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Warhammer 40k General thread

bluntblade said:
Though I do wonder if having a bit more emphasis on the most frightening opposition faced in the Crusade might've helped. It's there in some of the Black Library books - the first campaign in Jaghatai's Primarchs book is an example that springs to mind for me - but I know that for the most part, it's something I'm getting from the Forge World Black Books.
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... wasn't the great crusade a war of aggression and conquest? Is frightful opposition quite the right word for the efforts of folks resisting an invader?
 
I'm going to take the probably unpopular position that in the context of a galaxy as dangerous as 40k wars of conquest can be justified. It's simply a fact that humanity cannot afford to be divided, peaceful expansion should be preferable but war can be justified if there is no other option.

This shouldn't be seen as apologism for the IoM, how they did it was entirely excessively violent and cruel. A better model would be like the Tau where peaceful integration and diplomacy are always attempted over conquest. But conquest shouldn't be off the table.
 
Eliar said:
The peculiarity of nazism vs general fascism is that nazism rejected established religion and at least the high level nazis had their own brand of mysticism or pseudopaganism.
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Nazism was deeply in love with some aspects of Protestantism that helped excuse its worst excesses (Luther's rejection of rebellion, for example), and had an adversarial relationship with Catholicism primarily because it saw the Pope as a competing power center that was against them (and Roman Catholicism largely was by 1941) rather than any directly religious distaste. The psuedomystical psuedopaganist aspects attributed to senior Nazis were much more circumscribed than usually imagined; it was a thing mostly of Himmler and Martin Bormann when by contrast serious effort went into trying to unify the Protestant denominations into a single unified church. While there's evidence the paganists wanted to do something about Christianity in general and had plans for it, there's not much evidence they had workable plans or made effort to implement them.

When the war kicked off, whatever plans the Nazis had came to a screeching halt and they went all-in on maintaining Protestant loyalty.
 
Frumple said:
... wasn't the great crusade a war of aggression and conquest? Is frightful opposition quite the right word for the efforts of folks resisting an invader?
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In part. A large part, but there were also plenty of worlds which gladly threw their lot in with the Imperium. Not least because there were a great many alien species which were themselves enormously hostile. The Rangdan looked to have a chance of destroying the entire northern Imperium at one point.

The whole speed of the Crusade and the attendant absolute-ness of it was the result of real urgency, from the point of view of the Emperor and His generals.
 
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Parth said:
Unless kids have changed since I was in school finding someone who drew a swastika on something because it looks cool is more or less a dime a dozen. That's even with them knowing about the connotations of the symbol.

My point is that people aren't going to see the imperium as being a fascist regime, they're going to see tons of explosions, warriors in power armor, and fuck huge mechs and tanks duking it out on the battlefield.

So either the lore and novels are going to have to make it more clear that you're not supposed to be rooting for the empire. Or the idea that the imperium is fascist has to change.

Like I already stated, I personally find it irritating when the imperium is referred to as fascist because it tends to ignore the incredibly obvious religious themes of 40K and 30K. Not to mention that in terms of satire it's far far more obvious what's being made fun of.
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Yes, this is a problem we are dealing with, and being afraid of speaking the word fascist is not going to help.
Your insistence that we not refer to the empire as fascist because doing so will
A: Atract fascists.
B: Turn little children into fascists.
Remains, poorly founded.
As does your insistence that the religious nature of the empire somehow contradicts their fascism.
 
The Curious Fan said:
And a whole lot more that got marked as priority targets for peacefully working together with humans.
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Honestly I've rarely seen that in the actual text of the Heresy. It's in Fulgrim (rather ham-handedly) and Promethean Sun... and I think that's it?

I feel like the existence of perfectly peaceful, innocent xenos is kind of overstated in 30K. If nothing else, they've likely been moulded by the incredible violence of the Galaxy at large.
 
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I think the "perfectly peaceful Xenos" thing is a red-herring. It's, like.

"Oh, the aliens are hostile and fighting it out with you. Okay? Unlike humans such as yourself, who never did nothing to anybody."
 
Kuja said:
All of the Horus Heresy books were mistakes. The Black Library stable was utterly unprepared to write 30k as a meaningfully different setting from 40k, and it was a problem that exploded the same way the book series did. And it changed 40k in general for the worse as well, as all those writers then started porting their Heresy-era stuff in 40k to write sequel books and consequences which which shoved all of 40k's other aspects off to the side to focus entirely on the Chaos/Imperium war, AKA the stupidest conflict that can't ever be resolved without blowing up the entire setting a la the old world, and the conflict which makes the Imperium retroactively justified in literally everything because the need for escalation kept giving Chaos more and more power and because Chaos is such a darker-than-black faction all the Imperium's grimdark nonsense morphed into po-faced 'but we have to' as justification to keep Chaos at bay.

Like once upon a time, M41 was supposed to be a shit time to live in even by the standards of 40k. When we saw the crumbling infrastructure, the deadlocked government, the ineffectual justice system (huh this is all sounding really familiar...) we were supposed to be seeing a galactic civilization in its last days before the big collapse. M40, M39, M38, etc, they were not like this. They had bad times, but in M41 the bad times had swelled to encompass all times, and the bad times got even worse. But then were started writing M31, and it turned out to be just a slightly different flavor of grimdark even pre-Heresy, and M41 turned out to be nothing terribly special. And then we started porting the primarchs into modern day because primarchs are cool and also GW needs to release a new line of space marines that they can ferociously copywrite because they're butthurt about being slapped down in court.

15 years of the HH series gave 40k brainrot, and that's before we get into the absolute nonsense in the series itself like the constant retcons, the navelgazing, the idiotic shock twists, the grimdarkness of the far past, and especially the perpetuals and the assassination of MLK. Were there a few good ideas? Were there a few good moments? Were there a few good books? Yes, but they got drowned out by the sheer amount of awful coming out of BL and GW for the better part of ten years. It's only recently as the Heresy series winds down and people seem to be waking up to the fact they really can't milk it forever that we're starting to see more alien-centric stuff again, and I can't wait to see the Imperium/Chaos stuff to take a god damn backseat for awhile.

Now before someone else points it out, I'll do it myself - all the problems 40k has with its fanbase and its darker-than-dark thematics existed before the Horus Heresy series. But the Heresy series made it worse by bringing a laser focus on the worst aspects of the franchise and also trying to be Mature and Thoughtful and Philosophical which ended up carrying so much water for the worst elements of their fanbase while GW sat quietly and raked in the cash and only recently started speaking up once it became clear that their brand was not just attracting literal Nazis (who have always infested the 40k club) but that their IP was becoming more and more widely recognized as being associated with Nazis.
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What do you make of the HH portrayal of the Emperor?
 
Hykal94 said:


I can't decide if the best part is the oversized AK, Chaos Hitler, or the the soup.
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I could swear I've actually read isekai harem 40k at some point. Somewhat torn between wondering why that sounds so familiar and not wanting to know why that sounds so familiar, ha. I can only assume I've forgotten for a good reason :V
 
I always kinda just assume that unless otherwise specified, any gear the guard has looks like it came straight out of WW1, WW2, or cold war russia.
 
Sabertooth said:
What do you make of the HH portrayal of the Emperor?
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That's hard to answer, as it depends heavily on the specific authorial interpretation of the Emperor one prefers , there being several that have shown up. Dan Abnett, for instance, tends to interpret him as a hard, coldly calculating guy, as he'd have to be to do what he's done in unifying Terra and forging the Imperium, but not an unreasonable one, exactly (Prospero Burns mentions him giving a nation on Terra a grace period of a century and a half to negotiate and find some suitable accommodation for integrating into the collective Imperial sphere. Of course, once that grace period runs out with no resolution ...) and a whole lot of the people on Terra, at least, that he did over weren't exactly enlightened individuals themselves. Graham McNeill's interpretations run through various forms, usually depending on who's talking to/about him (from a callous arsehole (vision from a daemon in False Gods) to almost kindly (his conversations with Kai Zulane in The Outcast Dead)).

And Aaron Dembski-Bowden interprets Emps as an utterly incompetent Stupid!Evil knobhead, who needed to burn every Fate point he had just to unite Terra (no, I'm not an ADB fan, does it show? :p).
 
Captain Orsai said:
Dan Abnett, for instance, tends to interpret him as a hard, coldly calculating guy, as he'd have to be to do what he's done in unifying Terra and forging the Imperium, but not an unreasonable one, exactly (Prospero Burns mentions him giving a nation on Terra a grace period of a century and a half to negotiate and find some suitable accommodation for integrating into the collective Imperial sphere. Of course, once that grace period runs out with no resolution ...) and a whole lot of the people on Terra, at least, that he did over weren't exactly enlightened individuals themselves. Graham McNeill's
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Mind you, Dan Abnett also wrote the Legion and Saturnine interpretations of the Emperor which are distinctly less rosy when it comes up IIRC.
 
This argument on the Bolter & Chainsword has cost me too any hours of my life, but I'm going to glance across the fact that within Master of Mankind, even the Custodians differ in their perceptions of the Emperor, Primarchs and Legions. In the final scene, the Emperor speaks of Horus as a person, not a thing. He finishes on His most human note of the entire book.

Personally, I vibe with the Emperor as someone who, through sheer depth and breadth of lived and retained knowledge, has become something profoundly other. Tbh this might now be at a Star Wars point where I just have to put out a disclaimer with which writers I tend to get on with - Wraight, Abnett, AD-B and French primarily in my case.
 
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The Curious Fan said:
Mind you, Dan Abnett also wrote the Legion and Saturnine interpretations of the Emperor which are distinctly less rosy when it comes up IIRC.
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I can't speak as to Saturnine, as I haven't read it yet (and tbh, the fuck-stupid Perpetual plot makes me really disinclined to, because it is a legitimate cancer on the setting at this point), but as for Legion, I'm just going to point out that John Grammaticus is a gullible idiot, whose main source is a bunch of lying liars who lie. Like mattresses, so they do (and the one thing that's set up to prove them right, I am very convinced is entirely their handiwork to gull Grammaticus into doing what they want).
 
Sabertooth said:
What do you make of the HH portrayal of the Emperor?
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Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhokay. I can do this.

Let me quote a couple of old posts of mine-

original post
The Emperor is at his best in the old Index Astartes articles, wherein he is presented as a well-meaning but deeply flawed figure who wants to advance humanity's existence and for much of his own life has worked behind the scenes since his birth in 8000 BC, the spiritual amalgamation of many thousands of psykers ("shaman") who foresaw the coming of Chaos and scarified themselves to find a way to preserve humanity, ultimately coming to the fore following the Age of Strife in a determined effort to unite the disparate elements of our race before we are snuffed from existence by war with other species or by the ravages of the Warp. Despite being very good at the big-picture view, he has faults and foibles as does any human being and, in the fashion of classic Greek tragedy, he is ultimately undone by them. His love for his favorite gene-son Horus blinds him to said son's increasing vanity and ambition, and similar mistakes made amongst the other primarchs (best shown in the stories of Magnus and Mortarion, IMO) ultimately leads to the downfall of the Imperium (itself yet a deeply flawed, incomplete project at the time of the Heresy) and the sundering of everything he worked to create, twisting it into a hellish dystopia that grinds humans by the millions beneath its gears with each passing day.

The Emperor is at his worst in the above-mentioned Heresy novels, in which he is a floundering buffoon who couldn't organize a surprise birthday party let alone an empire, petty and malicious in spirit on the order of several MegaHitlers as he destroys people and things the instant they aren't of use to him and at times seems to evince none of the positive human emotions, utterly incapable of connecting with others on even a basic level. Oh yes and literally everyone with an ounce of experience knows better than him about how Chaos works and that the Imperium will fall to Chaos and tries to correct his stupid idiot mistakes but he's too stupid and idiotic to listen because he's the worst and also why didn't you love me dad. Also his backstory is retconned into being a dude who made a bargain with Chaos and promised to deliver humanity to them in exchange for the knowledge to stuff a bunch of warp power into human jackets he could call primarchs, then went back on his word because apparently the Chaos gods are such flaming morons they handed this guy a truckload of power based on a pinky swear with no take-backsies.
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original post
Like, Monarchia didn't exist until ADB got his hands into the HH series. Angron's story was more nebulous and had room for nuance (or rather let's be real, it was half-baked, even in the original IA articles). The vast majority of HH lore has been filled in or at times aggressively rewritten by authors who want to wring a quick buck of pathos for their favorites and so throw the Emperor under the bus because it's easy. Even right from the beginning in Horus Rising Abnett decided to massively change Horus' motivations from "spent years on the campaign trail and got full of himself while the Emperor ruled from home" to "dad literally just left me in charge of everything one planet ago, but he didn't tell me what his new project is and that makes me sad."
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I think it should be clear that I don't like the Horus Heresy book series' (henceforth HH) take on the Emperor. I don't like the HH's take on much, to be clear, but we're discussing the Emperor in particular.

Like, to be clear, I'm not opposed to a nuanced or even negative take on the Emperor - I've said in the past that I really liked the old Index Astartes articles on characters like Mortarion, Curze, Magnus, Lorgar, and Alpharius, and all of them depict instances of the Emperor fucking up. I fucking loved Lord of the Night by Si Spurrier, the OG novel that took a swing at the 'the Emperor was actually a bastard' twist. The problem with the HH series is that it doesn't know when to fucking stop; forget running with the goalposts, it takes the goalposts and puts them on a lightspeed freighter heading out of the solar system. Every single author seemed determined to one-up Spurrier by writing their own new 'bastard Emps' twist and these twists and reveals and ackshuallys all piled up to a series that I literally cannot discuss in a Watsonian manner because it's so far beyond the pale.

And even then, even if the HH series was going for that, the cosmic absurdity of the supposed superman being in truth an absolute bumbling fool and a monster, I could probably still get into that. But the HH series doesn't even do that - the tone of the HH book series is not tongue-in-cheek takedowns of right-wing politics, it's instead completely srs-faced navelgazing philosophy 101 that constantly vacillates author to author on 'Emps knew everything and Planned for it' to 'Emps meant well but was fatally flawed' to 'Emps is my dad my dad is the worst and I hate my dad.' It can't even settle on 'well things were always bad even before the fall actually' because we still get pages upon pages that return to the original fall-from-grace story with the descriptions of the knowledge and beauty lost in Mechanicum and Know No Fear. It tries to split the difference between A. sticking to the original Paradise Lost thematics of the Heresy as a fable and B. pulling back the veil to tell 'the real story' and consequently it fails at both.

Like let's take the case study of the Council of Nikaea, which is possibly the worst single retcon of everything the HH series pulled. (and there's a race to the bottom if ever there was one...)

One of the biggest points of the difference between 30k and 40k was introduced by Dan Abnett right in book 1 was the Imperial Truth: that the cornerstone of the Emperor's Imperium is a secular humanist anti-religious edict that vociferously states: there are no gods. there are no spirits. there is no supernatural. These beliefs are the product of superstitious minds and must be purged from humanity. Graham McNeil followed this up with The Last Church, which is basically Dawkins' First Theology Lecture depicting Emps arguing with a priest - and McNeil later made it clear that he expected people to agree with the Emperor's arguments.

So this is the Emperor of the HH series: virulently anti-religion, pro-science, pro-rationality, etc. He's that kind of asshole. He probably posts on the 30k edition of lesswrong in his free time. The fundamental guiding principal of the Imperium as depicted by the HH series is one of committed rationalists pulling the scattered and unenlightened elements of humanity out of the darkness. (With of course, the ultimate irony of the series being that the rationalists are wrong, Chaos is real and evil, etc, but that's not the point here.)

Then we get A Thousand Sons (also written by McNeil) in which we get the trial of Magnus and the question of how psykers should be utilized by the space marines. And famously we get this speech from the Space Wolf character condemning the Thousand Sons:

"I will not waste time with fancy words," said Wyrdmake. "I am called Ohthere Wyrdmake of the Space Wolves, and I fought in the murder-make with the Thousand Sons on Shrike. I stood alongside its warriors on the baked salt flats of Aghoru, and I name them a coven of warlocks, every one of them a star-cunning sorcerer and conjurer of unclean magic. That is all I have to say, and I swear its truth upon my oath as a warrior of Leman Russ."

The Emperor should be on his feet and smashing this dude in the face with a gavel for using this kind of language. The gathered space marines should be rolling in the aisles laughing hysterically that this is the opening argument used by the anti-psykers. Mortarian should be snarling at Leman to get his idiot nephew off the stage before he wrecks the entire case. Librarians from other Legions should be on their feet and calling for immediate censure of the VI Legion.

But no, Wyrdmake says his piece and calmly returns to his seat while Emp's right hand man Malcador describes it as 'a terrible accusation.' The trial ends with the Emps saying 'the warp is too dangerous so no more psyker space marines anymore ever, shut up Magnus.'

Bear in mind, this was the original Index Astartes description of the resolution of Nikaea:

A psyker, […] like an athlete, was a gifted individual whose native talent must be carefully nurtured. Psykers were not evil in themselves. Sorcery was a knowledge that had to be sought, even bargained for, and neither man nor paragon could be certain they had the best of such bargains. The other Librarians united around him, and proposed that the education of human psykers to best serve Mankind be made an Imperial priority. The conduct of sorcery would be outlawed forevermore as an unforgivable heresy against Mankind.

The compromise presented by the Librarians offered both factions something, and appeared to be what the Emperor himself had been waiting for. The Emperor ruled it law without allowing any rebuttal, and the Edicts of Nikaea stand to this millennium as Imperial policy regarding human psychic mutation. But it was not the decision favoured by Magnus. The Grimoire Hereticus records the fateful face-to-face confrontation between father and son when the Emperor himself barred Magnus's attempt to storm from the hall in protest. He bade Magnus cease the practice of sorcery and incantation, and the pursuit of all knowledge related to magic.
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Fuck's sake, if you want to depict the Emperor as a hardcore rationalist, this is far better a solution! Instead he issues an ultimatum that basically neuters an entire Legion (there's no Legion so fully built around one thing as the TS are built around psychics. It would be like denying the White Scars to use vehicles - not just wheels or antigrav or even tracks but vehicles, period.) Why? Well, because the Emperor is stupid and wrong and doesn't know how to people and SHOCK! TWIST! and so that we can have the grand irony that the librarians are all technically in violation of the Emperor's edict, and so that the next bunch of books can all wring cheap drama from 'I need a psychic, but the Emperor said no' situations. It all goes back to wringing more manpain from your characters by making dad a shithead.

Again, I didn't need, or want, a pre-Heresy Imperium that's all sunshine and rainbows. But if the man behind the curtain is just the reveal that 'eh, it was always grimdark all the way down, nothing changes but the flavor' then what's the point of having a different series? Just write more 40k, because that's all you're doing. And yes, I get it - a space age version of the Holy Roman Empire was never going to be good. You can't depict a space-fantasy feudal society, complete with internecine squabbles, massacres, massive violations of human rights, and responsibly make it look like a good thing, even before it falls apart. At the risk of making myself look like an egomaniac on the level of the Emperor I'm going to quote myself yet again-

original post
Some would probably argue that making the pre-war Imperium too nice treads too close to endorsing fascism. There's a point to be made there, yeah, but I think if the Horus Heresy really wanted to make an antifascist narrative they could have simply stuck closer to Horus' original story: the Emperor retires to Terra to continue the process of building humanity's new foundations following the Age of Strife, leaving Horus to run the war machine, and after years and years on the campaign trail, Horus gets full of himself and builds up a head of resentment for the little bureaucrats and weaklings overseeing things when HARD STRONG MEN are out here SECURING THE BOARDERS and FIGHTING FOR YOUR FREEDOMS and one day decides (with a little push from the Chaos gods) he's had enough of this. Combine Horus' strongman ideology with the Emperor's well-meaning but deeply flawed attempts to push humanity forward and the rejection of fascist ideology is not difficult to build.
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There is no single overriding theme to the HH series other than 'everything you like is bad.' Did you get into 40k because you liked the aesthetics? You liked the neo-Roman themes and the cool power armor? Well fuck you, all the loyalist characters are dumb idiot assholes who can't organize a parade. Did you like the rebellious, devil-may-care, power-metal aesthetics and feel of the Chaos legions? Well fuck you too, they're all a bunch of easily manipulated crying manbabbies who never got over being slapped around by their various Dads, because evil dads is about as deep philosophically as the HH series gets, and being the ultimate Dad, the Emperor gets it worst of everyone.

EDIT: fixed some words

EDIT 2: And to again clarify from that last paragraph: Yes. Everything you like is bad. Grim. Dark. My point is more that even if you want to revel in some good good grimdarkness, the HH series fails because it can't tell a good grimdark story. You can't enjoy the fall to hubris because it's so badly framed, you can't enjoy the 'rage against the dying of the light' because it's so badly managed. That's why I don't enjoy it, not just because it's a story about collapse and failure.
 
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