Soo... putting aside that whole knifefight, I've come back to thinking about something I threw purely out of irritation.
Like, thinking about it, I can't actually name a single named, distinct character who works with or serves Chaos. They're all either a crazed murderer or a crazed dictator, with a crazed dictatorial murderer occasionally thrown in for good measure.
And I'm saying that as a fan of Chaos. For a faction supposedly about deviation from the norm, they're awfully uniform in temperament and personality. And, to boot, if you do have someone with a distinct personality, the canon metaphysics strip it away until you're left with one of the aforementioned types.
Meanwhile, on the Imperium's end of things, you've got everything from Ciaphas Cain to Eisenhorn to Guilliman to Lukas the Trickster to Karamazov. All distinct characters, instantly identifiable from one another, all within the set of 'Catholic Space Nazi'.
Literally the only guy I can think of is the blood pact traitor, Mabbon, from the Gaunt's Ghosts series; and the fact that he doesn't play cricket with babies almost shatters the edifice that GW have erected.
Literally the only guy I can think of is the blood pact traitor, Mabbon, from the Gaunt's Ghosts series; and the fact that he doesn't play cricket with babies almost shatters the edifice that GW have erected.
OTOH, from everything I've heard about it, Cricket does appear to be a strange and ineffable right passed down through the ages, blindly aping the rituals carved into the minds of those sacrificed to the piping, dancing gods of incomprehensible madness.
So, why work at making chaos... "less bad" rather than the Imperium? Or rather, why not make the Imperium a better place instead of making chaos good?
More nuance would admittedly be nice, but I'm scratching my head a bit at the "the Imperium is child eating monsters but we can make chaos (the canon child eating monsters*) into good guys while the Imperium remains terrible" bit.
*though I wouldn't be surprised if the Imperium ate children now and then either, really.
So, why work at making chaos... "less bad" rather than the Imperium? Or rather, why not make the Imperium a better place instead of making chaos good?
More nuance would admittedly be nice, but I'm scratching my head a bit at the "the Imperium is child eating monsters but we can make chaos (the canon child eating monsters*) into good guys while the Imperium remains terrible" bit.
*though I wouldn't be surprised if the Imperium ate children now and then either, really.
Because the Imperium is fascist as heck and ATM Chaos is kinda coded as the fascist idea of minorities, which is super duper problematic for a variety of reasons. And, like, the setting already goes out of its way to justify a LOT of the Imperiums scummy actions and 90% of the time if a sympathetic viewpoint is to be had, it'll be with the Imperium.
So, why work at making chaos... "less bad" rather than the Imperium? Or rather, why not make the Imperium a better place instead of making chaos good?
More nuance would admittedly be nice, but I'm scratching my head a bit at the "the Imperium is child eating monsters but we can make chaos (the canon child eating monsters*) into good guys while the Imperium remains terrible" bit.
*though I wouldn't be surprised if the Imperium ate children now and then either, really.
Well, there is actually a decent amount of nuance within IoM. Like was said several posts above, Cain is not, say, Karamazov, who is not Calgar who is not Russ or Guilliman etc etc. IoM has wide variety of characters: fanatics, pragmatists, people who just want to survive, genuine helpful souls, ruthless backstabbing schemers - it's got everything humanity has to offer.
Chaos doesn't. For faction whose main schtick is being, well, chaotic, it's dumb to be less diverse and fragmented than Imperium of Catholic Space Nazis. Even setting aside politics of work for a moment (and that's a hella elephant in the room to ignore), it's imbecilic setting writing.
That's not what a 'cosmic horror story' is. Cosmic horror is where the universe is uncaring, and you might die not of malice, but because the uncaring universe is not a friendly place for humanity. Chaos is many things but it is not uncaring, it is actively malicious. Chaos actively cares and often plots and schemes on a very petty, human scale. In Lovecraft, in contrast, pretty much every major cosmic entity is on a level so significant that their motivations, desires, and plots are basically irrelevant to anyone in the setting. Everything they do is world-shaking and apocalyptic, basically by default, and they trample over humans just as a side effect of existing.
If 40k was cosmic horror, Horus would never have been corrupted by ~the chaos gods~. He would have realized the cruelty of the Emperor's ambitions after sympathizing with some group after he was ordered to commit the thousandth genocide of the deviant, or maybe he would have gotten too big for his britches and started a rebellion to take the throne for himself, then turned to the dangerous but powerful tools given by chaos-invocation to even the odds once he realized that despite the forces which defected to his coalition, he was still outnumbered and outgunned.
Firstly, because plenty of other people have already done that, in numerous iterations.
Secondly, because as noted during the knife-fight, well, Games Workshop did a thing, whether it was on purpose or by accident. Namely, not only is the Imperium actively a fascist state... But they've got it set up so that the Chaos cults are "coded," are displayed in a way that is strongly reminiscent of, the way fascists view various minority targets for their abuse.
Because the Imperium is fascist as heck and ATM Chaos is kinda coded as the fascist idea of minorities, which is super duper problematic for a variety of reasons. And, like, the setting already goes out of its way to justify a LOT of the Imperiums scummy actions and 90% of the time if a sympathetic viewpoint is to be had, it'll be with the Imperium.
More nuance would admittedly be nice, but I'm scratching my head a bit at the "the Imperium is child eating monsters but we can make chaos (the canon child eating monsters*) into good guys while the Imperium remains terrible" bit.
Chaos is turned into something that ranges from genuinely horrible up to monsters and down to something rather different.
To some extent, this is deliberately a "fuck you" directed at the fascist coding. Like, addressed to the kind of person who makes the Thermian Argument, as if the 40k fiction we see is what it is and cannot be viewed as social commentary defending or attacking certain political points of view, because it's metaphorically as if it was just objective recording of events that really happened and so one cannot ask questions like "why did Games Workshop and the fan base see fit to do things this way?"
They would advance this argument by saying something like:
"In-universe, anyone with a weird gender identity or unconventional sexual tastes is at risk of being mind-controlled and possessed by demons to turn into a baby-raping, drug-snorting monstrosity, so it perfectly MAKES SENSE that "PURGE THE PERVERTS" is an acceptable message to for real people to say in the context of roleplaying or discussing 40k. People who like 40k will naturally feel justified in saying such things, because in-universe the only good genderqueer person is a deeply closeted genderqueer person!"
(Note that this argument was literally made, pretty much in so many words, during the recent knife-fight. The Thermian's argument might continue...)
"And in-universe, there really are secret conspiracies of Tzeentchians pretending to be normal and pious only long enough to set in motion elaborate schemes to sacrifice us all to their Judaism dark god! So it MAKES SENSE to have an inquisition constantly running around questioning not just everyone's loyalty to the state, but piety to the state religion, and searching for secret religious minorities
And don't even THINK about rebelling against all this horrible shit the Imperium does! That's how Tzeentch gets ya! So in setting there is a perfectly good reason why all these people are marching around actively setting on fire anyone who seems to intent on changing the way things work; the God of Change is an enemy who wants to destroy and mutate all that is good and pure!"
"And in-universe, anyone who differs noticeably from the physical baseline of 'human' which is conveniently pretty damn Aryan is a degenerate mutant, likely to fall to Chaos and be turned into a gibbering Nurglite demon or chaos spawn, and so busting out literal Nazi concentration camps and castrating or killing all the people on the planet who have weird skin or funny-loking eyes unusually big teeth or whatever MAKES SENSE in-setting!"
*(Hey, ever notice how even though there ARE some characters clearly inspired by racial minorities in 40k, all the popular poster-child stuff seems to be white? The Ultramarines don't have to be beefcake white guys; they could look like beefcake Indians or beefcake Aztecs or beefcake Chinese guys. The Salamanders, the designated "beefcake black guys," albeit more like coal-black instead of Africa-black, are well enough liked but extremely rarely portrayed among the fanbase as far as I can tell, except perhaps for Vulkan himself who gets bonus points for being personally likeable. Why was that specific choice made so consistently? Why are, e.g., commissars and inquisitors usually white guys?)
The rejoinder then becomes:
"Hey, guy making arguments that sound eerily as if you really REALLY crave your burrito of thinly veiled fascist ideas and propaganda all wrapped up in a science fictional tortilla! You want to present everyone in the setting who makes you question the rules of sexuality as all being baby-raping drug-abusing degenerate literal monsters? You want to portray anyone who doesn't match your ideal of what people look like as either being a secret monster out to destroy humanity with plagues, or about to be such a monster? You want to portray the desire to change the Imperial system into something less face-on-pavement-grindingly brutal as the sole property of demon sorcerors out to ruin the human species?"
"Well, screw you! None of those things have to be that way. And the implications of such a setting for the real world where all these daemons don't exist are deeply troubling, especially given how unironically people drop into it and get used to thinking in "PURGE THE XENOS" terms. So I'm going to make my own set of stories, where that ISN'T the dominant message, where being a mutant doesn't automatically make you a target, where being 'too thinky' and wanting to change the world doesn't make you an evil cultist-sorceror, where being queer isn't a sign you're about to mutate into a Daemonette, or where even if that's true it isn't necessarily a bad thing."
So, why work at making chaos... "less bad" rather than the Imperium? Or rather, why not make the Imperium a better place instead of making chaos good?
More nuance would admittedly be nice, but I'm scratching my head a bit at the "the Imperium is child eating monsters but we can make chaos (the canon child eating monsters*) into good guys while the Imperium remains terrible" bit.
*though I wouldn't be surprised if the Imperium ate children now and then either, really.
Well, that's what GW's currently doing as an effort towards mass market appeal. What do you think Guilliman coming back was supposed to signal, if not an attempt to shift the Imperium more towards being the explicit good guys of the setting, so that potential customers don't have to get past the whole 'there are no good guys' aspect of the setting before buying in?
The problem with this idea is that, without excising the fascist elements of the Imperium, what you get by making the Imperium the explicit good guys of the setting is a great heaping pile of fascist apologia. And, since the Imperum's fascist elements are baked into the core of its identity as the Imperium of Man, you can't really excise the fascism from the Imperium without rendering the Imperium fairly unrecognizable. Which, quite frankly, would cause a riot among the fanbase.
Now, before someone jumps on the obvious comparison, the reason why @FBH's change to Chaos works where a similar change to the Imperium wouldn't is because, as the Imperium is generally considered to be the viewpoint into the 40K universe, due to the fact that they're the human faction and therefore more easily empathized with, we can interpret the 'objective' descriptions we see on Chaos as being colored by the Imperium's viewpoints. Postmodernism's a hell of a useful tool when applied correctly!
This isn't to say that I'd make no changes to the Imperium. Off the top of my head, there's removing the apparent infallibility of the Inquisition, introducing my (I think fairly unorthodox) opinions about the subject of women in the Space Marines as canon, maybe cutting down on the importance/power of the Space Marines in general, and emphasis both the sheer incompetence of the Imperium as a whole and how ambitious figures of power regularly carve out dominions inside it. But all of these are comparatively minor adjustments, focused in specific areas, or fleshing out already-canon but underdeveloped elements of the setting.
Actually, I might put up some more detailed specifics on the subject after I sleep on it.
Frankly, I'd say that the Ultramarines should look like beefcake Latin/Italian guys, if they have to look like any ethnicity in particular. Play into the Roman aesthetics, people!
I thought of a way to improve Chaos as a faction, and I thought I'd run it by the thread.
The Warp is the reflection of the psyches of most sentient beings in the galaxy. The Chaos Gods, being literally made out of Warp energy, are affected by its tides and shifts. While their general portfolio usually remains the same, the emphasis of different facets of their being shifts with the mental status of the galaxy at large. As the galaxy is swept by different events, moods, and fads, various personalities predominate.
Right now, the Chaos Gods are almost entirely awful, because the Warp is reflecting the state of the galaxy at large, which is pretty awful most of the time. The Imperium preaches violence, self-mortification, excessive zeal, and is a mess of pointlessly byzantine institutions and policies. As the Chaos threatens the Imperium, it doubles down on all that, inadvertently making the situation worse. Chaos once represented freedom, resilience, passion, and hope, but millennia of the present situation has corrupted it almost entirely.
Yes, most Chaos cults are run by the desperate or the sociopathic. They readily turn to the obvious, evil, powerful side of their gods. But hope exists. Some cults worship the gods in their more benevolent aspect. It's not without risk, of course; a god's positive side cannot be totally severed from their negative one, so occasionally you do get daemons crawling out of the woodwork. But usually it works well enough.
The Inquisition doesn't care to tell the difference and simply exterminates them all anyway.
The Imperium and Chaos both claim to be fighting the good fight, but all they're doing is dragging each other down the drain. Both are increasingly out of touch with their original nature, and both view the other side as a monolithic block of vantablack evil. They are both locked in a trap entirely of their own making, as ancient enemies beset them from all sides. A real dialogue could probably save them even now, but they've both poisoned the well so thoroughly that even just attempting that could break either of them.
I'm tired, so if this isn't clear enough just let me know and I'll fix it when I'm a little more alert.
Yes, and every single citizen of the Imperium is a psychotic, frothing flagellant who do nothing but beat themselves and attack suspected servants of Chaos.
Wait, no, they aren't, because the fascists are allowed to have character depth and differentiation, whereas Chaos is uniform in makeup and ambition, utterly identical in all ways. Even putting aside politics, changing Chaos to be less uniformly evil allows for them to have actual characters as opposed to four different colors of cardboard cutouts.
Even Kharn has moments where hes likable if you read his stories my dude. Like I said the Black Legion books already give chaos a Human face as well. A more recent books probs Shroud of night depicting Alpha Legionaries. Stories like this have been out there. Hell lords of Silence focuses on Mortarian pre plague war ffs
Frankly, I'd say that the Ultramarines should look like beefcake Latin/Italian guys, if they have to look like any ethnicity in particular. Play into the Roman aesthetics, people!
Even Kharn has moments where hes likable if you read his stories my dude. Like I said the Black Legion books already give chaos a Human face as well. A more recent books probs Shroud of night depicting Alpha Legionaries. Stories like this have been out there. Hell lords of Silence focuses on Mortarian pre plague war ffs
Kharn's defining character trait is that he's so much of a a crazy murderer that other crazy murderers think he's a crazy murderer. That's how he was introduced, that's how he's normally characterized, and even if he wasn't at some point in time, that's what he is now.
And, to boot, if you do have someone with a distinct personality, the canon metaphysics strip it away until you're left with one of the aforementioned types.
I should not have to dig through the back catalog of Black Library to find out what someones' personality was before they turned into either a crazed murderer, a crazed dictator, or maybe a crazed dictatorial murderer with no motivation besides one of four coats of paint. I, put simply, don't care about seeing how magical space voodoo slowly drove someone to the point of becoming one of four colors of cardboard cutout. I don't want to have cardboard cutouts for characters.
So, why work at making chaos... "less bad" rather than the Imperium? Or rather, why not make the Imperium a better place instead of making chaos good?
More nuance would admittedly be nice, but I'm scratching my head a bit at the "the Imperium is child eating monsters but we can make chaos (the canon child eating monsters*) into good guys while the Imperium remains terrible" bit.
*though I wouldn't be surprised if the Imperium ate children now and then either, really.
The issue with chaos being just pitch black is that it basically not only makes the faction completely uninteresting, but it obliterates any possible nuance to the story. You can't have hard choices. You can't have sympathetic characters or Imperials having conflicted decisions about how to respond to a chaos incursion or a possible chaos cult because Chaos is always Murder Death Rape Burn Pillage Destroy! And that just wastes all the opportunities that having actual human characters on the other side could provide. I mean, if you want an implacable force of destruction that can't be reasoned with and the only solution to is utter annihilation, the tyranids exist. Why does 40K need two of them? (This arguably also characterizes orcs).
It is fucking boring.
edit: I mean in the situation that chaos corruption is overrunning the planet, in canon 40k, the moral choice, if the corruption can't be eradicated, is to exterminatus the planet because that is more moral and causes less suffering than leaving the planet to fall to the forces of immeterium. How dumb is that that you can commonly have situations where annihilating whole worlds doesn't cause emotional conflict because it is both the pragmatic and the moral choice?
I mean, if you want an implacable force of destruction that can't be reasoned with and the only solution to is utter annihilation, the tyranids exist. Why does 40K need two of them? (This arguably also characterizes orcs).
Nitpicking a bit here, but the 'nids are the latecomers. Still, when they were introduced Chaos wasn't only "always Murder Death Rape Burn Pillage Destroy!", so having a faction of "scary bug aliens here only to eat us" was something different. The orks at the time were also a lot more the comic relief faction.
Now if only we got Slaanesh-aligned character taht weren't basically interchangeable with Dark Eldars, that would be an improvement.
I should not have to dig through the back catalog of Black Library to find out what someones' personality was before they turned into either a crazed murderer, a crazed dictator, or maybe a crazed dictatorial murderer with no motivation besides one of four coats of paint. I, put simply, don't care about seeing how magical space voodoo slowly drove someone to the point of becoming one of four colors of cardboard cutout. I don't want to have cardboard cutouts for characters.
But thats not how anyone is depicted in the Post heresy books depicting black Legion or well anybody. Actually read lord of silence or shroud of night even the Bile books whatever. Even Abaadon justifies his stuff and he thinks hes blueballing the gods by not giving into them like Horus did. Their nuance, theirs justification in his own pov the Imperium degrading into shit disgusted and excited him when they began the first Black Crusade. Its still a journey into madness
GW really really wishes they could just replace Slaanesh with the Great Horned Rat, but don't seem to be willing to actually carry through with that for fear of angering their fanbase.
Because the Imperium is fascist as heck and ATM Chaos is kinda coded as the fascist idea of minorities, which is super duper problematic for a variety of reasons. And, like, the setting already goes out of its way to justify a LOT of the Imperiums scummy actions and 90% of the time if a sympathetic viewpoint is to be had, it'll be with the Imperium.
Well yeah, but they're one thing, and one thing that isn't even prominently displayed in the artwork as opposed to the written works of Dan Abnett.
Meanwhile, if you're looking for recycled Nazi themes in the Imperium, you've got the explicit name 'storm troopers,' the general prevalence of genetically enhanced ubermenschen who crush the hordes of subhumans by sheer superiority and exotic weapons made by the finest German Martian engineering, the aesthetics of the commissars in general, and of the Armageddon Steel Legion and the Death Korps of Krieg, just for starters.
The point is, they are one group, relatively less-depicted.
I'm not saying you're wrong to mention them, I'm saying they're one example of some fascist imagery making its way into depictions of Chaos, as against many many depictions of queer-coded, racial-minority-coded Chaos antagonists. And as against the many pieces of fascist imagery found in the Imperium.
So while you are not objectively wrong in the sense that "no, the Blood Pact does not dress in something inspired by WWII German uniforms," the fact that this statement is true doesn't invalidate my point. And I'd prefer that my point not be overridden or ignored due to us getting down in the weeds and bickering over a single specific group portrayed in a single specific series of Black Library novels, when I'm trying to talk about 40k as a whole.
The point is, they are one group, relatively less-depicted.
I'm not saying you're wrong to mention them, I'm saying they're one example of some fascist imagery making its way into depictions of Chaos, as against many many depictions of queer-coded, racial-minority-coded Chaos antagonists. And as against the many pieces of fascist imagery found in the Imperium.
So while you are not objectively wrong in the sense that "no, the Blood Pact does not dress in something inspired by WWII German uniforms," the fact that this statement is true doesn't invalidate my point. And I'd prefer that my point not be overridden or ignored due to us getting down in the weeds and bickering over a single specific group portrayed in a single specific series of Black Library novels, when I'm trying to talk about 40k as a whole.
Especially given the blood pact aren't even the whole of the chaos forces the Sabbat crusade is facing.
TBH I never got a great feeling of them being super duper German Nazi coded. The enemy groups in Gaunt's Ghosts are usually more coded like evil natives. They lack discapline and are often explicately described as tribal.
