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?
It really doesn’t help that GW constantly oscillates between “the theocratic fascism is really self-destructive and stupid and is why the imperium is a decaying wreck, and having an autocrat and his large adult sons in charge of everything totally fucked it all up in the first place”, “the fascism isn’t great but it’s necessary and justified because it’s the only thing saving humanity from unimaginable horrors that vaguely resemble whatever ethnic group you’re most afraid of”, or “the space marines are unambiguously good heroes with honour and piety who keep everyone safe, yay for the good guys”
if you read like any of the popular W40k novels everything about the Imperium of man seems like unfettered dogshit
the majority of the people live in decaying hovels eking out a miserable agricultural existence or in enormous planet sized slums that have all sorts of issues (rampant crime, gangs, mutants, etc.)
if you're part of the actual government you are like an undying heavily bio augmented freak with an incredibly long lifespan (iirc Inquisitor Ravenor is like 300 years old lmfao) stemming back a tide of literally incomprehensible horrors that you aren't fully equipped to deal with
like in Caiphas Cain the entire point of the series is that he's a regular commissar who frequently stumbles into absolutely insane, fucked up situations and spends most of his time trying to run the fuck away because getting turned into some mutant freak by Tyrannids is in no way cool or exciting
god help you if you're part of the regular ass army
ive read way too many 40k novels lol (yeah i read theory) and theres a huuuuuge disconnect between the different writers. youre absolutely right that the eisenhorn/ravenor books in particular are all about how incredibly dogshit the imperium is, and other books do make this clear as well
but with a lot of the space marine focused ones you can just feel the authors jerking themselves off as they write (someone should compile all the bits from the horus heresy novels where they first describe each of the primarchs in particular lol) and they are often really uncritical or apologetic about not just the space marines but the imperium itself
and of course the video games mostly go no deeper than "yay space marines"
I like the Grey Knights novels because everything they deal with is shown to be a nightmarish shitshow lol, I couldn't get into the Horus Heresy books
also the moment in Gaunts Ghosts where the Chaos Space marines get fucking merc'ed by the indigenous people of a planet because they were too full of pride and hubris to wear helmets is 10/10 writing
yeah youre not missing much, apart from a couple of the dan abnett ones (this is a recurring theme for 40k novels) the horus heresy novels are unadulterated dogshit
and lol that sounds awesome
Unironically Angel Exterminatus is a fantastic novel, like in the classical sense
53 books you’re bound to hit gold
I think they make sense and are fun if you think about them less as a historical archive, and more like a space opera propaganda piece, with big men with big feelings that they can't deal with. Its like watching Riverdale but with more violence.
Which books are good to start with? I've heard Eisenhorn is pretty good.
none of them are anything remotely approaching good literature, but a good rule of thumb is that dan abnett and aaron dembski-bowden (sp?) are their two decent authors and everything else is complete and utter garbage
yeah eisenhorn is probably a pretty good place to start and probably the best of the ones ive read, i think its a much more interesting portrayal of the imperium than the ones that are just 200 pages of space marines shooting at things
edit: another series i would recommend are the aaron dembski bowden ones about the night lords - they always seemed like the most teenage edgelord chaos marines but their portrayal in these books is really interesting
kind of What other people told me upon further investigation is that Dan and aaron are the only two people writing for them worth a damn.
Thanks
Yeah I draw a line between Dembski-Bowden/Abnett and whatever the other guys are doing.
I think a better discussion would be who is the worst of them, I nominate Gav Thorpe.
I tried reading some WH40k books but yeah, the comment about 200 pages of space marines shooting things is apt. Even the Caiphas Cain books, while holding some interesting material was full of mostly combat.
I can't put my finger on why but even the first book of the Horus Heresy written by Dan Abnett (I think?) was too dull to continue and I'm not sure if it was combat intensive (ironically if I'd read it as a kid I probably would've loved it as I found these action scenes cool; now I just want a good story).
I want to take an opportunity to recommend the only Warhammer books that can count as good literature - everything written by Peter Fehervari.
Though the problem with the Guard books is that it shows ordinary people living somewhat fucked up but mostly ordinary lives. The Ghosts series makes it seem if the Imperium is just taxes and the church for 98% of the population and absurd horror only on the edges.
Fascism has an appeal for a reason. And while GW is run by dorky military worshipping man-children, I think they at least peg the vibe that drives fascism's appeal.
You can't really expect a successful war game franchise to just paper over why people love war. It's revealing, even if unsettling.
Fascism has an appeal for a reason. And while GW is run by dorky military worshipping man-children, I think they at least peg the vibe that drives fascism’s appeal.
You can’t really expect a successful war game franchise to just paper over why people love war. It’s revealing, even if unsettling.
I really feel like a Leninist WH40k universe could still be badass, and it's inherent inclusive nature and desire to help make people's lives awesome would make for a great jumping off point to make people ask about the principles behind it. Clearly WH40k as a satire of fascism is going over people's heads, so may as well embrace the style and make our own.
I really feel like a Leninist WH40k universe could still be badass, and it’s inherent inclusive nature and desire to help make people’s lives awesome would make for a great jumping off point to make people ask about the principles behind it.
We have that now. It's just Star Trek, circa Deep Space Nine.
But yes, you could absolutely make a WH40k universe in which the Galactic Soviet has carved out a utopian inner core of worlds caught in the politics created by the weirdness of an alien hostile cosmos. Meanwhile the periphery struggles with threats both immediate and existential, far from the endless bounty of the core worlds, as they seek to bridge the gap between their homeworlds and the frontier.
But I don't know if you'd want to make that a strictly military tactics game. Its going to look more like a 4X - a Twilight Imperium or Civilization style game - than the current setup.
Clearly WH40k as a satire of fascism is going over people’s heads, so may as well embrace the style and make our own.
Like so many other corporate media brands, once the writers start drinking their own kool-aid you just end up with context and nuance stripped away to make room for more Kick-ass Awesome Idealism. I don't think this is even so much that its going over people's heads as it is the GW writers' room has made juicing the setting with Super Space Marine Power Creep more of a priority than a coherent and continuously developed storyline.
in which the Galactic Soviet has carved out a utopian inner core of worlds caught in the politics created by the weirdness of an alien hostile cosmos. Meanwhile the periphery struggles with threats both immediate and existential, far from the endless bounty of the core worlds, as they seek to bridge the gap between their homeworlds and the frontier.
Lancer RPG
whatever ethnic group you’re most afraid of
ooh! don't forget gender or sexual minority either! scary gender-indeterminate slaanesh demon :cri:
And don't forget, Slaanesh was created by the Eldar having crazy sex. Sounds exactly like fascist allegory, saying that "removed" will destroy society... somehow.
slaanesh as a monsterous evil always made me really uncomfortable, and what makes it quadruple uncomfortable is how apparently one of the evil things they can do is make you enjoy fighting which is evil in a world where people fight all the time (???????)
like theres no actual philosophical critiques of hedonism inherent to slaanesh, its just ":le-pol-face: pleasure bad"
They've tried to change it recently, by making Slaanesh more a "god of perfection and artistic obsession" but really that's just a way of making the drugs and the rock and roll cover up all the sex.
lmao that's not even like what that's actually better
like actual, selfless monks are perfectionists that do artistic expression
Slaanesh is said to be a god of excess. So if anything, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk would embody Slaanesh more than orgies.
I unfortunately know some real people that never got the joke and got their start into fascism by way of that movie because of their failure of comprehension.
I believe Verhoven actually said that whether you thought the movie was pro-fascism or anti-fascist said a lot about you.
Oh no, they understand they're made fun of. They like the fact that they're seen as the bad guys by those people.
Warhammer's satirical roots are of a very similar nature to the original run of Judge Dredd (and it was created by writers and artists in the same social circle as the creators of Judge Dredd, in addition to just outright borrowing a ton of things from it - it would not be entirely inaccurate to describe the original version of Warhammer 40K as Lord of the Rings mashed up with Judge Dredd and turned into a space opera): despite the whacky elements the setting used to have its core satire was a bit drier, namely that it crafted this absurd world where enough people thinking bad thoughts could literally cause daemons to appear and eat everyone and aliens really were just comic book villains out to get you, a setting so extreme that it justified the Imperium's paranoia and iron grip. Effectively it was holding up this excessive, absurd, and contrived universe and saying "this is how stupid things would have to be for these actions to be rational" in much the same way Judge Dredd holds up Dredd himself as an impossibly perfect, selfless, and incorruptible superman as a "look how impossibly dedicated and perfect someone has to be to wield this sort of power, and even there he's the only one all the other Judges suck and the system is a wreck because it's stupid and dysfunctional." It could almost be seen as a sort of satirical Thermian Argument, where half the joke is how ridiculously contrived the justifications have to get to become coherent.
So obviously that gets missed and it becomes a sort of unintentional "Thermian Propaganda" to borrow the term someone else here came up with when I was trying to find a term to describe basically that phenomenon (but intentional) a couple of weeks ago, where the joke is lost and instead you're left with a set of justifications that make the Imperium's extremism become coherent and rational in-universe and that get taken seriously by its fans. On top of that is the fact that the Imperium is just steeped in the aesthetics of death and sacrifice and however silly and excessive it is it makes the viewer feel the emotions associated with ideas of doomed last-stands and redemptive violence, and that induced emotion is a key part of intentional Fascist propaganda because Fascism is fundamentally a warrior death-cult that reveres violence and sacrifice for their own sake (or more accurately, this is a cornerstone of Fascism and a key part of how it appeals to its would-be warrior class, because Fascism does have other fundamental attributes and other cornerstones as well).
Meaning if you write a story about the how 112th Death Brigade from Bellum IV covered themselves in pictures of skulls and fought to the last man in a hopeless battle against the space demons of Osteo IX using laser guns and building sized tanks, and their leader Colonel Bonehammer died setting off his own grenade when he was surrounded after getting his chainsaw stuck in a megademon's head, even if the intent is that this is all very silly and pointless you're still writing a story about soldiers covered in Fascist iconography dying "glorious" deaths in a battle against monsters and sacrificing themselves in acts of redemptive violence for a greater cause. It's like the old saying that you can't make an anti-war movie because even if the point is to showcase pointlessness and horror you're still making a spectacle of it and making the audience feel things and even if those things are sorrow and anger they're still consuming the media to feel those things and so despite being negative emotions they still satisfy and please the viewer.
Meaning if you write a story about the how 112th Death Brigade from Bellum IV covered themselves in pictures of skulls and fought to the last man in a hopeless battle against the space demons of Osteo IX using laser guns and building sized tanks, and their leader Colonel Bonehammer died setting off his own grenade when he was surrounded after getting his chainsaw stuck in a megademon’s head
112th Death Korps Infantry Regiment from Krieg, adorned with the Symbol Imperialis, fulfilled their duty to the God-Emperor in a fight to the death against the forces of the Ruinous powers of Chaos Undivided on the surface of Osteo IX armed with only lasguns and a single baneblade. Their leader Colonel-Commissar Aldridge Bearhammer died setting off his own grenade when he was surrounded after getting his chainsword stuck in a Daemon Prince's head
It's a lot funnier if they fulfilled their duty piling up their corpses to for a ramp up to a fortress's walls for the actual elite troops to walk up. (I do realise there is actually an example of that, but I think the setting would work better if more of the stories were like that and less about your brother impugning your honour by killing more demons than you)
Considering how we're talking about the Death Korps, they actually might use their own dead as a ramp so they can assault an enemy position. Honestly they might actually consider it an honor that their bodies can still serve in destroying the Emperor's enemies in death
Yeah, pretty much. I opted to make it more generic for anyone not familiar with the setting, while at the same time describing something that I'm just going to guess has been written at least several dozen times across the novels, sourcebooks, and splatbooks. Like Gaunt's Ghosts is weirdly one of the less fashy series (Dan Abnett in general seems to portray the Imperium much more like a federation of widely varied systems* ranging from feudal aristocracies to liberal democracies to things that are bizarre and completely alien like cryogenic necrarchies, along with making space marines genuinely alien and inhuman instead of the power armored crusader fratbros that other authors write them as) and every book is just one long string of named, long-standing characters dying heroically or pathetically with little rhyme or reason to most of it.
*That's another thing that's shifted how the setting is portrayed: authors sitting down and trying to make the Imperium into something that while still dysfunctional actually sort of works and is coherent with the scale of the setting, and that pretty much requires stripping out the sort of uniform extremity of it and instead making the Imperium something distant and concerned with little more than taxes in the form of resources and conscripts, with the vast bulk of its worlds being left alone even if they fall into bloody civil wars or revolution, so long as they keep up with their taxes. And that's almost more dangerous, because it further removes the setting from the satire and builds further justifications into the vague "Thermian Propaganda" quality that it already has.
There's lots of skulls and killing and death, and there are cool quotable dogmatic memes about exterminating aliens, mutants, and dissenting opinions.
It's not supposed to be "the good guys" but :le-pol-face: identifies with it and calls it good.
Everyone here is talking about the stories, but I want to add a point about how the hobby itself makes you really buy into the universe.
There's this concept in tabletop that sometimes called "Your Dudes", which basically describes how incredibly attached you get as a player to an army if you take the opportunity to customize them. My own Sisters of Battle aren't just pixels on a screen that I spawn in when I have enough command points, I remember painting literally every single on of their guns, liveries, and armored corsets. I've thought of names for each of the squads and applied little color variations to them so I can tell them apart on the board. I know the names of the sergeants and exactly what bits and pieces of wargear I attached to each of them so I can swap them in and out based on my army list. I have a whole backstory about how they come from a feudal planet and their liveries are super colorful because it's their family's banner.
Anyway I think that people who actually play the game get way more attached to the universe than in other hobbies, and that drives them to want to bend over backwards to explain why their faction is the Good Guys, actually.
Look at this nerd, painting their miniatures (I kid).
I'm under no illusions that my spiky space elves are not the good guys. They are hyper-individualist anti-buddhists, completely unable to see any interaction as anything other than a zero-sum game and have discovered that by feeding off the suffering of others they can live forever.
I think you can actually do philosophically interesting things with 40k, but usually it's just fanfic level fash-worship and glory (ironically or usually not).
I also think that the format of 40k, wherein you build and paint your army and then competitively duke it out with other players, lends itself to identifying with your army and seeking out your "clan" in a way that MtG or RPGs does not. Certainly some players in MtG will identify with a particular deck or build, but the game doesn't connect you with the lore of the cards you're using in the same way. I remember being a Dark Eldar player before 2009 (when the DE reboot happened), there was a level of camaraderie between Dark Eldar players as the unloved sons of GW in a way that I don't think existed for, say, green-black players in MtG.
Combined with the overtly fascist imagery of "the good guys", means that you wind up with a lot of unironic Imperium stans talking to a lot of other unironic Imperium stans. Obviously for GW, this is good business as they can sell lots of merch and miniatures.
is it like a human supremacist group
Yes and it's also meant to be a satire of them and the obviously horrifying implications of fascism drawn out on a 40 thousand year timeline.
The Imperium of Man is a space empire run by Earth (or Terra). It was formerly ruled by the Emperor, an autocrat with superpowers, but because of a combination of him being a terrible dad, his failsons being unable to communicate, and just fuckery from evil gods throughout the universe, he was brainkilled by one of his sons, and half of his sons turned evil. But his corpse still has JUST enough superpowers within that it's able to power transportation throughout the galaxy
Now, officially, his corpse still rules the Imperium, but now, there's a state religion devoted to him, and multiple bureaucrats pretend to speak for him, and of course, everything he wants is in the interest of the capitalists and the imperialists. It's implied that one guy sneezing wrong in his throne room would destroy him, making the galactic transportation impossibile, thus destroying the Imperium, if it's not destroyed by either it imploding on itself or destroyed by an external forcem
Now, it's supposed to be an obvious satire of fascism. The Imperium sucks. The one thing it's supposed to do, destroy all external threats, it's terrible at. But fascists either don't see the satire or don't care.
Now, don't get me wrong, the writers are not completely innocent here. First off, the marketing is almost exclusively Space Marines looking awesome. And many of the writers can't decide between three different, contradictory messages:
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The Imperium is a shitshow, and it's all because absolute power was given to an autocrat and his failsons.
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The Imperium is pretty bad, but it's necessary for mankind to exist.
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The heroic Space Marines save the humans from danger.
This obfuscates the satire pretty hard. Another thing is obsession with making it "gramdark enough". Like, originally, the Tau Empire was another faction that was as close as 40k had to good guys. It was not fascist. It wasn't perfect, but it had a good place in the story. It had the message "even though the Tau Empire isn't perfect, it's proof you don't need to be fascist to survive the universe of 40k". But people complained it wasn't grimdark enough, so it was made more evil (personally, I disagree that the concept is not grimdark, it makes the universe seem bleak that the one good faction stands no chance against the Imperium). But here's the thing: Fascists claim they like grimdark. They do not. What they think grimdarkness is is cruelty to the others. It's not. Probably the most famous story described as grimdark is George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and it's not just mindless cruelty. It's a highly nuanced story in which you look into all sides. Fascists don't like that.
(As a side note, a fun way to make people who say the Imperium is fine because they're justified is to remind them that the Dark Eldar are much more justified.)
Dark Eldar are kind of like cars that run on souls. They need to torture others to fill up their tank to keep going. And of they run empty their own soul is sucked out of them and is tortured for all of eternity by the hedonistic God of excess.
him being a terrible dad
That's the thing,
spoiler
he never really saw them as his sons. But they apparently viewed him as a father.
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Its numberless legions of soldiers and zealots bludgeon their way across the galaxy, delivering death to anyone and anything that doesn’t adhere to their blinkered view of purity. Almost every man and woman toils in misery either on the battlefield – where survival is measured in hours – or in the countless manufactorums and hive slums that fuel the Imperial war machine. All of this in slavish servitude to the living corpse of a God-Emperor whose commandments are at best only half-remembered, twisted by time and the fallibility of Humanity.
Warhammer 40,000 isn’t just grimdark. It’s the grimmest, darkest.
The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of Humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in. Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man is satirical.
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/11/19/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not/
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
In one of the PC games that's the Necron faction's ending! They totally pull it off!
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
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.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.
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".
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 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.
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 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.
Was it ever possible that there could have been a runaway positive feedback loop into a benevolent universe?
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.
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.
The Imperium of Man is simultaneously invincible and on the brink of collapse at the same time.
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
A force of a hundred of these genetically and biochemically-enhanced transhuman warriors could quell a rebellious city in solar hours. Thousands could conquer a world in only solar days, and tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands wielded at once were the doom of entire species, capable of reducing alien civilisations to mere dust and memory in a span no greater than the single course of Terra's orbit around the Sun.
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.
They don't get sarcasm. Art in general totally evades them. I remember looking at some Nazi poster from the 30s of the ideal German family and there was a 3 year old with the proportions of an adult man, like the kind of shit you'd see in Medieval illuminations. It was like looking at a version of American Gothic painted by an alien who had only met The Duggars.
Unfortunately no, it was during a dunk session on the old CTH sub, lost to the sands of time at this point.
another thing that nobody mentioned yet is that the imperium has the space marines who are the heavily-armoured genetically-modified superhuman special forces guys, and then the vaaaast majority of the army are the imperial guard who are mostly just conscripts with shitty guns who get sent in human wave style to die en masse
there are various themed imperial guard regiments that have distinctive uniforms and fighting styles of their planet. the most popular amongst warhammer nerds are the death korps of krieg, who resemble gas-masked wwi soldiers with a german-style helmet. purely coincidentally, they seem to be most commonly painted in feldgrau colour schemes
The Imperial guard are actually elite, well equipped troops iirc (for the most part), the cheaply armed cannon fodder are the Planetary Defense Armies. It's just the setting is so absurd that troops wearing magical nanotech flak vests that could stop a modern tank round and use guns that could pierce modern battleship armor may as well be conscripts with matchlocks.
the death korps of krieg, who resemble gas-masked wwi soldiers with a german-style helmet. purely coincidentally, they seem to be most commonly painted in feldgrau colour schemes
So they're actually a hodge-podge of the WW-1 factions.
The trench coat that the DKoK wear is basically just a French M1915 trench coat in a different colour (the original being in Horizon Blue). Note, however, that the contrast lining of the coat is German. The collar is also different from the French coat. The gas mask is based on the the Small box respirator (British) introduced in 1916, but is made in leather. The helmet is a Stalhelm with alterations. It has a decorative crest much like the French Adrian Helmet. The Puttees are clearly inspired by the British WW1 Puttees. Note that by WW2 these were no longer used. The Backpack and Pouches seem to be German. The Bayonet is German. The Shovel is most similar to the US M1910. This is because the shovel is normally depicted with a cross handle, and the US were the only ones to use a shovel with one of these. And lastly their war tactics generally don't have any set style beyond WW-1 style warfare.
oh damn, schooled lol
i just see them on warhammer subreddits and shit with like "here are my death korps, they will never surrender but lay down their lives gladly for the emperor, the backstory of my company is they were betrayed in their last war by their cowardly moneygrubbing planetary commanders who made them retreat before the filthy orcs even though they were winning, and now they want to fight to restore the martial pride and honour of krieg, and secure the existence of their people and a future for krieg children, anyway here they are, i painted them in 'field grey' and theyre the 88th 'free corps' regiment, their logo is this cool symbol representing their home planets black sun"
There was an event in the WH40k history where a group of humans married and mixed with an alien race and lived peacefully with them; the imperium gave them the option of either leaving the aliens so the imperium could wipe them out or dying with them. They chose to die with their non-human families and neighbors.
The problem is, imo, that most 40k fascist nerds live very meaningless lives, and this gives them a fantasy outlet in which they can glorify themselves in ultra-violence. What always gets me is when they regale me with things that happened in the books as if they were real life. Very disturbing lack of separation between fantasy and reality.
