tbh Games Workshop has been doing this themselves for ages. I'm not up to date on the books but in all of the ones I've read the humans are mainly Good People dealing with Hard Times using their Grit and Determination. The lore about humanity being a bunch of highly superstitious fascists? Well that only applies to the designated Bad Humans, and not our Boys in Blue.
Peak 40k was when it was a series of heavy metal album covers and sourcebooks full of over-the-top descriptions of how awful the future was, once they started trying to portray it through the lens of pulp science fiction/fantasy the heroification of humanity was more or less inevitable.
It's sad but it does at least speak to the quality of the satire in the original design of the setting that you'd have to really carve out its fundamentals to totally erase it. The idea of warp and chaos being an unresolvable problem, an enemy that will always meet whatever escalation thrown at it, at the heart of the imperium of man is cool, it captures the character of fascism as a sort of society-scale suicidal death spiral. GW may try everything it can to paper over it, but the truth is that if they truly made the setting completely unambiguous, it would lose the last of its appeal.
The old books went hard, they were so gleefully on-the-nose about it being a setting centered around a decaying fascist empire and its murder-golem space marines all trying to out-scowl and out-tantrum the spectres of decay/defeat/being outsmarted/gayness that are just getting more powerful the more they screech at them.
tbh Games Workshop has been doing this themselves for ages. I'm not up to date on the books but in all of the ones I've read the humans are mainly Good People dealing with Hard Times using their Grit and Determination. The lore about humanity being a bunch of highly superstitious fascists? Well that only applies to the designated Bad Humans, and not our Boys in Blue.
Peak 40k was when it was a series of heavy metal album covers and sourcebooks full of over-the-top descriptions of how awful the future was, once they started trying to portray it through the lens of pulp science fiction/fantasy the heroification of humanity was more or less inevitable.
It's sad but it does at least speak to the quality of the satire in the original design of the setting that you'd have to really carve out its fundamentals to totally erase it. The idea of warp and chaos being an unresolvable problem, an enemy that will always meet whatever escalation thrown at it, at the heart of the imperium of man is cool, it captures the character of fascism as a sort of society-scale suicidal death spiral. GW may try everything it can to paper over it, but the truth is that if they truly made the setting completely unambiguous, it would lose the last of its appeal.
The old books went hard, they were so gleefully on-the-nose about it being a setting centered around a decaying fascist empire and its murder-golem space marines all trying to out-scowl and out-tantrum the spectres of decay/defeat/being outsmarted/gayness that are just getting more powerful the more they screech at them.