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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!"
Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful."
Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment."
"Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."

Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
I'm reminded of seeing some calculations that show that it is actively cheaper to buy a mid-range Resin 3D Printer and buy a few .stl minis to print them yourself than it is to assemble an average-scale starting 40k army.
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It is cheaper... If you know what you are doing* and have the time and space to run a resin 3D printer.

*You will be dealing with considerably toxic materials, and it comes with electric and fire hazards. It is a miniaturized industrial process, it requires the preparation, risk assessment and waste treatment of such.
 
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Renu said:
Is Bretonnia the Empire then?
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I argued this incredibly stupid topic all day a few days ago and I have no interest in it anymore. The fact "The Empire and Imperium have similarities" got such a degree of anger is still kinda baffling to me frankly.

Also no, last I checked the Bretonians don't worship Giles Le Breton as a God, they worship the Lady
 
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itsbread said:
basically, Dark Heresy mechanically presents space marines as, like, not really worth the effort put into making them, which i've always thought seemed about right.
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I mean okay but also that edition actually described them as balance-nerfed too and even then recommended you be careful because they could totally destroy the balance of most published scenarios and campaigns.

Meanwhile over in the actual Space Marine roleplaying game Deathwatch they're significantly more impressive to the point their game basically invents an entire category of enemies that are meant to represent mobs of like forty guys as a group because otherwise they would pop like soap bubbles and bad dreams on contact with a Space Marine and if you're willing to let your Dark Heresy game lose all combat challenge we even have the Kill Marine meant to interface with that setting who can use their overpowered squad mode abilities in a squad with themselves, but also nerfed to the basics because we still want a greater daemon to be worth caring about.

So like...shrugs.
 
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MysticKnightJoe said:
I argued this incredibly stupid topic all day a few days ago and I have no interest in it anymore. The fact "The Empire and Imperium have similarities" got such a degree of anger is still kinda baffling to me frankly.

Also no, last I checked the Bretonians don't worship Giles Le Breton as a God, they worship the Lady
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So Bretonia worships a central god figure like you said, thus meeting the criteria you laid out. Which indicates that the strokes are a bit too broad, assuming they are accurate in the first place.
 
Ford Prefect said:
Your position is premised on the idea that the Dark Eldar are worse. As was pointed out to you, this isn't at all true.
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The Dark Eldar were presented as worse by just about every WH40K media I've experienced where Drukhari featured. As in, they were considered to be worse by the inhabitants of the Imperium.

Thus, the people of the Imperium clearly can imagine a state of being that can be considered more cruel and more bloody than the Imperium. And yet the tagline still claims the Imperium is "the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable".

Hence the part of my point which looks at it from the in-universe setting. The justification for the tagline phrase ends up in increasingly specific definitions of every word, and that's just if we assume the people of the Imperium literally cannot imagine "Drukhari but with the scale of the Imperium".
 
Cosar said:
So Bretonia worships a central god figure like you said, thus meeting the criteria you laid out. Which indicates that the strokes are a bit too broad, assuming they are accurate in the first place.
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The argument wasn't "Central God-Figure" it was very specifically about a Warrior-King God-Founder thing. I am getting really tired of this endless goal-post moving over what was a pretty minor statement of essentially "The Imperium and the Empire share some commonalities and creative DNA."
 
I am pretty sure that any attempt by either the Dark Eldar or Chaos trying to create a state organized and large enough that would be capable of being referred to as a regime would end up collapsing bloody before getting off the ground.

I think even the orks have shown themselves far more capable of creating large scale state than either the forces of chaos or the Dark Eldar given the orks at have established Mutiple interstellar empires.
 
MysticKnightJoe said:
The argument wasn't "Central God-Figure" it was very specifically about a Warrior-King God-Founder thing. I am getting really tired of this endless goal-post moving over what was a pretty minor statement of essentially "The Imperium and the Empire share some commonalities and creative DNA."
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That's not really what you started with. That was where you eventually moved the goalpost.

MysticKnightJoe said:
The real thing with 40k is that it is actually just a fantasy setting clumsily brought up to sci-fi. The Imperium of Man is just a version of the Empire from Fantasy, the Eldar are the Elves complete with the same three way split (High/Craftworld, Dark/Dark, Wood/Exodite), the Dwarves used to be there and are back now, the Orks are always just kind of the same...I don't necessarily read 40k as satire but it is very tongue in cheek.

The idea is just directly takes from British sci-fi is that it just kinda lifts aspects directly from 2000 AD and Michael Moorcock novels. I've been reading Moorcock very religiously lately and it really is so funny seeing how much popular SFF just lifted directly from him.
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You did say that Empire and Imperium are basically same, when they are not. You have moved from "the same thing" to "well there is founding god-king in their mythos"; which itself is so broad as to effectively be useless point of sharing.
 
Mandemon said:
That's not really what you started with. That was where you eventually moved the goalpost.



You did say that Empire and Imperium are basically same, when they are not. You have moved from "the same thing" to "well there is founding god-king in their mythos"; which itself is so broad as to effectively be useless point of sharing.
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Key word there is "version." As in a take on the concept. Me saying they are the exact same would be "copy."

If you want more comparisons both the Imperium and the Empire are hot-beds of religious fanaticism that come out in similar ways (Flagellants, War-Hammer Armed Warrior-Priests etc), they both have Witch Hunters that operate with near impunity, they are both split into fiefdoms ruled over by Elector Counts or Lord Governors. Lot of the facets of the Imperial Cult are so distinct it might as well be polytheism, and a lot of them have parallels (The Sisters Hospitaller with the Priestesses of Shallya, for example). The Imperium covers way more space, has more of a Roman than HRE vibe, and of course there are decades of GW constructing more and more detail on it over time, and obviously there are differences caused by genre. Oh and of course the Stormcast Eternals are just fantasy Space Marines, complete with being created by said God-King, though of course that isn't the Empire, I suppose.
 
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Tbh I think it'd be more accurate to say the Imperium takes the worst DNA from all the various human factions in fantasy and puts them in a blender. Like there are elements from the empire yes, same with bretonnia, but you also have some kislev, some tilea/estalia, etc.
 
MysticKnightJoe said:
The argument wasn't "Central God-Figure" it was very specifically about a Warrior-King God-Founder thing. I am getting really tired of this endless goal-post moving over what was a pretty minor statement of essentially "The Imperium and the Empire share some commonalities and creative DNA."
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No, you changed to that eventually. The post Renu quoted was the first post that was first where you drew a connection to the central god figure, and it was just that. Adding 'warrior king god founder' was something later once it was pointed out that your 'broad strokes' comparison was so broad that it basically included everything.
 
Founder warrior king worshipped as a God isn't anything special, lots of fantasy settings do that on top of historical examples. For Warhammer it's less a case of the Imperium of 40K being a carryover of the Empire and more both factions being drawn from the same sources made by the same people, but 40K takes it to a dystopian sci-fi extreme.

With Bretonnia the warrior god stuff is just King Arthur specifically, and is only a deputy of the larger power of the Wood Elves who are rooted in Arthurian mythos and the fair folk. The closest they get to a real parallel with the Imperium is honourbound knights being roughly similar to space marines. And only in the absence in any equivalent in the Empire except those bald hammer priest guys sort of (Chaos Warriors excepted as they're directly equivalent to Chaos Marines)

And then they just made fantasy space marines anyway. Which I think is generic but also kinda like because this time they're animated suits of armour instead of just giant dudes again.
 
Reveen said:
Founder warrior king worshipped as a God isn't anything special, lots of fantasy settings do that on top of historical examples. For Warhammer it's less a case of the Imperium of 40K being a carryover of the Empire and more both factions being drawn from the same sources made by the same people, but 40K takes it to a dystopian sci-fi extreme.

With Bretonnia the warrior god stuff is just King Arthur specifically, and is only a deputy of the larger power of the Wood Elves who are rooted in Arthurian mythos and the fair folk. The closest they get to a real parallel with the Imperium is honourbound knights being roughly similar to space marines. And only in the absence in any equivalent in the Empire except those bald hammer priest guys sort of (Chaos Warriors excepted as they're directly equivalent to Chaos Marines)

And then they just made fantasy space marines anyway. Which I think is generic but also kinda like because this time they're animated suits of armour instead of just giant dudes again.
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Actually turns out Stormcast Eternals are just big dudes (And gals) in armor too. Kind of surprised me when I walked into a GW a long time ago and saw a big cut-out of one with her helmet off.
 
MysticKnightJoe said:
I argued this incredibly stupid topic all day a few days ago and I have no interest in it anymore. The fact "The Empire and Imperium have similarities" got such a degree of anger is still kinda baffling to me frankly.
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Tbh I don't think it should be confusing why people would strongly disagree with the notion that a elective [1] multiethnic[2] multifaith[3] polity that coexists with a number of other nations[4] is the same (or more similar than different) to a totalitarian theocratic autocracy that is explicitly ideologically opposed to the existence of any other state.

Even setting aside values judgements they are objectively very different states. The only way to argue otherwise requires enormously vague comparisons that ignore all context (such as comparing Sigmar and the Emperor despite them occupying fundamentally different roles, or conflating the Witch Hunters and the Inquisition despite them having very different legal powers, etc). That's the issue with your arguments, it necessarily requires shoving a square peg into a round hole because they're just not that similar except in the most superficial ways.

This confusion partially exists because of GW's stupid decision to call The Empire the "Empire of Man" but a basic examination of the setting would reveal how markedly different Sigmar's Empire and the Imperium of Man is. They're night and day.


[1]= Sigmar's Empire is obviously no democracy but the Emperor is still elected and is treated as a first amongst equals, God-emperor Franz is not.
[2]= Sigmar's Empire has no species supremacy, humans are a majority of the population but it has Dwarf and Elf enclaves. Which are not seen the same way as the Imperium views abhumans, there is no polite fiction that they're just a form of human. They're treated as a different species and permitted to exist. It's not perfect tolerance but compared to the IoM it's a multiethnic wonderland.
[3]= There is no Imperial Cult equivalent, Sigmar is important historically but theologically the Cult of Ulric occupies a position of equal importance to the Cult of Sigmar and the worship of other Order Gods is broadly permitted. Inter-faith conflict is common but compared to the Imperium's policy of "Burn alive everyone who doesn't perfectly fall within the local fanatic's idea of the One True Faith" it's a bastion of religious pluralism.
[4]= The Imperium hates Xenos obviously but they're also fundamentally opposed to the existence of any human state outside their role as it challenges their ideological self-identification as the sole ruler of humanity, Sigmar's empire by contrast is more then willing to peacefully interact with a number of human majority states such as Bretonnia, Tilea, Eastalia, Cathay, etc.
 
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You know, aside from not acknowledging Age of Sigmar as canon, I actually think the Stormcast Eternals are better than Space Marines in general. They are just all around more interesting as a generic force than the Primaris. The combo of them (As far as I know) actually having lives outside the armor and a lot of them just being ordinary people I just think is nifty.

It is too bad Age of Sigmar is against my religion and also I think the design of the Stormcast in general is a little bad.
 
Hot take: The Imperium is the Space Dark Elves.

They're both oppressive states built on slavery and racial supremacy, that glorify pain and suffering and loyalty to the cause. They're ruled by crippled ancient genius warlords that they worship as god-kings.

Both Malekith and Emps even have personal armies of children stolen from their parents, subject to brutal indoctrination and training (that kills a bunch of the candidates) to turn them into ruthless, fanatically loyal warriors.
 
Solarion said:
Hot take: The Imperium is the Space Dark Elves.

They're both oppressive states built on slavery and racial supremacy, that glorify pain and suffering and loyalty to the cause. They're ruled by crippled ancient genius warlords that they worship as god-kings.

Both Malekith and Emps even have personal armies of children stolen from their parents, subject to brutal indoctrination and training (that kills a bunch of the candidates) to turn them into ruthless, fanatically loyal warriors.
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Imperium can't be the Dark Elves (The D.Elves are cool and the fandom doesn't have enough reactionaries).
 
Solarion said:
Hot take: The Imperium is the Space Dark Elves.

They're both oppressive states built on slavery and racial supremacy, that glorify pain and suffering and loyalty to the cause. They're ruled by crippled ancient genius warlords that they worship as god-kings.

Both Malekith and Emps even have personal armies of children stolen from their parents, subject to brutal indoctrination and training (that kills a bunch of the candidates) to turn them into ruthless, fanatically loyal warriors.
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If the Imperium is the Space Dark Elves, then what are the Drukhari?
 
Really the End Times had a ton of bad and ham-fisted retcons to make the Elves closer to the Eldar. It is actually a major reason I still don't want to engage with Age of Sigmar, since a lot of this involved utterly obliterating my High Elves off the face of the planet
 
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