They were initially parody but nerds completely lost their ability to detect satire, but I've read the devs haven't been so great about indicating the humans are not supposed to be admired.
Games Workshop sucks but in recent years their writing team has done a lot to push back against this. They brought back a Primarch, a son of the Emperor the Imperium worships as a God, and any time he's talking to someone in private he's basically the wojack.
The Primarch Guilliman is an enlightened despot type in the Roman sense. He generally wants what's best for his people (the Imperium) but is still willing to kill and do bad things to get it. He wakes up after 10,000 years in stasis and finds that the Imperium has gone straight to hell (some parts literally) and he has to put all of it back together. There was a series of novels where he had to deal with politics on Earth and he was complaining hard about how awful every institution is.
The funniest example of this is that Guilliman woke up after 10,000 years in Stasis and asked "what year is it?" The best answer anyone can give him is "we think it's the first year of the 41st millennium". Guilliman does his own calculations and as best as he can tell its probably the 41st millennium, with a margin of error of a thousand years. So he sets up a small organization to catelogue the history of his absence and their efforts to refine and apply Guilliman's dating system immediately causes them to get into a covert civil war with a faction of the Inquisition (exactly what they sound like) that deals with time-related heresy. It gets so bad that Guilliman has to personally step in to get them to stop killing each other.
It's not exactly leftist, but reintroducing a straight man (ayyy) into the setting is exactly what they needed to do to point out the absurdity of everything.
The Indomitus Crusade books starting with Avenging Son have a lot of the Guilliman grumbling scenes but a lot of it is just fairly generic Space Marine schlock. Watchers of the Throne is about a Custodes and a Sister of Silence in almost a buddy cop kind of match up and the second book delves a lot into the machinations of Imperial politics following Guilliman's return.
Games Workshop sucks but in recent years their writing team has done a lot to push back against this. They brought back a Primarch, a son of the Emperor the Imperium worships as a God, and any time he's talking to someone in private he's basically the
wojack.
The Primarch Guilliman is an enlightened despot type in the Roman sense. He generally wants what's best for his people (the Imperium) but is still willing to kill and do bad things to get it. He wakes up after 10,000 years in stasis and finds that the Imperium has gone straight to hell (some parts literally) and he has to put all of it back together. There was a series of novels where he had to deal with politics on Earth and he was complaining hard about how awful every institution is.
The funniest example of this is that Guilliman woke up after 10,000 years in Stasis and asked "what year is it?" The best answer anyone can give him is "we think it's the first year of the 41st millennium". Guilliman does his own calculations and as best as he can tell its probably the 41st millennium, with a margin of error of a thousand years. So he sets up a small organization to catelogue the history of his absence and their efforts to refine and apply Guilliman's dating system immediately causes them to get into a covert civil war with a faction of the Inquisition (exactly what they sound like) that deals with time-related heresy. It gets so bad that Guilliman has to personally step in to get them to stop killing each other.
It's not exactly leftist, but reintroducing a straight man (ayyy) into the setting is exactly what they needed to do to point out the absurdity of everything.
That sounds fantastic. I might have to read this, and the Ciaphas Cain novels.
The Indomitus Crusade books starting with Avenging Son have a lot of the Guilliman grumbling scenes but a lot of it is just fairly generic Space Marine schlock. Watchers of the Throne is about a Custodes and a Sister of Silence in almost a buddy cop kind of match up and the second book delves a lot into the machinations of Imperial politics following Guilliman's return.