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Sympathy for the heretic

Well, that certainly doesn't sound like the kind of social system I'd want to live in. It might be marginally less bad than living under the Imperium, but honestly that would mostly depend on the whims of the robots and hobos.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Well, that certainly doesn't sound like the kind of social system I'd want to live in. It might be marginally less bad than living under the Imperium, but honestly that would mostly depend on the whims of the robots and hobos.
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It's not great, no, but it's over the top amusing and fits well with the Imperium's aesthetics. The people are all trying to get by in a bad situation, and some of them are genuine assholes, but none are baby raping monsters.
 
Tithed_Verse said:
It's probably best to link the comic explaining it. Sadly I can't find a link to that specific comic. So... basically there are two rules: It's illegal to profit by harming other anarchists, and there are no other rules. Everything else is a suggestion, typically backed up by threats of force. For example "Trespassers will be shot"

A collection of hobos and police AI robots enforce Rule 1. The hobos hold the robot's leashes, the robots actually do the enforcement. All the hobos do is give them the go ahead to enforce. The penalty for breaking rule 1 is never really specified, but it's presume to be pretty nasty. That part is pretty sketchy.

The government consists of collections of 'advisors', and they introduce guidelines to society (not RULES, but they're still basically treated as such)

The way you advance in your career is by challenging a superior, and having the other subordinates agree that your idea is better than the superior's.

It's never really clarified how this is linked into the central government, but the central government follows the same pattern. The government is incredibly afraid of the populace, and tends to treat celebrations and rioting similarly. Most 'first advisers' the leaders end their careers being lynched. It's sorta interesting, really. I'm describing it poorly though.
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I'm not sure what this is, but it isn't anarchism.
 
Hakazin said:
Look, if anyone wants an explanation, go ask in one of the socialist meal threads in War & Peace.
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That's communo-anarchisim in the socialist thread, there's also syndical-anarchisim, corporate anarchy, crypto-anarchy and even more forms of anarchism

S.S.D.D (Webcomic) - TV Tropes

Simon_Jester said:
whims of the robots and hobos.
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The robot ai investigates wrongdoing and has it's own will. But it has to ask permission of the hobo.

The hobo's only job is to tell the robot yes or no, he's not allowed to give orders to the robot like 'investigate that guy'

If the robot can't convince the hobo a crime happened, then no crime happened.

Basically the hobo is the jury
 
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What I find odd about the canon worship by some in this thread is that, aside from the fact some people apparently think 40k hopefully unintentional excusing of fascist thought must be preserved even in SV spitballing equivalent of Wicked, is that they have a peculiarly narrow field of canon to begin with. What exactly makes the more recent "the Imperium can't help but be a bogglingly incompetent shit hole run by arseholes, and most German soldiers were alright, guys!" stuff more valid than say, the Tech-Priests not having a great excuse for being a stifling cult, or humans occasionally dealing peaceably enough with aliens, or Space Marines basically being space cops as viewed through the lens of British punk culture?
 
Academia Nut said:
Under the category of "I know 100% that the authors did not intend this, but this fits too well not to bring up":

In real world chaos theory there is the concept of the strange attractor. Which is to say that in mathematically chaotic systems there are certain patterns that the system will trend towards over time. Strange attractors are notable for the fact that they are fractal in nature, which is to say that they are self-similar at any scale.

Thus if you consider the Chaos Gods as presented as being a sort of Warp version of strange attractors it suddenly makes the relative creative stagnancy of Chaos pop into actual sense. It's neat and bizarre and definitely not something that was intended but still works, and more than that opens up a lot of design space without having to really change anything (I think among certain posters we simply feel that keeping Chaos bad while having alternatives to the Imperium is a strong indictment of the fascist policies of the Imperium as it makes the statement that even with the universe stacked to make fascists as right as possible, they are still wrong). The extremes of Chaos are a sort of degenerate state where one flavour of emotional resonance comes to dominate and you fall into self-similar patterns, but one should be able to go against the flow with effort. It's just that like the Imperium a lot of Chaos forces ultimately end up taking the expedient and lazy routes and thus get caught in the same old grooves.

I do also like the idea that like the Imperium Chaos has been getting progressively worse, a it's elements exaggerated to the point of parody. It would make more sense for the Interex to display various Warp tainted artefacts if when they interned them Chaos wasn't nearly as bad as it was by 30k, and then by 40k it is even worse as Chaos and the Imperium aggravate each other's own worst tendencies for the benefit of an elite few. I also now remember toying around with the idea that the Chaos gods may have at some point manifested some of their more positive traits in greater daemons, and then bound those daemons into artefacts. So somewhere out there there is a sword that holds a massive chunk of Khorne as an honourable warrior, because Khorne found the concept was stifling his ability to maintain a good frothing rage and thus his ability to inspire and thus feed upon unthinking and indiscriminate wrath.
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Hm, yeah, this is actually some good stuff. I especially like the idea of the Big 4 having "cleansed" themselves of what the greater portion of their being thought was "weakness".

Honestly, I think you could do with an angle of having a small (comparatively) chunk of the Imperium break off, specifically because of how terrible the rest is. You could probably even justify it in-universe by saying some Inquisitors get in on the act; some "radicals" from one of the "maybe we should make things better?" groups.

I do think there's room for non-evil, non-Chaos Warp "worshippers". Or even one or more groups trying to form warp gods by directed prayers and the like. Just, tricky business...
 
Honestly, the idea of the Chaos gods having multiple aspects, some either benevolent or at least less instriscally dedicated to fucking with you (yes, you) would make it more reflective of actual pantheistic theology through the ages.

Also, just an observation, people seem more offended by the idea of Chaos maybe in some instances being less fucked than the Space Nazis than say, making victims of actual historical witch hunts literal sorcerers. Looking at you, Salem...
 
Turning the victims of one's culture's past into strong people is easier to square with the brute-mind than turning one's enemies into acceptable things that may not need purging.

Because a myth about how the tribe's enemies were actually strong and not weak, that sells well.
 
Solution to all problems:

Bring back Law from the older Warhammer Fantays/Moorcock.

Inquisitors are cultists of their Law god the Emperor. The entire Imperium is a gigantic failing Law cult being eaten away at by their ideological rivals and fellow fanatics that are the worshipers of Chaos. Living saints are just Daemons of Law.

The real good guys are the pirates and rebels and splinter governments and human-alien consortiums that hang out in the edges of imperial space and do their best to avoid both the Man and the personifications of entropy.

Or actually don't do any of that. Just go play 1st edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay using the 2nd edition rules.
 
Academia Nut said:
Under the category of "I know 100% that the authors did not intend this, but this fits too well not to bring up":

In real world chaos theory there is the concept of the strange attractor. Which is to say that in mathematically chaotic systems there are certain patterns that the system will trend towards over time. Strange attractors are notable for the fact that they are fractal in nature, which is to say that they are self-similar at any scale.

Thus if you consider the Chaos Gods as presented as being a sort of Warp version of strange attractors it suddenly makes the relative creative stagnancy of Chaos pop into actual sense. It's neat and bizarre and definitely not something that was intended but still works, and more than that opens up a lot of design space without having to really change anything (I think among certain posters we simply feel that keeping Chaos bad while having alternatives to the Imperium is a strong indictment of the fascist policies of the Imperium as it makes the statement that even with the universe stacked to make fascists as right as possible, they are still wrong). The extremes of Chaos are a sort of degenerate state where one flavour of emotional resonance comes to dominate and you fall into self-similar patterns, but one should be able to go against the flow with effort. It's just that like the Imperium a lot of Chaos forces ultimately end up taking the expedient and lazy routes and thus get caught in the same old grooves.

I do also like the idea that like the Imperium Chaos has been getting progressively worse, a it's elements exaggerated to the point of parody. It would make more sense for the Interex to display various Warp tainted artefacts if when they interned them Chaos wasn't nearly as bad as it was by 30k, and then by 40k it is even worse as Chaos and the Imperium aggravate each other's own worst tendencies for the benefit of an elite few. I also now remember toying around with the idea that the Chaos gods may have at some point manifested some of their more positive traits in greater daemons, and then bound those daemons into artefacts. So somewhere out there there is a sword that holds a massive chunk of Khorne as an honourable warrior, because Khorne found the concept was stifling his ability to maintain a good frothing rage and thus his ability to inspire and thus feed upon unthinking and indiscriminate wrath.
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Simon_Jester said:
Well, if we're still trying the reimagine-while-preserving schtick...

Basically, Chaos would be the idea of revering the individual, the personal-emotional, that which is deeply innate to ourselves.

"Believe in yourself and follow your truth!" as opposed to "Thought for the Day: If you cannot speak well of your Master, be silent!"

Now, exactly which emotions and personal inner truths get followed determines what kind of Chaos-worshipper you get.

...

People who were basically decent become, well, weird often enough, but generally not evil. They turn into any of a number of things, based on their own innate preferences and the future they choose for themselves, but whatever they become reflects that. They become what they really were all along, in a manner that reflects their character. If they were beautiful on the inside, they will become beautiful- though perhaps strangely beautiful, an alien beauty- on the outside. If they were ugly on the inside, they become ugly- or strangely, sickly-sweetly repellent- on the outside.

...

People who were already evil become super-evil, throwing aside their restraints. This may be why it's always really fucking disastrous and atrocious when prominent Imperial officials turn to Chaos- because they're usually already pretty rotten and ruthless persons, and the only thing holding them back is the strictures of the Imperium telling them who they can and cannot brutalize and abuse. Remove the restraints of law from someone who's already enough of a sociopath to torture cities to death in the Emperor's name, and you get someone who will turn into a garden-variety Chaos daemon from canon 40k in short order.

So jaded Imperial noblewomen turn into what we in the canon setting call "Slaaneshi daemonettes." Not because that happens to everyone who listens to Slaanesh... but because they were already spoiled princesses who cared only for their own gratification. Giving them Chaos power just means they gratify themselves in stranger ways. If they weren't such horrible people already and had more personal virtues, then even after 'falling' into Chaos, they'd have had the willpower and focus to avoid transforming into cackling exhibitionist hermaphroditic torturers. Assuming, y'know, that's not what they originally would have wanted.

Imperial commissars who fall to chaos turn into daemons of Khorne because, well, they were already sadistic bloodthirsty monsters willing to kill their own side as long as it kept the blood flowing. All that changed is that now they've grown horns and are playing the same game or the opposite team, only maybe with a bit more muscle and guts to go out and do for themselves what they used to coerce others into doing for them.

For every individual bad example, every instance of Chaos gone wrong, the apostles of Chaos can point to the horrible fate that has befallen this warped, empowered, twisted, demented wreck of what was once human, and say "This isn't your fate... This is the future you chose for yourself."

Because Chaos always gives you the future that is the direct, foreseeable extrapolation of your own nature and actions.


Chaos, in this imagining, comes in four flavors.

Faced with the unacceptable...

Tzeentch says "Change it! Be as subtle and as strange as you have to be, to make it not happen."

Khorne says "Break it! Strike it with a blow that would shatter the heavens themselves! Destroy it!"

Nurgle says "Become whatever you must, to endure, to survive this!"

Slaanesh says "Become whatever you dream of being, to transcend, to go beyond this!"

...

And people heed those calls within themselves, embrace those ideas. And they do as those calls say.

They change the world, making it glorious or ghastly, but making it dance to their tune.

They break the world, creating a new one or bringing it all down in rubble and death, but refusing to allow it to advance even one more step in the way it did before their coming.

They resist and overcome their weakness, becoming sources of resilience in the face of misery, or demons striving to drag down everyone else into their own private hells.

They develop and refine their strengths, becoming persons and things of unspeakable beauty, or callous monsters in search of ever higher peaks to ascend.
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this, this is fucking interesting and adds the morally grey area for people who want chaos to be less ridiculously evil. Now all we need to do is hold GW at fucking gunpoint and have it written in a competent way, it should be all good
 
FBH said:
Slaanesh is the most obvious.

I'd actually say Tzeench is the second. The whole idea of a group that are conspiring to bring down everything through strange and arcane practices is... well, extremely problematic.
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In what context?

Wizard of Woah! said:
First of all, excellent post FBH, glad to see its gilded.

Secondly, oh, my God, you fucking nerds and your canon hard ons. Warhammer 40k as it stands has more babyish, black and white morality than your average Power Rangers season. Someone suggests maybe giving the enemy faction that uncomfortably resembles every "Other" as viewed through the lens of fascism, while somehow also being the psychic mirror of every living thing some layers, while drawing on real life strains of thought depicting "witchcraft" as an alternative to oppressive social structures, and you guys act like GW is making a fucking documentary on a real place.

Frankly, GW's obsession with justifying every shitty thing the Imperium does has robbed the setting of much of its flavour and darkly comic edge anyway. Sometimes, Nazis just be Nazis, and if you want your precious space Gestapo to have any "moral ambiguity" there has to at least be the possibility that they're wrong to shoot kids in the head for having six toes or whatever.
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What justification do you think is going on, on the part of Games Workshop?

Can you maybe give an example of how its been justified in a way that has removed flavour and edge perhaps?



Wizard of Woah! said:
So in other words, the Imperium may do bad things, but it's justifiable because anything else is Bad, not to be contemplated, and any attempt to actually fix things will just introduce Weakness.

This is a child's version of moral greyness. But with no room for doubt, there can be no ambiguity.

And yes, maybe it is fucking dodgy that GW has set up its flagship setting to prove the fascists right at every turn. Seriously, Ayn Rand books have more room for interpretation.
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For someone wittering about black and white interpretations, I think you might need to cast this keen eyed vision of yours at the mirror. Are you waffling about what Guy of G is saying without understanding that he's technically wrong?

Have you read the intro to 40k books. Does it actually say what you're deriving from Guy of G's comments?

Also, what are you fucking on about. GW doesn't try prove fascists right about anything.

Wizard of Woah! said:
A reminder that the idea of canon being more than a friendly suggestion is a very modern idea partly the result of stronger copyright law.
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Do you mean in the context of 40k or in general?


veteranMortal said:
"The Bloodiest Regime imaginable"

"The Alternatives are just infinitely more horrific"

:thonk::thonk::thonk::thonk:
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It doesn't actually say anything about the alternatives being more horrific. That is what Guy of G added, and its his opinion.

Now, obviously that does fall into a trap.

Because clearly there are alternatives to the Imperium in terms of government. However the Imperium is explicitly trapped on its current path.

That is what people are actually saying, I think, when they say stuff like the "alternative is worse". In the current state of the Imperium, an alternative is unachievable without intervention from something out of context, because everything is currently locked into various nightmare religious, political and social clusterfucks, that reinforce the appalling mess its in.

For example,

It's a bit hard to push social justice when there is an Imperial Commander sitting in orbit who requires your planet produces its tithe, or your local government is replaced, by force if necessary. A groundswell of public opinion has to be on an almost unimaginable scale to make a difference, and if its bad when a couple of bad actors do something violent on the "lunatic left" in modern politics, I suspect it'd be worse if there were actually malevolent entities psychically reinforcing negative behaviour on galactic scale.

FBH said:
But the dudes who conquered Sabbat are not.
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So the context that I can grab here is that you guys are saying lookit all the fascist imagery in "good guy" stuff.

One bloke is saying " but Blood pact" and you're saying that the rest of the bad guys in Gaunts ghosts aren't like Heritor Asphodels Zoicans or the Blood Pact, but tribal guys.

The origins of the "archonate" are the tribes of the Sanguinary Worlds, unified by Nadzybar, purportedly. Most of them being monstrous chaos cults that eventually subvert and absorb Imperial Worlds and their populations into said cults, so you end up with the Zoicans and the Shriven, who appear to be mostly subverted Imperial worker populations (some fun to be had there if you try hard enough, eh FBH?) with Sek and Gaur producing Imperial Guard style standing armies in response to,variously, the rise to power of Gaur himself, and the Imperial Crusade.

But I'm pretty sure the Chaos guys were the ones running the actual death camps during the Sabbat Worlds conflict. Traitor General is basically about operating behind the enemy lines of a bunch of oppressive occupying guys as well, and I'm sure some of the parallels are obvious between Excubitors barking VOI SHET MAGIR and angry German shouting.

This is because there isn't an active attempt to endorse fascist views in 40k background, but there definitely is use of imagery and concepts for both the Imperium and its enemies, because its supposed to be the opposite of black and white if you actually pay attention.
 
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Guessmyname said:
I suppose in a way I'm actually fine with the Imperium being super-duper fascist? Just as long as its tagged along with the footnote 'and that's terrible, here's why'.

Like, you could use the Imperium as a case study as to why fascism is a bloody terrible way to run things, how it makes the Imperium its own worst enemy; ever looking backwards rather than forwards, pushing its citizens so hard and so thoughtlessly they turn to Chaos because even a smidgen of joy or emotion not related to FAITH IN THE EMPEROR is now euphoric by comparison, its insane and ancient bureaucracy running up such inefficiencies they are inherently doomed to fail, it's sheer relentless focus on blind faith and zealotry to the state hampering their own ability to self-reflect, identify problems, change or improve, with all this misery done in the name of a dead person who never wanted their faith in the first place.

It absolutely should be a rat's nest of incompetents, lunatics and zealots from top to bottom, only ever getting anything done through sheer numbers whilst blindly ignoring the way they bleed themselves dry. How their sheer dogmatic focus on not allowing you to think for fear of Chaos both shackles their own feet and, ironically, makes it easier to fall to Chaos. Where the real danger isn't the common man falling to the ruinous powers, but those at the top, enabled by the sheer number of flaws in the system to indulge in their own excesses and nobody seems to notice, occasionally even themselves.

Like, the fact half their dogmatic super-soldiers turned traitor and wrecked all the shit shouldn't be taken as some masterstroke of Chaos or a sure sign of 'wow, those Primarchs in particular were massive pricks, weren't they?'. It should be seen as something inevitable from the very start, because of the nature of what the Imperium is.

...Instead, what we seem to be getting is just a playground for space marines to space marine in their heroically mariney manner whilst all the chaos lot shout vaguely about gods or something in the seconds before they explode.

I have to admit regarding the 'modern' 40K portrayal of Chaos I'm waaay behind the times; all I recall of Slaanesh for example was it being about being jumped up to your eyeballs on a thousand drugs and having rock concerts as you charge into battle rather than being about sexuality and gender - though given my age at the time its possible that flew over my head entirely. If that's what they've become now though I've even less interest in sticking my foot back in the fandom because... yeeesh.
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Slaanesh is the Chaos God of excess, perfection, and pleasure. This is not restricted to any singular pursuit of pleasure (notably the fleshy kind), but any activity which garners one strong emotional impulses while also being expressive enough to catch the eye of She-Who-Thirsts. To use an example from Fulgrim, once upon a time there was a remembrance painter. She was a wonderful artist, top of her league, but suffers from anxiety and is tasked with the stressful job of painting the Primarch himself. Nothing goes to plan however and she starts to go mad from the pressure, compounded by the growing supernatural perverseness sweeping through the ship. In single-minded drive for perfection, she secludes herself and cuts off all contact, including with her sculptor lover. Then she slips further, and starts slitting her wrists to use her own blood as paint for that perfect shade of red. Then her own excrement and bile for those perfect browns and blacks. Then she snaps fully and begins to mutilate herself in stress over the desire to achieve that greater high, just the feeling of completion for that grand magnum opus. But then she's snapped out of it when she finds her lover impaled on his own statue (by the primarch no-less), and grief-stricken, kills herself as the only escape from further descent.


Slaanesh is a drug lord. It dispenses positive emotions in exchange for further debased acts. One might start as a souffle chef, catching the eye of the Prince of Chaos with their delicious creations. But once caught under the patronage of the Dark Prince, they will eventually start baking their patrons into their Souffles, probably alive, because their dying screams are literally the only thing that elicits emotion for the chef.

It is for this reason that Slaanesh is the most disgusting, debased, and interesting of all the Chaos Gods. Khorne is garden variety murder with a mockery of honor. Nurgle gives you horrendous diseases that kill you very slowly (If you're lucky) but takes decent care of his cultists. Tzeentch is a backstabbing asshole who probably kills more of his own than the Imperium and Eldar do, combined. Slaanesh however seduces you to greater and more horrible reaches of inhumanity while holding a gun to your head and mindfucking you so you love nothing more than being its junkie.
 
white_rabbit said:
What justification do you think is going on, on the part of Games Workshop?
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Practises and repeated atrocities that were once just the Imperium being shitty and evil are now tar-papered with "well the galaxy is a bad place so you have to do all these bad things to survive" with considerably more words spilt over making us feel sorry for the poor, beleaguered servants of the Emperor than say, all the countless billions they butcher.

white_rabbit said:
Can you maybe give an example of how its been justified in a way that has removed flavour and edge perhaps?
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The Space Marines went from satirical space cops to basically the setting's poster-children and default "protagonists", with a whole lot of emphasis being put on "good ones" like the Ultramarines. There's a lot less emphasis put on the fact half of them are basically crazed street urchins stuffed with steroid glands and pointed at an enemy.

white_rabbit said:
or someone wittering about black and white interpretations, I think you might need to cast this keen eyed vision of yours at the mirror. Are you waffling about what Guy of G is saying without understanding that he's technically wrong?

Have you read the intro to 40k books. Does it actually say what you're deriving from Guy of G's comments?
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Honestly, the intro doesn't matter.

white_rabbit said:
Do you mean in the context of 40k or in general?
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In general and 40k in particular.

white_rabbit said:
That is what people are actually saying, I think, when they say stuff like the "alternative is worse". In the current state of the Imperium, an alternative is unachievable without intervention from something out of context, because everything is currently locked into various nightmare religious, political and social clusterfucks, that reinforce the appalling mess its in.

For example,

It's a bit hard to push social justice when there is an Imperial Commander sitting in orbit who requires your planet produces its tithe, or your local government is replaced, by force if necessary. A groundswell of public opinion has to be on an almost unimaginable scale to make a difference, and if its bad when a couple of bad actors do something violent on the "lunatic left" in modern politics, I suspect it'd be worse if there were actually malevolent entities psychically reinforcing negative behaviour on galactic scale.
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I don't get this constant refrain of "the Imperium is too fucked to change for the better, but can somehow put down all rebellions, everywhere, sooner or later."
 
Wizard of Woah! said:
I don't get this constant refrain of "the Imperium is too fucked to change for the better, but can somehow put down all rebellions, everywhere, sooner or later."
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There's no way for anything to be better because it will be corrupted eventually. The Imperium started out as a fairly enlightened, artistic civilization where the slave labor was mostly kept to hardened criminals and vat-born drones, then it had a galaxy-breaking civil war thanks to Chaos viewing the Emperor as an existential threat that led to centuries of misery. The Imperium however did recover to a peaceable state to the point that Astartes were almost disbanded and put in the freezer - but then the Beast showed up and nearly destroyed the Imperium again. Anything that tries to be both large (and thus noticeable) and modern in its morality will be corrupted or crushed, with no exception. Even the Tau have more or less teetered into a state arguably worse than the modern Imperium.

You can be morally modern in 40k, but only on the small scale, and that scale precludes you from self defense. Any polity going on its own will eventually be overrun, especially now that the Nids are showing up with even more numbers (and possibly encircling the galaxy) and the Orks are out of control once again.

However this is also forgetting that there's plenty of good planets by our modern standards in the Imperium. Maybe not regarding treatment of criminals, but Knight worlds, agri worlds, pleasure worlds, astartes planets, and even some guard planets like Vostroya are pretty alright places in the grimdarkness. It just doesn't work on a grand scale because something unwilling to conduct extermiantus, conscript the masses, run an inquisition, or field armies of lobotomized criminals/"volunteers" is liable to be swallowed up by the numerous threats bearing down on humanity.
 
Wyzilla said:
Slaanesh is the Chaos God of excess, perfection, and pleasure. This is not restricted to any singular pursuit of pleasure (notably the fleshy kind), but any activity which garners one strong emotional impulses while also being expressive enough to catch the eye of She-Who-Thirsts...
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See, we KNOW the canon characterization, we're not just stupid and blind and unaware of these things. Just repeating the canon characterization at us isn't going to tell anyone anything they don't already know.

That's, like, the place we're all using as a launchpad.

That's where the objection comes from.

...

The objection here is "Gee, isn't it awfully interesting that the only deity in 40k associated with sexuality as opposed to just killing things, associated with queerness, associated with ICKY NO NO stuff like art as opposed to BIG MEN WITH BIG GUNS, just happens to be the evil god of corrupting you into a parodic giggling torturer? Did we really have to set things up that way? Really?"

Remember Umberto Eco's characterization of th.e essence of fascism:

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons—doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

...

And everything that isn't just a complete disruptive waste of time in this thread, comes in after this objection. Not from blandly repeating the in-story justification ("But the god of sex is also the god of perverted deranged degenerate all-corrupting horror!"). But from trying to build and adapt beyond that.

The entire reason this thread exists is to try to exercise some imagination about the core concepts of 40k. Not so that three people can try to be imaginative while constantly being randomly dogpiled and shouted down by an endless stream of other 40k fans. Fans who seem to think that if they just repeat the canon explanations for why the Imperium is the way it is, if they double down on the Thermian argument hard enough and pretend that the fact that in-story justifications exist for the Imperium being this way mean that there really, truly, is no other valid way for the setting to be depicted by or for ANYONE... That somehow they'll "win."

I'm tired of people trying to 'win' but shouting down the core premise of this thread. No one here needs to be educated on the explanations given by Games Workshop for why the Imperium is a fascist tyranny and why this "can't" be any other way. They are well known.

Wizard of Woah! said:
Practises and repeated atrocities that were once just the Imperium being shitty and evil are now tar-papered with "well the galaxy is a bad place so you have to do all these bad things to survive" with considerably more words spilt over making us feel sorry for the poor, beleaguered servants of the Emperor than say, all the countless billions they butcher.
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Wyzilla said:
There's no way for anything to be better because it will be corrupted eventually. The Imperium started out as a fairly enlightened, artistic civilization where the slave labor was mostly kept to hardened criminals and vat-born drones, then it had a galaxy-breaking civil war thanks to Chaos viewing the Emperor as an existential threat that led to centuries of misery. The Imperium however did recover to a peaceable state to the point that Astartes were almost disbanded and put in the freezer - but then the Beast showed up and nearly destroyed the Imperium again. Anything that tries to be both large (and thus noticeable) and modern in its morality will be corrupted or crushed, with no exception. Even the Tau have more or less teetered into a state arguably worse than the modern Imperium.

You can be morally modern in 40k, but only on the small scale, and that scale precludes you from self defense. Any polity going on its own will eventually be overrun, especially now that the Nids are showing up with even more numbers (and possibly encircling the galaxy) and the Orks are out of control once again.

However this is also forgetting that there's plenty of good planets by our modern standards in the Imperium. Maybe not regarding treatment of criminals, but Knight worlds, agri worlds, pleasure worlds, astartes planets, and even some guard planets like Vostroya are pretty alright places in the grimdarkness. It just doesn't work on a grand scale because something unwilling to conduct extermiantus, conscript the masses, run an inquisition, or field armies of lobotomized criminals/"volunteers" is liable to be swallowed up by the numerous threats bearing down on humanity.
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Everything you just said is an excellent example of @Wizard of Woah! 's point.

When the Imperium was first depicted, Games Workshop didn't attempt to make excuses for the Imperium. It was nasty, brutish, and dark-comedically inefficient. It was like the government in the film Brazil; it was fundamentally screwed up, and everyone knew it.

At some point during the nineties, though, the fanbase and even the artists started swallowing their own fictional propaganda. That the Imperium's way really WAS the only way. And the fans' understanding of the setting, and ultimately the writers' depiction of the setting, started evolving accordingly.

So that what had once been only what the Imperium claimed to be true, and had then become what supposedly was true, became what the writers were going to deliberately alter the setting to make true.

And now we have fans saying "oh, the galaxy is a bad place so you have to do all these atrocious things to survive," and being firmly convinced that this is somehow objective truth that exists and is inherently more valid than another way of telling the same story... Which is exactly the point Wizard was making just hours ago!
 
In short, yes, we know that the GW writers have contrived endless justifications for the Imperium's savagery (well, aside from grinding up children for immortality bubble baths I guess, but I bet it's vitally important some inbred governor with Dark Eldar ties eke out another century) and that the official fiction generally depicts Chaos as irredeemably evil. This thread however is an AU spec thing based around the observation that, in real life, fascists often lie about and depict their enemies very similarly to Chaos. We know we're not being canon compliant. You can stop reminding us.

Hell, it's not like the Imperium lying to its subjects is without precedent in the lore. The Uplifting Infantryman's Primer anyone? Although I've totally seen people excuse telling guardsmen Orks are puny, weak creatures, and that Eldar tech is antiquated and barely works.
 
Wizard of Woah! said:
Although I've totally seen people excuse telling guardsmen Orks are puny, weak creatures, and that Eldar tech is antiquated and barely works.
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But if they don't lie to the soldiers then the soldiers won't allow themselves to be slaughtered brutally, and that'll stop them protecting the civilians! There is no other way to go about this.

:V
 
veteranMortal said:
But if they don't lie to the soldiers then the soldiers won't allow themselves to be slaughtered brutally, and that'll stop them protecting the civilians! There is no other way to go about this.

:V
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Said civilians were later rounded up in death camps and exterminated for fear they would be swayed to evil by the screaming soccer hooligans. It's alright, though, the Salamanders were a bit sad about it for a while.
 
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