And honestly, I don't agree with the OP's assessment, because it relies on the assumption that we're supposed to be rooting for the imperium.
Which isn't the case.
In practice, the overwhelming supermajority of the fanbase either roots for the Imperium, and the overwhelming majority of the text is written with the assumption that readers will see defeats for the Imperium as "bad," even if they are written from the viewpoint of the villains (e.g. Chaos or orks) to make said villains look cool.
It is extremely rare to see any significant piece of text published by Games Workshop that clearly and unambiguously presents the Imperium as a bad thing, without the added message "it's bad, but it must survive, because the alternatives are worse" creeping in there somewhere.
The short version?
- I agree that fascists need to be discouraged to be away from the fandom.
- I disagree that GW at any point has ever intentionally done someone to hurt a minority, anything in the lore that could be considered hurtful is a result of society changing.
- I do agree that GW should as I've stated, continue to remove the elements that could be considered problematic.
- I disagree that 40K is promoting fascism as a viable option, characters like Cain and Gaunt who choose to do non-fascist things are rewarded for their choices. Whereas others like Kryptman who choose the fascist option tend to make things worse.
- Finally, I disagree with the thread consensus that the narrative has to be rewritten, in order to make it unappealing to fascists. We've seen examples of how fascists think no rewriting short of renaming chaos into fascism would make them get the message.
That's really about it, the core issue I have is that I agree with the thread's premise I just disagree with the thread's conclusions.
1) Okay.
2) I don't think you're right about that. Much of the content of the lore is "young" enough to make kind of a mockery of this. If Games Workshop were making a good faith effort to, for example, not portray intersex and trans people as evil mutants, they would probably have started amending the way they write Slaanesh a long time ago. Even if this was not done "intentionally to hurt a minority," the key word there is "intentional." Since proving intent is inherently hard, it is easy to assert "well, they didn't mean to do it" as a deflection, when someone accuses a group of bad behavior. At some point it just
does not matter, and getting fixated on whether GW "meant" to cause harm is just completely irrelevant. I recommend you stop worrying yourself about it, because nobody else really cares whether the harm caused was intentional or negligent. It is what it is, and the personal moral intentions of the people involved just
don't matter.
3) Okay.
4) Cain is the "good cop" within a fundamentally broken system. Fascism is capable of generating such figures, but they do not define it. Gaunt is very much
not rewarded for his choices; he leads his regiment through a lot of battles and wins them, but he himself is not a happy man and the Ghosts are on a long road downhill to being ground up into hamburger for the greater glory of the Imperium. Notably, Gaunt is written by Abnett in such a way as to portray the Imperium's corrupt and dysfunctional aspects more directly, while Cain is written by Mitchell in such a way as to present the Imperium's dark side at a considerable philosophical distance or in such a way as to promote comedy. Note how Cain spends most of his time in the sole company of his own regiment, cut off and fighting alone for his life, or otherwise disconnected from other Imperial institutions. There's a reason for that.
5) The thread consensus is that it is
an interesting and desirable creative exercise to rewrite the narrative to make it unappealing to fascists, and as a corollary,
attractive to antifascists, such as the thread participants. If you don't like the idea or don't consider it interesting, please don't waste days of everyone's time carping at people about it.
Literally no one is forcing you to like something you don't like, or do something you don't do. There is no good reason for you to pick fights over the matter. Which you are kind of doing.
No I completely understand the point of the thread.
You're saying that the imperium is a fascist empire and that anyone who serves it is automatically a fascist. Even if they choose to do non-fascist things.
What do you call someone who works in furtherance of a fascist regime's goals, who puts in great amounts of time and effort to achieve fascists' goals, but is not personally loathsome?
Stop and think about the question for a moment.
Why does it even fucking matter?
Why is it
necessary that you come in here and denounce people for "calling X a fascist" when they have not in fact done so in so many words? Whose legacy is being threatened here? What, precisely, do you think is being threatened or attacked here? Do
you feel attacked? Why?
Could you accept that maybe not everyone in the imperium is a true believer? that just maybe people are stuck serving because the other option is death?
Why does it matter?
What, precisely, do you think is being threatened or attacked here, that you need to defend?
I like Warhammer Fantasy because it's actually pretty wholesome. Yes, people are frequently awful, but their awfulness isn't presented as somehow glorious or inevitable. They're a bunch of squabbling feudal lords who sometimes put aside their differences to punch Chaos in the face, then go back to bickering and stabbing each other.
I don't think it's a coincidence that there are several highly active Warhammer Fantasy quests where dozens or hundreds of SVers get together and roleplay some character within WHF's humanity or Empire, without fundamentally making it into a story rejecting the Empire's validity as a narrative.
All the prominent 40k quests I can think of involve a fairly radical attempt to remake the Imperium, or to reject some of its core premises, or to effectively cut the larger Imperium out of the narrative entirely, or just haven't gotten up that kind of traction and longevity and fandom.
It's interesting to me that the Tau are very obviously an attempt to port the lizardmen to 40k with a slightly different aesthetic.
I don't think so. The aesthetic is quite different, and the Tau are "young challengers" and not "old badasses who stay mostly aloof from everyone else's concerns because they're busy dealing with important cosmic shit."
