So, someone wanted some evidence of how the portrayal of the Imperium changed over time, and I thought I'd go digging for a bit since I'd been meaning to reread the earlier parts of the thread anyway to see where some of the current discussion came from.
So, for starters, we have the discussion contained in the original post of the thread, which I believe you claim to have read, though perhaps not to have understood.
I've made some elisions (...) to make the parts I'm actually referring to more apparent. Some spellings have been corrected.
FBH said:
Nemesis the Warlock: A revisionist history of the Imperium of Man
"Beware the alien, the heretic, and the mutant." -Warhammer 40K
"Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!" - Tomás de Torquemada, Nemesis the Warlock
In the 1980s there was a British comic running in 2000AD called Nemesis the Warlock. It's set in the cavernous tube ways of Might Terra, where the titular Warlock, servant of Khaos, is an alien revolutionary fighting against the Tube Police, who are basically the KKK + The Spanish Inquisition, led by Tomas De Torquemada, a reincarnation of all the worst people in history. It's mostly about anti-racism, with Nemesis fighting against the various fascist machinations of the Tube Police.
Nemesis... as with several other works in 2000AD and other British comics at the time... was a legitimate attempt to present a leftist worldview.
Warhammer 40K cribs from Judge Dredd, from Nemesis the Warlock, ABC Warriors and so on, taking elements as diverse as Eldar hat to the basic feeling of the Imperium from them and adding them to a few other things GW had, things from Traveler and so on. It's basically 2000 AD mashed up with Game's Workshop's previous fantasy stuff, in space... 40K is is the remanufacture of an aesthetic that would have been familiar to its target audience into a game. D&D does something similar for Tolkien, Conan and general fantasy literature. Only you can see that process more clearly with D&D because Tolkien is much more popular and has much wider circulation than does 1980s British SF comics. While the intention may have been to be a parody of conservatism, the main reason that it was ever this is because Judge Dredd, and Nemesis the Warlock and so on were previously been just that.
So here we have FBH, a Briton who was alive if young at the time this punk aesthetic was within collective memory in Britain, and who was well acquainted with that subculture.
FBH is explaining to us that one of the key sources from which 40k originally drew its inspiration was the anti-authoritarian comic genre in which characters very similar to the 40k Imperium were generally
the villains, or the extremely conspicuously anti-heroic and obnoxious viewpoint characters. The xenos-purging, mutant-crushing brute squads of ruthless inquisitors and armored roidasaurus Space Marines are fully in keeping with the 2000AD comic genre conventions... except that in a 2000AD comic they'd be the bad guys. Even in a settling like that of
Judge Dredd, they'd be the obnoxious, trigger-happy bastards who act as antagonists within Dredd's own government. They would not be getting cast in a positive light, because they are
exactly the kind of thing you see as the bastards working for The Man in a punk-themed science fiction setting.
Assuming you have a certain familiarity with basic facts about the history of science fiction, this will be a fairly comprehensible example to you. It's not the only thing I'm going to say, but there it is.
Then FBH goes on to discuss how this changed.
However, as the 1990s rolled on, and 40K outran the success of 2000AD, and as people who had played and liked the setting of 40K, and shifted from fans to staff, this wokeness, the fact that 40K is basically a parody, started to go into eclipse. A big reason for this, I think, is because 40K novels started to become more successful. The conventional way of doing a story narrative requires a protagonist who is in some way sympathetic to the reader. The same thing happened to Judge Dredd. The parody elements fell away because we're basically looking out from behind a fascists eyes, and they do cool stuff, so we increasingly find ourselves brought to sympathize with them.
This trend reaches its apotheosis with the Dan Abnett books (Abnett has also written for 2000AD) in which, because Abnett is a good writer, the characters are very sympathetic. They're just flawed enough to make them feel real, but at the same time, they're heroes who are easy to cheer for. Heroic, dutiful, having the qualities that both we and the Imperium of man wish people to have. Characters like Gaunt or Eisenhorn struggle to do the right thing, but they know, basically that the right thing is the status quo...
FBH, who was embedded in the culture that
produced these games and novels, is here describing the same process I referred to. The people who created 40K as a game in the mid-1980s are not the same people who were continuing to produce it twenty years later, and are most certainly not answering to the same market pressures.
So here we have a primary source account of the process you challenged me to provide evidence for. From someone who lived in the UK as successive iterations of this game rolled out. And who is familiar with the source material that provided inspiration for the game to be created in the first place.
Exhibit A.
Or here:
40k takes itself so seriously it actually loops back to being funny.
The primarch Corvus Corax is a dude who likes birds. His legion is called the Raven Guard.His name is also literally the scientific name for crows but no one brings this up. He's obviously Poe inspired. His chapter likes to wear the pig-snout helmet lovingly referred to as beakies in the fandom. His backstory with fixing his Legion is all very tragic. He runs off to the Warp to sulk crying NEVERMORE and that's the last we see of him.
But sure, 40k is totes serious guys. Just because it's srs bsns doesn't mean we can't have fun. Just look at Dawn of War and the memes it sprouted.
I never found the criticism of "taking itself too seriously" a bad thing. It makes grim dark over the top and I love it. I'd actually take post 3rd Edition seriousness (i.e current tone) over Rogue Trader's goofiness to be compltely frank.
Exhibit B.
To support the idea that the Imperium was always supposed to be clearly in the right, one CAN quote
Rogue Trader passages unironically. But just because one person doesn't get the joke doesn't mean everyone else didn't either.
Sympathy for the heretic | Page 8
FBH said:
If you're going to have a dramatic story in 40K, and then you need to make it fascist, and late 40K is very much about telling dramatic stories ever since Dan Abnett. I think that's why we've steadily got less and less parody and the Imperium more and more "YES THIS THING THAT WAS A PARODY! IS ACTUALLY REAL AND JUSTIFIED!"
Another discussion of the process. This may be condiered something of an amplification to Exhibit A.
Sympathy for the heretic | Page 8
Ford Prefect said:
Back when I was into 40k, around 3rd and 4th edition, I remember reading one of those comics where a bunch of fugitive types engage in an extremely risky plan, because they want to escape what they saw as a fate worse than death: being taken as prisoners of war by Orks. That this is fate worse than death is emphasised by reminding them of two things:
1. Ork cooking is uniformly awful.
2. Orks sing all the time, but have a limited repertoire so it's incredibly repetitive.
Obviously that's the joke, but it's funny to think that at some point in time that's basically what you had to deal with. Eating their food and putting up with their bad singing. Obviously now they're framed differently, and if you get captured you'll get tortured to death for amusement, but, you know
Exhibit C. The way things used to be.
Sympathy for the heretic | Page 9
Time and the gradual white-wash of the Imperium whilst making everyone else bastards ground it down until now I kind of... cringe, honestly. Like, early-ed Imperium was grimdark awful but the narrative and setting were clear it was awful, and why; because it was a theocratic fascist state. The rulebook had numerous cases of the Imperium doing terrible things blindly for no good justification because 'it was a hard decision they had to do' (or the Administratum made a rounding error and someone was covering their arse). Now it feels more 'look at this heroic space marine ubermensch look at him go purge them heretical xenos etc', like the newer batches of writers took the Imperium's face-value propaganda and decided they liked it. It feels like 40K as a setting has stopped taking outside inspirations and started self-cannibalisation, if that makes sense?
Exhibit D, how things changed.
Sabertooth said:
If I recall correctly, the original idea behind the Tau, was for them to be the "good guys" of 40k, but the fandom threw a hissyfit or something along those lines and they got reworked into the communist colective they are now known for.
Arawn_Emrys said:
No, they were supposed to be communists AND good guys. Then the fandom threw a fit that the fascist humans were no longer the least bad faction.
Arawn_Emrys said:
Yeah, but originally instead of having all non-tau be 2nd class citizens they literally just put them in whatever caste their existing job was. Because that man's a soldier, so he must be fire, that woman is a diplomat, she must be water, etc...
Sabertooth said:
Also there was no mention of the whole "brainwashing" or "forced sterilization" things.
Exhibit E, how things changed. Having the Tau be good guys, or at least less-bad guys you can plausibly reason with, makes the Imperium start to look ugly because, well, it kind of is. So they had to be rewritten so that they'd castrate you and throw you in a gulag,
in order to be no different from the Imperium.
Sabertooth said:
And in older editions, the Imperium exterminated loyal guard regiments that fought chaos and won, because..reasons. They managed to piss off the Space Wolves doing that.
It´s massively fucking idiotic.
Exhibit F; this is a pretty well-attested phenomenon in the setting. See the First War for Armageddon. In older editions the Imperium did more
unambiguously self-destructive and stupid-ass things, because they were more influenced by the parodic, self-aware understanding of "yes, these guys are space Nazis with a hard-on for purging and killing,
and that's bad.
Nowadays, things like the Imperium habit of destroying anyone who comes into contact with Chaos
even to kill it is either swept away (e.g. some parts of the
Gaunt's Ghosts series), or justified as being necessary (e.g. other parts of the
Gaunt's Ghosts series), or explained away as a thing that only occasionally happens when a bad Imperial who doesn't understand the
Fuhrer's Emperor's vision gets into power (e.g. other other parts of the
Gaunt's Ghosts series).
...
I'm only up to the one-quarter mark in the thread. I think I'm done for now.