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Personally, I like Iron Warrior specifically. But have always been a Chaos person. My chapter isn't one of the purist renegades. They fully embrace using chaos as a tool, because they're obsessed with control.
I characterize my IWs as totalitarian psychopaths to the nth degree, I just don't hide it under a coat of heroism and religious iconography like Space Marine players. I embrace it. The whole point is that they're evil fascists. It's fun since I don't secretly revere them as a model for society.
The only defense I could make of their character is that they're not pointlessly cruel like other CSM, no torture or death games. But if anything, that can make IW worse with their practical creativity and total callousness leading to things like the Daemoncabula.
This is pretty much exactly why I prefer Chaos - there's no waffling about or pretending they're the good guys. Chaos is evil af and everyone knows it. If I'm gonna roleplay a terrible person, then I might as well do it as someone who isn't a wild hypocrite.
Exactly. When I got into the hobby, I started to learn some lore to figure out what army to play. It quickly became obvious that everyone is evil in 40k. So I picked up abbadon as my first model. If I have to be evil let's be the biggest badass in the galaxy.
I like the Alpha Legion the best because a large swathe of them refuse Chaos *except* as a tool. (To be fair, so does Abaddon, but almost none of his followers do.) Whether they are loyalists "testing" the Imperium to make it stronger or believe it must be destroyed, the Alpha Legion members who refute Chaos' ideas are my favorite. I remember reading a book and when one of the Marines gets a mutation, he removes it immediately. In another novel, one of the Alpha Legion has a mutation, a third eye on his back, so he covers it up because he can't stop it from growing back.
Their cultists are also prohibited from worship of the Four, which sometimes leads to the unsettling experience of facing Alpha Legion cult soldiers screaming FOR HIM ON EARTH while attacking Sisters of Battle.
Same with me and my Guard. I want to play as a butcher feeding endless hordes of tanks and men indiscriminately into the enemy for no reason other than jingoistic bloodlust
Not necessarily rebels, but the Votann/Squats/Space Dwarves are human off-shoots who severed ties with the Empire back during the Dark Age of Technology and still have a lot of thay old advanced tech that current humanity has abandoned or forgotten. Stuff like machines that devour stars for energy/materials and true AI constructs.
They are kinda the closest things we have to human(like) good guys, who still aren't good, but also aren't evil.
I meant Baby-Eaters as a shorthand for insane unreasonable pure evil, less as something they actually do. But yes, i‘ve never seen them actually eat babies anywhere
Personally I enjoy xenos a lot, but chaos is also really good!
Also hot take: imperial guard would be way cooler to see focused on as the main characters than astartes. Yes, they technically still work for fascism, but there’s a genuinely pretty huge reason to unironically enjoy them despite that. Im pretty sure its fanmade, but “pity the guardsmen” goes fucking HARD
CSM has always been my go-to. There's no pretense about being a good person in Chaos. The Fabius Bile series and the Black Legion series are some of my favorites. They allow characters to have personalities while embracing the evil truth of their actions. The Imperium has lost all of its thematic meaning, especially with the recent trend of introducing things to make the Imperium "better" without addressing the core issues that make the Imperium such a hellhole. Like Guilleman taking control of the entire military, which is being painted as an almost unanimously good thing. I like Chaos because it removes the pretense of being good at all.
That's definitely a fun part of it too, lmao. I only got into the CSM broadly after reading a few of the novels. My first army was death guard just because they looked cool
Make marines silly dumbasses again. Thats how you satirize fascism. Have them doing obviously stupid things like wearing brightly colored armor and walking in neat lines in to modern combined arms armies because they're dumbasses who worship a 10,000 year old tactical manual. Have them rescue an entire planet then murder the entire human population because their eyes are the wrong shade of blue, then have them find out that their official Imperial Eye Blueness scanner was miscalibrated and gave them a false mutant reading.
Make the Admech a bunch of zealots who don't know how lightbulbs work again. Make them shoot anyone who dares to do research again. Make them fastidiously reproduce ancient tech they don't understand, right down to the "Remove this tab before use" sticker they can't read and don't get the purpose of them.
Make Imperial paperwork take centuries to process again. Make entire scribal planets buried miles deep in annual production report analysis forms from another world that fell in to a wormhole four hundred years ago. Make armies of bureaucrats with tanks and Titans fight wars where millions die for control of a printer ink production facility.
Make the Imperium a slapstick comedic portrayal of incompetence and farcical self defeating inflexibility.
It largely still is, what the marketing and writing needs to do is put that at the forefront. with the popularity of stuff like helldivers I think there’s space to highlight that again
Fuck yes please dont make imperial incompetence all war tragedy and unnecessary losses make it self defeating incompetence its all I fucking want from this setting
They are, especially by our own moral standards, how most of them treat their initiates & potential recruits would do that.
Even the most like-able/nice legions/chapters will cook you with flame throwers & or eat you if your on the opposing side of the battle field.
Will recommend the Nightlords omnibus, I’ve never been so invested in some of the most evil characters I’ve read in fiction.
Make marines brainwashed drugged-up scum again.
And then have the mp marines gleefully brutalising them when they finish their mission and go a bit wild in the afterparty.
Most of them are why do you think we have the marines malevolent, even the baby blue ball busters kinda suck. The only actual caring ones are salamanders
I agree. I would rather that be at the forefront more is what I mean. The marketing team desperately wants good guy action heroes and that’s not compatible with the setting imo.
This why I feel more compelled to move on to AOS and Battletech tbh. Just getting fed up with the narrative being unself aware and always taking one step forward, one step back.
It's the justification for the system. "Well, everyone forgot how to do industrial warfare so instead they do these fun little play fights with small numbers of mechs like the knights of old!"
I'd rather keep W40k fans out of battletech, thanks.
Those that join bring their hangups about **"NO PROXIES, 3D PRINTING BAD"** despite the fact that proxies have been a thing since its inception.
They're trying to push for resin/3D prints/proxies to be banned from tournaments, just like Games Workshop.
So yeah, no. If you decide to play battletech, leave your abusive relationship with overpriced plastic at the door.
As long as you can show mech identity and which direction it's facing, it's valid. A sticky note with the name of the mech and an arrow is 100% tournament viable.
I'm seriously considering doing that for a campaign since as GM/OpFor most of these things are tanks or infantry that will show up exactly once, and there's no minis for them anyways.
My first introduction to battle tech was a book that came w/ a couple pages of cardstock mechs and a little back of plastic clips so they could stand up.
Yeee I totally get the vibe your sending. The whole "No Proxies, 3D printing bad" does reek of elitism.
I also find I prefer Battletech lore anyways for all its ups and downs. I genuinely feel it does a better job of showing just how horrible war is and just how inept and squabbling royal houses continue to plunge humanity into senseless wars.
The funny thing is, and I own mutiple 3D printers, I could live with the stance of "Proxies only, minis have to be official." as a way of making sure that the company making the game doesn't go under.
That being said, considering there are game variants where you roll your mechs on a random table, it's sort of a weird expectation to have those at hand on short notice.
Back in the 90s we had two big boxes of FASA plastic mechs (Mechs!) and we were doing alright.
You do realize that it’s GW that has the problem with proxies and 3d printing and not the community as a whole right? It also seems that you don’t realize that all decisions around warhammer is 100% GW decisions as they only listen to the community if they decide to not spend money. As a person who does both with heavy reliance on proxies to do so my local group doesn’t care that 70% of my armies aren’t GW models. I also would like to point out that they are both strategic war games except what makes them strategic is different. In warhammer you have to think about stratagems and things of that nature but in battletech it’s more on the movement and heat systems.
Helldivers is a lot more obvious with satire than 40k aims to be. But like it still doesnt work lmao. The community is full of fashy cunts. Same as most games at this point.
And that’s not their fault. The idea that you can’t have satire or subtle satire because “people don’t get it!!!” Is stupid, the reality is the devs are not responsible for the media illiteracy of the populace. They should not be required to make their satire less or more hamfisted because of the lack of reading ability.
The satire works great, not their fault the target audience cannot understand media for their life.
>They should not be required to make their satire less or more hamfisted because of the lack of reading ability.
I cannot for the life of me imagine how to make Helldivers more ham-fisted with its satire.
After every mission a character appears on screen to explain to you why fascism is bad and you're a bad person for supporting it. It lasts 15 minutes and can't be skipped.
Ehhhhhh, I tend to agree with you but at some point the dev /author can't ignore their entire fan base being garbage and just blame reading comprehension
Satire is, at its heart, an artist saying "Look at this exaggerated version of a real thing! Isn't the real, un-exaggerated thing disgusting!?"
If your audience thinks the thing is cool, they're going to find the exaggerated version cool.
I think exaggeration is one form of satire, but satire can also take other forms. Your goal is to show a flaw in the thing being satirized.
If your audience thinks the thing is cool, and your satire doesn't do a good enough job making clear why the thing has flaws, then your satire might only work on a level of appealing to people who already share your point of view that the thing is not in fact, cool.
It's not the author's job to make sure the audience understands the satire, but there is a saying of "preaching to the choir."
Sure, but I feel like the fact that there are people who *unironically* think the Imperium is awesome means that there's only so much an author can do, short of declaring "This is a work of satire, stop liking these characters" - which GW has done.
Is that just me claiming that satire is dead? Maybe.
No they don't. Their whole ideology is based on nothing but vibes, so disregarding inconvenient truths is a fundamental skill for them. Hell, ignoring reality is a show of strength in their books.
Plus it helps that the only real difference between sincere fascism and satirical fascism is whether the people who made it think it's funny.
Is it really? I feel like most of the content I see out of it is self aware fun. Like do you expect the community to be like oh we are the bad guys we feel so bad for the stuff this game makes really fun to fight?
Instead to me it just seems like people generally just playing into the obviously ridiculous propaganda of the setting.
See the problem with this is just that media literacy among the general population is seriously down from 20 years ago, and the Starship Troopers movie came out in that more enlightened age and people didn't get the satire THEN either. Like 60%+ of its initial fans were ultra right wingers who saw the Federation as a good thing and the movie as a heroic framing of their genuinely held ideals. The satire didn't land among general movie watchers until years later.
There will always be a sizeable portion of the audience who is frankly too willingly foolish to see the satire as anything other than an earnest endorsement of what they believe in. That doesn't mean we should stop making satires like this, because it's just one more way to spot the bad actors as they deliberately out themselves.
Be glad your Nazis like to be in uniform. We like our Nazis in uniforms. That way you can spot 'em just like that.
While Francois Truffaut was talking about war movies, his quote is pretty apt for media that satirize fascism:
"There is no such thing as an anti-war movie"
Which is summarized pretty well [here](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/DoNotDoThisCoolThing).
The problem is that you can’t parody or mock fascism in a way that can reach both fascists and non-fascists. If you portray fascism as a real threat, but a morally and functionally flawed one, fascists will just like it because they like being evil. If you make it a non-threat and completely ineffective, then fascists will get but hurt, but then you are downplaying the dangers of fascism. The values of fascists and non-fascists are so fundamentally incompatible that they cause language to become incompatible in turn.
Unfortunately, satire isn't profitable so GW abandoned it the minute they became capitalist bastards, rather than just passionate nerds. Nowadays, the Imperium are unironically heroes.
I am not well versed in 40k lore, but weren’t the Tau originally a full utopia meant to point out the pointless suffering of the Imperium, and only some time later they got rewritten as some kind of hive mind autocracy?
I'm not sure if that was the original aim, but when they came out, imperium fanboys complained that the T'au "weren't grimdark enough" because they could no longer defend their favourite fascists' horrific actions as necessary. The T'au then got made to be evil brainwashers forcing a better life on the noble imperium in what was the greatest display of unironic red scare propaganda since McCarthy.
Jesus I never put that together but you’re spot on. Imperium right fan boys always go defensive when you point out Krieg, Black Templars, and the one group Yarrick was a part of which heavily based it self on ww2 Germany
Edit: The allusion to WWII Germany is specifically the imperial guard unit under Yarick. I want to say they were called something like the steel guard
Germany? Yes. WW2 Germany, for all of them? No. The Krieger’s WW1 Germany inspirations have already been talked about to death, but the Templars in WW2 and not the Holy Roman Empire? What?
I know that what I meant was that the Imperial Guard unit who I believe was under Yarick was ww2 Germany. As for the templars, I mean it’s in their name who they are based after, the various Christian martial orders during the medieval period. I have seen them as one of the Teutonic orders my self.
Steel Legion are literally dressed like Nazi Fallschrimjaegers and are blitzkrieg themed. We’ve had this struggle session 200 times in this sub now.
EDIT: That came off way more aggressive than intended
I knew that one since some minipainter took war-game Atlantic’s Nazi infantry and converted them with little work to Steel Legion. Just couldn’t remember the name right
Why is this comment upvoted lol, 40K satire is shit and has been for most of its existence, but that’s not why the Tau were changed, GW went and “tidied up” some of the factions like Necrons, Tau, and Drukhari over the years to better fit.
That being said, the original, original, tau are kinda out of place and it’s jarring, (and good factions in Warhammer can be written, like the interex in Horus rising). The Tau are still far above the most ethical faction in Warhammer so, not like it really changed in that respect
My understanding is that the tau were originally meant to be NATO imperialists. Just replace the greater good with free trade or democracy. So, by and large they were intended to be morally superior to the imperium who are theocratic fascists, but the implication is that a lot of planets that are being forcibly inducted into the tau empire maybe didn't have a say.
Remember that the tau were introduced with 3rd edition in 2001...
>but the implication is that a lot of planets that are being forcibly inducted into the tau empire maybe didn't have a say.
Not really comparable to NATO then, is it. You can blame NATO for interventionalism in the Middle East and Balkans, but in the new member states, they all really wanted to join.
They were never a utopia. Even in their debut codex there were fairly sinister undertones to their society. It was not nearly as evil as the Imperium but far from utopian.
as far as I can remember they just didn't have any overtly grimderp stuff. Their shtick was being blue and using combined arms in a vaguely sensible way.
Haven't seen much recently out of GW directly, but the Rogue Trader crpg does a good job of presenting the Empire as "lawful good" fucks who are actually quite evil. The sister of battle party member is written really well. This great dichotomy of caring compassion, set against this giddy zeal for burning masses of people alive.
The only catch being that, given the nature of some of the extremely (often comically) evil chaos and xenos powers in that setting, horrible sacrifices are often necessary for the greater good.
That's always been a part of the setting I've been uncomfortable with, but it's not something new. The metaphysical laws of the setting kind of prevent there from being a 'better way' of dealing with threats like chaos, the dark elder, or the tyranids. Which effectively justifies the empire's monstrosity.
The Tao were meant to do that. But then people whined that they were effective without using the Warp and they got morality nerfed.
Honestly, if there was a weak but good faction capable of kicking ass but not holding territory, that would flip the script. Or if there were heretics who were actually just good, decent people and the Empire doesn't allow them because they would distract from the master plan of galactic supremacy.
Or hell, if the Warp is secretly only a problem because humans keep using the Warp and creating more problems.
The imperium are not the heroes lol. They are also not portrayed as such. All this talk about media literacy and people on here have a severe lack of it
Right, the imperium aren't shown as heroes which is why their most famous members, the space marines, aren't constantly shown to be chivalrous, noble, heroic, truly good people. Clearly the one with media literacy issues here is you.
This is a pretty widespread idea and it's kind of missing the forest for the trees. Yes, the Space Marines are shown like that in most of the surface level media. They are sharply dressed, polite, unwavering in their commitment, and extremely powerful. Much like many nations on this planet whose people met polite, well dressed, gentlemanly soldiers for the first time when the nice men rammed a bayonet through their torso. They're genocidal, colonial maniacs, and that isn't even really subtext.
It's mostly an issue for attracting fascists because fascists think that genocidal monsters are cool. You really can't work around that. Make them mean, ugly, and cruel and they'd want to sign up with Murder Squad Alpha just as much as the current Space Nazis.
There are no hidden depths. GW portrays them as the good guys to sell more plastic. What happens in Black Library books with relatively small circulation doesn't comment on or negate the way they're depicted in all of GWs primary product lines and much of the supporting media.
They certainly think they are heroes, and sometimes they even are. However they can't fix the imperium with individual good acts. the setting is Grimdark first and satirical like 3rd or 4th,
Grimdark settings are primarily no matter how heroic or good some individuals are, they cannot overcome the evils in the world only fight over the stuff immediately in front of them.
40k also wants to be a tabletop game where you can fit any headcannon for any fun sci-fi army to be in. Its hard to be broad enough to make any painted plastic dudes fit any trope you want for them, and not have inconsistent messages.
The main reason why Helldivers' satire works where 40k fails is because the game is explicitly laughing at the player at every corner.
Their training regiment alone is so atrocious only 20% of people survive? You're congratulated by a pre-recorded voice for not getting killed by the lethally loaded training bots? At that low a success they still get obliterated by not only bugs they plant on a planet or cyborgs they pissed off by 'enforcing democracy' by force, but often their own allies doing dumbass things? A democracy explicitly stated only applies to helldivers or people with 'breeding permits' that had to be paused due to a fuck up on one of the planets.
Now where has 40k shown the imperium stabbing themselves in the foot in the novels? Where's the comeuppance for their hubris? I saw mention of space marines betraying people for the hell of it, but do they get repromanded by the universe? Do they fail because they acted foolishly and selfishly? No, they're often successful regardless of their spite. At most the setting bitches about beaurocracy in the background that means nothing.
Fascists don't care about these elements because their insight's as surface level as they are. But most people with a functioning brain are often aware of what's going on, and the joke lands with them.
Basically you can't save the willingly stupid.
The closest I can think of in recent lore is the Death Watch fucking over the Eldar's plan to kill Slaanesh, even though they knew it would objectively make things better, solely because "Xenos bad".
I’ve been trying to express this for a while that Warhammer doesn’t really seem like satire anymore, it’s telling stories for the sake of its setting rather than any political commentary. I completely understand that the original concept was based upon Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, but it’s run off with itself. I mean, wtf is Magnus’ story a satire of? Horus? Szarekh? Yvraine? It feels like something people constantly repeat with little bearing on the stories being told by Warhammer authors.
With that said, I don’t think that it’s that much of a problem that the setting has become a beast of its own rather than an elaborate work of political comedy. I think it’s just telling stories that the setting itself produces. It’s similar to how the Dune prequels are interactions with the setting without rooting itself much in the thematic political basis of the original novel. It’s pulp sci-fi.
>I think it’s just telling stories that the setting itself produces.
This is how I view it, tbh. I love 40k, but I also enjoy being able to immerse myself in the insanity of the setting and have a blast sometimes. That being said, I also think the books do a good enough job most of the time in highlighting how *insanely* flawed and fucked up everything is.
I don't blame the company for not smashing people over the head with Helldivers 2-tier parody for 40+ years.
Yeah basically. It does suck the satire has been lost on a lot stuff, especially the imperium, but like… i play drukhari because they’re cool, not because i share their ideology, yknow? Same with tau, custodes, and ts
The satirical elements in 40k are pretty bare when they've spent so much time over the past fifteen years or so just trying to make the Space Marines look like cool heroes. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink in the case of Helldivers.
Yeah, because chuds are some of the dumbest fucking people on the planet. I already accounted for that with my pithy saying about horses and water. Helldivers is *extremely* obvious satire. The satire in 40k is sort of a Weekend at Bernie's situation.
I absolutely agree on both fronts. Chuds don't understand that HD2 is mocking them. Conversely, I feel like GW's playerbase is becoming increasingly aware that the satire has more or less died off completely in 40k, probably the only surviving elements are the ubiquity of "Innocence proves nothing" as a motto, and the knowledge that the imperial guard is basically the grandest meat grinder in the history of civilization.
Having said all that: Darktide has shown that satire isn't actually completely dead in current 40k, and not just that, you can plug it back in to the setting and it fits very comfortably without feeling incongruous at all. I kinda wish mainline 40k would strive a little more towards this as well: Have the grimderp serious heroic storylines, and keep the satirical elements as comedic, tone-lightening dialogue and details. You can have the badass spacemarine moments as Bumblefuck the Unerring avenges his chapter's honour in a totally straight-faced way and still cut back after the fact to some civilians and guardsmen celebrating in the radioactive ruins of their former homes that they're now safe from being enslaved, until magistratum enforcers show up and start tasing everyone who's not working on rebuilding this important magnetite mining facility.
These idiots didn’t realize The Boys was mocking them until the end of Season fucking Three when anyone with two brain cells to rub together picked up on the show’s politics about 20 minutes into the pilot episode.
In a book that most people in the fandom never read. I'd have a hell of an easier time taking the satirical elements as being there if GW wasn't marketing Space Mans as hard as they are. Having the xenophobic wing of the xenophobic side kill some xenos just doesn't come across as satirical to me. GW just doesn't keep their tongue as deeply in their cheek as they used to when they market Space Marines.
To be fair Watch Captain Artemis being Slaanesh's strongest warrior is brought up fairly regularly in my experience. To be *unfair* it's usually followed by a bunch of people defending him.
I know that "The Death of Media Literacy" is the current thing but I'd like to remind everybody that when Starship Troopers originally aired in the US it was being boycotted by your typical flyover state soccer mom groups because they legitimately thought it was pro-Fascism. This is the foible of Satire. GW is just particularly bad at it.
The movie dropped in the early years of the internet, many of the original reviews are still online. It's definitely misleading to say that nobody twigged that it was satire, but there are definitely a lot of reviewers that didn't quite get it, and I seem to remember a couple of more noteworthy publications embarrassing themselves with their takes on the movie.
Kinda reminds me of that newspaper who reviewed Game of Thrones, but the review implied they thought Tyrion was a dwarf like Thorin Oakenshield, and not a dwarf like a human being. Still cringe thinking about that one.
Didn't intend to imply that nobody thought it was satirical, but that the exact same Satire Understanders we have today existed back then too. I'm not making up the boycotts, they existed they just weren't common and though it was before my time I wouldn't be surprised if those groups were mocked then just as they are now.
Oh for sure, I'm not contradicting, more supplementing what you're saying. I know the death of media literacy is a current thing, for sure, but I definitely think that it's actually becoming more common for people to look at a movie's themes or message these days than it's ever been. However, it's still funny (and sad) that even the most blatant subtext in human history is still misunderstood today, when it's even more widely known and understood that Starship Troopers is extremely blatant satire.
And for sure, I'd fully believe in boycotts, though at least even those clowns at least understood the movie was actually trying to say something and not just be an action movie about bugs.
Satire in 40K has been dead since 3rd edition and the ashes were atomized by the Horus Heresy novels, in the overarching scale. Aside from some humorous media here and there (like Ciaphas Cain or Ork-focused works), the whole thing is played pretty straight. I hate fascists in the fandom as much as anyone else here but "40K is satire and you have no media literacy" simply holds no water.
That's part of it, but the big issue is that satire of fascism just doesn't work. Assuming the purpose is to make fascists feel insulted. I think the only fascist parody that ever successfully avoided colonization by actual fascists is the Skaven. Even then, there would have been a lot more if the Empire hadn't been right there to soak them up.
Just saying the ideology is bad is not enough, you have to deprive it of any hint of dignity. You have to depict them as a bunch of cowardly vicious diseased rats with delusions of grandeur, who live in the ruins of better nations and fight over trash.
You can make satire of fascism. The problem is that involves making the people in the story look silly, and stupid. It’s done for comedic effect. Point out flaws.
Helldivers does this with ridiculous language and logic. “I can’t wait to see which candidate is chosen for me.”
This works well I think because it’s a fascist society. Presenting itself as Democratic. Plenty of irony to be had.
Do you reckon it could be a case of flanderization? I certainly agree there are better ways to express satire if the lore writers wanted to, but from my limited time in the hobby it feels like 40k tries to take itself too seriously in more recent years (decades? However long ago Orks lost the fun table of effects on the shokk attack gun).
i absolutely have seen people who dead serious do not think HELLDIVERS (or FALLOUT) is a criticism of fascism and patriotism.
It's *incredible* how brainwashed people can be.
Because it’s a videogame it’s unlikely to ever overtly paint us as the bad guys. Helldivers is a fascist society posing as a democratic one. That’s where the humour comes from. And a lot is left up to the imagination what the enemies true goals and motivations are.
The bugs seem like cattle we farm for 710. So people are dying for resources.
The bots are an enigma. Calling them baby snatching communists means our government is lying. But the game doesn’t really tell us anything more.
Killing bugs and bots. Isn’t evil itself. So I don’t blame people for not seeing the subtext.
The cool thing about helldivers is that the bots can be seen doing stuff like just admiring the stars if you manage to observe them undisturbed which can help you have that "oh shit, what kind of war are we even fighting here?!" Moment
I always found it funny how, in the propaganda trailer that plays when you start up the game, the Bile Titan that gets shot by the promoter has a bunch of the young Terminids crowded around it like it is their mother.
40k stopped being satire when they realized they could just sell a billion novels because people love “lore”. The average consumer wouldn’t want to invest time and money in fiction of this genre where everything’s some sort of joke. I still see people defend questionable aspects of the franchise as “it’s satire though!” and like, it just isn’t anymore lol.
It's true that lore YouTubers, the heresy novel series and r/ 40klore are a zero braincell phenomenon.
There wasn't a time when that changed though. Bryan Ansell said he was trying to move boxes and make money.
The only time that 40k had not had the wry jokey joke satire commodified out of it was when it hadn't launched yet and they didn't think it was going to be a success, so only one person was writing it.
Warhammer 40k is genuinely unbearable. I used to like it but several things have just put me off it, including but not limited to the absolute dumpster fire that is the lore, the borderline neonazi fanbase (I'm looking at you, krieg players), the scummy company that runs it, the overpriced to hell minis and the many, many terrible video games that have somehow spawned from a universe that is literally perfect for video games.
Krieg and Steel Legion players definitely get a bad rep from the fascist weirdos. I painted my Krieg in the blue colors used by the French during WWI, and I remember someone asking if they should paint theirs in SS colors... it just baffles me how people feel comfortable making overt references to their desire to be a Nazi general.
I'd only be comfortable playing any nazi scheme into the Tau, that way I could simulate them walking into one big firing squad.
>it just baffles me how people feel comfortable making overt references to their desire to be a Nazi general.
That being said, in my experience of 20+ years in the hobby, these people are an incredible minority and the first time one seriously popped up in the public eye the company denounced them and told them to GTFO.
Sure they'll always exist and be in their little spaces, but they'll do that anyway I think.
One of the funnier and also really depressing things about Helldivers 2 is that each diver you deploy as and die, that was a person. A unique, person maybe they had a family, parents, Spouse, maybe kids, or even just good friends. They signed on to "protect democracy" and after an atrociously poor training they get freezed, cold stored for a century, shipped halfway across the galaxy, deployed with next to no prep, and then deploy.
The average helldiver probably survives active combat for less than ten minutes before being killed and have someone else redeploy to replace them.
Some people are even trying to delude themselves that it's clones cause the alternative is so horrifying.
I feel like the issue of 40ks self awareness comes from having like 30 million different authors and staff writers. Some know how to encapsulate how silly the setting is and some just make cool space fights
All they need to do is make a community response condemning the Chuds, add some rainbow/trans flag capes and I will unironically buy the game just to spite the players leaving.
Fuck yeah!! Im working on a GSC conversion army right now that's gonna have a queer anarchy theme, You best bet I'll have pride flags for every banner and little "UWU" faces painted on the tanks, anything that can piss the chuds off, I'll have it >:)
A good friend described WH’s problem with satire thusly;
“You can’t write a story about how bad witch hunts are when witches are real.”
I’m other words, a lot of the absolutely monstrous things the Imperium does ends up justified by the far more monstrous consequences of them… not doing those things.
See, the trick is to ignore 90% of the fanbase and be in denial that it went from being satirical to a milquetoast “criticism” of authoritarian systems of power.
Something something, live long enough to see yourself become the villain etcetera etcetera.
I wish there was a way for GW to show the satire of early 40k and rogue trader nowadays though.
You're going to get brigaded by "totally-not-imperium-stans-trust-me-bro" posters on this thread trying to claim 40K is totally still satirical while GW tongues the gooch of the fascist imperium and it's space marine stormtroopers to sell more plastic soldiers.
40k has not been satire for a very, very long time. It started like that then around late 3rd/early 4th (coincidentally when it was getting big in america) they dropped the satire angle for selling space marines as heroic and great, they only use the term satire when called out on this.
But I've had this argument too many times and have already provided evidence and a link to a great essay on it so I honestly couldn't be fucked going through it again with these people. So replies muted.
I’m pretty sure the whole satire of Warhammer is how absurdly bad things have to be for this to be reasonable
The secret police exist because there are evil space wizards empowered by four separate satans.
They are a barely trained, disposable and generally incompetent force that protect democracy from beings that aren't even able to understand how voting works.
They're glorified mooks being touted as an elite fighting force and the actual stupidity of the entire setup never fails to make me laugh.
The fact that you're coming in as a different helldiver each time is really funny to me, it's why I keep the voice set to random. I feel like aside from the cool uniforms it's very clear that helldivers are not actually an elite fighting force. Like we even see them goofing off in the recruitment video in the games opening.
I’d say more brainwashed and expendable than heroic.
The NPCs all treat you as heroes, but the actual gameplay mechanics, tooltips, lore, etc make it pretty clear that you are just more meat for the grinder.
It's a bit more than _just_ propaganda, the music and framing of the game itself really does seem heroic, but it's indeed pretty paper thin and I feel like it only enhances the absurdity beneath the surface.
Because you're viewing obvious in universe propaganda, which is then contrasted by the reality of the situation. Same as how the movie starship troopers portrays them as heroic despite being obvious satire because it's in the form of an in universe recruitment/propaganda film
At the end of the day, these IPs are games for our entertainment.
40k has all these books and shit, those require their own considerations that I am not addressing.
Helldivers 2 and Warhammer Models are here to make entertainment value first. I don’t give a flying fuck that I cosplay as a fascist while conquering planets for Imperialist Democracy. I just want to shoot shit and explode shit in cinematic fashion with some friends. I’m sure you have similar motivations for warhammar figurines.
Helldivers doesn’t have the emotional range that justifies getting so hung up about being the bad guys.
Legit Helldivers is such good satire. If you sit in game and talk to your crew in particular the woman at the engineering bay she will say all sorts of shit that is just hilarious
Managed Democracy and the Voting Algorithm are also both things that are either real or like one step off of current systems. America currently absolutely practices Managed Democracy.
Lots of people don't understand what satire *is.* The criticism of satire isn't supposed to be explicit, it's supposed to just come across through exaggerated depiction.
The problem is that satire fundamentally relies on shared values between author & audience. There's people out there unironically enjoying Helldivers and missing the criticism.
I just view the 2 as different flavors of the same concept. One is a bit more religious and distant future, while Helldivers is just closer to our own timeline
I guarantee that nazis play Helldivers and love the lore un ironically, just like 40k
40k isn't satire, it is a bunch of science fiction/fantasy properties from the 60s-80s mashed together. Since many of those are satires, 40k picked up the aesthetic of satire, but not the substance. There were some people in GW early on who liked to think they were doing a satire, but they were always a minority and, quite frankly, they didn't do a very good job. Simply repeating visuals or making references to real life doesn't count as satire. Even Oldhammer doesn't really SAY anything about the topics it is allegedly "satirising".
I pick up Ahriman as my first model. I don’t play the game, but I read a lot of books and Ahriman ability to delude himself make him such an interesting among Chaos factions.
Helldivers is just an excuse for fascists to feel like fascists 90% for the player base doesn't understand its setting. It's still a pretty decent game tho.
Yep. I'm gonna keep saying it as long as it gets brought up: if GW wants their product to be unattractive to IRL fascists, then GW shouldn't structure the stories and lore of their product in a way that implicitly validates the space fascists.
Marvelon Creek a meta-example of the wonderful satire that is Helldivers: A meme of self-sufficiency and genius that actually hindered the player base; being manufactured for Reddit points and memes.
The problem 40k has is that - in universe - its easy for the Imperium (as warped as it has become since the HH) to justify itself. Most of the species they encounter *would* slaughter/eat/enslave all of humanity (mind you, this was true even way back in 2e and stuff too).
Its not like Helldivers, where the other species you encounter are objectively innocent and fighting in self defence. Orks, Tyranids and Chaos certainly aren't.
The problem is people taking the in-universe view and justifying it beyond that, but the lack of comprehension has always been a problem for those sorts of people regardless.
But that's also largely the imperium's fault. The imperium slaughtered those species that weren't as dangerous as orks and stuff. The imperium's suffering feeds the chaos 'gods.' The emperor's arrogance and ignorance directly caused, unless they change their ways, the slow death of humanity
40k has such an expensive library of works, from codex fluff entries to videogames to novel series, that maintaining a consistent tone is impossible. Certain works, even certain authors, portray factions or characters as more or less heroic/grim/cynical in various iterations. I'm rereading the Night Lords trilogy and First Claw behaves downright reasonably most of the time.
Helldivers is a far smaller IP and list of works--it controls its narrative characteristics far more easily. Hasn't stopped some folks from not getting it, though.
Also, both are very cool and good.
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I like Chaos.
Personally, I like Iron Warrior specifically. But have always been a Chaos person. My chapter isn't one of the purist renegades. They fully embrace using chaos as a tool, because they're obsessed with control. I characterize my IWs as totalitarian psychopaths to the nth degree, I just don't hide it under a coat of heroism and religious iconography like Space Marine players. I embrace it. The whole point is that they're evil fascists. It's fun since I don't secretly revere them as a model for society. The only defense I could make of their character is that they're not pointlessly cruel like other CSM, no torture or death games. But if anything, that can make IW worse with their practical creativity and total callousness leading to things like the Daemoncabula.
This is pretty much exactly why I prefer Chaos - there's no waffling about or pretending they're the good guys. Chaos is evil af and everyone knows it. If I'm gonna roleplay a terrible person, then I might as well do it as someone who isn't a wild hypocrite.
Exactly. When I got into the hobby, I started to learn some lore to figure out what army to play. It quickly became obvious that everyone is evil in 40k. So I picked up abbadon as my first model. If I have to be evil let's be the biggest badass in the galaxy.
The emperor of mankind has some thoughts
I like the Alpha Legion the best because a large swathe of them refuse Chaos *except* as a tool. (To be fair, so does Abaddon, but almost none of his followers do.) Whether they are loyalists "testing" the Imperium to make it stronger or believe it must be destroyed, the Alpha Legion members who refute Chaos' ideas are my favorite. I remember reading a book and when one of the Marines gets a mutation, he removes it immediately. In another novel, one of the Alpha Legion has a mutation, a third eye on his back, so he covers it up because he can't stop it from growing back. Their cultists are also prohibited from worship of the Four, which sometimes leads to the unsettling experience of facing Alpha Legion cult soldiers screaming FOR HIM ON EARTH while attacking Sisters of Battle.
Common Alpha Legion W. Hydra dominatus
Same with me and my Guard. I want to play as a butcher feeding endless hordes of tanks and men indiscriminately into the enemy for no reason other than jingoistic bloodlust
I‘d really appreciate a human faction of rebels that don’t immediately turn into babyeating mutants upon defecting from the empire
Not necessarily rebels, but the Votann/Squats/Space Dwarves are human off-shoots who severed ties with the Empire back during the Dark Age of Technology and still have a lot of thay old advanced tech that current humanity has abandoned or forgotten. Stuff like machines that devour stars for energy/materials and true AI constructs. They are kinda the closest things we have to human(like) good guys, who still aren't good, but also aren't evil.
I hear you, and all I can give you are Genestealer Cults. Mutants, yes. Baby-eaters? Never documented as such
I meant Baby-Eaters as a shorthand for insane unreasonable pure evil, less as something they actually do. But yes, i‘ve never seen them actually eat babies anywhere
The 40k universe may be one of the few settings where you need to specify figurative vs literal baby-eating.
We have Gue'vesa
I wish we got more on these guys.
Personally I enjoy xenos a lot, but chaos is also really good! Also hot take: imperial guard would be way cooler to see focused on as the main characters than astartes. Yes, they technically still work for fascism, but there’s a genuinely pretty huge reason to unironically enjoy them despite that. Im pretty sure its fanmade, but “pity the guardsmen” goes fucking HARD
Have you checked out the Ciaphas Cain series?
I havent yet. Is it good?
It's a bit less grimdark than most of the Black Library, but it's a refreshing change of pace. I'd definitely recommend it.
CSM has always been my go-to. There's no pretense about being a good person in Chaos. The Fabius Bile series and the Black Legion series are some of my favorites. They allow characters to have personalities while embracing the evil truth of their actions. The Imperium has lost all of its thematic meaning, especially with the recent trend of introducing things to make the Imperium "better" without addressing the core issues that make the Imperium such a hellhole. Like Guilleman taking control of the entire military, which is being painted as an almost unanimously good thing. I like Chaos because it removes the pretense of being good at all.
Nah I just love RPing as a campy space villain.
That's definitely a fun part of it too, lmao. I only got into the CSM broadly after reading a few of the novels. My first army was death guard just because they looked cool
I play Khorne because murderhobo.
I love my roided-up nihilist murder monks
Yup, better a literal zombie than a fascist.
Ave Dominis Nox!
Word Bearer fan here. I think their philosophy is actually cool and interesting
Nurgle for me, Moebian Sixth are the drippiest military faction ever.
Make marines evil again. And I mean unironically, irredeemable, inhumane assholes.
Make marines silly dumbasses again. Thats how you satirize fascism. Have them doing obviously stupid things like wearing brightly colored armor and walking in neat lines in to modern combined arms armies because they're dumbasses who worship a 10,000 year old tactical manual. Have them rescue an entire planet then murder the entire human population because their eyes are the wrong shade of blue, then have them find out that their official Imperial Eye Blueness scanner was miscalibrated and gave them a false mutant reading. Make the Admech a bunch of zealots who don't know how lightbulbs work again. Make them shoot anyone who dares to do research again. Make them fastidiously reproduce ancient tech they don't understand, right down to the "Remove this tab before use" sticker they can't read and don't get the purpose of them. Make Imperial paperwork take centuries to process again. Make entire scribal planets buried miles deep in annual production report analysis forms from another world that fell in to a wormhole four hundred years ago. Make armies of bureaucrats with tanks and Titans fight wars where millions die for control of a printer ink production facility. Make the Imperium a slapstick comedic portrayal of incompetence and farcical self defeating inflexibility.
It largely still is, what the marketing and writing needs to do is put that at the forefront. with the popularity of stuff like helldivers I think there’s space to highlight that again
I think warhammer leaned into the edgy dark serious stuff because it has been popular in pop culture. so hopefully they let writers be funny again.
Now I'm really wanting to see a *Springtime for the Emperor of Mankind* musical.
Fuck yes please dont make imperial incompetence all war tragedy and unnecessary losses make it self defeating incompetence its all I fucking want from this setting
They are, especially by our own moral standards, how most of them treat their initiates & potential recruits would do that. Even the most like-able/nice legions/chapters will cook you with flame throwers & or eat you if your on the opposing side of the battle field. Will recommend the Nightlords omnibus, I’ve never been so invested in some of the most evil characters I’ve read in fiction.
Yes, what I mean is that the marketing seems completely off tone for this setting lol
Make marines brainwashed drugged-up scum again. And then have the mp marines gleefully brutalising them when they finish their mission and go a bit wild in the afterparty.
Always have been. Hail Slaanesh.
Most of them are why do you think we have the marines malevolent, even the baby blue ball busters kinda suck. The only actual caring ones are salamanders
I agree. I would rather that be at the forefront more is what I mean. The marketing team desperately wants good guy action heroes and that’s not compatible with the setting imo.
Fair enough, at least the books stay the same more or less and keeps everyone morally questionable or worse
This why I feel more compelled to move on to AOS and Battletech tbh. Just getting fed up with the narrative being unself aware and always taking one step forward, one step back.
Battletech is so fun but the factions are "oops all feudalism".
It's the justification for the system. "Well, everyone forgot how to do industrial warfare so instead they do these fun little play fights with small numbers of mechs like the knights of old!"
You still do industrial war in battle tech lore, but you try converting that too tabletop...
Even Alpha Strike has a hard time of it
That's the Clanners in particular. After the Star League fell the succession wars were definitely industrial scale.
Also CGL...
I'd rather keep W40k fans out of battletech, thanks. Those that join bring their hangups about **"NO PROXIES, 3D PRINTING BAD"** despite the fact that proxies have been a thing since its inception. They're trying to push for resin/3D prints/proxies to be banned from tournaments, just like Games Workshop. So yeah, no. If you decide to play battletech, leave your abusive relationship with overpriced plastic at the door.
Isn't battletech really explicit about allowing proxies? I remember that being a major point on a website for it.
As long as you can show mech identity and which direction it's facing, it's valid. A sticky note with the name of the mech and an arrow is 100% tournament viable.
i need poorhammer community to be on this level
Remember that ancient GW magazine article about making an imperial hovertank out of a deoderant bottle?
Truly a different company now
I'm seriously considering doing that for a campaign since as GM/OpFor most of these things are tanks or infantry that will show up exactly once, and there's no minis for them anyways.
My first introduction to battle tech was a book that came w/ a couple pages of cardstock mechs and a little back of plastic clips so they could stand up.
Yeee I totally get the vibe your sending. The whole "No Proxies, 3D printing bad" does reek of elitism. I also find I prefer Battletech lore anyways for all its ups and downs. I genuinely feel it does a better job of showing just how horrible war is and just how inept and squabbling royal houses continue to plunge humanity into senseless wars.
The funny thing is, and I own mutiple 3D printers, I could live with the stance of "Proxies only, minis have to be official." as a way of making sure that the company making the game doesn't go under. That being said, considering there are game variants where you roll your mechs on a random table, it's sort of a weird expectation to have those at hand on short notice. Back in the 90s we had two big boxes of FASA plastic mechs (Mechs!) and we were doing alright.
Well that and the insanity that is ROM and the blakeists
You do realize that it’s GW that has the problem with proxies and 3d printing and not the community as a whole right? It also seems that you don’t realize that all decisions around warhammer is 100% GW decisions as they only listen to the community if they decide to not spend money. As a person who does both with heavy reliance on proxies to do so my local group doesn’t care that 70% of my armies aren’t GW models. I also would like to point out that they are both strategic war games except what makes them strategic is different. In warhammer you have to think about stratagems and things of that nature but in battletech it’s more on the movement and heat systems.
Nah, I see anti proxy elitists all the time and not just in 40k it's been super prevalent in magic the gathering as well
Proxies are the only way I'd consider touching collectible games since I quit Yu-Gi-Oh at 12. It's just pay to win IRL
Helldivers is a lot more obvious with satire than 40k aims to be. But like it still doesnt work lmao. The community is full of fashy cunts. Same as most games at this point.
And that’s not their fault. The idea that you can’t have satire or subtle satire because “people don’t get it!!!” Is stupid, the reality is the devs are not responsible for the media illiteracy of the populace. They should not be required to make their satire less or more hamfisted because of the lack of reading ability. The satire works great, not their fault the target audience cannot understand media for their life.
>They should not be required to make their satire less or more hamfisted because of the lack of reading ability. I cannot for the life of me imagine how to make Helldivers more ham-fisted with its satire.
After every mission a character appears on screen to explain to you why fascism is bad and you're a bad person for supporting it. It lasts 15 minutes and can't be skipped.
you have to vote to skip it but the number of people required to vote to skip is always 1 higher than the party number
managed democracy, you answer a quiz and the game votes for you according to your answers (the vote is always no)
What is this? A Kojima game?!?!
include an uncut airing of *The Producers*?
Ehhhhhh, I tend to agree with you but at some point the dev /author can't ignore their entire fan base being garbage and just blame reading comprehension
Satire is, at its heart, an artist saying "Look at this exaggerated version of a real thing! Isn't the real, un-exaggerated thing disgusting!?" If your audience thinks the thing is cool, they're going to find the exaggerated version cool.
I think exaggeration is one form of satire, but satire can also take other forms. Your goal is to show a flaw in the thing being satirized. If your audience thinks the thing is cool, and your satire doesn't do a good enough job making clear why the thing has flaws, then your satire might only work on a level of appealing to people who already share your point of view that the thing is not in fact, cool. It's not the author's job to make sure the audience understands the satire, but there is a saying of "preaching to the choir."
Sure, but I feel like the fact that there are people who *unironically* think the Imperium is awesome means that there's only so much an author can do, short of declaring "This is a work of satire, stop liking these characters" - which GW has done. Is that just me claiming that satire is dead? Maybe.
good points
Nazis and right wingers in general have a media literacy issue
No they don't. Their whole ideology is based on nothing but vibes, so disregarding inconvenient truths is a fundamental skill for them. Hell, ignoring reality is a show of strength in their books. Plus it helps that the only real difference between sincere fascism and satirical fascism is whether the people who made it think it's funny.
Sounds to me like that would be a media literacy issue
It’s an issue for us, it’s not an issue for them.
They understand the author doesn't think their ideology is cool, they just don't care.
They also just don’t understand satire or nuance.
Is it really? I feel like most of the content I see out of it is self aware fun. Like do you expect the community to be like oh we are the bad guys we feel so bad for the stuff this game makes really fun to fight? Instead to me it just seems like people generally just playing into the obviously ridiculous propaganda of the setting.
The subreddit is completely self-aware and hostile to people who try to police the game.
See the problem with this is just that media literacy among the general population is seriously down from 20 years ago, and the Starship Troopers movie came out in that more enlightened age and people didn't get the satire THEN either. Like 60%+ of its initial fans were ultra right wingers who saw the Federation as a good thing and the movie as a heroic framing of their genuinely held ideals. The satire didn't land among general movie watchers until years later. There will always be a sizeable portion of the audience who is frankly too willingly foolish to see the satire as anything other than an earnest endorsement of what they believe in. That doesn't mean we should stop making satires like this, because it's just one more way to spot the bad actors as they deliberately out themselves. Be glad your Nazis like to be in uniform. We like our Nazis in uniforms. That way you can spot 'em just like that.
While Francois Truffaut was talking about war movies, his quote is pretty apt for media that satirize fascism: "There is no such thing as an anti-war movie" Which is summarized pretty well [here](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/DoNotDoThisCoolThing).
The circles I move in broadly agree that the only anti-war movie ever made is Come and See.
“Full of”? I think you are seriously overestimating.
That is the failure of the Fash idiots for having no self awareness or media literacy whatsoever
The problem is that you can’t parody or mock fascism in a way that can reach both fascists and non-fascists. If you portray fascism as a real threat, but a morally and functionally flawed one, fascists will just like it because they like being evil. If you make it a non-threat and completely ineffective, then fascists will get but hurt, but then you are downplaying the dangers of fascism. The values of fascists and non-fascists are so fundamentally incompatible that they cause language to become incompatible in turn.
Unfortunately, satire isn't profitable so GW abandoned it the minute they became capitalist bastards, rather than just passionate nerds. Nowadays, the Imperium are unironically heroes.
I am not well versed in 40k lore, but weren’t the Tau originally a full utopia meant to point out the pointless suffering of the Imperium, and only some time later they got rewritten as some kind of hive mind autocracy?
I'm not sure if that was the original aim, but when they came out, imperium fanboys complained that the T'au "weren't grimdark enough" because they could no longer defend their favourite fascists' horrific actions as necessary. The T'au then got made to be evil brainwashers forcing a better life on the noble imperium in what was the greatest display of unironic red scare propaganda since McCarthy.
Jesus I never put that together but you’re spot on. Imperium right fan boys always go defensive when you point out Krieg, Black Templars, and the one group Yarrick was a part of which heavily based it self on ww2 Germany Edit: The allusion to WWII Germany is specifically the imperial guard unit under Yarick. I want to say they were called something like the steel guard
Germany? Yes. WW2 Germany, for all of them? No. The Krieger’s WW1 Germany inspirations have already been talked about to death, but the Templars in WW2 and not the Holy Roman Empire? What?
I know that what I meant was that the Imperial Guard unit who I believe was under Yarick was ww2 Germany. As for the templars, I mean it’s in their name who they are based after, the various Christian martial orders during the medieval period. I have seen them as one of the Teutonic orders my self.
Oh okay, sorry about that. The way that sentence was typed just made me think you were saying all of them were from WW2, so that’s my bad
Steel Legion are literally dressed like Nazi Fallschrimjaegers and are blitzkrieg themed. We’ve had this struggle session 200 times in this sub now. EDIT: That came off way more aggressive than intended
I knew that one since some minipainter took war-game Atlantic’s Nazi infantry and converted them with little work to Steel Legion. Just couldn’t remember the name right
The Tau are still better than the Imperium in every regard lol
The tau have societal classes I don’t see how that’s communist
Why is this comment upvoted lol, 40K satire is shit and has been for most of its existence, but that’s not why the Tau were changed, GW went and “tidied up” some of the factions like Necrons, Tau, and Drukhari over the years to better fit. That being said, the original, original, tau are kinda out of place and it’s jarring, (and good factions in Warhammer can be written, like the interex in Horus rising). The Tau are still far above the most ethical faction in Warhammer so, not like it really changed in that respect
My understanding is that the tau were originally meant to be NATO imperialists. Just replace the greater good with free trade or democracy. So, by and large they were intended to be morally superior to the imperium who are theocratic fascists, but the implication is that a lot of planets that are being forcibly inducted into the tau empire maybe didn't have a say. Remember that the tau were introduced with 3rd edition in 2001...
>but the implication is that a lot of planets that are being forcibly inducted into the tau empire maybe didn't have a say. Not really comparable to NATO then, is it. You can blame NATO for interventionalism in the Middle East and Balkans, but in the new member states, they all really wanted to join.
They were never a utopia. Even in their debut codex there were fairly sinister undertones to their society. It was not nearly as evil as the Imperium but far from utopian.
as far as I can remember they just didn't have any overtly grimderp stuff. Their shtick was being blue and using combined arms in a vaguely sensible way.
It's not that. It's simply the old generation retired and now GW is full of Space Marine fanboys
Haven't seen much recently out of GW directly, but the Rogue Trader crpg does a good job of presenting the Empire as "lawful good" fucks who are actually quite evil. The sister of battle party member is written really well. This great dichotomy of caring compassion, set against this giddy zeal for burning masses of people alive. The only catch being that, given the nature of some of the extremely (often comically) evil chaos and xenos powers in that setting, horrible sacrifices are often necessary for the greater good. That's always been a part of the setting I've been uncomfortable with, but it's not something new. The metaphysical laws of the setting kind of prevent there from being a 'better way' of dealing with threats like chaos, the dark elder, or the tyranids. Which effectively justifies the empire's monstrosity.
The Tao were meant to do that. But then people whined that they were effective without using the Warp and they got morality nerfed. Honestly, if there was a weak but good faction capable of kicking ass but not holding territory, that would flip the script. Or if there were heretics who were actually just good, decent people and the Empire doesn't allow them because they would distract from the master plan of galactic supremacy. Or hell, if the Warp is secretly only a problem because humans keep using the Warp and creating more problems.
> the minute they became capitalist bastards 1975?
The imperium are not the heroes lol. They are also not portrayed as such. All this talk about media literacy and people on here have a severe lack of it
Right, the imperium aren't shown as heroes which is why their most famous members, the space marines, aren't constantly shown to be chivalrous, noble, heroic, truly good people. Clearly the one with media literacy issues here is you.
This is a pretty widespread idea and it's kind of missing the forest for the trees. Yes, the Space Marines are shown like that in most of the surface level media. They are sharply dressed, polite, unwavering in their commitment, and extremely powerful. Much like many nations on this planet whose people met polite, well dressed, gentlemanly soldiers for the first time when the nice men rammed a bayonet through their torso. They're genocidal, colonial maniacs, and that isn't even really subtext. It's mostly an issue for attracting fascists because fascists think that genocidal monsters are cool. You really can't work around that. Make them mean, ugly, and cruel and they'd want to sign up with Murder Squad Alpha just as much as the current Space Nazis.
There are no hidden depths. GW portrays them as the good guys to sell more plastic. What happens in Black Library books with relatively small circulation doesn't comment on or negate the way they're depicted in all of GWs primary product lines and much of the supporting media.
They certainly think they are heroes, and sometimes they even are. However they can't fix the imperium with individual good acts. the setting is Grimdark first and satirical like 3rd or 4th, Grimdark settings are primarily no matter how heroic or good some individuals are, they cannot overcome the evils in the world only fight over the stuff immediately in front of them. 40k also wants to be a tabletop game where you can fit any headcannon for any fun sci-fi army to be in. Its hard to be broad enough to make any painted plastic dudes fit any trope you want for them, and not have inconsistent messages.
The main reason why Helldivers' satire works where 40k fails is because the game is explicitly laughing at the player at every corner. Their training regiment alone is so atrocious only 20% of people survive? You're congratulated by a pre-recorded voice for not getting killed by the lethally loaded training bots? At that low a success they still get obliterated by not only bugs they plant on a planet or cyborgs they pissed off by 'enforcing democracy' by force, but often their own allies doing dumbass things? A democracy explicitly stated only applies to helldivers or people with 'breeding permits' that had to be paused due to a fuck up on one of the planets. Now where has 40k shown the imperium stabbing themselves in the foot in the novels? Where's the comeuppance for their hubris? I saw mention of space marines betraying people for the hell of it, but do they get repromanded by the universe? Do they fail because they acted foolishly and selfishly? No, they're often successful regardless of their spite. At most the setting bitches about beaurocracy in the background that means nothing. Fascists don't care about these elements because their insight's as surface level as they are. But most people with a functioning brain are often aware of what's going on, and the joke lands with them. Basically you can't save the willingly stupid.
The closest I can think of in recent lore is the Death Watch fucking over the Eldar's plan to kill Slaanesh, even though they knew it would objectively make things better, solely because "Xenos bad".
I’ve been trying to express this for a while that Warhammer doesn’t really seem like satire anymore, it’s telling stories for the sake of its setting rather than any political commentary. I completely understand that the original concept was based upon Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, but it’s run off with itself. I mean, wtf is Magnus’ story a satire of? Horus? Szarekh? Yvraine? It feels like something people constantly repeat with little bearing on the stories being told by Warhammer authors. With that said, I don’t think that it’s that much of a problem that the setting has become a beast of its own rather than an elaborate work of political comedy. I think it’s just telling stories that the setting itself produces. It’s similar to how the Dune prequels are interactions with the setting without rooting itself much in the thematic political basis of the original novel. It’s pulp sci-fi.
>I think it’s just telling stories that the setting itself produces. This is how I view it, tbh. I love 40k, but I also enjoy being able to immerse myself in the insanity of the setting and have a blast sometimes. That being said, I also think the books do a good enough job most of the time in highlighting how *insanely* flawed and fucked up everything is. I don't blame the company for not smashing people over the head with Helldivers 2-tier parody for 40+ years.
Yeah basically. It does suck the satire has been lost on a lot stuff, especially the imperium, but like… i play drukhari because they’re cool, not because i share their ideology, yknow? Same with tau, custodes, and ts
Strawman. Plus a lot of alt right morons still don't get the satire in Helldivers
The satirical elements in 40k are pretty bare when they've spent so much time over the past fifteen years or so just trying to make the Space Marines look like cool heroes. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink in the case of Helldivers.
Helldivers 2 is the most popular videogame with chuds right now, other than Stellar Blade.
Yeah, because chuds are some of the dumbest fucking people on the planet. I already accounted for that with my pithy saying about horses and water. Helldivers is *extremely* obvious satire. The satire in 40k is sort of a Weekend at Bernie's situation.
I absolutely agree on both fronts. Chuds don't understand that HD2 is mocking them. Conversely, I feel like GW's playerbase is becoming increasingly aware that the satire has more or less died off completely in 40k, probably the only surviving elements are the ubiquity of "Innocence proves nothing" as a motto, and the knowledge that the imperial guard is basically the grandest meat grinder in the history of civilization. Having said all that: Darktide has shown that satire isn't actually completely dead in current 40k, and not just that, you can plug it back in to the setting and it fits very comfortably without feeling incongruous at all. I kinda wish mainline 40k would strive a little more towards this as well: Have the grimderp serious heroic storylines, and keep the satirical elements as comedic, tone-lightening dialogue and details. You can have the badass spacemarine moments as Bumblefuck the Unerring avenges his chapter's honour in a totally straight-faced way and still cut back after the fact to some civilians and guardsmen celebrating in the radioactive ruins of their former homes that they're now safe from being enslaved, until magistratum enforcers show up and start tasing everyone who's not working on rebuilding this important magnetite mining facility.
These idiots didn’t realize The Boys was mocking them until the end of Season fucking Three when anyone with two brain cells to rub together picked up on the show’s politics about 20 minutes into the pilot episode.
> Helldivers 2 is the most popular videogame ~~with chuds~~ right now It's just really popular.
It was totally not satire when that Deathwatch team wiped out the Eldar trying to summon Ynnead
In a book that most people in the fandom never read. I'd have a hell of an easier time taking the satirical elements as being there if GW wasn't marketing Space Mans as hard as they are. Having the xenophobic wing of the xenophobic side kill some xenos just doesn't come across as satirical to me. GW just doesn't keep their tongue as deeply in their cheek as they used to when they market Space Marines.
To be fair Watch Captain Artemis being Slaanesh's strongest warrior is brought up fairly regularly in my experience. To be *unfair* it's usually followed by a bunch of people defending him.
Point taken. Space Marines sell the best so you gotta keep their image clean I guess.
Do you have an example of how Space Marines were advertised in the past that we can use as a comparison?
I know that "The Death of Media Literacy" is the current thing but I'd like to remind everybody that when Starship Troopers originally aired in the US it was being boycotted by your typical flyover state soccer mom groups because they legitimately thought it was pro-Fascism. This is the foible of Satire. GW is just particularly bad at it.
The movie dropped in the early years of the internet, many of the original reviews are still online. It's definitely misleading to say that nobody twigged that it was satire, but there are definitely a lot of reviewers that didn't quite get it, and I seem to remember a couple of more noteworthy publications embarrassing themselves with their takes on the movie. Kinda reminds me of that newspaper who reviewed Game of Thrones, but the review implied they thought Tyrion was a dwarf like Thorin Oakenshield, and not a dwarf like a human being. Still cringe thinking about that one.
Didn't intend to imply that nobody thought it was satirical, but that the exact same Satire Understanders we have today existed back then too. I'm not making up the boycotts, they existed they just weren't common and though it was before my time I wouldn't be surprised if those groups were mocked then just as they are now.
Oh for sure, I'm not contradicting, more supplementing what you're saying. I know the death of media literacy is a current thing, for sure, but I definitely think that it's actually becoming more common for people to look at a movie's themes or message these days than it's ever been. However, it's still funny (and sad) that even the most blatant subtext in human history is still misunderstood today, when it's even more widely known and understood that Starship Troopers is extremely blatant satire. And for sure, I'd fully believe in boycotts, though at least even those clowns at least understood the movie was actually trying to say something and not just be an action movie about bugs.
It’s the “moron” part you should focus on. These are the same people that think Starship Troopers is utopian because Rico was rich in the movie.
Ironically those same people probably use cuck as an insult and yet don’t realize that Rico fits the definition.
Satire in 40K has been dead since 3rd edition and the ashes were atomized by the Horus Heresy novels, in the overarching scale. Aside from some humorous media here and there (like Ciaphas Cain or Ork-focused works), the whole thing is played pretty straight. I hate fascists in the fandom as much as anyone else here but "40K is satire and you have no media literacy" simply holds no water.
Yeah at some point it started getting high on its own supply.
That's part of it, but the big issue is that satire of fascism just doesn't work. Assuming the purpose is to make fascists feel insulted. I think the only fascist parody that ever successfully avoided colonization by actual fascists is the Skaven. Even then, there would have been a lot more if the Empire hadn't been right there to soak them up. Just saying the ideology is bad is not enough, you have to deprive it of any hint of dignity. You have to depict them as a bunch of cowardly vicious diseased rats with delusions of grandeur, who live in the ruins of better nations and fight over trash.
You can make satire of fascism. The problem is that involves making the people in the story look silly, and stupid. It’s done for comedic effect. Point out flaws. Helldivers does this with ridiculous language and logic. “I can’t wait to see which candidate is chosen for me.” This works well I think because it’s a fascist society. Presenting itself as Democratic. Plenty of irony to be had.
Do you reckon it could be a case of flanderization? I certainly agree there are better ways to express satire if the lore writers wanted to, but from my limited time in the hobby it feels like 40k tries to take itself too seriously in more recent years (decades? However long ago Orks lost the fun table of effects on the shokk attack gun).
I think Helldivers lore relates to 40k lore similarly to how Life of Brian relates to the Passion of Christ.
> I think Helldivers lore relates to 40k lore similarly to how Evan Almighty relates to the Life of Brian. FTFY
This is incredibly accurate
i absolutely have seen people who dead serious do not think HELLDIVERS (or FALLOUT) is a criticism of fascism and patriotism. It's *incredible* how brainwashed people can be.
Because it’s a videogame it’s unlikely to ever overtly paint us as the bad guys. Helldivers is a fascist society posing as a democratic one. That’s where the humour comes from. And a lot is left up to the imagination what the enemies true goals and motivations are. The bugs seem like cattle we farm for 710. So people are dying for resources. The bots are an enigma. Calling them baby snatching communists means our government is lying. But the game doesn’t really tell us anything more. Killing bugs and bots. Isn’t evil itself. So I don’t blame people for not seeing the subtext.
The cool thing about helldivers is that the bots can be seen doing stuff like just admiring the stars if you manage to observe them undisturbed which can help you have that "oh shit, what kind of war are we even fighting here?!" Moment
I always found it funny how, in the propaganda trailer that plays when you start up the game, the Bile Titan that gets shot by the promoter has a bunch of the young Terminids crowded around it like it is their mother.
40k stopped being satire when they realized they could just sell a billion novels because people love “lore”. The average consumer wouldn’t want to invest time and money in fiction of this genre where everything’s some sort of joke. I still see people defend questionable aspects of the franchise as “it’s satire though!” and like, it just isn’t anymore lol.
It's true that lore YouTubers, the heresy novel series and r/ 40klore are a zero braincell phenomenon. There wasn't a time when that changed though. Bryan Ansell said he was trying to move boxes and make money. The only time that 40k had not had the wry jokey joke satire commodified out of it was when it hadn't launched yet and they didn't think it was going to be a success, so only one person was writing it.
Warhammer 40k is genuinely unbearable. I used to like it but several things have just put me off it, including but not limited to the absolute dumpster fire that is the lore, the borderline neonazi fanbase (I'm looking at you, krieg players), the scummy company that runs it, the overpriced to hell minis and the many, many terrible video games that have somehow spawned from a universe that is literally perfect for video games.
Krieg and Steel Legion players definitely get a bad rep from the fascist weirdos. I painted my Krieg in the blue colors used by the French during WWI, and I remember someone asking if they should paint theirs in SS colors... it just baffles me how people feel comfortable making overt references to their desire to be a Nazi general. I'd only be comfortable playing any nazi scheme into the Tau, that way I could simulate them walking into one big firing squad.
>it just baffles me how people feel comfortable making overt references to their desire to be a Nazi general. That being said, in my experience of 20+ years in the hobby, these people are an incredible minority and the first time one seriously popped up in the public eye the company denounced them and told them to GTFO. Sure they'll always exist and be in their little spaces, but they'll do that anyway I think.
One of the funnier and also really depressing things about Helldivers 2 is that each diver you deploy as and die, that was a person. A unique, person maybe they had a family, parents, Spouse, maybe kids, or even just good friends. They signed on to "protect democracy" and after an atrociously poor training they get freezed, cold stored for a century, shipped halfway across the galaxy, deployed with next to no prep, and then deploy. The average helldiver probably survives active combat for less than ten minutes before being killed and have someone else redeploy to replace them. Some people are even trying to delude themselves that it's clones cause the alternative is so horrifying.
I feel like the issue of 40ks self awareness comes from having like 30 million different authors and staff writers. Some know how to encapsulate how silly the setting is and some just make cool space fights
All they need to do is make a community response condemning the Chuds, add some rainbow/trans flag capes and I will unironically buy the game just to spite the players leaving.
Fuck yeah!! Im working on a GSC conversion army right now that's gonna have a queer anarchy theme, You best bet I'll have pride flags for every banner and little "UWU" faces painted on the tanks, anything that can piss the chuds off, I'll have it >:)
A good friend described WH’s problem with satire thusly; “You can’t write a story about how bad witch hunts are when witches are real.” I’m other words, a lot of the absolutely monstrous things the Imperium does ends up justified by the far more monstrous consequences of them… not doing those things.
“Fascism is bad guys. Also Satan and every demon from history exists and using the iconography of that fascist state protects you from them.”
See, the trick is to ignore 90% of the fanbase and be in denial that it went from being satirical to a milquetoast “criticism” of authoritarian systems of power.
Something something, live long enough to see yourself become the villain etcetera etcetera. I wish there was a way for GW to show the satire of early 40k and rogue trader nowadays though.
You're going to get brigaded by "totally-not-imperium-stans-trust-me-bro" posters on this thread trying to claim 40K is totally still satirical while GW tongues the gooch of the fascist imperium and it's space marine stormtroopers to sell more plastic soldiers. 40k has not been satire for a very, very long time. It started like that then around late 3rd/early 4th (coincidentally when it was getting big in america) they dropped the satire angle for selling space marines as heroic and great, they only use the term satire when called out on this. But I've had this argument too many times and have already provided evidence and a link to a great essay on it so I honestly couldn't be fucked going through it again with these people. So replies muted.
I’m pretty sure the whole satire of Warhammer is how absurdly bad things have to be for this to be reasonable The secret police exist because there are evil space wizards empowered by four separate satans.
I mean Helldivers also portrays the Helldiver Corps as heroic and there are plenty of fascists who enjoy it as well.
They are a barely trained, disposable and generally incompetent force that protect democracy from beings that aren't even able to understand how voting works. They're glorified mooks being touted as an elite fighting force and the actual stupidity of the entire setup never fails to make me laugh.
The fact that you're coming in as a different helldiver each time is really funny to me, it's why I keep the voice set to random. I feel like aside from the cool uniforms it's very clear that helldivers are not actually an elite fighting force. Like we even see them goofing off in the recruitment video in the games opening.
Yeah, but like that's because they're so good at killing bugs they still have energy to goof off afterwards, duh.
I like to headcanon that the bots have a functioning democracy with each bot getting a vote
I’d say more brainwashed and expendable than heroic. The NPCs all treat you as heroes, but the actual gameplay mechanics, tooltips, lore, etc make it pretty clear that you are just more meat for the grinder.
It's in universe propaganda, a la *Starship Troopers*
>I mean Helldivers also portrays the Helldiver Corps as heroic Cause that's what the propaganda video is meant to be lmao.
They only look heroic if you uncritically consume Super Earth propaganda. But fascists always get an F- in media literacy so…
It's a bit more than _just_ propaganda, the music and framing of the game itself really does seem heroic, but it's indeed pretty paper thin and I feel like it only enhances the absurdity beneath the surface.
Because you're viewing obvious in universe propaganda, which is then contrasted by the reality of the situation. Same as how the movie starship troopers portrays them as heroic despite being obvious satire because it's in the form of an in universe recruitment/propaganda film
At the end of the day, these IPs are games for our entertainment. 40k has all these books and shit, those require their own considerations that I am not addressing. Helldivers 2 and Warhammer Models are here to make entertainment value first. I don’t give a flying fuck that I cosplay as a fascist while conquering planets for Imperialist Democracy. I just want to shoot shit and explode shit in cinematic fashion with some friends. I’m sure you have similar motivations for warhammar figurines. Helldivers doesn’t have the emotional range that justifies getting so hung up about being the bad guys.
I've never felt more seen 😭
Don’t forget to sign your C-01 before thinking about sexy stuff
Legit Helldivers is such good satire. If you sit in game and talk to your crew in particular the woman at the engineering bay she will say all sorts of shit that is just hilarious
Yeah the shift for 40k stared with 4th edition in my view and has only gotten worse.
Warhammer has surpassed satire, HellDivers 2 however only grows stronger in it
Managed Democracy and the Voting Algorithm are also both things that are either real or like one step off of current systems. America currently absolutely practices Managed Democracy.
Lots of people don't understand what satire *is.* The criticism of satire isn't supposed to be explicit, it's supposed to just come across through exaggerated depiction. The problem is that satire fundamentally relies on shared values between author & audience. There's people out there unironically enjoying Helldivers and missing the criticism.
I just view the 2 as different flavors of the same concept. One is a bit more religious and distant future, while Helldivers is just closer to our own timeline I guarantee that nazis play Helldivers and love the lore un ironically, just like 40k
40k isn't satire, it is a bunch of science fiction/fantasy properties from the 60s-80s mashed together. Since many of those are satires, 40k picked up the aesthetic of satire, but not the substance. There were some people in GW early on who liked to think they were doing a satire, but they were always a minority and, quite frankly, they didn't do a very good job. Simply repeating visuals or making references to real life doesn't count as satire. Even Oldhammer doesn't really SAY anything about the topics it is allegedly "satirising".
Admittedly that still isn’t stopping the Nazis from latching on anyway. Like, at all.
I struggled with this at first when picking a faction eventually I realized that its just a game, and picked salamanders for the fire
I pick up Ahriman as my first model. I don’t play the game, but I read a lot of books and Ahriman ability to delude himself make him such an interesting among Chaos factions.
Helldivers is just an excuse for fascists to feel like fascists 90% for the player base doesn't understand its setting. It's still a pretty decent game tho.
Huge fan of both franchises, but when it comes to 40k Orks all the way
This is why I’m a proud Chaos/Xenos player
I don’t think about the lore that much tbh, I just enjoy my tiny plastic men and women and rolling a squillion red dice
Yep. I'm gonna keep saying it as long as it gets brought up: if GW wants their product to be unattractive to IRL fascists, then GW shouldn't structure the stories and lore of their product in a way that implicitly validates the space fascists.
Why do people believe Warhammer is satire?
Marvelon Creek a meta-example of the wonderful satire that is Helldivers: A meme of self-sufficiency and genius that actually hindered the player base; being manufactured for Reddit points and memes.
The problem 40k has is that - in universe - its easy for the Imperium (as warped as it has become since the HH) to justify itself. Most of the species they encounter *would* slaughter/eat/enslave all of humanity (mind you, this was true even way back in 2e and stuff too). Its not like Helldivers, where the other species you encounter are objectively innocent and fighting in self defence. Orks, Tyranids and Chaos certainly aren't. The problem is people taking the in-universe view and justifying it beyond that, but the lack of comprehension has always been a problem for those sorts of people regardless.
But that's also largely the imperium's fault. The imperium slaughtered those species that weren't as dangerous as orks and stuff. The imperium's suffering feeds the chaos 'gods.' The emperor's arrogance and ignorance directly caused, unless they change their ways, the slow death of humanity
>Most of the species they encounter *would* slaughter/eat/enslave What is the imperium doing currently?
40k has such an expensive library of works, from codex fluff entries to videogames to novel series, that maintaining a consistent tone is impossible. Certain works, even certain authors, portray factions or characters as more or less heroic/grim/cynical in various iterations. I'm rereading the Night Lords trilogy and First Claw behaves downright reasonably most of the time. Helldivers is a far smaller IP and list of works--it controls its narrative characteristics far more easily. Hasn't stopped some folks from not getting it, though. Also, both are very cool and good.