What's your least favorite trope of this genre? I used to read a lot of these while bored at work and by far the worst one to me is stuff like:
"Humans evolved on a death world with crushing gravity that blablablabla"; "There are thousands of predators there yet humans prey on them!"
my author in Christ if our gravity was notably smaller we would not have an atmosphere and the idea to have a planet with a biosphere but without any predators is stupid on it's face unless you explain why that is, which you never do!
Honorable mention of aliens that have figured out interstellar space travel but still use their natural weapons to fight, who somehow are seen as scary by their peers.
Ha, yes. The infamous "deathworld" trope. They absolutely love this one but can never do it well.
I'm sure there is a way to make Earth the most dangerous planet or whatever for plot reasons in a way that work, but this aint it. The way "deathworld" is defined in these stories is always so hollow, lazy and vibe based it's just not believable at all.
It's just "hard times create strong men" over and over and over again.
My least favorite trope is "commit total human death, refuse to elaborate". All too often the alien bad guys just hate humanity for some reason with little elaboration as to why. At least in the Covies' case it's due to corrupt fuckheads trying to keep their power.
HFY, as far as my experience goes is like 70% lowest common denominator cookie cutter sf trope, 29% cryptofash genocide fantasy about how the aliens deserved to be genocided, and once in a blue moon you find some of the 1% stories that aren't too bad.
I'm not too familiar with 40k so I don't know. I'm talking about HFY stories on I've read on the internet, so stuff not written by professional writers.
We are sometimes reminded that the empire of man is a gigantic fascist death cult.
That's literally the whole point though. I mean the God Emperor of man literally did not like religion.
The challenge of finding a story in the HFY genre that isn't a bad Warhammer 40k fanfic
