IT'S AN ALLEGORY FOR FASCISM
IT'S LITERALLY WORD-OF-GOD AN ALLEGORY FOR FASCISM
IT COULDN'T BE ANY MORE CLEAR-CUT
YOU CAN LITERALLY GOOGLE THE PHRASE "WHAT IS WARHAMMER AN ALLEGORY FOR" AND YOU WILL GET THAT AS A FRONT-PAGE RESULTprime contender for one of the most "no investigation no right to speak" a g*mer has ever embodied
I know basically nothing about Warhammer, so I typed it into image search to see if it was super obvious and this was on the first page of results.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's probably not a subtle allegory lol.
But see Krieg Imperial Guard have gas masks and I like gas masks and you know the swastika is really just religious imagery and well you know war is brutal so you really have to just do whatever you can against the fake plastic armies of Chaos and space elves and undead robots and green men and those weird things that spit acid at you so actually YOU'RE the fascist for even bringing it up to begin with!!!!!
No you don't understand Krieg is inspired by a combination of all the forces from WWI which is why it's okay for someone to paint theirs like the afrika korps and add swastika transfers.
Oh God that reminded of some chud that was trying to argue that his afrika korp "inspired" imperial guard army (complete with custom afrika korp emblems but with the swastika replaced with an imperial aquilla) wasn't fascist and didn't make him a fascist. Spoiler: the rest of his account was wheraboo-level Nazi tank worship including pictures of a whole-ass shrine to them he made complete with anime girl nazi officers
Yep, guard players are mostly chuds. GW should nuke every guard subfaction but valhallans and then make them communist rebels.
Yep, guard players are mostly chuds.
I still won't give up my guard army, but honestly 40k in general has too many chuds. Gone are the days of it being satirical and people understanding that the clearly theocratic fascist imperium aren't The Good Guys™. Now a days GW hides behind the shield of "it's satire guys, don't be fascist!!1!1!" while writing the hundredth book about how it's actually cool and good for a
ubermenschsuperhuman dictator to slaughter billions in the name of some fictional past glory daysYeah, I know. Some pig lives matter themed ultramarines would be a funny bit of satire to me. You've already got the blue and the skulls and the fascist oppression. However, warhammer fans would see it as unironically supporting fascist super cops. So I'd never paint it because warhammer is the wrong fandom to do it in. Same with trans masc space marines. Getting juiced up on super testosterone is something you can do a lot of gender themes with, but warhammer is too fascist to do it right.
I think I've seen blue lives matter themed space marines before, so you're unfortunately late to that party. Satire is truly dead
Warhammer Fantasy is different from Warhammer 40k, but it's pretty much just a piss take on how horrific and shitty sword and sorcery fantasy worlds really are, cutting away all the anachronistic romance and replacing it with horror and filth. It's basically satirizing fantasy monarchist apologia and romanticism in the same way 40K directs that towards fashy sci-fi.
Neither setting does a particularly good job with the satire though, imo, to the point that I'd almost say 40K is more "what if Judge Dredd went back into space and we took this to a whole new level of silly? Like we could do a Judge Dredd/Dune crossover with like elves and shit, lmao," than it is even the sort of tepid and still-brainwormed satire that Judge Dredd was.
I mean, it still has to sell miniatures and is owned by a corporation that has many incentives to cut away anything particularly biting.
yeah top result on google is "it's an allegory for germany" (the empire)
a little further down I found this: https://br.ifunny.co/video/warhammer-is-an-allegory-it-s-a-commentary-on-fascism-yd0RLTL29
Might be some confusion there. In warhammer fantasy, the empire is very much supposed to be the HRE: a bunch of squabbling states that are only nominally subservient to the central authority of the emperor. The Imperium of Man in 40k on the other hand is just fascism. Love to have two settings that use similar names, definitely not confusing, thank u james workshop.
Yeah they literally copied Mussolini artworks and replaced him with the god-emperor.
It's going to blow their minds once they figure out who the Empire in Star Wars was an allegory for.
I'd like to have this person watch Starship Troopers and then write an essay on what it's about.
I found his essay
"Cool soldier guys cleanse the galaxy of unholy xenos"
That's all it says, he turned in the same paper for the Warhammer essay too.
Damn, F 10% for correctly identifying the movie and writing name and date at the top of the paper
They'd probably think it was about how fascism is good. It doesn't go far enough imo.
You can explicitly make the fascists into cartoon villains like Star Wars and still get people doing the "empire did nothing wrong" larp and unironically making support for fascists their identity through it.
To be clear I want a 20 minute long presentation and the start and end of the movie explaining that the federation are the bad guys, why their systems do not work, as well as an overview of the horrors of fascism. During the movie, the fascists must be depicted to be fundamentally wrong. Bonus points for them also constantly being portrayed as incompetent, by eg slipping on a banana peel every 20 seconds (and then being eaten by a bug, which are explicitly communist and also good).
EDIT: This unironically
I think the issue is that you shouldn't make fascists "fun" or "cool" in any way whatsoever.
In both Star Wars and Troopers the fascists are undeniably fun and entertaining to ride along with. Fun, cool or entertaining things inevitably make people want to imitate or copy-cat them for funsies, and this rubs off into personal identity.
The only movies that portrayed Nazis correctly are the Indiana Jones movies and Come and See. One for portraying the Nazis as a bunch of incompetent buffoons and the other for portraying the Nazis as a bunch of incompetent genocidal buffoons.
This is totally correct and nobody wants to imitate being those nazis as a result.
Reposting one of my old comments:
Fundamentally satire of fascism doesn't work because fascist ideology revolves around the idea that you're a loser made weak by the removed other but can be made strong and cool by doing all the violence.
If fight club had a scene where Tyler Durden tried to ask a girl out in queue to the McDonald's breakfast menu, pissed himself out of nervousness, and then broke into tears in front of everyone. All that would change is there'd be a fascist org called Piss Boys whose initiation would involve drink a lot of water before queuing up for the world's greasiest hash browns.
I entirely agree, if fascists are to be portrayed at all it should be as buffoons and idiots, because nobody will want to be seen as a buffoon and idiot.
Which is why my biggest critique of 40k will always be James Workshop are too much of cowards to let another faction be a decent fucking foil for the satire of the Imperium. So long as the fash-inclined fans can circle back around to "Well the Imperium may be bad, but it's worse everywhere else!" you've lost as a satirist. Stop ass-pulling Ws for the blueberries so they always come out on top smelling like roses so you can sell more toys, and actually stand by the idea that there is a viable alternative to human fascism in your fictional setting; instead of leaving that to the interpretation of the most media illiterate people in the history of the concept.
The Monteverdi/Shakespeare school of Prologue writing. "We are the muses, sit down and shut up as we take 10 min to explain to you exactly what this story is about and what moral lesson you should take from it. We will be back at the end with a chorus illustrating this, There will be an exam."
That’s actually what the book is about, though! Heinlein was a classic example of a libertarian-turned-fascist. He wrote a book about how war is cool and the military is a necessary part of an ordered society. The book reads like satire because you would have to be a very dumb Nazi to read it and think “Of course we should be constantly at war with a faceless and dehumanized enemy, and create a society around that principle. This makes sense and is good.” but that’s literally what Heinlein was trying to say, or at least present as a possibility in the book.
There’s some argument that he was being ironic and leaving things to be interpreted by the audience, but if you look at his work on the whole, and his political opinions, it’s clear that he’s just a bog-standard American conservative who likes war, racism, and misogyny, but doesn’t like the government or taxes.
The actual Robert Heinlein novel is very much about “fascism is good.” Bob Heinlein was this kind of weird mix of Ayn Rand libertarian, military-fetishist, pedophilic and incest obsessed futurist who also liked cats but not non-white people. The movie was a parody of the ideas in the novel, but Heinlein took those ideas very seriously and they cropped up time and again in his books. He embraced bisexuality while still thinking that the man-woman relationship was what nature intended. There’s a lot to not like about the guy - like fathers being seduced and bedded by their thirteen year old sexually aggressive but still meek and mild daughters, with said daughters proceeding in their quest with the active help of the mother. And so on.
Anyway, I don’t know how many people that enjoyed the movie knew that it was not only a parody, but one that intentionally and in great detail directly mocked the book it was based on.
The grandaddy of the fantasy genre, Tolkein's Lord of the Rings, is so old it's an allegory for the evils of the Industrial Revolution.
The grandaddy of the fantasy genre, Tolkein's Lord of the Rings
George MacDonald/HG Wells/William Morris erasure!!!
The Shire, a pastoral Garden of Eden kept in a medieval-communal state where the biggest worry is how much food your friend is going to eat when they come for a visit to get high and drunk.
Mordor, an advanced state using all kinds of witchery like gunpowder and mechanical engineering, looks like hell filled with ash and dust like a factory might.
i wonder what he meant by this
Tolkien specifically stated that it wasn’t an allegory because his bff CS Lewis (whose Narnia books were explicitly supposed to be read as christian allegory with Alan = Jesus) tried to pressure him to do the same. Tolkien was Catholic and Lewis was Protestant, but they were both very religious. Tolkien felt that the approach Lewis took was too ham-fisted.
However, what Tolkien specifically objected to was the interpretation of his work as allegorical to the world wars. He would go on and on about how the ring was not the atomic bomb. He was, however, an unapologetic romanticist and he made sure his readers knew that. Saruman was the bad guy in that respect - he served evil out of greed and cut down forests and destroyed the land to serve his own ambition, the allegory with which he’s bashing readers over the head in the last bit with the Scouring of the Shire. He really liked the idea of jolly peasant farmers, the reality of actual peasant farmers not being relevant.
I think his work was colored by his war experiences, but wasn’t intended as allegorical in that respect. On the other hand, hobbits, Treebeard, Tom Bombadil, Lothlorien, and the rest were very deliberate.
iirc he did make sure to respect the reader's right to see it as applicable though right? Or maybe I'm mixing Tolkein up with another author who denied allegorical intent.
An early draft of The Fall of Gondolin featured orcs in mechanized tanks.
I once got a whole room of guys to laugh when I mentioned the X-men comics are an allegory for persecuted ethnic, religious, sexual, etc minorities. That one is the most clear allegories out of any popular media, and yet people still don't get it. The mutants are clearly oppressed, they're not typical superheroes who are fighting crime out of some intrinsic feeling of superiority. The X-men are organized and militant to defend themselves from discrimination.
The 2000s era X-men movies are even more clear about it, although they squeeze the allegory down so that mutants specifically represent queer people. You've got teenage runaways, unsupportive families, and there's a whole theme of mutants figuring themselves out around the age of puberty. There's a line in the second movie where one mutant's mother asks "Have you tried not being a mutant?" which is a parody of a common conservative line from the time "Have you tried not being gay?" I mentioned all of this and only got one guy on board because I mentioned the director, Bryan Singer, is gay. Then he was able to believe there's gay stuff in the X-men.
I think some people only engage in media because it's comforting lights and sounds they can distract themselves with
Could it also be that typical mindset of “I don’t care about (or even think of) thing unless it affects me personally”? Maybe they simply can’t see why some old cishet white dudes in the 60s would want to represent ethnic/gender/sexual minorities. Empathy on a deeper level, considering the views of others who may have vastly different experiences, and wanting to support them seems damn near impossible for most griller-americans.
You could have also mentioned that Stan Lee has explicitly stated that the X-Men are a civil rights allegory.
But yeah I have no idea how someone could consume the X-Men and not see the obvious.
ETA: FFS in First Class Magneto is explicitly shown to be a Holocaust survivor, and in the climax of the movie Charles drops a "they're just following orders" about the dudes firing missles at them and Magneto says "I've been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again". How could you POSSIBLY be more explicit.
And the comics don't shy away from it either.
I remember the first time I saw (and loved) There Will Be Blood I had an argument with a friend about it. He hated it and said he didn't understand who could enjoy a movie like that--"everyone was so shitty, who am.i supposed to root for?" I was kinda floored by that, because I remember thinking it was amazing and near-perfect. To me it was like a surgical diagram, delving much deeper than some trite ethical parable into the minds of the powerful and the power-seeking, and demonstrating the world they perpetuate.
Not saying I was right when I disagreed, but I realized we were watching movies for different reasons. I had my foot in the real world, enjoying media for how it interacts with it, while he was enjoying movies as something to utterly submit yourself to. If a movie doesn't have a good slot for him to sit in, he's homeless in it. In some ways he probably enjoyed media more than I do.
Sometimes similar people to that revel in "everyone is an asshole" stories if what they get out of it is "therefore status quo good, pick your favorite ruling class monster to quote and emulate." You can often tell when those stories come about and how they'll be received when the supposed worst character is the one that is trying to improve society somewhat instead of just oinking and rolling in shit like everyone else in it.
"These are bad guys, good thing that's not us" stories hit different than "nobody can be good actually" stories, sure
"nobody can be good actually"
This can sometimes miss its audience as the intended message. Look at how many people idolize and imitate Walter White
or even fucking Patrick Bateman. 
Tony Soprano is probably the best example. Undeniably a compelling character, constantly wavering in a sort of moral blind spot and making you think about the reliability of the signifiers we look for in figuring out who to trust. For some he's just an awesome dad who kicks ass and gets shit done
For some he's just an awesome dad who kicks ass and gets shit done
The worst chuds in my biological family directly quote that character, including to their own wives. Yes, they're also wifebeating fascists.
Location, location, location!
I work where I have to meet lots of people that are generally not happy to see me because I'm talking to them about problems their kids are having in class. Also, I have coworkers that I am friendly enough with (it makes the day more bearable) that I just sort of quietly listen to their terrible takes. Also, bookstores and other hangouts around here tend to have very opinionated people that don't hesitate to talk up strangers about their "ideas" (they want to sell you on some "hustle" or startup, both of which are abundant here).
Well, that and having a very chuddy biological family (in-laws are a lot better and that's where I go for the holidays now).
They followed it up with:
Where's the gender dysphoria in warhammer then?
Good stuff.
I think I know this one. There's at least one cosmic entity, Slaneesh, that is some kind of genderfluid, but she/he/it is portrayed as evil or something. I don't know the lore well The 40k humans though are like an exaggerated parody of the worst attributes of fascists, medieval crusaders, and British colonizers. They were initially parody but nerds completely lost their ability to detect satire, but I've read the devs haven't been so great about indicating the humans are not supposed to be admired.
I remember back in the 2014 times when slaneesh was considered to be the cause of “lgbt+ people” by “corrupting” heteros. Like the fash pipeline was huge back then. As someone who loves warhammer, it was almost impossible to find creators who weren’t in alt-right pipeline.
All the choas gods are neither good nor evil. They're just manifestations of latent sentient psychic power.
I see them as symptomatic of the suffering of mortal beings in the setting, many of them specifically suffering in Imperium of Man hive worlds and crushed under the weight of oppression and servitude. The Imperium tries to fight the symptoms because the High Lords of Terra benefit from the disease and always have. :Sigmarxism:
The only pushback I would offer is that they're empowered by strong emotions generally. Like Slaneesh from love, or pleasure. Is that pleasure from non consensual sadism?
Sometimes. Mostly, lol 40k suuucksI could add a mostly to it, because so much empowerment of Chaos seems to come from negative emotions, such as hate, fear, greed, and yeah non consensual sadism.
Mostly
yeah I agree.
However it would be possible to generate the gods from a 40k that was ordered differently, like a communist choas god that arose from an abundance of self actualization.
In the pleasant brightness of the far future, there is only comradeship and community ping pong tournaments.
I kinda wish the writers would have a more nuanced view of Chaos, but Chaos just seems to be "spiky Imperium" and easily identifiable bad guys. Ain't nothing about the God of Death and the God of Life having a relationship being a mythical version of a circle of life. >:(
I'd prefer a Liberation Chaos Theology take if the writers werent pandering to their big spending SPEHS MUHREEN cryptofascist whales.
They were initially parody but nerds completely lost their ability to detect satire, but I've read the devs haven't been so great about indicating the humans are not supposed to be admired.
Games Workshop sucks but in recent years their writing team has done a lot to push back against this. They brought back a Primarch, a son of the Emperor the Imperium worships as a God, and any time he's talking to someone in private he's basically the
wojack.The Primarch Guilliman is an enlightened despot type in the Roman sense. He generally wants what's best for his people (the Imperium) but is still willing to kill and do bad things to get it. He wakes up after 10,000 years in stasis and finds that the Imperium has gone straight to hell (some parts literally) and he has to put all of it back together. There was a series of novels where he had to deal with politics on Earth and he was complaining hard about how awful every institution is.
The funniest example of this is that Guilliman woke up after 10,000 years in Stasis and asked "what year is it?" The best answer anyone can give him is "we think it's the first year of the 41st millennium". Guilliman does his own calculations and as best as he can tell its probably the 41st millennium, with a margin of error of a thousand years. So he sets up a small organization to catelogue the history of his absence and their efforts to refine and apply Guilliman's dating system immediately causes them to get into a covert civil war with a faction of the Inquisition (exactly what they sound like) that deals with time-related heresy. It gets so bad that Guilliman has to personally step in to get them to stop killing each other.
It's not exactly leftist, but reintroducing a straight man (ayyy) into the setting is exactly what they needed to do to point out the absurdity of everything.
That sounds fantastic. I might have to read this, and the Ciaphas Cain novels.
The Indomitus Crusade books starting with Avenging Son have a lot of the Guilliman grumbling scenes but a lot of it is just fairly generic Space Marine schlock. Watchers of the Throne is about a Custodes and a Sister of Silence in almost a buddy cop kind of match up and the second book delves a lot into the machinations of Imperial politics following Guilliman's return.
i freakin hate "modern day mentality"!!!
retvrn to tradition! (eating fruit gushers and watching nickelodeon)
Retvrn to tradition (⅓ of Han emperors were bisexual)
return to tradition (China only stopped being gay because after the century of humiliation they decided they had to copy the west to survive. China, just like everywhere else was pretty fucking gay before the christians fucked it up)
You gotta start small with Yankees.
Tell them The Lorax isn't only about trees, challenge them to figure it out on their own.
It’s incredible how bad literacy education is in this country
I always sound like a crackpot whenever people say anything about low media literacy. It gets me yelling about the CIA, anti communism, and how it's all a race to the bottom.
ah, yep, that's it, you win the prize
the prize is I am so much more tired after seeing that than I was before
That headline had me primed to expect The Hard Times lmao
If they were serious they'd kill off the space marines (and also Krieg while they're at it).
I disagree, but not really vehemently, mostly I want to say here that there's not really anything inherently problematic about the DKoK that doesn't apply to the other armies and I'd even argue there's more explicit and egregious armies you could go after before DKoK.
To these kinds of people, nothing is political until their views are challenged. Politics dominates every facet of their life and they only notice when a necessary change is pointed out.
Warhammer Fantasy
Europe is full of savage anglos chomping at the bit to kill each other and the only thing stopping them is the fact that there are other countries they can go after
Also, Scotsmen hold grudges
The dwarves aren't Scots, they're from Yorkshire. Which makes a lot more sense if you know about the history of Yorkshire and mining.
Yanks can't tell the difference though.
And their voice acting in Total War is so ridiculously French, they sound like the French knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
All art, all stories are an expression of one's own thoughts and ideas. All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters' goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view. No fascist will ever write about a communist utopia positively. No communist will ever uncritically write about a great man pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a billionaire. If you're an "apolitical gamer" you will unquestioningly write about whatever you're finding in the trash can of ideology at the moment. Similarly, everything you write will be tainted by "modern day thought" because everything we have ever experienced has happened in the modern day, including learning about the past. Every fantasy world is merely a reinterpretation of ours and every sapient fantasy race is allegorical to humans in some way, whether you intend it to be or not. We cannot comprehend non-human conflict and thus human conflict is all we can write about.
These people really do believe the curtains are blue, huh?
These people really do believe the curtains are blue, huh?
I once had a prolonged and fruitless argument in a video game guild chat with someone that insisted the 1980s GI JOE cartoon was perfect because it "had no politics and no political agenda."
He even topped it off after a while with "did anyone ever tell you... the curtains are FUCKING BLUE?"
I have no idea what it means to say the curtains are blue anymore.
At first, I thought it was meant to poke fun at people who over analyze or really reach when discussing literature, but I don't think it means that.
Can someone explain?
At first, I thought it was meant to poke fun at people who over analyze or really reach when discussing literature, but I don't think it means that.
It still means that, though the extension is generally mocking the over-reaction against the idea of over-analysis by people that dogmatically claim that no message should be allowed to be derived from their treats.
Or also, if the author didn't want to draw attention to the curtains, they wouldn't have mentioned them!
So it's used to describe people who over analyze but also people who don't read into media at all (example: the curtains are just blue, and that has no meaning)?
it might help to think if it like "the curtains are just blue!" being anti-over analysis vs "tHe CuRtAiNs ArE jUSt BlUe!!!" being anti-anti- over analysis
Hah okay.
It's interesting how language develops. A word can mean something but also the exact opposite of that thing.
Advertising, or "capitalist propaganda" as the kids call it, is famously non-political and incites the audience to no action or thought that could possibly influence the structures of power we've surrounded ourselves with.
Absolutely wild
All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters' goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view.
This explains why I'm terrible at writing anything, or coming up with good overarching plots whenever I want to run a TTRPG. Because I don't really understand other people very well.
I found a lot of success in joint-DM ventures with somebody who is great at telling ground-level stories. I do all the world building, they handle all the people stuff.
One of my favourite settings I built was a world where magic flows out of nexuses of power built by an ancient civilization that's now lost to ruin. (Spoiler warning for my son if he reads this.) The world is a polar-shifted Earth, post-climate change and post-nuclear war. The power nexuses are the locations of nuclear power plants, and the island chain the story takes place on is a flooded European continent. I did a whole bunch of math and simulations in a GIS thingy, and figured out where the floodplains would be, and what would still be above water if sea level rose by X meters. Then I rotated it, just to make it even less recognizable.
It's one of the ways I came to grips with the limitations of being Autistic, and how I can lean into the strengths I have instead.
that is such an awesome concept for a fantasy setting!!!
No communist will ever uncritically write about a great man pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a billionaire.
This is mostly true but I will state that as a communist one of my major stories I'm working on does have heroic monarchs in it.
To be fair this story is something I've been working on since before I became communist, and I've added revolutionary themes to it since, but the main "heroic monarch" character is one I created after becoming a communist. Like to be clear she's a heroic monarch in a society where feudalism is every country, and I plan for the world the story takes place in to go through historical materialism stages of development over time. She's a proactively progressive character that makes positive developments for the society she rules. She's also one of my favorite characters I've developed.
But ngl I do kind of like Gambo/CKII dynastic stuff aesthetically and one of my two major works features it heavily. And features characters that are part of dynasties that are better or worse than others. And also feudal countries that are more progressive than other ones in the world.
I do worry that i'm letting my special interest make me too ideologically incoherent but its the story I wanna write so
This is like my fifth time reading this and the psychic damage is still immense.
Politics must mean something else to them, like perhaps some form of packaged good or a fruit.
This is about Warhammer Fantasy. Literally every faction is an allegory/pastiche for a specific historical nation/culture.
IIRC in 40k Nurgle became a great power during the Black Death. In fantasy idk the origins but the chaos wastes where chaos is strongest are at the poles. The world map is literally just the real world with a bit of fantasy stuff like elf atlantis, and the landmass that would be "Britain" is Albion, a land of swamps and brutal savages. Culturally, Bretonnia is like a 50/50 of Britain/France with chivalrous knights and super poor peasants, where the peasants are tithed literally more than 100% of their harvest.
The Orks are literally cockney football hooligans. The lizardfolk are literally aztec/maya. The Tomb Kings are literally egypt. Norsca is literally vikings.
The real take away is that only white people get to be humans. Also skaven are a parody of capitalism/individualism so there is that at least.
cockney football hooligans aren't human
Lol
Also I agree, fantasy is/was generally pretty racist.
Jesus I wish I could. That especially but araby too is just so fucking rascist.
Also skaven are a parody of capitalism/individualism so there is that at least.
Is their bell imagery symbolic of the opening of the New York Stock Exchange?
Lmao thatd be hillarious. It has to to with their origin story, so coicidence. "The skaven" arent the parody. Its how the skaven talk and relate to each other and themselves.
They all have hyper individiualism and main character syndeome to an absurd degree
