That rambles on way too long, but it does make a salient point: Space Marines are weird and bad, and attempts to make them just big manly fighty dudes that grunt and fight instead of weird mutant battle-nerds suck and are bad. They shouldn't be relatable, they should barely be human, and they definitely shouldn't be "wot if ur normal soldier man was big and extra fighty?"
Not least of which because Orks already fill the niche of being big silly guys that like to fight.
I don't understand why people write like this. They've made their point in the first 3 paragraphs, and then it just goes on and on.
I think it needed better editing or organization. I just started skimming after the first page worth of text and there were some good points here and there, but it just meandered way too much. It needed to be pared down and condensed into the key points, cutting all the redundant bits and rambling.
This is why it is neigh impossible to parody fascism while making its footsoldiers protagonists. Someone will always identify with them.
The way to satirize fascists is to make them stupid and incompetent. It's for this reason that the Nazis in the Indiana Jones movies are probably the only proper satirical portrayal of Nazis. It's that and the Three Stooges parody of Hitler and Mussolini. As we can see irl with Zionists, fascists revel in depravity. They do not give two shits that they are portrayed as inhuman because they fucking relish that shit with a shit-eating grin. But stupidity and incompetence? They hate being truthfully portrayed as the buffoons they are. Of course, space marines will never be portrayed as stupid and incompetent because who's going to blow their money buying overly priced figures of the stupid and incompetent faction?
Fascists believe in embracing contradictions, lies, and hypocrisy. They don't really believe in anything beyond base carnal urges. So it's basically impossible to criticize or mock them because they can just edit the version of reality in their brain to make them feel cool again. This is why you just need to bash them out of existence, there's no "owning" them, they just have to stop being.
I see more ironic and comedic 40K material than I see actual 40K lore these days. Fuck I made a 40K lore joke post on here not to long ago and it was received well.
My point is, while there are actual fascists attracted to 40K lore, I think the phenomenon is overplayed more than a little. Fuck there are fascists in the My Little Pony fandom, fash dorks will latch onto anything. I think most 40K fans these days are fully aware it's tongue-and-cheek nature. I really don't think people who like painting goofy miniatures of armored dudes wielding chainsaw guns are any more predisposed to fascism than anyone else.
Meanwhile you try any of that shit in any of the places near me and you'd be thrown out instantly and would definitely not be allowed back. I think as it is with most things it depends on where you are and what kind of community the location builds.
And yes I have played 40k on tables in game shops full of people who were probably chuds, and they kept their damn mouths shut because they just wanted to play and knew they wouldn't be allowed to if they started talking about anything other than the game.
I'm all for chasing fash out of 40k, any My Little Pony, and the planet. I'm just saying I don't think there's anything inherent to 40k that makes it more attractive to fash than any other fandom. Fash are consumerist nerds, they'll glom onto anything. There are fash in the fucking Trek fandom for Christ sakes.
True but I've honestly seen more explicitly Nazi MLP memes than explicitly Nazi 40k memes, surprisingly.
They have a space comunsit faction. They are based on anime and after they got too popular the company changed it from space comunists to it all being secret mind controll. So that is intresting a little bit. Othe than that you aren't missing much
Yeah. I think that is kinda intresting so see how the game started with Mar'gret Thatch'er being a demon of greed and how that progressed to mirror CIA propaganda about brain washed celestials. Just the arc of capitlaism and fascist co-opation is wild to see in microcosim.
Warhammer 40k came out of the same circles of comic artist nerds as Judge Dredd, and very much always embodied the same sort of left-lib brainrot where they're satirizing fascists and shitty government policy and all, but then turn around and whinge about communists and just unironically do fascist fearmongering about communist invasions and fifth columns and shit, like the Judge Dredd authors did with the Apocalypse War arc.
Like Warhammer 40k is at its core Dune and Judge Dredd and Tolkien all squished together and then inflated into something absurd and grotesque, as a joke. And then on top of that is 40 some years of different authors and artists painting it with coats of "trying to do real serious grown up worldbuilding in the silly space game world" until what's left is something weird and entirely incoherent.
It's concerning seeing how willing people are to enjoy fascism because it looks cool to them.
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Ugh, Warhammer is a friend’s special interest right now so I have to play this game with them so they won’t be suicidal.
It's a cool game. No worries. I do get what the article says, though. The game does not adequately represent how awful the space marines are, even though it does show you that the empire sucks.
That's a really really long idealist article, that dosn't say much in the end and might have been much shorter if the author had a materialist perspective on fascism.
this is called vulgar materialism, don’t do it.
Can I still be vulgar while I do materialism though? I analyse better when I swear a lot.
Yes, I know. That's not what I meant though. It seemed idealist to me, because the author sought fascism and means against it only in the realm of culture instead of linking it to material contradictions in the real word.
Darktide is the superior Warhammer game anyways. Who needs some dumb eight foot tall nerd wearing a tank as a business suit when you can play a 5' tall woman wearing a burlap sack, with the worst haircut you've ever seen, swinging a 6' long chainsaw around, who is diegetically too angry to die?
I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that online leftists just can't help but hit a brick wall when it comes to 40k
The crux of all these satire arguments boils down to "make the satire MORE obvious, MORE cartoonish, eliminate all nuance or three dimensional character development and most importantly make it NOT FUN" and I always ask, WHY?
Yes the heroic, relatable, goofy ass space imperialists serve an evil empire that destroys whole worlds, all while quoting war poetry and the unity of humanity....and sometimes they crack jokes, there it is, we found your satire on the hypocrisy and mundane evil of imperialism, is that not obvious enough, does every character need to shout "I'm a fascist!" every other line?
Do they need to make space marines literal cannibalistic vampires who thirst for blood and eat civilians alive before the satire becomes acceptable for high culture lefties?......OH WAIT that's literally a quarter of the space marine chapters
Subversion and nuance are fine in anti-fascist satire, you don't need to drop an anvil on the setting to get the point across
Do they need to make space marines literal cannibalistic
They do canonically eat people's brains to steal their knowledge. That's canon, that's the actual lore. Space Marines literally eat people in the official lore books describing the things Space Marines do.
lmao you're just taking the worst interpretations by the chud members of the fandom at face value, the confusion arises when you let chuds relay the lore to you instead of engaging with it yourself
No, the whole "cosmological structure" argument chuds and leftists use to justify their likes and dislikes about the setting is exploded nonsense at this point, it's not 2008, the lore and storytelling has moved on
The setting has been restructured since 2017, many of the chuds were not happy about it and online culture critical leftists just never bothered to update their takes
It is not good satire to make the people you're satirizing actually material do good in your world even if you try to counterbalance it with obscure war crimes they do no one will read
No, that is good satire because it's describing how actual human beings operate and not simple caricatures, and if your concern is simply there are people who are not smart enough to get that, then that's not the satire's or your problem, stop obsessing at how chuds interpret shit and develop your own interpretation
I agree there are problematic elements, most exemplified by the whole "no girls allowed" nonsense so much of the fandom engages in (tho the addition of female Custodes has been a welcome development) and the Slaanesh faction, which is in dire need of more fleshed out characterization
But I don't agree with there being a genuine lack of mockery of fascism, there's just so much to pick from, take for instance this single excerpt from one of the most popular space marine novels, where the undoubted protagonist of the novel slaughters alien refugees, the point is absolutely obvious, and the satire is blatant, the space marines literally lose their humanity as they descend into bloodlust, if a nazi looks at that and thinks COOL then who gives a shit, 99% of people reading that excerpt understand what's being described
And here we have GW literally making allusions to 20th century lynchings of black Americans in a scene describing the lynching and burning alive of suspected "mutants", I mean come on how blatant does the satire have to get before we acknowledge, just because there are nazis in a fandom doesn't mean the writing caters to them, because it certainly doesn't in those examples I gave
People do not get into Warhammer 40K for the boxart or even the figurines, they get into it because of the LORE, that's not an in-universe diegetic reason, that is the literal motivation for why people in the real world consume this product, it's pure nerd shit distilled, it's Verhoeven, it's Hellraiser, it's Dune, its Isaac Asimov meets gothic horrors meets Lovercraft meets Moorcock
Aesthetics does not define art alone, what matters is what is being said, what is the nature of the satire, the critique, the presentation being shown thru in-universe elements and characters, and for that 40K can't be "Hilterite" for the simple reason that FASCISTS DO NOT MAKE FUN OF THEMSELVES and that crtitical mockery is present even in the most bolter porny, tacticool crap produced by GW and certainly present in the actual worthwhile productions
Again if the expectation is you can't make satirical anti-fascist art without guaranteeing every single nazi out there will get it and hate it then frankly no one can make any anti-fascist art whatsoever
The whole point of online discourse around Starship Troopers wasn't that Verhoeven shouldn't have made the film, the point is fascists are brain-dead and their opinions of art should ever be taken seriously, let alone form the reactionary crux of how leftists should create and interact with art themselves
If a fascist likes it, I can't like it, well ok, have fun with that
The majority of fans literally cannot afford the miniatures lmao, I was serious when I said the majority of the fandom are in it for the lore, not simply books or comics, but youtube, video games, TV shorts, the wikis, the tabletop game is in a firm last place for the simple reason it's freakin expensive as a hobby, people don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on this shit. And even then, why would anyone buy a specific min if they don't care about the backstory behind the figures? And this has become especially true after the success of Space Marines 2
Also those lore examples I gave aren't simply representative of "10% of lore books nobody reads" they're representative of the vast majority of the lore, you can keep asserting without proof that the mockery "doesn't work in this case. the people it is mocking are not affected by this criticism" when in reality the 40K chuds are famous for doing nothing but complaining that their faction is unfairly being represented as incompetent, evil, and gross. The fascists who like this game are affected by the critique because they're constantly whining about it and throwing fits every time new lore about their favorite faction drops, again to the point where that whining becomes the butt of countless memes
Again I think you're letting the chuds lead you by the nose when it comes to this franchise, is GW trying to have it's cake and eat it too with the way they unduly focus so much of the narrative on the imperium at the expense of other factions, along with their obsession with tacticool aesthetics, yes absolutely, it's a capitalist game company. But the satire, the mockery, and anti-fascist subtext are still fully intact and still pissing the chudy fans off to the point they have to rely on fan fiction to get their nazi rocks off, fan fiction that is widely mocked among a fandom that isn't exactly all that progressive
Warhammer 40K isn't the kind of satire that's gonna hit bullseye 100% or even 80% of the time, that wasn't even true during the 80s, but considering the wasteland of anti-fascist satire out there, I'll take my cool 75% hit ratio thank you very much
I just think the satire could be improved without dumbing it down
I couldn't agree more, that's why I'm cautiously optimistic about the recent direction of the franchise, compared to pre-2017 I've noticed a more critical tinge to alot of the writing (which personally I believe is the result of Trump and the politics centered around him) even tho alot of the problematic and annoying aspects still remain
I mean they kinda did that with the Blood Gorgons who's specialty is literally pulling off maoist revolts on imperial worlds, but it was only a single novel
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The setting has been restructured since 2017, many of the chuds were not happy about it and online culture critical leftists just never bothered to update their takes
I might be missing something, but how did it get restructured in ways that invalidate those takes? If anything, the Indomitus-era Imperium is portrayed as more heroic than before. Like okay the Imperium was in decline but now the fascist ubermensch Roboute Guilliman shows up and starts reforming things to improve it. Ten thousand years of steady technological decay due to the dogmatism of the Mechanicus is undone because Cawl was working on a bunch of new tech in his secret base.
I disagree that Indomitus-era Imperium has been portrayed as more "heroic", simply more competent and only in so far as it concerns Guillliman and even then there's an interesting juxtaposition between his more "progressive" views and the reality of the Imperium, which defines the whole rebrand; storylines involving the High Lords of Terra revolting against his rule, a huge ass defeat in the Arks of Omen campaign, the Chronostrife breaking out simply because Gulliman wanted to reform the calendar......imperial incompetence and malice is on full display in all those storylines
The tension between the revived primarch and the brutal nature of the imperium creates these opportunities for interesting storytelling and it can't simply be reduced to "Generalismo Roboute is back and has fixed the Imperium", like memes aside that's not what the lore is presenting, the whole point of the character now is centered around his frustration born from the fact that even with all his primarch powers all he's managed to do is temporally stabilize half of the imperium while the other is in literal hell, that's it, occasional military competence so the whole setting doesn't collapse, that's literally the full extent of the so-called "heroics" being presented.....meanwhile the rest of the lore looks like the excerpts I shared above with both of those novels taking place under the Indomitus rebrand
The point of this restructuring from GW's point of view was to create two imperiums for the fans, the noble bright imperium that Guilliman has saved (that's still fascist af) and the nasty, brutal, mockery of fascism imperium that people who watch too many pop culture critical youtubers keep demanding.....I mean half the empire is literally called Imperium Nihlus now, like how many anvils does GW need to drop on the setting before leftists get off their high chairs about this goofy ass tabletop game
I disagree that Indomitus-era Imperium has been portrayed as more "heroic", simply more competent and only in so far as it concerns Guillliman and even then there's an interesting juxtaposition between his more "progressive" views and the reality of the Imperium [...]
The point of this restructuring from GW's point of view was to create two imperiums for the fans, the noble bright imperium that Guilliman has saved (that's still fascist af) and the nasty, brutal, mockery of fascism imperium that people who watch too many pop culture critical youtubers keep demanding
Right but that's the problem: Guilliman is just a more competent fascist, and a more "noblebright" setting with the Imperium as the protagonist faction is a setting that says "fascism works, the Imperium just need to do it better". As for the excerpts you linked, neither seem meaningfully different in tone from the older lore imo. IIRC Horus Rising has Loken being a space fascist but feeling kinda bad about it occasionally, and that was written back in 2006.
It's also worth noting that only an extreme minority of fans are actually reading the books, and while Dante might be popular enough that a good chunk of SM bookreaders see it, Warhammer Crime is a niche within a niche. I would hazard to guess that a majority of the fanbase engages with the setting through youtube lore channels, video games, and memes, and if you go into the communities that pop up around those parts of the fandom, they get all kinds of reactionary. Imo that means that GW still has to go further in purging the chuds, which means continuing to make the space fascists look less cool. The problem here is that SM are by far the most popular faction and they absolutely will not do anything to risk losing them money.
You have an interview about the split Imperiums being a deliberate choice to make two different settings for different parts of the fanbase or something? I've never heard that and tbh it sounds like it's giving GW way too much credit when it seems like they don't generally plan the lore carefully because it's a vehicle to sell minis and, as you say, a goofy ass tabletop game that fans take far more seriously than the creators.
If you wanted to make them likable, they should have been Salamanders or maybe Space Wolves. But then, I guess that makes it even harder to beat someone over the head with "fascism bad".
arguing that the Imperium are the Good Guys despite the fact they are Space Fascists because The Universe Is Just That Bad
arguing the Imperium are the Good Guys because they have Space Commissars and are therefore Communists doing Galactic War Communism, being literally ruled by Psychic Lenin's Preserved Corpse after the Horus Revisionism. Space Marines are the True Volcel Vanguard.their beef with the Tau is like a weird Sino-Soviet Split
Is good games journalism back? 👀
Shout-out to aftermath and RPS for holding it down in the meantime
Update: I played (space marine 2) with my friend, and yeah it’s a pretty solid game. I set the voices to Russian because it was silly.
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