- Pronouns
- She/Her
Sometime in the early 1990s or maybe the late 1980s, I was a young boy living in a small village in rural England. I was already kind of a nerd, developing small obsessions with various things, that kind of geeky obsessive information gaining. One day, I was at a WH Smith, a British shop which basically serves as a magazine rack so giant it has its own shop, and saw a pack of cards on the shelves. It proved to be one of the decks for citadel combat cards, and contain a series of colorful pictures of various citadel miniatures of that era. It also contained a small, folded advertising strip, which told me about other Games Workshop projects.
I became hooked immediately. In my previous obsessions I'd always eventually run out of things to find out about, but here, not just in Games Workshop but in science fiction, I'd found something that could never run out.
Over the years that followed. I brought space marine, the precursor to epic, Warhammer 40K, and Warhammer fantasy battle, plus an endless number of white dwarfs. The truth was I was never very serious about collecting an army. I vaguely had an Eldar force that was mostly built because of what looked cool, and I had some imperial guard because they looked cool, and I had a lot of codexes and white dwarfs. I didn't really paint most of my miniatures very well, most of them ending up either unpainted grey, base coat white or gaudily splashed with red and gold. Eventually, my interest in 40K waned. I fell out with the friend I played it with, and moved school. Nobody to play with at the boarding school I attended as a day pupil, and nobody of my own age to play against anywhere near my home. I was an isolated, lonely teen, affected by frequent bouts of long-term illness and what I now think was probably clinical depression. I fell out of Warhammer and onto other things. Science fiction novels (most of them trash) rifts (even more trash) and roleplaying games in general, which I actually got to play at a game club at a local town.
That was the era when I first started to read baen published right-wing trash SF novels, which at the time were just bad enough to bring on the kind of energizing, annoyed anger that I somehow enjoyed. A reassuring feeling that I could do better than this. The books were trash but they were readable, and as a dyslexic, I found it much harder to read stuff with more than basic prose. As I was often having them read to me by my mother (I was sick and dyslexic) we developed an almost MST3K vibe, poking fun at the plot points, or laughing at how ridiculous they were. They joined Star Wars and some Battletech as part of my teenage self's general reading list.
Sometime around the end of my teens, I got woke. My family had always been a bit leftist, but at the end of my teens, around 2000, was when my leftism started to truly bite. At the same time as the Iraq war was rumbling up, I met someone from Jordan online, a Muslim Arab of Palestinian descent, and realized that he was, apart from an unfortunate desire to write what was almost self-insert characters, not very different than I was. I opposed the Iraq war, and for my degree (international relations) studied it. I came to dislike the groups in power, to regard them not just as corrupt but as incompetent, as untruthful. Especially, I came to despise those who told me that the only way to hold back the night was with hard decisions. That our morality must be put aside to fight.
Time passed. I got a degree. I got more left. I saw myself betrayed by the one party I'd thought worth giving my support.
Through all this though, I never forgot my desire for that wanting, wistful dislike for books but the target changed. Baen novels, which have long since gone both full trash and full fash can't provide it. Star Wars and Battletech were by this point basically dead letters, so I turned to Warhammer 40K novels to get my fix. I'd first started reading black library mostly to fight people on VS debates, but now I read them for pleasure because they were just acceptable enough for me to get through them, while at the same time being bad in that special way that I enjoy.
But I'm much older now, and I don't read the same way my teenage self did. I can't read a bad novel, as most Warhammer 40K books, even the good ones are, in the same way, that I used to read the pulp novels of my teenage years. It's hard to escape the fact the better class of 40K novels that the people you're reading about, and almost certainly supposed to root for are either fascists or enabling the continuation of fascism. While a lot of characters are not as uncompromising as the Imperium is presented in the rulebooks, they are basically fighting for the continuation of a system of almost absolute tyranny and desolation for most of its population.
This, we are told, again and again, is necessary, because of the dark forces which lurk just outside the light, who will do things even worse than what the Imperium already does to its population if they're not prevented by the stern-jawed servants of the Imperium of Man.
But you know, I've heard rhetoric like this before. So I came to wonder: who are these enemies? These aliens, these mutants, these heretics, who stand outside the Emperor's light?
Nemesis the Warlock: A revisionist history of the Imperium of Man
"Beware the alien, the heretic, and the mutant." -Warhammer 40K
"Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!" - Tomás de Torquemada, Nemesis the Warlock
In the 1980s there was a British comic running in 2000AD called Nemesis the Warlock. It's set in the cavernous tube ways of Might Terra, where the titular Warlock, servant of Khaos, is an alien revolutionary fighting against the Tube Police, who are basically the KKK + The Spanish Inquisition, led by Tomas De Torquemada, a reincarnation of all the worst people in history. It's mostly about anti-racism, with Nemesis fighting against the various fascist machinations of the Tube Police.
Nemesis is not perfect. It's thoughtlessly woke in that kind of pseudo-punk rock way a lot of the 1980s and 1990s attempts at creating a more just society are for instance: the KKK was profoundly anti-catholic, and it's kind of offensive to be conflating the two or the part where they're mocking racism but also inserting some jokes at the expense of how white South Africans have funny accents. There's a whole subplot about the protagonist's jealous wife betraying him. However, as with several other works in 2000AD and other British comics at the time, it was a legitimate attempt to present a leftist worldview.
Warhammer 40K cribs from Judge Dread, from Nemesis the Warlock, ABC warriors and so on, taking elements as diverse as Eldar hat to the basic feeling of the Imperium from them and adding them to a few other things GW had, things from traveler and so on. It's basically 2000 AD mashed up with Game's Workshop's previous fantasy stuff, in space. I often hear it said that 40K is a parody of Thatcherite Britain. I don't think that's really true. Rather, like most hobby games (RPGs and wargames) what 40K is is the remanufacture of an aesthetic that would have been familiar to its target audience into a game. D&D does something similar for Tolkien, Conan and general fantasy literature. Only you can see that process more clearly with D&D because Tolkien is much more popular and has much wider circulation than does 1980s British SF comics. While the intention may have been to be a parody of conservatism, the main reason that it was ever this is because Judge Dread, and Nemesis the Warlock and so on were previously been just that.
However, as the 1990s rolled on, and 40K outran the success of 2000AD, and as people who had played and liked the setting of 40K, and shifted from fans to staff, this wokeness, the fact that 40K is basically a parody, started to go into eclipse. A big reason for this, I think, is because 40K novels started to become more successful. The conventional way of doing a story narrative requires a protagonist who is in some way sympathetic to the reader. The same thing happened to Judge Dread. The parody elements fell away because we're basically looking out from behind a fascists eyes, and they do cool stuff, so we increasingly find ourselves brought to sympathize with them.
This trend reaches its apotheosis with the Dan Abnett books (Abnett has also written for 2000AD) in which, because Abnett is a good writer, the characters are very sympathetic. They're just flawed enough to make them feel real, but at the same time, they're heroes who are easy to cheer for. Heroic, dutiful, having the qualities that both we and the Imperium of man wish people to have. Characters like Gaunt or Eisenhorn struggle to do the right thing, but they know, basically that the right thing is the status quo. Abnett especially also presented a self consciously more woke version of 40K, one with people who aren't white British men in it, and where most imperial citizens have a pseudo modern understanding of things like gender and sexuality.
This is welcome, but at the same time always rings slightly false with the other elements of the Imperium. It manages to be fascist, without any of the real parts of fascism.
Without, I think, anyone realizing it, 40K started to deliver a different though familiar message, the same message that most SF of that era was delivering: This is a fallen world, but you can't really change anything.
We're all witches now: Lovecraft and being Woke for the Inquisition
It was late April 2017. Theresa May had just called an election. Labour was running at around 20% in the polls, a deficit of 20 points. I decided we were doomed. We'd lost the last election, and the Brexit referendum, and as much as I might hate them, as much as I supported Corbyn, I couldn't help but believe the almost constant chorus of media talking about how bad he was. I had a book to finish, a plan to save myself from Tory Britain by becoming successful enough to move overseas, perhaps to somewhere like Canada. I'd done local politics before in losing campaigns and hated it.
I didn't volunteer.
The idea that, despite how awful the world is, the best we can do is to keep normal, ignorant, people alive to live their normal, horrible lives is not exactly unique to 40K. Indeed, by the time of books like Eisenhorn (2001) or Ravenor (2005), it was pretty much the mainstream view you'd find in SF/F. Even before the 1990s guttered out and the alternative globalization movement lost way in the winds of 9/11, you saw it all over the place in SF/F. It was the defining aesthetic of Mage's revised edition (the ascension war is over), and with a more cynical twist in most cyberpunk since Gibson. The battle lines had become whether or not it would be a fallen world that was equally shit for everyone, or whether it would be a fallen world that was slightly less shit for straight, white rich men (and a few women) and slightly more shit for people who weren't.
The idea was also mainstream in the wider culture. It was widely agreed that history had ended at least twenty years ago. That at most what we were going to see the clash of civilizations now, where Western civilization would fight it out with radical Islam and China for dominance. The only thing left to do was to contain the excesses of that battle, or stop it, or to make sure innocent people survived the resulting terrorist attacks.
In the same way that D&D, not Tolkien, has defined a lot of fantasy fiction that came after it, we can't really talk about the works of Lovecraft without talking about the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. In Call of Cthulhu, there is a mechanic for losing sanity. When you hit sanity zero, you're out of play in the same way that zero HP means you're dead. You lose sanity for seeing horrors and gain it for completing adventures. However, you also lose it for casting most magical spells. This means that most enemy NPCs (who have 0 sanity) are at a bit of an advantage in terms of using their magical powers freely compared to knowledgable PCs who are not yet over the edge.
This, and the moments of revelation in Lovecraft's stories themselves have filtered into the mainstream to create a stratum of protagonists who know The Awful Truth and have access to its power, but they must make sure not to Go Too Far and lose themselves completely to the nightmare reality of the truth. In the process, they become strange and otherworldly to their fellows, often seen as mad. With the power they've got they must stop the others, those who serve the truth, and those who seek to use in dangerous ways to transform what is.
For me though, there's another moment that this revelation of the Awful Truth reminds me of though: of waking up to the fact that the world is a profoundly bad place, and that we can, and must change it. For most of my formative years, to say something like this was to be considered almost as insane as someone spouting about Cthulhu. Even after the great crash, we were told again and again that austerity was where it was at. That even if we might not feel immigration was an important issue, other people did. That we had to go along with what they want and stop talking about the truth we'd seen. Even as every piece of evidence we had shown these things were just wrong.
I never understood why they seemed so angry with us about it. As if we'd committed some kind of religious crime. Some adoption of a badly regarded dogma. What was happening? Some of them even seemed to have seen the truth, so why was it that they were still trying to prop up this fallen world?
In the post-punk world, there are basically two ways you can deal with waking up to how bad things are. You either take it in stride, try to work within the institutions that exist to make it better in slow incrementalism, or you try to transform those institutions into something that can make things better rapidly. I understand why people do the first, as it seems like it offers an easier path to power, but when I encountered people in Britain who did it they almost all seemed to want to fight me. Wanted me out. It was strange.
It was June the Eighth of 2017. I'd started to cautiously become more hopeful. There were signs and portents, the polls seemed to be rising, the Tories seemed to be flailing. It couldn't be true though. The Conservatives had gone into this campaign with a lead of twenty points. They'd won the last election even though the polls had shown us in a much better position than this. There was no way that we could make the world a better place from here.
It's ten PM. Exit poll time. "...and what we're saying is the Conservatives are the largest party, note they don't have an overall majority at this stage. 314 for the conservatives, down 17."
That moment, that hoped for, unexpected win felt the closest I've ever had to something supernatural.
My Soul is inside out
Are we the baddies? -Mitchell and Webb
It's a hard thing, to realize that if you were in most stories, you'd probably be the villain. Even harder (but also better) when you realize that you don't even what to be the hero.
The space marine is a fourteen-year-old boy's idea of the ultimate man. I don't think it's any accident that most space marines, at least when they were made up, are inducted in their early teens.
At fourteen, I was mostly lying down sick. I wasn't sporty and couldn't, frankly, imagine myself ever getting through the kind of lethal selection that you need to go through to be a space marine.
Also, space marines have to be male, and though I didn't really know it back then, long before I started realizing how genderqueer I was, I didn't have all that much interest in being a male superbeing.
So if you're not the hero, what else can you be?
Well, I can be one of the people starving out in their hab blocks, getting eaten by Tyranids or orks, dying of the exterminatus strike called because some inquisitor hit the wrong button. If my life is impinged on by the story it's probably because something horrible is about to happen to me.
The Imperium, its fash corpse Emperor says that the only alternative to these two are demons, but then again, when has a fascist ever told you the truth about their enemies? They either know the truth and are liars, or they deny the truth and are fools.
You have choices:
You can be someone who wants a better, more beautiful world. You can think that maybe someone who that to be a bit more feminine, no matter how society identifies them isn't the worst. You can think that the way that society traditionally wants you to fuck might not be for you.
You can be someone of strange ways and alien thought. They often worry about you the most. They want you to be just like them, or they fear that you're undermining them from within, or that you're mad or dangerous. Why can't they see you're just trying to get on in the world like everyone else?
You can be someone they call diseased. Mind or body. Someone who needs something different to get past. They hate that you remind them of their fragility. Their own imperfection, because they can't see that maybe you're not as imperfect as they think.
You can even be someone who fights for justice. I'm not sure I'm with you all the way here, there are some of you who are as bad as they are or are just another version of them. But if you're against them I'll at least consider you. Someone has to fight them.
Maybe if enough of us see the choice, and get together, we can make a future where there's more than only war.
I became hooked immediately. In my previous obsessions I'd always eventually run out of things to find out about, but here, not just in Games Workshop but in science fiction, I'd found something that could never run out.
Over the years that followed. I brought space marine, the precursor to epic, Warhammer 40K, and Warhammer fantasy battle, plus an endless number of white dwarfs. The truth was I was never very serious about collecting an army. I vaguely had an Eldar force that was mostly built because of what looked cool, and I had some imperial guard because they looked cool, and I had a lot of codexes and white dwarfs. I didn't really paint most of my miniatures very well, most of them ending up either unpainted grey, base coat white or gaudily splashed with red and gold. Eventually, my interest in 40K waned. I fell out with the friend I played it with, and moved school. Nobody to play with at the boarding school I attended as a day pupil, and nobody of my own age to play against anywhere near my home. I was an isolated, lonely teen, affected by frequent bouts of long-term illness and what I now think was probably clinical depression. I fell out of Warhammer and onto other things. Science fiction novels (most of them trash) rifts (even more trash) and roleplaying games in general, which I actually got to play at a game club at a local town.
That was the era when I first started to read baen published right-wing trash SF novels, which at the time were just bad enough to bring on the kind of energizing, annoyed anger that I somehow enjoyed. A reassuring feeling that I could do better than this. The books were trash but they were readable, and as a dyslexic, I found it much harder to read stuff with more than basic prose. As I was often having them read to me by my mother (I was sick and dyslexic) we developed an almost MST3K vibe, poking fun at the plot points, or laughing at how ridiculous they were. They joined Star Wars and some Battletech as part of my teenage self's general reading list.
Sometime around the end of my teens, I got woke. My family had always been a bit leftist, but at the end of my teens, around 2000, was when my leftism started to truly bite. At the same time as the Iraq war was rumbling up, I met someone from Jordan online, a Muslim Arab of Palestinian descent, and realized that he was, apart from an unfortunate desire to write what was almost self-insert characters, not very different than I was. I opposed the Iraq war, and for my degree (international relations) studied it. I came to dislike the groups in power, to regard them not just as corrupt but as incompetent, as untruthful. Especially, I came to despise those who told me that the only way to hold back the night was with hard decisions. That our morality must be put aside to fight.
Time passed. I got a degree. I got more left. I saw myself betrayed by the one party I'd thought worth giving my support.
Through all this though, I never forgot my desire for that wanting, wistful dislike for books but the target changed. Baen novels, which have long since gone both full trash and full fash can't provide it. Star Wars and Battletech were by this point basically dead letters, so I turned to Warhammer 40K novels to get my fix. I'd first started reading black library mostly to fight people on VS debates, but now I read them for pleasure because they were just acceptable enough for me to get through them, while at the same time being bad in that special way that I enjoy.
But I'm much older now, and I don't read the same way my teenage self did. I can't read a bad novel, as most Warhammer 40K books, even the good ones are, in the same way, that I used to read the pulp novels of my teenage years. It's hard to escape the fact the better class of 40K novels that the people you're reading about, and almost certainly supposed to root for are either fascists or enabling the continuation of fascism. While a lot of characters are not as uncompromising as the Imperium is presented in the rulebooks, they are basically fighting for the continuation of a system of almost absolute tyranny and desolation for most of its population.
This, we are told, again and again, is necessary, because of the dark forces which lurk just outside the light, who will do things even worse than what the Imperium already does to its population if they're not prevented by the stern-jawed servants of the Imperium of Man.
But you know, I've heard rhetoric like this before. So I came to wonder: who are these enemies? These aliens, these mutants, these heretics, who stand outside the Emperor's light?
Nemesis the Warlock: A revisionist history of the Imperium of Man
"Beware the alien, the heretic, and the mutant." -Warhammer 40K
"Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!" - Tomás de Torquemada, Nemesis the Warlock
In the 1980s there was a British comic running in 2000AD called Nemesis the Warlock. It's set in the cavernous tube ways of Might Terra, where the titular Warlock, servant of Khaos, is an alien revolutionary fighting against the Tube Police, who are basically the KKK + The Spanish Inquisition, led by Tomas De Torquemada, a reincarnation of all the worst people in history. It's mostly about anti-racism, with Nemesis fighting against the various fascist machinations of the Tube Police.
Nemesis is not perfect. It's thoughtlessly woke in that kind of pseudo-punk rock way a lot of the 1980s and 1990s attempts at creating a more just society are for instance: the KKK was profoundly anti-catholic, and it's kind of offensive to be conflating the two or the part where they're mocking racism but also inserting some jokes at the expense of how white South Africans have funny accents. There's a whole subplot about the protagonist's jealous wife betraying him. However, as with several other works in 2000AD and other British comics at the time, it was a legitimate attempt to present a leftist worldview.
Warhammer 40K cribs from Judge Dread, from Nemesis the Warlock, ABC warriors and so on, taking elements as diverse as Eldar hat to the basic feeling of the Imperium from them and adding them to a few other things GW had, things from traveler and so on. It's basically 2000 AD mashed up with Game's Workshop's previous fantasy stuff, in space. I often hear it said that 40K is a parody of Thatcherite Britain. I don't think that's really true. Rather, like most hobby games (RPGs and wargames) what 40K is is the remanufacture of an aesthetic that would have been familiar to its target audience into a game. D&D does something similar for Tolkien, Conan and general fantasy literature. Only you can see that process more clearly with D&D because Tolkien is much more popular and has much wider circulation than does 1980s British SF comics. While the intention may have been to be a parody of conservatism, the main reason that it was ever this is because Judge Dread, and Nemesis the Warlock and so on were previously been just that.
However, as the 1990s rolled on, and 40K outran the success of 2000AD, and as people who had played and liked the setting of 40K, and shifted from fans to staff, this wokeness, the fact that 40K is basically a parody, started to go into eclipse. A big reason for this, I think, is because 40K novels started to become more successful. The conventional way of doing a story narrative requires a protagonist who is in some way sympathetic to the reader. The same thing happened to Judge Dread. The parody elements fell away because we're basically looking out from behind a fascists eyes, and they do cool stuff, so we increasingly find ourselves brought to sympathize with them.
This trend reaches its apotheosis with the Dan Abnett books (Abnett has also written for 2000AD) in which, because Abnett is a good writer, the characters are very sympathetic. They're just flawed enough to make them feel real, but at the same time, they're heroes who are easy to cheer for. Heroic, dutiful, having the qualities that both we and the Imperium of man wish people to have. Characters like Gaunt or Eisenhorn struggle to do the right thing, but they know, basically that the right thing is the status quo. Abnett especially also presented a self consciously more woke version of 40K, one with people who aren't white British men in it, and where most imperial citizens have a pseudo modern understanding of things like gender and sexuality.
This is welcome, but at the same time always rings slightly false with the other elements of the Imperium. It manages to be fascist, without any of the real parts of fascism.
Without, I think, anyone realizing it, 40K started to deliver a different though familiar message, the same message that most SF of that era was delivering: This is a fallen world, but you can't really change anything.
We're all witches now: Lovecraft and being Woke for the Inquisition
It was late April 2017. Theresa May had just called an election. Labour was running at around 20% in the polls, a deficit of 20 points. I decided we were doomed. We'd lost the last election, and the Brexit referendum, and as much as I might hate them, as much as I supported Corbyn, I couldn't help but believe the almost constant chorus of media talking about how bad he was. I had a book to finish, a plan to save myself from Tory Britain by becoming successful enough to move overseas, perhaps to somewhere like Canada. I'd done local politics before in losing campaigns and hated it.
I didn't volunteer.
The idea that, despite how awful the world is, the best we can do is to keep normal, ignorant, people alive to live their normal, horrible lives is not exactly unique to 40K. Indeed, by the time of books like Eisenhorn (2001) or Ravenor (2005), it was pretty much the mainstream view you'd find in SF/F. Even before the 1990s guttered out and the alternative globalization movement lost way in the winds of 9/11, you saw it all over the place in SF/F. It was the defining aesthetic of Mage's revised edition (the ascension war is over), and with a more cynical twist in most cyberpunk since Gibson. The battle lines had become whether or not it would be a fallen world that was equally shit for everyone, or whether it would be a fallen world that was slightly less shit for straight, white rich men (and a few women) and slightly more shit for people who weren't.
The idea was also mainstream in the wider culture. It was widely agreed that history had ended at least twenty years ago. That at most what we were going to see the clash of civilizations now, where Western civilization would fight it out with radical Islam and China for dominance. The only thing left to do was to contain the excesses of that battle, or stop it, or to make sure innocent people survived the resulting terrorist attacks.
In the same way that D&D, not Tolkien, has defined a lot of fantasy fiction that came after it, we can't really talk about the works of Lovecraft without talking about the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. In Call of Cthulhu, there is a mechanic for losing sanity. When you hit sanity zero, you're out of play in the same way that zero HP means you're dead. You lose sanity for seeing horrors and gain it for completing adventures. However, you also lose it for casting most magical spells. This means that most enemy NPCs (who have 0 sanity) are at a bit of an advantage in terms of using their magical powers freely compared to knowledgable PCs who are not yet over the edge.
This, and the moments of revelation in Lovecraft's stories themselves have filtered into the mainstream to create a stratum of protagonists who know The Awful Truth and have access to its power, but they must make sure not to Go Too Far and lose themselves completely to the nightmare reality of the truth. In the process, they become strange and otherworldly to their fellows, often seen as mad. With the power they've got they must stop the others, those who serve the truth, and those who seek to use in dangerous ways to transform what is.
For me though, there's another moment that this revelation of the Awful Truth reminds me of though: of waking up to the fact that the world is a profoundly bad place, and that we can, and must change it. For most of my formative years, to say something like this was to be considered almost as insane as someone spouting about Cthulhu. Even after the great crash, we were told again and again that austerity was where it was at. That even if we might not feel immigration was an important issue, other people did. That we had to go along with what they want and stop talking about the truth we'd seen. Even as every piece of evidence we had shown these things were just wrong.
I never understood why they seemed so angry with us about it. As if we'd committed some kind of religious crime. Some adoption of a badly regarded dogma. What was happening? Some of them even seemed to have seen the truth, so why was it that they were still trying to prop up this fallen world?
In the post-punk world, there are basically two ways you can deal with waking up to how bad things are. You either take it in stride, try to work within the institutions that exist to make it better in slow incrementalism, or you try to transform those institutions into something that can make things better rapidly. I understand why people do the first, as it seems like it offers an easier path to power, but when I encountered people in Britain who did it they almost all seemed to want to fight me. Wanted me out. It was strange.
It was June the Eighth of 2017. I'd started to cautiously become more hopeful. There were signs and portents, the polls seemed to be rising, the Tories seemed to be flailing. It couldn't be true though. The Conservatives had gone into this campaign with a lead of twenty points. They'd won the last election even though the polls had shown us in a much better position than this. There was no way that we could make the world a better place from here.
It's ten PM. Exit poll time. "...and what we're saying is the Conservatives are the largest party, note they don't have an overall majority at this stage. 314 for the conservatives, down 17."
That moment, that hoped for, unexpected win felt the closest I've ever had to something supernatural.
My Soul is inside out
Are we the baddies? -Mitchell and Webb
It's a hard thing, to realize that if you were in most stories, you'd probably be the villain. Even harder (but also better) when you realize that you don't even what to be the hero.
The space marine is a fourteen-year-old boy's idea of the ultimate man. I don't think it's any accident that most space marines, at least when they were made up, are inducted in their early teens.
At fourteen, I was mostly lying down sick. I wasn't sporty and couldn't, frankly, imagine myself ever getting through the kind of lethal selection that you need to go through to be a space marine.
Also, space marines have to be male, and though I didn't really know it back then, long before I started realizing how genderqueer I was, I didn't have all that much interest in being a male superbeing.
So if you're not the hero, what else can you be?
Well, I can be one of the people starving out in their hab blocks, getting eaten by Tyranids or orks, dying of the exterminatus strike called because some inquisitor hit the wrong button. If my life is impinged on by the story it's probably because something horrible is about to happen to me.
The Imperium, its fash corpse Emperor says that the only alternative to these two are demons, but then again, when has a fascist ever told you the truth about their enemies? They either know the truth and are liars, or they deny the truth and are fools.
You have choices:
You can be someone who wants a better, more beautiful world. You can think that maybe someone who that to be a bit more feminine, no matter how society identifies them isn't the worst. You can think that the way that society traditionally wants you to fuck might not be for you.
You can be someone of strange ways and alien thought. They often worry about you the most. They want you to be just like them, or they fear that you're undermining them from within, or that you're mad or dangerous. Why can't they see you're just trying to get on in the world like everyone else?
You can be someone they call diseased. Mind or body. Someone who needs something different to get past. They hate that you remind them of their fragility. Their own imperfection, because they can't see that maybe you're not as imperfect as they think.
You can even be someone who fights for justice. I'm not sure I'm with you all the way here, there are some of you who are as bad as they are or are just another version of them. But if you're against them I'll at least consider you. Someone has to fight them.
Maybe if enough of us see the choice, and get together, we can make a future where there's more than only war.
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. It's a horrible nightmare government justifying it's horrible actions with the consequences of it's other horrible actions.
