Well, for one thing, there's the Beastmen, the beastmen, and the beast men.
The foremost, the Beastmen, are literally described as the True Children of Chaos, in their army books, in their lore, by their very characters in books and video game and tabletop alike. Humans are born one way or the other, and can end up choosing. The Beastmen proper are, really if you think about it, almost sort of like twisted versions of the Lizardmen. Sure, they have ideas, goals, things like that, but at the end of the day they are inextricably linked with some higher power which basically determined their general course in life one way or the other (Old Ones vs. Chaos). The Fimir were a race that lived on the planet and started worshipping Chaos first, and they are jealous of humanity for taking the attentions of the Chaos Gods away from them. The Beastmen were spawned
by Chaos and hate humanity for the same reasons and more.
Here's the very first words, the intro blurb itself, on their 7th Edition Armybook:
Beastmen Intro said:
The Beastmen are the True Children of Chaos. Grotesque hybrids of fierce animal and primitive human, these horned and stinking warrior-beasts infest the blighted forests that cover the Old World. Their savage tribes explode from the depths of the haunted woods to wage bitter war against the civilized races. So profound is the Beastmen's hatred of order and reason that they seek to drag the world kicking and screaming into a barbaric and primal age.
Then comes the 'why would you collect Beastmen as models' thing that they do in ever Armybook:
On Beastmen said:
Beastmen are unruly, coarse, and foul. Their obscene and thuggish behavior is about as degenerate and disgusting as it is possible to get. Despite (or perhaps because of) this fact, the Beastmen have an undeniable appeal as an army of malicious bad guys. When the Beastmen go to war, it is with truly evil intent. They seek to slaughter the civilized races like cattle, burn down and shatter their buildings, and stomp the remains into the ground with their cloven hooves until there is nothing left but devastation and ruin.
They are profoundly, inextricably, bound up by their own creation/realization in the world as malicious byproducts and tools of the Chaos Gods. They are pitiable in that, I think, because unlike humans, dwarfs, elves, and others, at the end of the day while they have the choice of stomping a human baby into mush or eating a human baby raw and alive, at the end of the day they don't really have the power of true and actual Choice. They have an innate desire to destroy/defile/devour, because that is how the Chaos Gods like them. In fact, one of the reasons that the Chaos Gods stopped favoring them so much is because the Beastmen were SO incapable of defying them or choosing to do or act in a way against them that they weren't entertaining.
Consider that.
The Chaos Gods got bored of them...because as a race, top to bottom, they were simply always going to serve them one way or another. Because they, quite simply, couldn't do otherwise.
Mutated people have a chance, certain spells and artifacts can remove their corruption, purify them. Most will never experience such things, and yet even then they have time. There's even a novel about it, about a guy undeniably mutated, who actively works against the Dark Gods and their servants, and the whole time he KNOWS that at some point down the road the voices of the Dark Gods will grow too loud for his mortal mind and soul to resist. But he has time before now and then to make them pay.
The Beastmen proper don't have that period of freedom, only the turnskins could boast such things. They are disgusting, horrible, violent, etc. because they were crudely created that way, and for that the blame falls on the Ruinous Powers. If, perhaps, you could block off the Polar Gates again, they might be free of that permanent influence. If you put them in a room that was blocked off with runes from the Ancestor Gods of the dwarfs and spellwork of the Slann to create a wholly deadened zone through which the Warp would be unable to affect, you might get some different versions of the Beastmen.
But the moment you let them out of that room, into a world touched from head to toe, corner to corner, by the Winds of Chaos?
They are lost.
The Ruinous Powers would immediately seize upon the idea of a Beastman that is not utterly enthralled by them, and would crush their existence into a new more 'pleasing' shape.
They've got their grudges, their outrage, their causes and guttural speeches and evil spells and what have you, but at the end of the day, they are unfortunately what the Chaos Gods made of them, which are the ones who are ultimately to blame for creating such a tortured existence in the first place. Even the Fimir, the rapey flesh-eaters who live in swamps, have more choice than the Beastmen. You're more likely to get a Fimir to abandon the Chaos Gods than a Beastman. Beastmen are not merely driven by their instincts to kill, to devour, to raze, they are driven by the levers implanted in their very souls bubbling out of the Warp, levers around which the Ruinous Powers have had, will have, and will never not have, pushed to the hilt. If a couple deep in the woods gave birth to a Beastman, a true Beastman, not just a mutant who happens to have horns and hooves and fur, they would, one day, be driven by the Ruinous Powers to take a bite out of dear old mom and dad, and then another, and then another, until they were nothing more than a burp and a pile of shit on the ground to be forgotten in search of the next meal. Their house would be razed into the ground, because again, innate hateful drive to destroy all civilization including houses. And that would be that. The only difference is that it would take longer for the Ruinous Powers to drive the mutant insane and have them do the same. It's not good, it's not great, and it's not even representative of IRL, because in IRL the greatest monsters are still often human on some level or another. INB4 Hitler was a vegetarian and cried when his mom died and all that. The Beastmen don't have those minor forms of humanization or complexity, of anything like that at all, because at the end of the day they AREN'T natural, the natural world is an affront to them and they to it. They quite simply aren't allowed to be that complex, because the Ruinous Powers are dicks like that, and that's the way they want it.
Still. Is it possible? Sure, almost anything is with the Warp reflecting all possibilities. But, grimdark, no one has the time, resources, or power to maintain such an experiment while there is just...so much else crushing down on them.
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Now, beastmen on the other hand, are like the ones from Ind and those that live in Khuresh. Bestial folk, fully sentient, capable of Choice on level that the Beastmen proper cannot match. The Tigermen have heads like great cats, maybe some claws and tails, but the bodies generally of 'regular' humans. They are altered, changed, yes, but more like a Gryphon or Pegasus, creatures who have not been
twisted but simply...changed into a stable and self-propagating kind which can make their own decisions. Ironic, perhaps, that Beasts only capable of existing through the mutative effects of Chaos having more Choice to them than Beastmen. The Tigermen are mercurial, as like to aid as to harm, and have their own culture and wonts and needs. The naga and such in Khuresh are....mmm, I described previously how I've built them to have slithered out of the Warp so but they're also more independent than Beastmen as well, not to mention capable of creating cities and such, even if they are horrific locations of sacrifice and bloodletting. But they can craft, they can excel, they can Choose, at least far more than the Beastmen proper can.
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Finally, you have beast men. Such as the sentient monkeys what live in Cathay, who are bipedal and all that with culture, industry, weapons, tools, etc. Past the Tigermen in terms of being fully animal, and like Gryphons and Pegasi in being just...who they are, without being bound body and soul before and after birth and death like the Beastmen are. So they are their own thing as well, and can be both good or bad, and so on and so forth. Right up in the northern mountains of Cathay, so closer to the Chaos Wastes and all that, but still...an independent if small polity/race.
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Skaven....mmm. As aforementioned, they do have the Black Hunger, the whole 'immediately commit cannibalism at BIRTH' thing. It was noted by a Greater Daemon of the Horned Rat in the End Times that a genuinely loyal and faithful skaven was a metaphysical
aberration. They eat each other in the litter, devour them, and basically don't stop after they've reached maturity. Certainly, their culture is learned, but they were also sorta-kinda engineered by the Horned Rat to be the way they are. Sometimes they get too into it, and It slaps them around, but for the most part everything that the Skaven do is as the Horned Rat likes. They are altered by the Horned Rat to be who they are, the Breeders are chemically and warpstone and magically altered to be what they are, and it is they who give birth, so it's basically like pumping the womb fully of three kinds of mutative alteration and such, and the eggs themselves, which sorta dooms any skaven born from said womb from the start. If you somehow got a living Breeder, and somehow cleansed her of all the warpstone, the generational mutation, flushed the chemicals nonlethally, and kept her alive somehow? Yes, I guess you might be able to eventually breed out a skaven and raise them different.
But uh...literally no one in-universe wants to do that. Or ever will.
That's...kind of Warhammer, you know? There's a chance, but we can't afford to take it because of [gestures at just...just everything].
We, as IRL humans, can look upon things like this and go 'ah man, that sucks that Beastmen are inextricably bound to mostly omnipotent Idiot Gods in all ways, in a manner that is utterly unnatural that simply couldn't happen and is impossible to relate/compare to anything in real life with its sheer brutality and horror.' Well, the humans in Warhammer would probably agree! And yes, the nature of being GM and there being quests and such is such that we can change and alter and wiggle about with certain things, but for me there's a line between making things make a bit more sense, and it just...sort of not being Warhammer anymore. There are some things that can be made better, be changed. There are some things that can't. And for all that magic, all that reality warping, that's something true in Warhammer as it is in real life. Frankly, that's one of the most fantastical things, that they are some things which are just...evil? And not grey? I think that's amazing. There's a lot of grey in real life, but one of the things I like about fantasy is that sometimes there really are just good people, and there really are just some bad things that need to go away. That you can fight, rather than flail uselessly at an infinitely powerful faceless grey corporate entity or uncaring callous government, something you can point at and say 'This is Evil' and there are no lobbyists or lawyers or bribed people to support them. Just everyone going 'yep, evil, hit it with sword'. And sometimes it's fun to be cartoonishly evil, gwee hee hee, etc. because you know that it's straight evil and not something you'd do in real life. Fantasy, man. Where things can be simpler in a way that real life can't always match. And sometimes I like it when there is complexity, and grey, for instance, SWTOR Sith not being sheer super villains always with the Dark Side, more of a half/half rather than good/evil thing. Just saying, you know, I'm not purely binary in my tastes for this sort of stuff. There's a good bit in the show '
The Good Place' where the complexities of modern life makes even choosing to eat a Tomato karmically bad, because you're supporting unwholesome farming practices, even if you aren't aware of it, abusive labor, helping corrupt corporate executives out by buying their product, pesticides, etc. Sometimes, you want something complex and rich with depth, sometimes you just want something cut and dry/good or evil. For me, often beastmen and skaven fall into the latter category.
I could make a story in Blasphemous where everything goes great at the end and the sacrifice turns out to not be meaningless, and all the people in the Color Out of Space are completely okay, and all the good people on Train to Busan live and only the bad people die, and lighting the flame in Dark Souls 1 makes everything good forever always, nd so on and so forth. But uh, doing so would make that work its own independent thing, you know what I mean?
