Sympathy for the heretic

[Simon_Jester]

This is not exactly contradicting my impression of explicit math being considered repulsive, shameful, unclean.

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If you were familiar with my posting history you'd struggle to say this with a straight face. No, that's not what I'm getting at.

Your ATGM example is flawed, anyway, since it assumes a tank initially in perfect condition (rather than softened up by prior small-arms fire, terrain hazards, missed maintenance...), lack of options by which a gunner could add bonus damage, and generally the rules being so narrow - or the fictional situation so thoroughly defined - as to exclude any weird corner cases. Proving negatives is hard in any context complex enough to be interesting.

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Missing the point.

In principle, there are a thousand ways that a game can justify having had the tank take three points of damage, or whatever else, so that it can be blown up by a max-damage crit from the aforesaid bazooka rocket and actually destroyed.

The point is, that for purposes of telling a story, as distinct from the purpose of playing an RPG, trying to introduce the hit point and damage mechanics don't add anything. You're better off just having the narrative say that antitank rockets behave towards tanks more or less as they do in real life, where typically either they manage to punch through the armor and hit something that'll catch fire and cook off or otherwise wreck the tank, or they don't. A realistic sword fight in storytelling is not made better by mentally imagining (let alone explicitly declaring) that the combatants are steadily losing hit points, as opposed to the biomechanics of how a sword fight actually works and what a wound from a sword might realistically do to someone.

Game mechanics, while they can be useful inspiration for ideas and for telling stories, don't make things better when ported into the stories themselves. Not because math is icky, but because artificial rules created to enable us to model quasi-realistic situations in a manner that is entertaining to play on a tabletop, CRPG, or other such setting... Those rules do not provide good guidance for those who are trying to tell stories in other frameworks. It's like bringing mosquito netting on your submarine. Helpful though it is in other situations, it's not going to help much with the things you're trying to accomplish here in this new situation.

 

[strange_person]

You're better off just having the narrative say that antitank rockets behave towards tanks more or less as they do in real life,

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This is unhelpful advice with regard to the interactions of things which are not known to exist in real life, such as man-portable lascannons, powered armor involving compact fusion reactors, artificial gravity cheap enough for deck plates and expendable scout drones, sapient aliens, multi-megaton FTL colony ships, hive cities, spiritual corruption with results clearly distinguishable from placebo... all told, most of what makes the 40k setting recognizable as such.
We can't just take a company of real space marines, load up their bolters with paintball rounds, and see how they fare against last year's graduating class from West Point in an elaborate training exercise with objective scoring criteria. Effectiveness of space marines against ordinary infantry varies across different games and stories because there simply is no fixed underlying truth to refer back to.
To the extent 40k mimics fascist memes, strength or weakness shifting wildly according to the needs of the moment is to be expected. Committing to a reasonably comprehensive set of specific numbers in advance helps prevent that, enabling more 'surprising but inevitable' results to derive purely from the logic of simulation rather than propaganda-narrative, which is desirable if general resistance to fascist memes is the goal. Risk of ludonarrative dissonance is reason to select those starting assumptions carefully, check each change for potential unintended consequences, but that tedious fine-tuning is where the artful results come from.

 

[Maugan Ra]

This is unhelpful advice with regard to the interactions of things which are not known to exist in real life, such as man-portable lascannons, powered armor involving compact fusion reactors, artificial gravity cheap enough for deck plates and expendable scout drones, sapient aliens, multi-megaton FTL colony ships, hive cities, spiritual corruption with results clearly distinguishable from placebo... all told, most of what makes the 40k setting recognizable as such.

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We have no numbers for any of those things either, though (well maybe expendable scout drones). Because they're not real and we have no idea how they would work, or how we could make them. Any numerical values we might think to assign to them would therefore be pretty much entirely arbitrary, and any calculations or comparative assessments that relied on those figures would essentially be gut-feel approximations rather than anything useful.

Which ties back into the larger point - figuring out the underlying mechanics of the Warhammer 40k setting and adopting rigorous mathematical standards in the name of consistency is neither possible nor desirable.

To the extent 40k mimics fascist memes, strength or weakness shifting wildly according to the needs of the moment is to be expected. Committing to a reasonably comprehensive set of specific numbers in advance helps prevent that, enabling more 'surprising but inevitable' results to derive purely from the logic of simulation rather than propaganda-narrative, which is desirable if general resistance to fascist memes is the goal.

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Fascism has quite literally never cared about the actual factual data at hand though.

Having explicit scientific truth as carefully proven under rigorous experimentation and meticulous peer review means less than nothing to the fascists if it conflicts with their existing beliefs about the perfidious strong/weak [slurs] undermining their country that are deserving of nothing more than death.

 

[Emy]

Effectiveness of space marines against ordinary infantry varies across different games and stories because there simply is no fixed underlying truth to refer back to.

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I hope this isn't cherry picking but I feel like this sentence in particular is pretty central to what you're saying.

The thing that gets me about this, though, is that assigning stats to things does not create a "fixed underlying truth", it just lets the assumptions that you used to create the numbers become less visible. It produces a veneer of objectivity, even though it's fundamentally still based on the same wobbly foundation as any other reasoning about the capabilities of fictional people and technologies.

 

[mr_stibbons]

In principle, there are a thousand ways that a game can justify having had the tank take three points of damage, or whatever else, so that it can be blown up by a max-damage crit from the aforesaid bazooka rocket and actually destroyed.

The point is, that for purposes of telling a story, as distinct from the purpose of playing an RPG, trying to introduce the hit point and damage mechanics don't add anything. You're better off just having the narrative say that antitank rockets behave towards tanks more or less as they do in real life, where typically either they manage to punch through the armor and hit something that'll catch fire and cook off or otherwise wreck the tank, or they don't. A realistic sword fight in storytelling is not made better by mentally imagining (let alone explicitly declaring) that the combatants are steadily losing hit points, as opposed to the biomechanics of how a sword fight actually works and what a wound from a sword might realistically do to someone.

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Just throwing out the game mechanics and defaulting to realistic sword fights and military hardware working about like it's modern analogs is almost as stupid as trying to strictly follow game mechanics one-to-one. Especially for a setting as wild as 40k.

The game mechanics are a source of information about how setting elements like tanks are supposed to normally behave in setting and for the general tone of the setting. To use a very on point example, man portable anti vehicle missile launchers in WH40k the tabletop wargame have been portrayed for literal decades as being fairly ineffective against proper battle tanks, only a threat to lighter vehicles. If you ignore that and have them reliably take out battle tanks in one shot like it's 2023, you've done a bad and lazy job adapting the setting. More generally you are adapting something like D&D, where the game rules lead to fairly long swordfights where combatants take many hits each, then realistic swordfights is a probably a bad choice. Look at high fantasy works, or shonen as basis for your action instead.

The game designer has generally not pulled these rules out of a hat while not considering the setting. The rules are part of the text and you should try to analyze what they are saying about the setting. They are going to contain abstractions, and require you to make subjective interpretations at times, but that doesn't make them meaningless.

 

[strange_person]

We have no numbers for any of those things either

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We have numbers for the versions of them that appear in various 40k-affiliated tabletop wargames and RPGs. Looks like Mr. Stibbons already covered that point better than I could've, though.

The thing that gets me about this, though, is that assigning stats to things does not create a "fixed underlying truth", it just lets the assumptions that you used to create the numbers become less visible. It produces a veneer of objectivity, even though it's fundamentally still based on the same wobbly foundation as any other reasoning about the capabilities of fictional people and technologies.

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That's a very fair criticism, but I'm not really doing this in an effort to investigate underlying truths (at least, not about the specific in-setting technical stuff; insights into the nature of nonfictional humanity are a whole other can of worms). Goal there to persuade, drive a wedge - make any given dedicated fascist less comfortable with 40k, or 40k fan less tempted by fascism. Starting from numbers somebody else (at FFG) made up for a different purpose, so that my own tailored assumptions are plausibly just fun-oriented extensions of or patches to pre-existing acceptable content, hopefully means it'll be harder for that target audience to spot the full conceptual conflict until premises which lead to it have already been willingly adopted, put to use, entangled with the rest of their mental landscape.

Also a better colony/city-simulator compatible with the Rogue Trader starship rules is something I want to build just so i can have it for my own use, but the nature of multiplayer games is such that would require sharing it with other people anyway, so, might as well put it out there for broader peer review. Probably I should start a thread for that but not sure how best to do so - I've literally never browsed SV by forum category, only been linked directly to threads.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Just throwing out the game mechanics and defaulting to realistic sword fights and military hardware working about like it's modern analogs is almost as stupid as trying to strictly follow game mechanics one-to-one. Especially for a setting as wild as 40k.

The game mechanics are a source of information about how setting elements like tanks are supposed to normally behave in setting and for the general tone of the setting. To use a very on point example, man portable anti vehicle missile launchers in WH40k the tabletop wargame have been portrayed for literal decades as being fairly ineffective against proper battle tanks, only a threat to lighter vehicles. If you ignore that and have them reliably take out battle tanks in one shot like it's 2023, you've done a bad and lazy job adapting the setting. More generally you are adapting something like D&D, where the game rules lead to fairly long swordfights where combatants take many hits each, then realistic swordfights is a probably a bad choice. Look at high fantasy works, or shonen as basis for your action instead.

The game designer has generally not pulled these rules out of a hat while not considering the setting. The rules are part of the text and you should try to analyze what they are saying about the setting. They are going to contain abstractions, and require you to make subjective interpretations at times, but that doesn't make them meaningless.

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I am weary.

I'm not arguing that the rules are meaningless or should not be used to inspire storytelling.

I'm saying that trying to inject the actual numerical mechanics of the gameplay directly into the storytelling and reasoning about what should happen in the story, outside the context of the game those mechanics were designed for, tends to be to the storytelling's detriment.

 

[EarthScorpion]

I am weary.

I'm not arguing that the rules are meaningless or should not be used to inspire storytelling.

I'm saying that trying to inject the actual numerical mechanics of the gameplay directly into the storytelling and reasoning about what should happen in the story, outside the context of the game those mechanics were designed for, tends to be to the storytelling's detriment.

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Especially in the case of 40k, you need to first work out what genre you're operating in, because 40k genres can vary from story to story.

For example, if you're in a Guard story, the Guard is going to be a mix of British Army + Soviets, is going to basically be sci-fi Mid Cold War (the Chimera is basically a BMP-2, after all), and it's going to follow the conventions and rough effectiveness of Cold War military stuff against its given opponents (for example, a Guard missile launcher may or may not kill an enemy tank, depending on where you hit it).

But if you're in Marine bolter-porn, then the missile launcher will basically blow up any non-superheavy vehicle the boring protagonists point it at, unless the story wants to show them charging in with a meltagun and taking out the target at close range.

 

[Mutton]

And if you're in a Heresy story the rule is "the primarch can do anything as long as their theme music is playing."

 

[RiverDelta]

The more I write my 40K fanfic, the more I dislike the setting. It just makes me uncomfortable, as a Jew, as a trans/NB person, as an autistic person, and so on.

I know this is inflammatory, so I want to say that I know this wasn't the intent of the writers of 40K, but it really does feel like a setting where "Sure, the Nazis are bad, but the Jews really are out to get you."

The entire setting is structured so that a fascist state whose officers wear peaked hats with Totenkopf-style skulls on them and constantly commit mass genocide are, if not the heroes, at least the most sympathetic villains. GW has said that it's a "satire of fascism", and while I understand that it can be written that way, the more I look at these Codexes and the more I read the lore the more it seems like that label doesn't apply.

It doesn't expose fascism as the shallow, cruel, weak, childish, morally repugnant lie that it is. It justifies it.

The sexual deviants, the Asian-coded foreigner collectivists, the perverse bourgeois schemers who sacrifice the innocent in their dark rituals, the effete urban intellectuals who look down upon the common people, the boisterous and stupid urban working poor, technology itself, nature itself...They're all out to get you. They need to be dominated or eliminated.

That is the message that 40K seems to give. "Fascism is cruel, fascism is stupid, fascism is violent...but fascism is right. Bigotry may cause you to make the wrong calls sometimes, but they'll be badass wrong calls, and compassion will always get everyone you love dead."

In particular, there's a segment in the Chaos Daemons Codex where they talk about a colony that accidentally channeled Nurgle and lead to everyone dying in five paragraphs of torturously detailed medical horror prose as if the whole planet deserved it for accidentally channeling him to cure horrible diseases in their loved ones.

The book reads like it's proud of itself, like those dastardly Chaos cultists deserved it for not submitting to their technologically-stingy elite.

I'm not saying people who like 40K are fascist. I'm not saying that the people who make 40K are cackling and planning to spread fascism among the masses.

I think, honestly, it's just a mix of what sells, the "cult of the badass", and this drive to be edgy for edge's sake. I doubt a single avowed fascist or fascist sympathizer has even worked on 40K.

Still, it really does come off like "Yeah, what if the Jews really were trying to violate our women and control us from the shadows?"

I'm glad people like 40K, I'm glad it makes them happy. I'm just...I don't know, in a mood.

So, yeah, I guess Ynathe is Jewish-coded, now. Go figure.

 

[Avernus]

I'm not saying people who like 40K are fascist. I'm not saying that the people who make 40K are cackling and planning to spread fascism among the masses.

I think, honestly, it's just a mix of what sells, the "cult of the badass", and this drive to be edgy for edge's sake. I doubt a single avowed fascist or fascist sympathizer has even worked on 40K.

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I think that a lot of the reason is that fascism itself is "all sizzle, no steak". Fascists don't care about the facts or internal logic of what they say, just in appealing to people's emotions and satisfying their impulses. Its politics as advertising, entirely based on appealing to unthinking and irrational impulses and desires.

And as a result a great deal of entertainment will naturally end up inadvertently fascist-adjacent in terms of style since it also is meant to appeal to people's passions and fantasies rather than their reason; just without the whole "actually tyrannizing and killing people" part. It's evolutionary convergence of a sort.

 

[RiverDelta]

I think that a lot of the reason is that fascism itself is "all sizzle, no steak". Fascists don't care about the facts or internal logic of what they say, just in appealing to people's emotions and satisfying their impulses. Its politics as advertising, entirely based on appealing to unthinking and irrational impulses and desires.

And as a result a great deal of entertainment will naturally end up inadvertently fascist-adjacent in terms of style since it also is meant to appeal to people's passions and fantasies rather than their reason; just without the whole "actually tyrannizing and killing people" part. It's evolutionary convergence of a sort.

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Yeah, it's just that 40K is much more explicit about the fascistic overtones than most, since every enemy of the Imperium pretty easily maps onto some bugbear of fascists. I do agree, though, and I think fascism's great strength as an idea is that it's emotionally compelling to many people but also deeply simplistic.

The message "The people you already don't like are ontologically evil, and you're ontologically good and morally better than them, so you need to be a brave hero and get rid of the bad people who hate you and are the reason you don't have the things you think you should have (and I as a strong leader can give you the chance to do that)" is very compelling to the human brain.

It's simple, clear, emotionally investing, and it sounds right.

It's dead wrong and leads almost inevitably to terror and cruelty, but it's a message that flatters the listener and makes them feel as though they have a place and the world makes sense.

I don't think that I'm immune from it, I think almost everyone's flirted with one or two of those statements at some point in their lives, if not all of them.

 

[Nyvis]

The more I write my 40K fanfic, the more I dislike the setting. It just makes me uncomfortable, as a Jew, as a trans/NB person, as an autistic person, and so on.

I know this is inflammatory, so I want to say that I know this wasn't the intent of the writers of 40K, but it really does feel like a setting where "Sure, the Nazis are bad, but the Jews really are out to get you."

The entire setting is structured so that a fascist state whose officers wear peaked hats with Totenkopf-style skulls on them and constantly commit mass genocide are, if not the heroes, at least the most sympathetic villains. GW has said that it's a "satire of fascism", and while I understand that it can be written that way, the more I look at these Codexes and the more I read the lore the more it seems like that label doesn't apply.

It doesn't expose fascism as the shallow, cruel, weak, childish, morally repugnant lie that it is. It justifies it.

The sexual deviants, the Asian-coded foreigner collectivists, the perverse bourgeois schemers who sacrifice the innocent in their dark rituals, the effete urban intellectuals who look down upon the common people, the boisterous and stupid urban working poor, technology itself, nature itself...They're all out to get you. They need to be dominated or eliminated.

That is the message that 40K seems to give. "Fascism is cruel, fascism is stupid, fascism is violent...but fascism is right. Bigotry may cause you to make the wrong calls sometimes, but they'll be badass wrong calls, and compassion will always get everyone you love dead."

In particular, there's a segment in the Chaos Daemons Codex where they talk about a colony that accidentally channeled Nurgle and lead to everyone dying in five paragraphs of torturously detailed medical horror prose as if the whole planet deserved it for accidentally channeling him to cure horrible diseases in their loved ones.

The book reads like it's proud of itself, like those dastardly Chaos cultists deserved it for not submitting to their technologically-stingy elite.

I'm not saying people who like 40K are fascist. I'm not saying that the people who make 40K are cackling and planning to spread fascism among the masses.

I think, honestly, it's just a mix of what sells, the "cult of the badass", and this drive to be edgy for edge's sake. I doubt a single avowed fascist or fascist sympathizer has even worked on 40K.

Still, it really does come off like "Yeah, what if the Jews really were trying to violate our women and control us from the shadows?"

I'm glad people like 40K, I'm glad it makes them happy. I'm just...I don't know, in a mood.

So, yeah, I guess Ynathe is Jewish-coded, now. Go figure.

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I've said it before, chaos is written as a projection of the fascists' fears. Genestealers too obviously.

I think it's worth remembering that when people tell you W40K is a satire, they're drawing from its older incarnations, where it was a lot more obviously a pastiche of current British tropes specifically.

But fascism sells. And GW is a company.

 

[DestinyPlayer]

All of that is why I think that the best way to rewrite W40k to be less... that is to make it so that Chaos just flat out doesn't exist. The Warp does. There are some dangerous entities there, but overall it isn't Hell. It's just... another realm. All of the apocalyptic fears of the Imperium are just that, fears, with little grounding in reality.

 

[RiverDelta]

All of that is why I think that the best way to rewrite W40k to be less... that is to make it so that Chaos just flat out doesn't exist. The Warp does. There are some dangerous entities there, but overall it isn't Hell. It's just... another realm. All of the apocalyptic fears of the Imperium are just that, fears, with little grounding in reality.

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I also think the Tau and Dark Eldar and Orks and such reflect fascist fears as well. It's not just Chaos.

 

[DestinyPlayer]

I also think the Tau and Dark Eldar and Orks and such reflect fascist fears as well. It's not just Chaos.

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Orks are British football hooligans and basically the last remnant of W40k's origins as a parody so I think they're fine as they are, maybe increase their comedy factor. Make it so that that one Police Procedural comedy fanfic about the Orks just kinda vibing on a Space Hulk with a lot of other races and being a police department can be canon.

On the other hand, I've always thought that the Tau should have stayed the only good faction in the entirety of W40k. Fuck the Etheral conspiracy, fuck the Greater Good fanaticism. Make them an actually good natured space nation.

Not sure what to do about the Dark Eldar. I think that making the Craftworlds less idiotically selfish would work wonders at making the Dark Eldar be a contrast rather than as the Face of the Eldar, which would help combat the fascist undertones of "hedonistic society of horror we have to fight to protect ourselves and everyone else".

I guess you could intensify the Aristocrats™ vibe and decrease the Gays™ vibe, but I'm not sure how to do that.

 

[Avernus]

All of that is why I think that the best way to rewrite W40k to be less... that is to make it so that Chaos just flat out doesn't exist. The Warp does. There are some dangerous entities there, but overall it isn't Hell. It's just... another realm. All of the apocalyptic fears of the Imperium are just that, fears, with little grounding in reality.

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I like the idea that since the Warp is powered by emotion, it matches the fears and hates of the Imperium because it's powered and shaped by the fear and hate of the Imperium. To quote a Demon Prince in another setting "We are the rod you made for your own back", in this scenario the Warp would be their own evil turned back on them.

So the actual reason other species or even humanity of the past typically aren't besieged the same way by the Warp is that they lack the necessary level of raving hate and paranoia. It even fits with the Eldar who did make their own evil Warp God by heir own indulgences.

 

[DestinyPlayer]

I like the idea that since the Warp is powered by emotion, it matches the fears and hates of the Imperium because it's powered and shaped by the fear and hate of the Imperium. To quote a Demon Prince in another setting "We are the rod you made for your own back", in this scenario the Warp would be their own evil turned back on them.

So the actual reason other species or even humanity of the past typically aren't besieged the same way by the Warp is that they lack the necessary level of raving hate and paranoia. It even fits with the Eldar who did make their own evil Warp God by heir own indulgences.

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I fear that "Your fears turn into reality" would be too close to the actual fascist worldview. It is an interesting idea from a worldbuilding perspective but from a thematic perspective it still reeks wrong.

 

[Nyvis]

All of that is why I think that the best way to rewrite W40k to be less... that is to make it so that Chaos just flat out doesn't exist. The Warp does. There are some dangerous entities there, but overall it isn't Hell. It's just... another realm. All of the apocalyptic fears of the Imperium are just that, fears, with little grounding in reality.

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I think someone proposed before that Chaos is just what the imperium call behavior it wants to purge.

Ill or disabled? Must be a nurge cultist, time to kill you. Politically organized? Has to be a Tzeentch cult, time to kill you. Decided you don't want your church assigned gender role? Has to be a Slaanesh cult, time to kill you. Protest turned violent when the arbites hit you? Must be a khorne cult, time to kill you. Got some mutation because your workplace is improperly shielded? Must be a genestealer cult, time to kill you.

Does the imperium do this cynically or are its purge happy zealots genuinely convinced dissidents are otherwordly threats? Does it matter?

And of course if the warp exist, these fears might get reflected in it, as do the dissidents' own aspirations and desperation in the face of the pyre, which fuels the rhetoric. But they're not the source of dissent, that's the imperium's own everything.

 

[Night]

I also think the Tau and Dark Eldar and Orks and such reflect fascist fears as well. It's not just Chaos.

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I kind of doubt the Orks really reflect a fear so much as a belief in the lumpenproletariat; if anything they undermine the whole thing with the Imperium as a fascist utopia. Such should be easily co-opted and turned to the cause, lead by their base desires to serve fascism. That is, as discussed, arguably the only real political theory it has. But it never works with the Orks, and the attempt is often costly. They represent an almost omnipresent failure of fascism to work the way it's supposed to work. It's one of the few areas that are so consistent in the setting.

But also I think this thread of conversation is...something of a failure in itself? Let's step back a moment.

Yeah, it's just that 40K is much more explicit about the fascistic overtones than most, since every enemy of the Imperium pretty easily maps onto some bugbear of fascists.

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If so, you have to remember a lot of people play 40k not for the Imperium. Not, perhaps, as many as do, but Eldar have been consistently among the most-played factions, and they represent something different, if not necessarily better. I myself am an avowed Tau player, which, yes, I mainly do because they play much more like armies I'm used to playing in other wargames, where assault is something of an afterthought. But the communalist aesthetic, bond-knife brothers together for the Greater Good, has its appeal too. Oldcrons represented a rejection of the setting's politics entirely: We will bring you all the peace of the grave, and the universe will be better for it; there were definitely people who were into them for that sentiment. Even the Dark Eldar, who manage to be almost completely reprehensible no matter how you look at them, nail down the whole "I wanna be evil and look cool doing it" schtick better than anyone else.

40k is definitely Imperium-centered, possibly because xenofiction is hard, but if it shapes the Imperium's enemies in the fears of fascists, that's not necessarily bad. This whole thread started because of people feeling that Chaos was getting a bad rap, after all. It is always morally correct to punch Nazis in the face. Terrorize the Imperium all you like.

 

[Nyvis]

If so, you have to remember a lot of people play 40k not for the Imperium.

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Something you could easily forget if you look at the focus of GW marketing and development, of course.

40k is definitely Imperium-centered, possibly because xenofiction is hard, but if it shapes the Imperium's enemies in the fears of fascists, that's not necessarily bad. This whole thread started because of people feeling that Chaos was getting a bad rap, after all. It is always morally correct to punch Nazis in the face. Terrorize the Imperium all you like.

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Well yes but they're the fascists' fears if they were right about how evil all the undesirables are. Not so much the eldars, but the ones that are supposed to be inside human society rather than outside it.

 

[Night]

Well yes but they're the fascists' fears if they were right about how evil all the undesirables are.

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And if we take the Imperium's word for it, which, again, look at the thread you're in.

 

[Nyvis]

And if we take the Imperium's word for it, which, again, look at the thread you're in.

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Well yes but no, that's the point. Yes, this is the thread about it, but the issue is that GW makes it pretty clear that's how Chaos is, not how it's perceived, which is the root of our issue here.

We can reclaim the setting by changing it, but it has to be a process of reclaiming. Which require establishing the problem in the first place.

 

[Mutton]

Chaos is entirely a reflection of the Imperium's evil is the thing. All its sins come home to roost. It's the metaphor manifested, same as with the collapse of the Eldar, that the Imperium is the source of all its own woes and every evil it does in the name of fighting Chaos only serves to empower it further

 

[Simon_Jester]

Orks are British football hooligans and basically the last remnant of W40k's origins as a parody so I think they're fine as they are

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Orks work as a parody, but they do slot neatly into the fascist brainworm of "big dumb violent brute-people with no culture and no depth, who exist mainly as a giant slab of meat for the Real People to either overpower or be crushed by."

I fear that "Your fears turn into reality" would be too close to the actual fascist worldview. It is an interesting idea from a worldbuilding perspective but from a thematic perspective it still reeks wrong.

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Ehhh.

If you explicitly make it "your paranoia is literally causing these things to happen to you, and they do not happen to people who are not paranoid," I think it diverges pretty sharply from the fascist worldview, by explicitly rejecting that worldview and calling it out as a delusional brainworm.

You'd need to reimagine the Emperor's original plans, though, because in a world where things worked that way, just not telling people about Chaos would actually be a pretty damn good plan. You'd need to, I dunno, remake the Emperor as a more villainous figure (another way of moving farther from fascism) manipulating things with an eye to bringing about some goal that would best be served by the overall institutional paranoia and Warp-phobia of the Imperium. Maybe his eventual goal was to deliberately self-destruct humanity the way the Eldar self-destructed themselves accidentally. Only instead of a Prince(ss) of Pleasure, humanity would give rise to a Lord of Tyranny. And then you'd reimagine what he did and how he did it through that lens, rewrite the rules of how things work, and so on.

Well yes but no, that's the point. Yes, this is the thread about it, but the issue is that GW makes it pretty clear that's how Chaos is, not how it's perceived, which is the root of our issue here.

We can reclaim the setting by changing it, but it has to be a process of reclaiming. Which require establishing the problem in the first place.

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[gestures to the past 100+ pages of thread]

Yes. That's true, but it's also, essentially... a done thing, y'know? The problem has been very well, dare I say repetitively, established. There's room for fresh and earnest takes on it like @RiverDelta 's to kick things back into liveliness, and that's well and good. But you can literally just flip back through a random sample of the thread including the OP essay and have a very good idea of "establishing the problem."

I know that in the wider world there's people who just don't Get It, but there's little gain to be had in talking to people here like they don't Get It until they really, really go above-and-beyond to prove that they do. Like Simplicio.