Here's a link.
Does it fail as satire? Does this kind of thing work as good satire for specific people? Somebody explain.
Cultures without art of their own will glom unto satire as if it were a compliment.
I think that even with GW literally spelling it out for them most of the cryptofascists who idolize it will carry on carrying on unperturbed.
What could work is to push a sessesion narative over this, to make the Nazis split from the main fandom and then fade to irrelevance. Like, seed the idea that this is going wrong and that they need their own even more fascist version that hardly nyon with a brain would support. Could keep em distracted though
Disclaimer: Against my better judgement I’m a pretty big 40k fan even though I realise the fanbase is painfully infested with chuds and a lot of the content enables that.
Like the book took pains to make Inquisition or Space Marines or whatever seem as cool as possible, not ridicule them.
Interestingly from what I understand the earlier portrayals of Space Marines (going back to Rogue Trader, which was a D&D like tabletop game that I believe was the first ever 40k thing) were a bit better for this - They were roided out fascist thugs who were good at slaughtering targets softer than themselves but prone to hubris and fanatacism that would often get them killed in droves for basically no reason. There was a lot more lore about how the Imperium was barely functional and the cause of a lot of it’s own worst problems, too.
Unfortunately I think GW realised that dorks who loved the Empire were a good market so they gradually revised Space Marines to be perfect badasses (something that’s only gotten worse recently with the Primaris Space Marines who are basically Space Marines but with a tacticool aesthetic and with any interesting facets about how they can turn against the Emperor ironed out) and made the Imperium seem more functional. By and large in regards to Warhammer 40k related media it kind of depends on who’s writing it. Obviously being a Capitalist product a lot of the lore serves to sell overpriced miniatures too which probably stifles some of the creative intent behind it.
I guess ultimately it’s good that GW put this message out, although I can’t help but feel like they also massively enabled the worst parts of their fanbase with all the "Purge the Xenos the Emperor protects bolter porn blah blah blah :le-pol-face: " shit lmao
It doesn't help at all that they push the ubermensch marines so hard while neglecting their other lines. The space elves have models more than twenty years old, the rape elves are even more out of date, god knows what's going on with orks, and do they even sell guard anymore? The only line that consistently gets new models, new lore, and new books is the space marines. I mean the poor bolter bitches barely even have an army
why havent i heard of metal albums themed after that? liddy af
It actually gets even more metal - the reason for this is that before the Dark Eldar were a separate faction, the original united Eldar sunk so deep into hedonism and drug-fueled giga-orgies that their sheer drive towards ecstasy spawned a new Chaos God of Pleasure, who then proceeded to claim all their souls as food. So one particular group of Eldar decided to delay having their own souls eaten by instead making sure others suffer and are consumed in their place, hence all the extreme torture. Their society is also completely dysfunctional on account of everyone being a sadistic mass murderer, with politics consisting pretty much entirely of assassination attempts and other schemes and intrigues.
There was a lot more lore about how the Imperium was barely functional and the cause of a lot of it’s own worst problems, too.
aint that still how it works
When handled by better writers very much so, but I've seen a lot of cringe "The Empire is super evil but it's the only thing stopping humanity from being wiped out" bs before
a lot of cringe “The Empire is super evil but it’s the only thing stopping humanity from being wiped out” bs
Which would still work fine if done with a satirical bent, if the overall theme of these stories was a kind of fatalistic "we could have stopped this" angle, rather than the cynical, psychotic banality of the worst evils mankind can inflict on the universe being the best we could have ever hoped to do.
Exactly, I actually quite like the stupid "stiff upper lip" propaganda side of the Imperium when it's used to shine a light on the realities of life in Warhammer 40k. There was a really good short story I read where after fighting tooth and nail in defence of a planet, a garrison of Imperial Guard get told "The Emperor Protects" at the end of a radio communication informing them that the Administratum have decided that it's more resource effective to nuke the whole battlefield they're on from orbit rather than risk transport ships getting shot down in an evacuation which is both darkly hilarious and, in a very unsubtle way, somewhat poignant but I guess bolter porn sells better so we end up with trash.
Depends. A lot of the books make things seem more functional because it's hard to tell an interesting story when things are too grimdark. And they've turned away from the good old days when the Space Marines were so honor bound that they would do stupid shit like marching in a firing line in to enemy anti-tank fire FOR THE EMPRAH. Now the marines use tactics and shit.
I'm not really into 40k, but my group to played the Dark Heresy ttrpg for a bit and I could never figure out how this kind of satire supposed to work. Like the book took pains to make Inquisition or Space Marines or whatever seem as cool as possible, not ridicule them. Novels and faction (?) books might be different, I dunno.
People on twitter are angry and calling GWS a "nazi bar". Then again I know leftists who swear by the setting...
Yeah they have a real problem with the space marine fan boys, every fascist I've ever encountered who was into 40K played space marines because they obviously salivate over being "inherently superior" to the masses.
Playing Guard against them is very fun because exploding from a mortar round fired by some acne scarred teenage conscript is just about the funniest and least dignified end possible for their beloved immortal uber-soldiers.
Mfs out here playing Buzz Lightyear while I'm playing Stalingrad.
guard is great you get to be like those historically incorrect descriptions of the Soviet Union, sending unarmed masses to soak up the bullets with their cheap bodies while your commissars shoot everyone who even thinks of running away. Great fun.
I love that the Catachan have an officer fragging mechanic
For non 40K-Knowers, the Catachan are a Guard subfaction very obviously styled after US troops in Vietnam. If your army includes any commissars, you have to roll a die during deployment to see if they even make it to the battlefield. The rule is called Oops, sorry sir!
That's so fucking good, I've been a guard man for a minute now and I didn't even know about that rule
Your Commisars can execute their own troops for in game bonuses. They have awesome tanks. There are penal battalions. It's like if Enemy at the Gates wasn't just American propaganda.
I could never figure out how this kind of satire supposed to work.
Judging by the letter, it doesn't. But then people think I'm ridiculous for suggesting that maybe dressing up kids as storm troopers or Darth Vader isn't the greatest idea. So what do I know?
I, too, am seriously creeped out by people who dress up as spacce nazis for funsies.
Seriously fucking weird shit. Like those storm trooper cosplay regiments. Wtf.
Yeah it's like read the fucking subtext, guys. I get that it's fiction but you're dressing up as very literal space Nazis. What kind of person would want to dress up as a stormtrooper when you could be a Jedi, or even a Clone Trooper?
What idiot dresses their kids up as stormtroopers anyway? They were the faceless henchmen who just got owned every time they were on screen lol
Slaanesh, the God of Rape and Cocaine, has evil Space Marines who murder people using the power of Heavy Metal. They literally have guitar flamethrower guns. Back in the 80s the game was so obviously over the top and silly that it was hard to take seriously. The Space Orks talk, dress, and act like British football hooligans. They've gotten more serious about the Grim Dark since then and it's made it harder to read as satire.
I think the problem is that little kids who played warhammer grew up to be writers who write warhammer and they've forgotten that the nazi genocidal space empire is supposed to be tongue in cheek.
I think I was trying to make an analogy to the way that a generation of recruits raised entirely on US propaganda has compounded certain issues in intelligence agencies, but I was super stoned and I might have gotten lost somewhere along the way.
GW sucks for a lot of reasons, but I'm glad they came out and said it.
TBH Warhammer hasn't ever been good satire, it's almost always been a grab bag universe of things people think are cool in an edgelord kinda way.
TBH Warhammer hasn’t ever been good satire
It came about from the same general circle of artists and writers that spawned Judge Dredd (and 40k stole a whole lot of concepts and aesthetics outright from Judge Dredd), and I'd argue that both do some things right but are undermined by lib brainworms and the danger of appropriating fascist aesthetics and themes. Like even if the clear portrayal is "this is bad and everyone is suffering because of it" that just works back into the Fascist aesthetic of violence and sacrifice for the sake of violence and "glory."
Like (at least in the old comics) Judge Dredd's whole thing is that he's incorruptible, inhumanly self-less, and never wrong: he arrests other cops, he arrests himself, he arrests the rich, he fights against his own ruling class over atrocities they're committing against sapient non-humans, and even tries to de-escalate and non-violently solve mental health crises instead of just going in guns blazing. That works as a pretty good piss-take on superheroes, and as a very dry "this is the sort of impossible perfection you'd need to trust someone with the power cops have." But then he also commits genocide, preserves the deranged social fascist status-quo, and generally does a bunch of stupid bullshit too, which confounds the whole thing: is Judge Dredd an impossible paragon, and that's the joke, or is he just another piece of shit in a deranged system? It loses its clarity and creates the same situation 40k is in, where whatever satire may have been there gets lost in unironic "ok but what if the conditions were such that genocide really was the lesser evil? what about that, ever think about that?" brainworms.
GW fucking suck, and are greedy little shits even as far as capitalists go. but this is obviously a good statement to put out
Does it fail as satire? Does this kind of thing work as good satire for specific people?
Satire is useless for anything other than entertainment purposes. It entertains everyone that dislikes the thing being attacked, and it similarly entertains everyone that likes the thing being attacked.
Satire is the production of media that depicts the thing those under satirical attack aspire to be. They always simply coopt it as something they like.
It should be viewed purely as a form of entertainment and not as any form of political use because it basically has none.
I disagree with your point about satire always being coopted. It depends on depiction and the "values" of the satirized group.
A lot of negative depictions coopted by nazis show them as scary, cruel, genocidal, obsessed with purity. They love that shit, because they only care about strength and power. Show them as weak and pathetic and they are much less likely to latch onto it.
Fascist nerds are kind of unique in that they're already incorporated the intensely negative self image into their ideology. They don't necessarily have the belief that fascism is helping anything in society or that they are a positive force in the world. A lot of them want to die.
So an effective satirical 40k novel would have to do something like getting the reader invested in a story that isn't just endless grimdark space warfare to the point the reader actually wants to escape from the baseline fascist ideation in the franchise. Reinforcing that there are no "good guys", there is nothing but warfare, the galaxy is just endless suffering, etc. All of that is perfectly in line with their world view. Like it is extremely telling that the chud nerd self mascot was never Chad. It's Pepe, the doomer, or wojack.
Edit: Now that I think about it, Moderan is basically what 40k would be as more effective satire. Moderan also stars a bunch of super soldiers in a far future that consist of perpetual warfare, it also has a lot of similarities with the typical space marine story where you start off with a human and see the transition into a cyborg killing machine. The difference with Moderan is that it feels genuinely painful to be trapped in that world with those people.
It feels awful to be trapped within the narrations of a mind that can't conceive anything outside of violence and hate. It feels awful to be trapped in the book's world because fascism has destroyed human culture to the point where there isn't even an aesthetic appeal to the omnipresent violence. So when the book hints at any kind of escape back into humanity, you lurch for it.
40k could do a thing about a far-off colony world that nobody knows about, that gets taken over by the imperium.
Maybe one of the "evil" alien races even knows about those humans but leaves them alone because they aren't actually evil, just very violently fighting against their own genocide from the imperium.
Maybe to the extent that those aliens are evil, it's because they had to become that way to survive. And most of the lore ends up being just imperium lies.
I just think WH40k kind of fails as satire because the type of storytelling they need to do is basically incompatible with satire. Like they have this long running universe with sure this evil fascist state, but contrasted against literal gods of death and decay and demons, which naturally makes even the fascists seem good in comparison. Also you publish like 60 books a year about the adventures of space marines from a variety of authors that clarity of satire is going to be lost rather quickly.
It's very similar to the satire issues you get in Judge Dredd, it's like yea he's a fascist cop executing people for minor crimes but the world he is operating in is a crime-ridden hell hole so it's easier to see it as necessary. I think the take away here is that British people need to stop making post apocalyptic future fascist satire.
Dredd has outgrown his origins in a lot of ways. He's a product of Thatcherite England and so much of the banality and evil of the post-Reagan/Thatcher world has become completely normalized, so the satire doesn't hit the same.
Every satirical universe like this explicitly needs to end with a pan out through the fourth wall, showing some gammon fuck roleplaying his fantasy with his pants around his ankles.
At least with Dredd its written in a way that makes it very hard to take seriously.
The real good guys are the Space Ork, who just want to have a good scrap and bear no ill will to anyone.
Yeah, at the end of the day, most authors don’t write the universe as satire.
Even the actual game universe doesn't feel like satire so much in the Primaris era.
Either way this is gonna make the fash foam at the mouth and I'm in full support
Absolutely fails in its current state. If there's anyone responsible for attracting fascists to it, it's GW for for the way it's depicted the Imperium for decades.
Also, apparently chuds were mad when a recent book had a black ultramarine on the cover. But as far as i know this is literallly the first black person ever pictured in warhammer art. You're telling me that humanity has spread to thousands of planets with a population of trillions and everyone is just a white british guy with an aquilline nose?
The funniest thing is that per the lore, any Space Marine not wearing a helmet while in direct sunlight would be black, and then pasty white when they went inside, and sort of tan on a cloudy day, etc, with the only exceptions being the chapters where their photochromatic skin mutation is broken and set to one extreme or the other. Like Space Marines aren't people in power armor, they're basically Super Mutants from Fallout: they have redundant organs, they spit acid, they eat brains to steal their enemy's knowledge, they change color when exposed to light, and they have completely alien minds reworked to have perfect memory and improved ballistic calculation ability.
Also there's fewer than 1 million of them in a galaxy of some 20 quadrillion people, and they each have about the combat effectiveness of a single light IFV. They are outnumbered a hundred million to one by normal human soldiers, a million to one by main battletanks, ten thousand to one by super-heavy tanks, a hundred to one by Titans, and still outnumbered by space craft that can level continents with sustained bombardment. That is to say, they're completely irrelevant in every material way. Saying this is the easiest way to make 40k chuds frothing mad :frothingfash:
But as far as i know this is literallly the first black person ever pictured in warhammer art
It's not the first, 40k art is white as low fat mayonnaise, but like, 5% of the human artwork is of black people.
One of the Emperor’s 20 sons, Vulkan He’stan is black, as are the Salamanders, his legion and all of their successor chapters.
They’ve got their own their own models rules and lore books with pictures of them on the front cover.
There was a recent series of 40k childrens books called Warhammer adventures chuds got big mad about that had a black child protagonist featured on the cover art.
And just generally in the 40k lore and art when they’re depicting humans some are depicted as black.
In universe it’s shown as everyone’s too busy hating aliens and mutants to be properly racist to other humans. What’s really problematic, and a big part of the reason why 40k has so much appeal to fascists, is that the imperium’s extreme violent xenophobia towards aliens, mutants and people with different religions is typically portrayed as wise and justified. There is orders of magnitude more 40k media about the Imperium’s extreme xenophobia saving billions of people from horrible deaths than there isof it causing problems or biting the imperium in the arse. It’s often portrayed as horrible, there’s a lot of “we firebombed this entire city of innocent people to kill 1 (one) genuinely dangerous heretic” or “if you fail in your mission space marine we will have no choice but to glass the entire planet from orbit” but it’s not portrayed as ineffective. It’s generally shown that if that one heretic was allowed to live or the mission failed then the entire planet or star sector would die such horrible deaths they would be begging us for the swift release of an orbital bombardment we would no longer be capable of delivering 😔.
Which is the sort of strength and sacrifice, death before dishonour, murder 100 to save 1000, hard men making hard choices slop fascists absolutely adore, so of course they love 40k and games workshop, being spineless capitalists, are more than happy to feed into it and write a once satirical anti fascist piece of media entirely unsatirically so long as they don’t have to engage with real life fascism. This statement is nice, but unless they seriously re-evaluate how they present fascists (as cool horribly effective ubermensch who do WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE) they’re not going to impact the portion of their audience that is fascist or their ideologically based enjoyment of the media Games Workshop is putting out.
I get your point, but I guess in the end of the day it's a question of statistics. If 99% of people got your message I'd say you've succeeded at satire even if there's enough people who took it at face value...
You can SAY the Imperium is the bad guys, and even intend that, but fascists view themselves as the guys who do the hard stuff that needs to be done, so it will have no effect on them.
Satire is useless because chuds will see someone genociding 39492949595 people and say "wow this is literally me" :stupidpol:
