each other and to influence the world in the Eye of Terror. At least depending on the lore you read. I mean, you still have Gork and Mork, and in Warhammer there is the ratling god as well, as well as Sigmar. The pantheon of Warhammer is weird.
The Warp isnt inherently evil in nature, it's a reflection of the minds of all psychically active creatures. So basically it's a situation where the world is so fantastically brutal and cruel that it's own reflection is such an evil that only more brutality and evil can stop it. It's like the idea that violence only begets violence given material reality.
Well if violence was always going to beget violence, it seems like it’s structured into the universe that this is the inevitable outcome of existence and life
Was it ever possible that there could have been a runaway positive feedback loop into a benevolent universe? I don’t think so. The existence of a warp in this way seems to doom the sentient life that brush up against it
Yeah sorta, but that's getting a little to into the pretty shaky metaphysics of a satire universe. Fundamentally in the cannon of the universe the warp is not supposed to be inherently evil, it is just thats how the history of the universe played out.
Possibly? If the Emperor had been space Lenin, then it strikes me that they could've found the Tau and the universe would be a better place, especially as (provided he does a better job with his sons than the Emperor did) you don't end up with beings like the Chaos marines.
But then going down this path you could also say that had the advanced race that created the Orks to fight the (potentially Necrons?) done a better job at improving their design of Orks (I think the original Orks were called Krorks or something) that maybe you would have had two advanced species (Eldars and an improved Ork species). Necrons were always going to go down a bad path, there was no saving that, and Tyranids are flat out monsters, literally. Eldar culture kind of shot itself in the foot too, so had they made better choices there wouldn't even have been a Slaanesh.
there was a "good" warp wasn't there? The Elder just severely fucked it up with their hubris and decay into what is essentially fascism. From what I remember about the lore everything was relatively chill until Slaanesh was born
That was just the sins of the universe building up before they became too heavy and broke, birthing another chaos god. I don’t see the warp birthing any good gods or lawful gods 😂
Maybe it’s because the mortals of this world are evil and cause so much suffering that their collective psychic energy is negative and only births evil gods. My point stands that the entire universe is fucked. It is a chicken and egg situation though - is everyone warp sensitive tinged by evil because the warp is evil? Or is the warp evil because everyone constructing it are themselves evil?
The Imperium of Man is simultaneously invincible and on the brink of collapse at the same time. It's one of the disadvantages of a setting meant for wargames instead of a tabletop game where you create your own narrative: because the players don't want their preferred faction to become obsolete, the setting is in stasis. Nobody can win or lose in any way which matters.
...Old figurines become obsolete anyways due to better stuff coming out. Gotta make the dosh.
Ironically (or probably not a coincidence) the fascist propaganda; "We're powerful and unbeatable" but also "We're falling apart and being destroyed".
sometime around our generation, humanity colonizes mars and then terraforms it. we then go and colonize other planets, so on so forth. like 20 thousand years pass and eventually we figure out how to use this thing called the warp (like the fabric of the universe i guess?) to do space travel quickly, and then manifest destiny kicks into overdrive. a bunch of random stuff happens, but 3000 years later some thing makes warp drive impossible to do (i forget what it is). by now people learn they can do magic by channeling the warp, and this plus being cut off from the warp drive stuff makes humanity descend into chaos. bunch of wars and nazi stuff happens for like 10000 years. then the emperor shows up, who is one of those guys who knows how to use magic, and is supposed to be immortal and uber smart and basically hes the ultra propagandized ultra fantasy version of hitler. conquers earth, creates imperium of man. more importantly he knows how to channel the warp to do the space travel warp drive thing, and uses this to conquer all the broken-off nations that got cut off when warp drive machine broke. he does this by genetically engineering massive space marines who are uber powerful and shit
he does a bunch of conquering and genocides for like 10000 years, then there is this thing called the horus heresy that happens, and he becomes deathly ill and requires like 1000 people to be sacrificed at his throne daily just to stay alive. and if he dies, the space travel thing goes away too. and also at some point, some of his followers resurrected the catholic church basically and started to do a bunch of inquisitions
reactionaries love it because its what they fantasize. what they dont get is that if you have an ounce of critical thought and don't consume media in a literalism mode 110% of the time, you would see that its clearly satire since average life for a human is immensely bleak. your life is defined by your service to the state. if you dont produce or carry out the will of the state, your are killed. if you carry out the will of the state, you are either literal cannon fodder asiatic horde mass wave shit, or a genetically engineered slave destined to fight for near infinity. the only culture is the religion surrounding the empire, and if you dont believe in it 110%, then you are a heretic to be disposed of. there is no quality of life, as your life is not supposed to have any quality. its all horrible, awful shit, but the reactionaries just cant see it as "bad"
heres some good videos if youre curious
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05YRMHWtv1Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCGKPRiJp84
also r/sigmarxism is actually pretty decent
The Dreadnoughts should be evidence enough of how little value the Imperium puts into human life. Even being killed won't save you from your eternal state of enslaved warfare. Your corpse will be reanimated with the faintest spark of your former life inhabiting a walking metal coffin. You'll become only the hatred, murder, and genocide you exhibited in life without any of the humanity to get in the way. Your only use now is a shriveled organic meat paste to pilot walking artillery
And if you fall in battle as a Dreadnought, well, better hope the rest of your team survives (and remember, Dreadnoughts are the most powerful soldiers) or finds you later, because otherwise, you'll just be sitting there forever, still conscious, but unable to move or do anything.
In the earlier lore, the Emperor was the result of every Shaman on Earth committing ritual suicide to release their psychic essence into the warp that manifested in the Emperor. He was apparently born on the steppes of Anatolia in antiquity, and had tried to guide humanity from the shadows. So he then lived through all of this, maybe he was literally Hitler or even Stalin??? Then after the dark ages he decides to finally reveal himself.
The Emperor is then of course Turkish 🇹🇷
It is heavily implied that he was Julius Caesar, which is where all the Latin comes from.
There is hope yet, De Red Gobbo leads Da Revolushun! :red-fist: