Slenessh doesnt represent homosexuality, he represents hedonism, Guys Like Lucius the Eternal seek pleasure for being beaten in fights and respawns when the victor feels satisfied. So ya hes basically the god of sick shit the fact you automatically associate this with alternate sexualities is a unfortunate implication. Sleneesh worshippers aren't some random person who likes those of the same gender they are the Wasteland bandits in Mad max wearing leather and sadomachochist crap raping and rampaging for kicks.
Sympathy for the heretic
- Thread starter BiopunkOtrera
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Yeah, but when your most visible (and often only) visible representation of queerness (which covers more than homosexuality, FYI) is the rapacious intersexed deity of soul rotting hedonism and empty sensation, you're kind of sending out some bad vibes. I mean, for God sakes, the intended, visceral horror of Slanessh's daemonettes is that they don't fit the gender binary, and exist to seduce the setting's ultimate men into alternative sexualities. These are deliberate creative choices on the part of the writers and artists, and like it or not, art does not exist in a vacuum. If I wrote a story where aliens modelled after stereotypical black people really liked being slaves, could only prosper and conduct themselves morally as slaves, and were sometimes seduced into running off by the Diabolical Demon of Drapetomania, I would rightfully be called a bag of shit, even if I only did it because I think the Space Confederates have sexy southern accents!
Incidentally, Mad Max 2 having all the evil guys be leather queens is problematic, too.
Quantumsheep
Rank Amateur
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He didn't say 'homosexuality.' He said 'sexuality,' 'queerness,' and 'ICKY NO NO stuff like art.' If you're going to play this insipid 'those who perceive unfortunate connotations are the real bigots' game, at least don't be a hypocrite about it.
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Perhaps if his primary daemon type were something other than what it is, people wouldn't make the association? You can say all you want what Slaanesh is supposed to be, but somehow all the trappings scream "alternate genders/sexuality is bad"
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Look, as we all know, stories are dropped fully formed into the heads of writers by the Narrative Goblin--and we must not question the Goblin's decisions.
But G unintentionally raises a good point: Slaanesh isn't all about sex. And since this thread shouldn't just be defending itself from grognaks, I'd like to expand on that. One thing a lot of the Imperium doesn't really truck with is the idea of pleasure for its own sake. Not just decadent orgies, but just doing things that aren't work or praise for the sake of it. I'm imagining wild dancing breaking out along the production lines, or droning praise choruses suddenly launching into forgotten folk songs from before Imperial contact. Perhaps these outbreaks of pure, ceaseless joy might become brachical in character. Ecstatics tearing their oppressors apart, limb from limb. I mean, Chaos should still be dangerous to interact with much of the time: as is any potent force for change, good or evil. What is divine is also terrifying.
Here, as resident master of the sad super-children Wildbow hasn't hoovered up yet, here's a Me take: outbreaks of playing in some miserable juvenile worker dormitory. You could draw influences from real life child witch hunts in places in Papa New Guinea or Nigeria. Do some of that ambiguity of childhood stuff for the ringleaders actually in contact with Chaos.
Or for that matter, maybe something about an ecclesiastical artist driven to produce art about anything else besides paens to the Corpse God. Lots of stuff.
(Incidentally, maybe our first hint Fulgrim was a bad'un was that he introduced activities other than perpetual work and toil to his homeworld)
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I think you're discounting the Dark Eldar, those are also keen to some of the stuff Slaanesh is usually associated. Not that makes the situation better, since they can charitably called a race of BDSM gear-wearing torturers and drug addicts.
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
And portraying the appreciation of art as a gateway into the practices of the effete and degenerate
No parallels whatsoever.
...
What I don't think people realize is how persuasive including certain themes in your work actually is. Literature exposes people to new ideas and themes, ones they might never have encountered before. This is why fascists in the real world have sought to censor and ban works which oppose them- because by controlling the ideas that people are exposed to through the literature they read, they can control the worldview of their populace and exercise a degree of control over what the public sphere thinks.
Now, I don't believe Games Workshop is run by fascists. However, while GW may not intend to justify, exalt, and promote fascist ideas through the themes and mechanics of 40k, the fact is that the themes and mechanics of 40k as it is broadly interpreted by its fans map very closely to fascist ideology and do end up justifying, exalting, and promoting that ideology.
What this thread is about is not saying 'Well that's bad we should boycott Games Workshop for being fascist,' or even 'Games Workshop is bad for having done this.' The purpose is to create our own homebrew setting of 40k, where the themes and assumptions of vanilla 40k are challenged and thrown out in favor of our own personal aesthetic preferences.
As such, saying 'but in canon 40k Cooking Mama baked an entire sector of the imperium into a pie after being converted into a slaaneshi daemonette' is more or less meaningless. We don't care. We don't care. We don't care. It's got nothing to do with what we're talking about, or the purpose of the thread, and at this point it's kind of just tiresome to have a new person jumping in every day in order to tell everyone off for having fun wrong and being too thinky when they should just accept the 'Canon' 40k without question.
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Inspired by someone in the viewers bar, I suggest any story that comes out of these ideas be titled If I Had a Hammer
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The problem is, this thread isn't in the Fanfiction Discussion subforum. It's in the main Fiction discussion forum, so people coming in and seeing it doesn't think "hey, 40k AU worldbuilding", but they go "hey, a 40k discussion on Chaos". The way the OP is wirtten also doesn't exactly scream "bring ideas for reworking Chaos in 40k" either.
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Well, given the roughly infinite and one posts explaining the idea and premise to them, they probably should get the hint by now.
white_rabbit
Shadow Cabal Berserker
Okay, to be clear, I'm not interested in you just repeating yourself with different words.
So when you say "argle bargle stuff tarpapered over" you need to actually demonstrate that this is the case.
Space Marines stopped being satirical space cops more than 20 years ago. They weren't even that sort of thing for very long at all, or exclusively. Also that isn't an example of GW "justifying every shitting thing the Imperium does". It's a nonsensical response for the context of my query, which I remind you, was this little screed.
As far as emphasis being put on the Ultramarines goes. Well in the context of your comment, you are apparently rewinding things back longer than people reading this thread have been alive, before Ultramarines, at the cusp of Second edition, got their initial splurge of background in Codex Ultramarines-but-use-it-for-any-other-chapter.
Funnily enough, GW recently did 500 facts for their 500th store celebration. As I recall, one of them was that all marine releases got painted at least as Ultramarines so they could field everything at once as part of unified force. I mention this because of course, one of the big things years ago was that GW painted up the entire Ultramarines Chapter, which during the era of mostly metal, was a real fucking crazy thing to do. In other words, Ultramarines have been getting emphasis since lets say, day 1.5?
So given that you seem to telling me that anything after Rogue Trader is a problem, I think your problem might be that you don't know what you're talking about. Ultramarines, despite not getting their own starter set until the Battle of Macragge box, have always been very prominent, and early on were established to be numerically significant. Your characterisation of half-crazed street urchins is interesting though, because it seems like you're jumping from the "satirical space cops" concept, which if I give you the benefit of the doubt, is Rogue Trader era background filtered through internet chinese whispers and lack of knowledge, to the background of say, Ian Watsons Space Marine, which didn't exactly fit in smoothly when he wrote it, never mind second edition, or decades later, where Lexandro gets recruited from a Hive Gang into the Imperial Fists.
It seems difficult to give you credit for doing the research if you don't know that the different recruiting practises of the various Chapters are intended as direct contrasts to the Ultramarines, but are specifically still done on the basis of a transfiguration of normal humanity into something more, and less than human that was established for Marine background originally.
Out of interest, can you expand on why you think Marines, who are presumably the "space gestapo", murder people for having 6 toes? Yes yes, hyperbole, but presumably you have some context for your comment?
I do, because I can remember the "satirical space cop" era Marines, space wolves as I recall, executing humans suffering from environmentally caused mutation (milky eyes, skin deformities etc) after their dome cities were damaged, on the basis of their "genetic deviance"
With regards the intro not mattering, you might be giving out mixed messaging with vigorous commentary that shrivels away when someone pokes at it, but far be it from me to interfere with gastropod roleplay.
Now, you've said that you're confused by the constant refrain that the Imperium is too fucked up to change, but can constantly put down all rebellions everywhere for the better.
Now that is confusing, for a couple of reasons.
First that comes to mind is that I didn't fucking say that, so you're either projecting someone elses words onto mine, which is stupid, or you're just bloody pontificating and are in fact incapable of engaging in a discussion, in which case do let me know that you don't intend to actual debate the facts, just the rubbish you've heard on the internet.
Then when I look at the actual statement its a bit weird as well. If I was arguing that the Imperium was too fucked up to change, as opposed for it being difficult for truly large scale change in an empire spread thinly across the galaxy, with an iron grip on reliable transport and interplanetary communications in the hands of the government, from the perspective of the vast proportion of the population, then why is it problematic that the Imperium can constantly put down all rebellions for the better?
The second proposition doesn't actually force a contradiction with the first, without you giving some additional context as to why.
But of course, I didn't actually post this particular argument, so I guess it doesn't matter that you made a bollocks of addressing it, technically.
I get the feeling "space is big" is a revelation you haven't quite processed.
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I've been actually posting in the thread! How has my name gone so unnoticed.
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Look, mate, I'm not going to spill more words justifying why I don't find much merit in 40k unironically presenting facist paranoia as true. The thread's supposed to be about reinterpreting Chaos as a sort of liberating force for change in a stagnant, oppressive society, not explaining Death of the Author again and again to geeks.
"Suffer not the mutant to live"
And the difference was that it was generally portrayed as an act of pointless evil born from bigotry rather than prudent eugenic actions because they'd all turn to Chaos if left to fester.
Speaking of which, mutants turning to a religion that glorifies their differences rather than bedgrudengly tolerate or mark them out for extermination. That seems like something this thread could talk about.
"Suffer not the mutant to live"
And the difference was that it was generally portrayed as an act of pointless evil born from bigotry rather than prudent eugenic actions because they'd all turn to Chaos if left to fester.
Speaking of which, mutants turning to a religion that glorifies their differences rather than bedgrudengly tolerate or mark them out for extermination. That seems like something this thread could talk about.
white_rabbit
Shadow Cabal Berserker
Where is this event I've missed? Like, I'm not asking for a transitional fossil here, but something other that being informed of how things have changed, without actual specific examples or evidence in a situation where virtually the entire history of the setting is at our fingertips.
Because it'll be interesting if you want to give it a go dismissing anything I've said, for example, to Wizard of Woah as "making excuses" for the Imperium in the context you describe, but what I'm really asking is where did this idea come from that you folks are passing around like, if you'll forgive the analogy, intoxicating drug paraphernalia?
Basically, can you illustrate "point A", which I excerpt as this.
aaand then show me some reasoning, and hopefully evidence, as to how its become point B, which is encapsulated apparently as the following.
Now, I get the impression from Wizard of Woah squalling about "Grognards/whatever" , and you grumping at the THERMIAN HORDE that you might just want to get on with your alt-universe 40k fic writing, although I do cock a cynical eyebrow at phrasing about how its "disruptive" that people aren't agreeing with you, given that's a bit of a triggerword for the haphazardly programmed clockwork sharks that might choose to moderate this discussion.
But having had as much of a scroll back through the thread as I could survive after 4 months of being away from the internet except for work, hell, I barely survived FBH's opening post) I haven't actually seen any one make a decent stab at explaining this, except in the sense you did, which is a lecture of the filthy non-intellectuals spoiling your broth.
Note, I make no accomodations for what any other disgusting 40ker protestor might have carped at you. I address their comments specifically or they don't exist.
You'll forgive me, but whilst I can indeed read the words you're writing, I can't help but grin at the concept of Death of the Author being invoked.
Primarily because if I incorporate what I know to be your brief background, i.e. someone who is factually incorrect and applying information in a haphazard and awkward fashion, your comments are as equally defunct as if I segregate them from what I know of your background opinions and intent, and treat them in isolation.
What you actually communicate very clearly is, "shutupshutupshutupshutupIwannapreachwithoutinterruption".
But hey, you cherry picked some stuff to reply to.
Quoting "suffer not the mutant to live" is not an adequate answer. Neither is your claim that at some unknown point, killing mutants was protrayed as mere idiotic bigotry, whereas now its shown as a necessary requirement. Stop being a wuss or idle, and apply some your vociferousness to proving your argument is actual reality, and not your imagination.
Its a bit weird actually, since killing mutants is something that the Imperium has always been show to be rather selective about, with various elements encouraging it to a greater or less degree, and the fundamental underpinning of its galactic reach being reliant on human mutation.
But ultimately you're actually utterly wrong.
The end justifies the means and "lets kill mutants because dangerous shit will happen from psychic aliens monsters" is literally baked into 40k from the first five fucking pages of background material.
So do tell me where you saw this portrayal of the killing of mutants as generally "Pointless bigotry" instead of prudence? Because I'd be super interested to find out!
No, wait, come back!
Note for those who don't know better, and that is definitely you, the Chaos Gods in detail arrived shortly after this, although hostile psychic alien entities in the warp, including the first entry on daemons as one of the examples of hostile psychic alien creatures were obviously present from the get go.
Page 147, "countless" psykers are executed because its too dangerous to keep them alive, justified for the survival of humanity etc.
Pg 170, control over scattered planets that might let anti-psyker or taxes slip is maintain with brute force, or Imperial agents using clever diplomacy, bribery, economic warfare, terrorism torture, murder, sassassination.
I thought I'd add that last one because of the nuance it adds to my previous comments about your lack of understanding with regards the efficacy of popular uprisings. Crushing people with the treads of the Imperial Guard is really not the only option shown.
Incidentally, its uncontrolled mutation which is the consistantly decried theme of the Imperium as an institution, which also hypocritically employs billions of them as a labour force.
Stable mutants have always been "tolerated or exploited"
As far as mutants glorifying their differences goes, I'd point out that chaos worship is very happy with physical mutation as a sign of favour.
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So, anyone got any thoughts on how Nurgle could fit into this Chaos paradigm? I mean, the others are fairly straightforward, but then you have the disease guy. I mean, you do have the hope and universal brotherhood angles, but I feel like his more visceral aspects should be represented.
Khona Moshr
Pink Flamingo Cabal Healer(they/them)
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- Alabama
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Ok back after work, sleep and classes
that doesnt address my criticism, since its just not very imaginative to me,
you could have something where a followers of Nurgle are able to take into themselves all of the sickness and pain of people around them in a form of self sacrifice, and have them be very selfless in their actions
that doesnt address my criticism, since its just not very imaginative to me,
you could have something where a followers of Nurgle are able to take into themselves all of the sickness and pain of people around them in a form of self sacrifice, and have them be very selfless in their actions
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
Iirc, Nurgle is the god of life- diseases being merely one form thereof.
As such, you could probably work his worshippers being, well, hippies and anprims- back to nature types- with a side order of 'I don't need no vaccines, papa Nurgle wouldn't let me die' thrown in for good measure.
As such, you could probably work his worshippers being, well, hippies and anprims- back to nature types- with a side order of 'I don't need no vaccines, papa Nurgle wouldn't let me die' thrown in for good measure.
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Do it like with Morgion in Dragonlance, where the faithful are protected even as they remain carriers. Pray to kind Father Nergal for the suffering to end, and so it does, but the life within you remains as before. As long as their faith is strong, they live in harmony with the diseases within them suffering neither pain nor symptom, despite being as infectious as ever. So the more faithful they are, the less obvious their condition. But still dangerous to others, since we want this to be grey rather than making Chaos the actual heroes.
white_rabbit
Shadow Cabal Berserker
Technically there is an argument that the sword you are thinking of is the Avatars of Khaela Mensha Khaine.
One of the interpretations of the shattering of Khaine is that the Khaine/Khorne took the field in person against Kaelis Ra at the height of the War in Heaven, and when he destroyed it, his burning form absorbed an aspect of death and the arcane metallic form of the Yngir, trapping the entity in this avatar.
Khorne/Khaine later tried to give the Eldar the opportunity to pull back from the various stuff that was leading to the fall by paradoxically restraining the already eternally in existance but about to be born chaos God, but the apotheosis of Slaanesh blew apart this manifestation apart and scattered the fragments of Khaine throughout time and space, whilst Khorne returned to the orbit of the Chaos gods.
Howling Banshee's have technically referred to Khorne, for example, as the "father of Khaine". Khaine encapsulating generally a more nuanced and varied approach to the war god concept, with the morph from Khaine to Khorne being partially attributed to the galactic cataclysms of prehistoric 40k.
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You mean the "reimagine as non-vantablack" paradigm?
Well, clearly 'disease!Nurgle' is a real thing, much as 'psychotic!Khorne' is a thing. But there's a much broader spectrum of Nurglite things and ideas, that can act in the world without turning you into a suppurating mass of disease spoors that makes everyone reach for a firehose loaded with bleach. Just as Khorne is also the god of ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH! who can and will empower you to break the system restraining you without automatically turning you into a deranged illiterate axe murderer.
Play up the angle of Nurgle being the god of endurance, resilience, and adaptation. Tzeentch and Khorne are all about changing your environment, Slaanesh is about remaking yourself into some pseudo-idealized form of what you would, by nature, be; "you do you" taken to infinite regress until you transcend the petty constraints of whatever was troubling you before. But Nurgle is about remaking yourself into that which can survive anything, outlast anything, adapt to and withstand anything.
If a fundamentally decent person turns to Nurgle, they turn into a genuinely compassionate being taking the sufferings of others onto themselves, promoting life and peace, seeking to help others endure, even curing diseases and other forms of suffering (which is pretty anti-canon for a Nurglite). They may look funny, but they're recognizable as one of the good guys.
If a person who was a bitter jackass, one who demoralizes others, who spreads pain and trouble, who offloads their burdens onto others, becomes a Nurglite... They turn into the kind of being that we know as the canon Nurglites. Beings that exist to spread even worse misfortunes, and for whom that is their coping strategy. Exporters and carriers of pain.
Heh. That's why I referenced art, not just sexuality. Because it's not just that any open sexuality and any unconventional sexuality is portrayed as leading to everyone getting forcibly transformed into giggling hermaphroditic torture-daemons.
It's that practically everything in the setting that isn't both literally and metaphorically sterile, every form of self-expression whether it be 'clean' or 'dirty,' gets shoved into the box labeled 'Slaanesh' and shoved under the bed, to make room for more BIG GUYS WITH BIG GUNS. The ultimate rejection of the fine arts students and the English majors, so we can all go fantasize about kaboom.
I repeat my quote from Eco:
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.
Just to be clear, you're asking for how early depictions of the Imperium were more ironic and "yes, these guys are fascist and not necessarily likeable at all," and less overtly signalling the reader that "all these evils are necessary evils!"
And thus explain what I mean, when I say that this state of affairs changed over time?
I call it 'disruptive' because it's basically you coming in and saying "stop having a discussion of non-canon interpretations of a work of fiction, don't you understand that the canon is such-and-such?"
We're not even preaching, we're just trying to sit around and play our game without having people kick over the board every so often. You don't have to read this thread if you don't want to.
But people do. And this has happened enough times that it's become impractical to actually HAVE a discussion of the non-canon interpretations, because we keep getting interrupted and being obliged to defend ourselves from people repetitively bringing up the same accusations that we are objectively wrong because:
1) Games Workshop did it this way (yes, we know, we don't like it, that's the point), and...
2) Because Games Workshop found justifications for the stuff we don't like and baked them into the setting, which it has unlimited power to do because the setting is an entirely fictional creation, the stuff we don't like is justified and therefore not bad.
And (2) is, in its way, also the point. Because it serves to underline how 40k itself has become a tool for justifying horrible things in a fictional context, and to subtly groom millions if not tens of millions of people to justify and argue for authoritarian doctrines and policies rather than seeing them as what they are- namely, a crime and a desecration of human values.
But we've done this dance before.
If you are the 20th person to interrupt this program with the same very important announcement, and expect to get as gracious a treatment as the first person to do so, you are going to wind up disappointed.
There's this thing called 'irony.' I think it plays a role here.
I believe it's been discussed earlier in the thread where the evidence for the irony can be found, and I'm actually legit willing to find it for you, but not this minute- time constraints.
>leave me alone we're making fanfic
>we are making a point your fiction grooms people INTO LITERAL NAZIS
Im pretty sure this is what people take umbrage to not the navel gazing thing my dude. Some people just like to talk about plastic models and make jokes on the setting not bring about a 4th righ.
white_rabbit
Shadow Cabal Berserker
I don't think I exactly obfuscated what I asked. If I had to ridiculously simplify it, so I didn't get another eye-rolling evasion, it'd be "where are the excuses" ?
But don't answer that. You've crystallised it enough in what I quoted as Points A and B.
Can you justify that as something which is evidenced, or is it just what you've decided as the basis for what this thread evolved into. Because I don't think it started as the thing you're talking about at the moment, as opposed to a interesting and funny look inside FBH's brain.
So you know, spare me the protestations that I'm ruining the fun would you? Anyway, I don't care if you've totally made it all up. (hint, I think you've made a couple of scarecrows to molest if Wizard is anything to go by) but I do question people if they say something that seems odd to me.
Which is why I posted.
As far as disruption goes, can we be clear here. I haven't said "stop having a discussion of non-canon interpretations of a work of fiction, don't you understand that the canon is such-and-such?"
Not once, at all , in any shape or form. So I'd like you to be equally clear that if you're accusing me of such, I'd ask you to show me where I've done that.
If you can deign to make that particular admission, then I'd say there isn't really any dismissal to be had of my own comments. If you can't bring yourself to make that comment, then I'm happy to have a robust discussion on it, as I said above.
Note, I have looked back on the previous posts a little bit, so if you want to claim that what I've said has already been addressed, then point it out, and I'll take a look. I wouldn't go expecting any silver bullets though.
In other words, I don't consider myself the 20th person to have started a dance, and Wizard and your own comments stand as evidence against that, unless you just told other people to fuck off, we're creating here you Thermian Fiend.
I don't mind about a lack of graciousness of course, given the constraints of SV, its a bit like being booped with candy floss. It's a little awkward and you wonder why someone would be so stupid as to do it.
Oh please do go find it for me. You can't do the whole implied " hur hur you are already dead" thing and not give me the payoff of explaining which of my pressure points you've attacked.
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
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- (and made of) Parts Unknown
This fiction probably isn't that influential guys it probably hasn't meaningfully shaped the thought of real world political groups who vote or people who influence them I don't know why we're all getting s-
Hmm
Nah we can ignore this it has real no world implications
Hmm
Nah we can ignore this it has real no world implications
This fiction probably isn't that influential guys it probably hasn't meaningfully shaped the thought of real world political groups who vote or people who influence them I don't know why we're all getting s-
Hmm
Nah we can ignore this it has real no world implications
Create meme "Lenin Warhammer 40K (Lenin Warhammer 40K , warhammer 40K , the emperor )" - Pictures - Meme-arsenal.com
Hmm I wonder if this meme is...bipartisan?
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Quantumsheep
Rank Amateur
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I mean, you've been slipping in snide insults left and right and generally going out of your way to be really combative and derogatory in almost every post you've made in here (including this one), so you seem pretty well positioned to answer that mystery yourself if you actually cared to?