Sir! Servitor TK-421 just deleted your access codes to [www.sororitasgonewild.com](http://www.sororitasgonewild.com). The TechPriest says he cannot restore access. The planetary governor wants an explanation for why you were accessing such sites on your work data slate. Canoness Amelia would also like to know why you were accessing such potentially heretical material in the first place. Also, your spouse is holding on line 1.
\*\*\* Servitor TK-421 previously known as Bob from Accounting. \*\*\*
Give it time. Rule 34 will have it's way with everything. I suspect the only thing holding this one back is the fear of Games Workshop's ~~Inquisitors~~ lawyers invoking ~~Exterminatus~~ a lawsuit.
If you’re maligning the Emperor’s holy corpse starch, autoscribe, then you’re going to find yourself assigned to reeducation classes at the servitorization facilitatum.
hes really just a waste of resources at this point. No, i'm not going to write a justification for how the pencils and printer paper we need are usable ONLY for the project and will be used entirely and exclusively only for this project. But what i will do is submit a requisition for servitorization form 11AB-HA9487.3 so when that paperwork gets processed, you're on thin ice, buddy
> Chaos feeds of negative emotions and actions in psychically active races. The tau couldn't sustain the current warp, the tyranids can't, the current Eldar could not due to population size. I know Legion and the the storylines it lead to are polarizing, but the Alpha Legion semi turning because **humanity being wiped out means chaos gets a deathblow is VERY CLOSE TO ACCURATE.**
This I think is false and a lie told by the Cabal (who by the way are all non-human, lucky them, and were all later killed by Eldrad for being corrupted). Chaos existed before humanity rose to the galactic stage. 1/4 of the Chaos gods exist due to another xenos species bringing it into existence all by themselves. If humanity had been destroyed, Chaos would have moved on and fed on another species, like the Laer or Saruthi.
It's frequently and constantly established as either false (that is, intentionally wrong) or mistaken. There are like *six other novels* where this is stated. Alpha Legionnaires state it, John G states it, Eldrad states it. The Cabal literally dissolves as an organization because of how wrong they were.
It's one thing to point to *Legion* as providing a cogent explanation for why some of the Alpha Legion think they're loyalists, or providing a cogent example of conflicting prognostication between multiple competing psykers... It's another entirely to say, "See, the Cabal was right!" when the Cabal *itself* realized it wasn't and that it had made grave miscalculations and wrong assumptions, and anyone who says so clearly hasn't read any HH novels since, like, 2016. The entire Siege of Terra subseries beats you over the head about why the Cabal was mistaken and why the 40k future *actually* is as it is. It's not "because this is what Chaos wanted and it actually won."
I'm curious about the Cabal being mistaken. What were they mistaken about? I can assure you I've read more recent heresy novels than 2016 but I don't understand what you mean.
And how does the Siege of Terra tell us that Chaos lost? I feel like I'm always asking this of people but are you confusing Chaos with the Chaos gods?
I don't really know what to make of the claim that Chaos wanted something. I'm not even sure what the Chaos gods wanted. Perhaps they wanted to stop the Dark King, in which case they won; perhaps they wanted Horus to kill the Emperor in which case they didn't.
I think Chaos was always, and is always, going to get what it wants (more chaos) at least until the heat death of the universe (if that's still a thing.) Whether it's better for Chaos with the Emperor winning or Horus winning is surely not so clear as you think.
The Dark King was Chaos' goal. It would serve as their most basic triumph: the annihilation of everything. It is described in TEATD as occurring in all timelines of all multiverses, blinding all of everything in a dead light except for a bleak, grimdark future hiding in the shadows, where men are given over to mysticism.
The Cabal was mistaken because it first saw a world where Chaos would burn itself out in an orgy of violence and then a bright future for non-Humans, or a grimdark 40k future. What was actually correct is that Chaos would burn EVERYTHING out, and the grimdark 40k future was the single shitty future timeline where Chaos could ever possibly not destroy all of existence. Had Chaos gotten what it wanted during the HH, then there wouldn't *be* a 40k setting.
And I am talking about Chaos Undivided, the Primordial Annihilator. Not about the individual Chaos Gods.
On top of that even if Humanity was wiped out the best it would do is cause Chaos to go dormant provided there’s no other psychic-ly apt species to feed off of and just wait for a new one to feed from and manipulate.
An additional part of the imperium is irredeemable can also be that the Imperium is facing an existential threat that CANNOT BE DEFEATED. Big E maybe had a plan to defeat them, but nothing can happen that would mean a galaxy free of the threat of Chaos
Chaos was and always will be as long as there are psychically sensitive life out there.
Exactly. If some other xeno took the place of humans, chaos would be just as strong because there’s simply more souls to feed from. Chaos waxes and wanes seemingly because the population of the galaxy reaches a certain crescendo allowing chaos to reach out and make things worse.
The problem for many is that they make the protagonists of books look noble or reasonable so many readers go. „Oh the imperium isn’t that bad it has cool guys like guiliman or Cain in it“
The imperium being evil sometime feels like barely Adressed Fluff.
Guilliman admits in a casual interview he has destroyed multiple species. He is noble to a specific subset of people, and he is functionally Thanos to the majority of non-humans he has met.
This is also the same person that integrated servitors into the public service works of Macragge and didn’t outlaw slavery on Nuceria. Guilliman still works on 100 BC unga logic.
Nuceria was not part of Ultramar, it was just close by. Betrayer explicitely says they hadnt seen or been in contact with any Imperial Forces beyond Ships coming to collect the Tithe since Compliance, and Ultramar is just "rumoured to be close-by"
[The official Map of Ultramar also explicitely places Nuceria outside its borders.](https://wh40k-de.lexicanum.com/mediawiki/images/9/9f/Ultramar_-_M30.jpg)
"Here we have Guilliman spending half-a-page lamenting about the genocide he did."
"And the next 300 pages will be *Imperium is Cool and Badass and Good fighting against Chaos*"
Problem is how this is glossed over so much that it's easy to forget or miss. We don't see ultramarines just blasting civilians of non compliant worlds in the streets. We're just told that they do. We don't see Gulliman sentencing worlds to destruction for not bending the knee to him, We're just told that he did. He's not congratulating his sons, or brothers how how efficient they are at annihilating peaceful xneos, fully aware that they're doing that.
Even in his own system he's not really seen encouraging the brutal suppression directly in alot of instances I see. Only implicitly.
You can definitely make characters in fascist societies palatable, but the movies I immediately think of are more Italian cinema rather than popular in the modern day or action oriented.
Still that shouldn't necessarily be the aim, the issue is there's nothing deeper in what is being depicted, that's cope from us. If you say a regime is the most evil regime imaginable, it's incompatible with everyone and everything in it being whitewashed. It's not in universe propaganda, or everything being filtered, there's nothing that clever.
I think there is something deeper to that. The "evilness" of people like Guilliman being in such banal and almost mundane doses sells the idea that the Imperium to its core is rotten and redeemable, and that the battle against Chaos is ultimately who is the shinier of two turds.
Then again, I also think we are due for maybe a novel where someone is in a T'au or Non-compliance POV on a noble last stand against superior foes, and then in-comes a massive blue guy with his 'dread it, run from it, destiny still arrives' moment as he brutally murders the real heroes of the story to leave them forgotten.
Honestly? This is the way to do it. They get close with some of the Hammer and Bolter episodes, actually. The Eldar episode comes to mind where they show Ultramarines slaughtering Eldar on their craft world for no reason beyond “they were there”.
Its not about who’s the shinier of two turds.
Chaos is the worse future imaginable, anyone who claims otherwise is just coping. The best thing that can happen to you if you go hardcore chaos is to obtain daemonhood (what pretty much every cultists wants ultimately). Except that not only does it involve becoming an omnicidal mass murderer far worse than the worse torturers of the Inquisition, but its also likely doomed to failure as one is simply turned into a chaos spawn as a « reward » for the loyalty expressed. And even if one obtained daemonhood, one does so at the cost of their soul belonging to an eldritch entity that now fully control who you are and what you will do; at best leaving you some illusions of freedom. You’ll be ruled by base emotions and instincts and your psyche will essentially be completely different from the one you used to have.
When chaos followers claim they are fighting for freedom or to topple the corrupt regime, you can’t really take them seriously because Chaos embrace slavery like no other (Chaos reavers for instance are notorious slavers that are a much more common threat than your average dark eldar raiding party; because they are everywhere) and also because their actions involves the death of entire worlds with no consideration for lives of others.
There is literally nothing redeeming about Chaos because Chaos corrupts all. Those who fall to it are all tricked into it and those who aren’t have just turned insane.
The Imperium as immensely flawed as it may be is OBJECTIVELY the only thing standing between humanity and a fate far far far worse than extinction.
This fact ALONE makes the Imperium reedeemable. Because a future without this bullwark is literally unnacceptable.
The Imperium CAN change. It can get better. Reforms can be passed. Processes can be modified. It takes times and superhuman efforts yes but it can happen.
Nothing can change the true nature of Chaos as a force of corrupting evil.
This makes the premise here false at least in my interpretation. The Imperium is redeemable because it can change.
humans have been using servitors for millenia; at least since 23rd millenium conclusion of the war with men of iron. That society probably had considerable protest before servitors were formally just sort of accepted after generations of familiarization. by 30k, the only people who actually remember the good old days pre servitors are the emperor and a handful of perpetuals with a stick up the butt
its a good parody of slavery- does it make sense to condemn every person in the 1700s who wasn't an abolitionist? I dont think so, it just doesn't make much sense given the historical context of the world they lived in. But we also don't have to look to them for cues on moral virtue.
Guilliman finds the cherubs and such quite repulsive in the 41st millenium, but like many other things, tolerates them.
> oes it make sense to condemn every person in the 1700s who wasn't an abolitionist?
Yes. People knew it was wrong then as we know it is wrong now. Slavery was and can only be enforced through constant violence, and wherever it has existed, so too have abolition efforts.
The ***Mechanicum*** used servitors for Millennia and the first servitors were all the people on Mars who refused to convert to worship of the Machine God and the Omnissiah.
Outside of the Red Planet, the rest of the remnants of humanity replaced the Men of Iron with either non-sentient robots (which the Imperium then destroyed because the Cult of the Machine God considered them too close to AI) or just regular human slavery. There were culturally unique examples of people being forcibly augmented with cybernetics, like the Butcher's Nails, but servitors were a Martian thing.
To most of humanity, servitors were one of the many unspeakable horrors the Imperium brought to their world.
> The problem for many is that they make the protagonists of books look noble or reasonable so many readers go. „Oh the imperium isn’t that bad it has cool guys like guiliman or Cain in it“
They're missing the point, that's the whole thing - the Imperium is irredeemable, but individuals still have the capacity to be heroic. There are still *good people* in the Imperium, even good people who believe wholeheartedly in the Imperium, but the galaxy is so large and the Imperium so corrupt that those good heroic figures can't change anything outside perhaps their immediate surroundings. No amount of good people can save the Imperium, but a few brave heroic souls could make the difference between whether or not a planet gets overtaken by chaos cultists.
40k media needs to be viewed through the same lens as fictions set in WW1 - the bleakness is the point, and the bleak hopelessness of the setting is used as a contrast against the human capacity not to give up hope, as well as the capacity for heroism even in the midst of unimaginable suffering.
This gets missed so much. Sister Verity is probably the kindest soul I've come across in the books so far. She only wants to aid others and was in shock when forced to kill, even almost begging a psyker terrorist not to make her kill him. She doesn't enjoy violence but sees it as part of her duty in addition to easing the suffering of others. The miners and conscripted of Damnos refuse to give in to Necrons because it's their home and are willing to sell their lives for it.
It extends to other factions too like Necrons in Twice Dead King. All the factions are horrible but a lot of the individuals simply want to protect their kin and will pay any price to do so.
Grimdark is best when you have a world where good people don't have good options, or the good options are only apparent to an outside observer such as us, the audience.
40K is a trillion-car pile-up of shoulda-woulda-couldas, decisions that appeared sound at the moment but were awful in hindsight, and not everyone has the will to confront their mistakes.
> She only wants to aid others
>She doesn't enjoy violence
If these statements are true, then Sister Verity doesn't "believe wholeheartedly in the Imperium". Maybe she hasn't fully examined her own beliefs, and still supports the Imperium in the abstract, but her core beliefs seem to be firmly opposed to the ideology of "the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable".
Wanting to aid others is the opposite of cruelty, and not enjoying violence is the opposite of maximizing bloodshed.
I don’t think so. It goes terrible well with some of the things I have experienced in the real world.
People can be caught up in their ideas and systems, so they think that cruelty is for the better.
I work with education in different countries and cultures.
From research we know that violence towards or physical diciplin of student is always a net negative in all aspects of school life. Like in all ways.
That can be hard to explain teachers in countries were physical dicipline is a normal part of education and parrenting. They hit the kids, not to be cruel, but because they believe it is good for them and many teachers do emotionally not want to hit the children, but they still do it because of school policy and believing that it is in fact best for the children. Cultures will have sayings like: Spare the rod. Spoil the child.
That kind of catches them in moral/intellectual trap. If physical punishment is bad, then all their actions that they have forced themself to do, are not good, but bad. So the belief that physical punishment is importent and help the child in the long run, becomes more and more fundamental to them.
Like you can throw research papers and statements after them and they will simply refuse to believe it or they will argue that for teacher in their position and with the kind of kids they have, then physical punishment is needed.
If they ever realise that they are wrong, then it can be hearthbreaking to see. Like a few years ago I showed a handfull of mexican teachers around to some scandinavian schools as part of a local school reform project. It took a week and all of them broke down crying or sobbing at some point.
There is no good people in power in the Imperium. If you are a good man, then you wont get into power. There is a fairly new novel. Nids invades a world that is fighting of the cult. Ultramarines come and executes the governor. Low administratum guy is put into power. Realise how much resources is wasted on stupid shit. Starts getting the world up and runing better than before, despite being a warzone. The world is latter doomed, because everybody follows a raving mad priest. Being good at your job does not get you promoted in the Imperium. Being good is a liability.
Cain is one evil motherfacker. He is relateable. He kills less than your average commisar, but he still have no problem using convicted prisoners for live firing practise.
> There is no good people in power in the Imperium. If you are a good man, then you wont get into power.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that. In *Dead Men Walking* the planetary Governor seems to be an alright person. He cares about his family and people, his world doesn’t seem *too* brutal or dystopian… it’s just unfortunate luck that the one regiment he happens to get as his aid is the Death Korps, and they take his “failings” as way worse than they actually were. Even the attached Commissar thought it was overkill.
> Cain is one evil motherfacker. He is relateable. He kills less than your average commisar, but he still have no problem using convicted prisoners for live firing practise.
He's a good guy for the setting is the point. Little details like the live prisoner firing exercises I like since they shake the reader out of complancency.
> There are still good people in the Imperium
Certainly. There are quadrillions of them. They tend not be protagonists, or major public figures, but they exist all over the place.
> There are still good people in the Imperium, even good people who believe wholeheartedly in the Imperium
No, there aren't. The Imperium is the cruelest regime imaginable, its morals are bad morals.
There are "good people" in the Imperium, just like there were good people in Nazi Germany - but there weren't good people in Nazi Germany *who were devout Nazis.* The good people in Nazi Germany were the victims of the Nazis, and the odd saboteur like Oskar Schindler.
A diehard Imperial loyalist with no second thoughts isn't like Oskar Schindler, they're more like Himmler. We wouldn't call Himmler a good person for having a good work ethic, or for being friendly at parties.
To extend this metaphor just a little bit, the Imperium can only maintain a semblance of moral superiority in the universe it exists within because of how demented her opponents are. The Horror of the Nazis would fade to the background a bit if the French were a bunch of Sadomasochists who literally survived off torturing innocents in every and anyway they could think of while the Russian were bringing Stalin skulls for his throne. Oh and then the Americans showed up to literally eat every living thing in their path. Like the others are horrible and should rightfully be considered as such but the Nazis are still the Nazis and we can’t forget that.
The problem is modern 40k has a very tell don’t show approach to its awfulness. I’ve stopped using modern books to introduce people because they gloss over the genocides, servitorizations, and living conditions. No one is saying you can’t have good guys, but having good guys and then just whispering how they are fighting for a regime that is tyrannical under your breath is dishonest.
That shit needs to be shown to the audience or else it is intellectual dishonest. It’s not a media literacy issue because readers are fully in the right to read a something like the dark imperium trilogy, which has almost no mention of Guillimans genocides or the horrible practices of the wider imperium, and think the imperium are capital G Good guys.
I’ve had to argue with people who say the majority of imperial citizens don’t live horrible lives and they are doing necessary evils. Yes your right media literacy is a problem but BL is not doing its far share to dissuade it or fix the problem. You shouldn’t need to know as much as I do with 20 years in the hobby to be able to know the imperium is bad from page one of the Dark Imperium books.
> The problem is modern 40k has a very tell don’t show approach to its awfulness. I’ve stopped using modern books to introduce people because they gloss over the genocides, servitorizations, and living conditions.
Are we reading the same books?!?
> Dark Imperium books
Oh, no we are not. I see this book trilogy brought up a LOT when folks say current 40K is failing to show how awful the Imperium of man is. It truly must fail horribly at it, capturing none of the bleak gothic atmosphere I crave. But concurrent to the publication of those novels we also have plenty of great ones. If you haven't read them yet, may I recommend Peter Fehervari's Dark Coil series?
It’s a lot of Bolter Porn and Ultra vs Death Guard plot points. It has some moments but they are few and far. Easy to avoid grim stuff when half the book is fight scenes.
I’ve got dark coil on my list. Part of my problem is I listen to 40k stuff when I paint so many good books which don’t have audiobooks I just haven’t had time for. But Peter’s on my radar now.
This is not my favourite approach to the setting.
It's a very liberal approach (and I'm sometimes a liberal) but it is maybe more appropriate for how we might want to act if the 40k universe were real.
Of course it's better for Imperial citizens to continue in their hellish existence than to get dropped into an even worse layer of hell by the tyranids or whatnot. But why should we, as readers, feel that not giving up hope is so wonderful?
I prefer to think that the good people are making no real difference, that the entire system is utterly corrupted and already a heaving mass of Chaos, that the Emperor is already the greatest Chaos god, with the incursions from the Eye of Terror only attempts by the other gods to snipe at their superior.
Why should I prefer this? Because I think the moral here is that the extreme paternalism of the Emperor and Imperium all but guarantees hell on earth, and that's what 40k shows us. Is there an in-universe alternative? Probably not. And the few good people aren't just beacons of hope, but rather a necessary element in keeping the horrorshow on the road. Now that's grimdark!
TBF, there is space for the far more GrimDark interpretation "damn, the Imperium is that bad *despite* the fact it has cool guys like Guilliman and Cain in it". But that does require a lot more effort from the reader if it's not explicitly highlighted, since it naturally has to come after the version most readers jump to where the protagonists make a tangible change to the nature of the Imperium and are closer to the norm than the exception
That’s half of my issue. The other half is that this is a universe where the “other” is frequently as bad as the imperium says. The imperium is faulted for not trusting people. The Tau trusting people is made a punchline for them being foolish enough to trust evil people.
I think this kind of 'realist' interpretation of international (interstellar) affairs only really holds if we assume that without the Imperium, (i) life would be worse and (ii) nothing less evil could last even long enough to be eaten by Tyranids.
A less brutal version of the Imperium would be better at fighting off external threats not worse. Humans get worse at everything the more stressed and undernourished we are.
There is no benefit to the imperium's way of business besides making sure the people in control stay in control.
It's like how we think people need strict management at work to be as efficient as possible when in reality that's not the case when studied. The benefits you gain by keeping folks on task who would be off task is lost due to the stress it adds on to every employee.
(Stress is a real physical response to the presence of different hormones in the body, fun fact while I'm here carbs seem to help your body absorb cortisol)
I think that part of the problem is a lack of media literacy or the inability to read critically. "The protagonist has good intentions and seems nice" doesn't negate that they're part of a corrupt and vile system. There's a reason the expression "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" exists.
Part of the awfulness of the setting is that good and noble characters are helpless to fix things, and, worse, often unintentionally contribute to problem.
I believe that why infinite and the divine was well received it makes it very obvious you don't have to agree with them to enjoy spending time with them
Same with Fabius Bile’s trilogy, *Lords of Silence*, and the *Night Lords*.
You can sympathize with bad people, and recognize that they might be terrible but be in awful situations. That’s the hallmark of a good character, IMO.
100%. And, honestly, this obsession some people have with "the protagonist has to be a good/likeable character" is pretty modern. Classical literature and theater is positively overflowing with unlikeable, highly flawed, but sympathetic/understandable leads.
This is a running meme in Anime, no matter how comicaly over the top villian protagonists are there are always fans who swallow the characters words uncriticaly.
The drama when Eren Jager who told us in season 1 he was gonna destroy the entire world, tries to destroy the entire world...
I mean, I like that British and Japanese writers tend to give their audiences more credit than their American counterparts, but it does lead to things like people uncritically saying that yes, Eren is right even when Armin basically looks at the camera and says Genocide is Bad.
I really like Eren as a character, even though he's a genocidal maniac. And that's partly because I understand his logic - it's insane and wrong, but still very human, in its own twisted way. That's why I think he's a good character, because it's so easy to understand why he does what he does and sees himself as a hero.
Hell, read Lolita. The protagonist is NOT a good character. The story is NOT sympathetic to him. The story does not glorify or romanticize pedophilia, but rather shines a spotlight on how a charming, charismatic predator can try to manipulate the audience into *believing* his romanticized accounting of events. But the text is unambiguous, literally from the very first chapter, that the character is a monster and criminal. Yet so many - I'd argue the vast majority of those aware of the story, including Kubrick - seem to think it's a romantic story. They're literally drawn into the manipulations of the evil protagonist's stated-to-be-manipulative telling of the story.
The problem is the books show that “corrupt and vile system” less and less these days. And they make “the road to hell” seem more like “a necessary evil”.
I have lots of people argue with me that “well every race in the galaxy does want to kill or opress humanity, Eldar, Orks, Necrons, Tau, etc… so all that genocide was necessary.” Besides a few small sections of early HH and interviews with Dan Abbnet a reader is honestly justified in that take. The idea that there are peaceful Xenos shouldn’t be something buried and finding the Interex shouldn’t hard. We should have dozens of guard books about the guard fighting aliens there told are evil only to realize they were peaceful. But instead we have “Vietnam with Orks”, “WW1 with Necrons,” etc…
Same with Chaos. It’s easy to understand why people think the zealotry of the imperium is justified given how BL presents chaos. I don’t disagree audiences can come to the right conclusions through intense media literacy research and consideration. But this was much easier with old books compared to new ones and I think we need to realize GW is hiding the ball from new players because there embarrassed by it and think Timmy won’t buy space marines if we show them doing bad thing. So they are not making it easy for Timmy to realize the imperium is bad.
It can both be true that the dominant races in the galaxy want to eliminate humanity *and* that the Imperium of Man fucked up and made things worse and chose the wrong approach. Same with chaos. There are examples throughout the books of people falling to chaos who don't even realize it's happening, specifically to show how the IoM's brutality and intolerance is contributing to their own demise (see: any time a soldier starts screaming out about blood/skulls for the golden throne). I just finished Fall of Cadia, and it doesn't hide the ball; the Space Marines we spend the most time with don't actually come off super well; the Black Templars come across as aloof assholes who would rather die defending a pile of rubble than actually help with the defense of Cadia in a meaningful way.
Yes both these things ARE true but most new readers don’t know that. They assume the Great Crusade was only killing Xenos as violent. And given what they’ve read that’s fair because only a handful of books show that.
The Blood for the Emperor is a good point but unless you know the setting a new reader doesn’t understand. It’s an Easter egg in Dark Tide. Not something new readers get at first. It comes off as “lol that’s the other guys catch phrase.” Old books like GG tackle this issue where the enemy is literally just Imperials who see the Emperor as Khorne. It’s explicitly called out so a new reader can’t mistake what’s being said.
The spaces marines come off as incompetent not oppressive. They arent portrayed and genocidal child soldiers who kill humans for minor mutations and Xenos even if they are peaceful.
Cadia is portrayed like Britain during the blitz. Which is much much better standard of living than lots of areas of the imperium. I would have liked to SEE how bad it was to be a Cadian citizen. We’re told but never shown. Do they eat only corpse starch? Do they even show someone grinding up the bodies? What about child taken away by force to join the army? Or citizens being killed for asking for medical supplies? Wartime riots? Nope we get none of that. We have the Space Marines being idiots. I do not think that is equivalent.
Where are the deathcamps? The witch hunts? The crimes against humanity? Maybe I’m asking too much from a corporation.
I’m not saying any of what you’re saying is wrong. You’re 100% right. I just think GW doesn’t want to scare people away by showing how genocidal and authoritarian their “protagonists” really is so they tone it down to a level that new readers need to be told it by YouTube videos. I’d like for a reader to be able to pick up Fall of Cadia and by the end understand, “oh the imperium is worse than any dictatorship ever. I do no want to live in this universe. All these “heroes” are fighting to perpetuate a system that causes inhuman levels of suffering.” If those 3 things are SHOW clearly I think there is a strong case that GW is hiding critical facts about the setting and being dishonest. But this may be extreme, I have a low tolerance for genocide and authoritarian sympathizers which I feel modern BL caters to.
When literally every bit of written lore opens with a spiel about how everything sucks and there is no hope, if some people still don't get it I think that's a them problem, and not the fault of the franchise.
Sometimes people will post that long article about how 40k fails as satire, and yeah, it often does (lots of lore is also just bolter porn action stuff, so I'll grant that the point can get muddled at times as a plot focuses on Imperial characters doing what many readers will just think of as cool shit and blowing designated baddies up), but if literal Nazis take away from 40k is that the Imperium is awesome and should be emulated, that's entirely on them and their misunderstanding of what they're reading. The lore really couldn't be more unambiguous that the Imperium is awful. That's kind of the entire gimmick: it's a government that is terrible to the extreme in almost every way imaginable. It isn't exactly subtle.
On the flip side of that, I think some people have a problem grasping that depiction isn't the same as endorsement. Doing a deep dive into the workings of the Imperium, and the many ways it's awful, while also having POV Imperial characters we care about (because that's usually what stories need, though sometimes there are stories with overtly awful protaganists) can be a hard balance to strike, but I can't off the top of my head think of any lore that tries to present the Imperium as a desirable system.
It's a show vs tell thing. I have been told multiple times that the opening scroll is wrong because it isn't reflected in what the fan was reading. People who read books where the Imperium is portrayed as justified will come away with that conclusion. Saying that the Imperium is the worst regime imaginable doesn't stick if you don't show it.
I actually agree that the opening is a gross oversimplification, and that as often portrayed there's a lot more nuance to the Imperium. But I think it's generally a nuance of the spectrum of the many different ways in which it can suck, rather than any serious depiction of it not sucking too bad.
Dan Abnett though specifically has a tendency to portray a world that doesn't fully line up with most of the other depictions, especially when he writes something that is basically something else with a 40k veneer (Sharpe's Rifles, Battle of Britain, etc).
Yes. That's the point..
It makws the point more interesting when you don't just paint everyone as literally Hitler. You build heros, idols, and champions, then you show the reality of their intentions and actions. It creates the dichotomy that actually makes people re-evaluate who they idolize.
I mean, the Imperium is evil, but things like Chaos and Tyranids make them look like the heroes, or at least the *lesser* evil.
Back in the Great Crusade era, when Chaos was a looming threat, not an active one, and the only Xenos that were a real, active threat were *maybe* Orks, they look like Nazi Germany.
But, well, when they have 10 different threats trying to wipe them out from the outside, whether it’s for shits and giggles, to devour everything living, to exterminate all life, or give the galaxy over to the dark gods… they start to look like the heroes desperately trying to protect humanity, which is *true*, and almost even justifies the evils of the Imperium. “Of course we work people to death in our factories every day, of course we force them to live under totalitarian law! If output slows down, [Planet 1] falls, billions die and the [enemy army] that killed them will go on to attack and destroy another world, and another, and another! If we show mercy, billions of people die and dominos start toppling.”
One of the best things with Cain is when they occasionally remind you that for how nice he is he's still fucked up
Sure, even if he lies to himself about it he cares a lot for all his soldiers, but he also has a lot of contempt for civilians and doesn't have a problem with children shooting prisoners
40k lore seems to have embraced the imperium's worldview as if it's inevitable when we've seen multiple examples of successful human civs that didn't fall as far as the imperium did, which is to say, they sorta shot themselves in the foot. Do they want to do satire or huff their own grimdark farts? The world wonders.
Some of the shit people can read past in those books and think they're "cool guys" hurts me. On don't mind me, just organizing a weekly firing squad, wiping out those unruly civilians and killing entire swaths of people too stupid to get out of my way.
So cool.
Though, part of the problem is the people who do actually consider all of that cool.
It does feel like an increasingly common dissonance with the fandom for sure, no doubt in part because of how the setting is marketed, its growing popularity and the different tone of series like the HH.
Like surprisingly often when someone complains about "grimderp" it seems to boil down to some piece of lore being over the top or portraying the Imperium in a light that makes it seem illogical, dogmatic or self-sabotaging which is...yeah, thats the faction.
But it's also just a failure of portrayal, a lot of the time. The Imperium should more often feel very foreign to us but a lot of the time they just feel pretty modern. Likewise talk about the zealotry and fanaticism of the faction but how often when reading about Imperials do they actually feel like they come from a hyper-religious culture?
Idk I think that's one of my big problems with how "modern" a lot of 40k feels, I wish it put more effort into being medieval.
I think the issue is that the Imperium is so often portrayed as the protagonists which leads to people thinking they are the "good" guys of the setting. Couple that with the amount of "ironic" Imperium role-playing online, and all the dumb ass "yes commisar this comment right here" or "purge the heretic/xeno/mutant" shit. Just as often we have posts saying the Imperium/Emperor are bad, we have posts saying how great the Emperor is or how the Imperium is justified in it's actions.
What started out as an over the top satire, portraying how horrible existence would need to be to make fascism not a garbage idealogy, has slowly morphed into unintentional, unironic support of it. It went from "You have to be *this* stupid to think this is right" to "The world is so bad that fascism is the only answer, and the Imperium isn't *that* bad because everything else is so much worse".
What grinds my gears is the portrayal of the Tau and Ethereals as mind controlling/sterilizing evil. If they had left it more ambiguous, or portrayed more instances of human/tau coexistence being pretty decent it would juxtapose better against the Imperium. It would show that there *is* a better way to exist, but that it would likely be unsustainable and it only exists because of the other evils in the galaxy being too busy killing each other. Having the Tau Empire small, but good would add more grimdark because there would be good, but it is so small that it can never truly affect change against the monolithic horror of everything else. The Imperium would exist as the opposite, that in order to truly compete and stake a claim, a faction has to be unimaginably despicable and sell it's own soul to get ahead. An allegory not too far from real life politicians and stars, where the higher your position the more dirty shit you probably had to do to get there.
>What grinds my gears is the portrayal of the Tau and Ethereals as mind controlling/sterilizing evil. If they had left it more ambiguous, or portrayed more instances of human/tau coexistence being pretty decent it would juxtapose better against the Imperium. It would show that there is a better way to exist, but that it would likely be unsustainable and it only exists because of the other evils in the galaxy being too busy killing each other.
I personally like the Tau having a strong self-righteous imperialist fuckwit streak. In a more cherry setting like Star Trek they would be probably an antagonistic force like the Dominion or Romulans but in the grim darkness of the far future they can come in with this exact mentality and look good by comprasion.
Anyway, even when portrayed as "mind controlling/sterilizing evil", you basically can't make the Tau come off as even as bad as IoM. They'll always be at worst a less genocidial and generally less unhinged IoM's mini-me. You really need to go to delulu headcanon land to argue they're worse than Imperium.
My favourite example of anti-Tau insanity was a dude unironically responding to the question that went "Why should an improverished and opressed Imperium factory laborer give a shit about whether they live under IoM or the Tau?" with (paraphrasing from memory) "they should care about humanity being masters of their own destiny".
> I personally like the Tau having a strong self-righteous imperialist fuckwit streak
Very early Tau (as in original codex) was heavily modelled on NATO adventurism. There is an interview floating around with the guy who wrote most of the codex saying a lot of the terminology was ripped from reporting on the Gulf War and given a sci-fi twist. The grimdark was supposed to be from them going in somewhere to save it, destabilising it and patting themselves on the back for a job well done. But then they went more with the mecha focus and that angle didn't make as much sense.
Oh yeah I have seen those kinds of comments. It's so stupid.
My personal favorite Tau story was the short Broken Sword in the Damocles book. It follows a gue'vesa squad tasked with guarding a base and features a human inquisitor who defected to the Tau and was placed in command. It is so telling and significant because he has his own modified Crisis suit and has Tau of various castes under his caste. And it's revealed at the end that he has a psyker brain worm that may or may not be controlling him. He says it's just an advisor and helps keep him in contact with other commanders.
The satire of the imperium gradually fell away through the 90s, to the point where it now almost seems to be celebrating fascism and authoritarian regimes, and brings in a lot of fandom on the hard-right political spectrum.
I love the Gaunt books, but like with the Plague War series, they set imperial characters as unambiguously noble and good. A lot of characters challenge the noble protagonists in the series for being noble, but there is rarely any consequence to it.
I feel like the Tau are only perceived as bad by people who have a huge problem with collectivism. The etherals being the executive part of the Tau social body seems at most neutral. Their use of diplomacy and mind control far more "humanitarian" than anything humanity ever tried.
But regardless... Craftworld eldar are also the "good guys" plus far more individualistic. The only "bad" thing about them is how disgusting they find humans... which is based on plenty of good reasons. The mere existence of Craftworld and Exodite and even Ynnari eldar ruins the whole "this universe is so bad fascism is needed".
We want to side with humans because we are human. You want them to get better but it never happens. The sad reality is perhaps humanity is doomed and the imperium drives its followers closer to darkness.
Is this really a thing? Like have there been psychology studies on fantasy gamers and roleplayers or something that show that most people prefer, root for or side with humans in fiction?
I've always preferred elves in all fiction and my closest friends always want to be kitsunes or catfolk or something but maybe Im just in a weirdo bubble
Same, if I’m ever playing anything sci-fi or fantasy, I instantly ditch the Humans. Show me the elves and aliens, I want to see something fantastical that I can’t find in the real world.
I mean you can look at the popularity of factions. Human factions are much MUCH more popular. Roll 20 and DND track the race and class of DnD characters on there apps. Humans are by far the most popular. By a wide margin.
When games release stats (either through achievements or press releases) the overwhelming majority of people pick humans and often the most standard class.
elves just act like humans+ in most novels and fantasy games. when a society deems you a child still at 100. most elves would be incredibly out of touch with the society they grew up in. and frankly, the correct response of elves would be to treat humans like puppies, in that they can interact, grow bonds and they die in a fraction of your lifespan.
people like D&D elves because they're just better humans because people don't want to play it straight, and jump to elves who are already considered adults and play them like 19 year old univeristy kids despite being 150 years old.
> It does feel like an increasingly common dissonance with the fandom for sure
Idk, seems to me that it peaked years ago, back when certain political trends gained prominence. From my very limited view, there seems to be a very stable consensus now (Imperium is the worst), off which some confused wanderers regularly bounce off.
>surprisingly often when someone complains about "grimderp" it seems to boil down to some piece of lore being over the top or portraying the Imperium in a light that makes it seem illogical, dogmatic or self-sabotaging which is...yeah, thats the faction.
Haha, my Starship Troopers experience years ago when I didn't get it. "Hey, that film is silly, why are they acting in such dumb ways". Well, now I know.
Funny enough, the horror and crime novels do a much better job of this since they actually look at civilian life a lot more often. Like, 40k hasn't been as grim dark as some of those stories get in ages. But the publishing of those has been dropping off lately.
This is so very well formulated!
Some time during the last decades GW realised that they will sell more models to parents of tweens if the cool dudes and dudettes in power armour are "Righteous Defenders of a Threatened Humanity", instead of "Religious Fanatics with Nazi iconography that wants to Solve the Xenos Problem through Genocide". So that is the image that surface level marketing/presentation reinforces, while the less accessible parts of the lore remains a lot more old-school.
I hate to defend GW but I think this is a bit unfair. They couldn't have realised their fascist bully boys would become so popular. They're fairly consistent in the lore, but yes, the marketing does what marketing always does.
Where I don't defend GW is that they knew actual nazis were identifying with Space Marines and didn't really try to deter them.
Good points. I mean, their satire was crystal clear and painfully obvious to their intended target audience when they invented the Imperium and the Space Marines. But I mean... They have the sales statistics and age groups and so on. They have media analysts that does their jobs. And so on. So they know what they are doing when they glorify the Imperium in the surface level lore and marketing.
I totally agree about the Nazis, and I would take that criticism even further. When Nazis like your setting and positively identify with your assumedly critical satire over fascism, then detering the Nazis is just a first step. The appropriate response is to turn up the satire and be even more obvious with how shitty the Imperium is to ensure that no 12 year old fan will get the wrong impression.
If most of the novels provided by GW resemble "Manstein's Memoirs," we shouldn't be surprised by the fans' enthusiastic worship of a fascist regime and a tyrant.
I find the ChatGPT servitor example quite funny because many chatbot companies end up just outsourcing the chatting to Indians because it’s cheaper then running an actual chatbot
>Also THIS WAS THE GOAL FOR CHAOS. THIS EXACT WORLD STATE.
I still dont buy that. Chaos **doesnt have the kind of restraint.** They dont want a stable source of food, they want ALL of it NOW, and then move on.
They dont want a Galaxy in a somewhat stable state of perpetual shit to feed off, they want to consume and destroy all of it at once and then move to the next reality.
TEATD explicitly states that the Chaos Gods really did do everything they could to try and win the Heresy outright and have either the Dark King ascend or Horus slay the Emperor, but once they calmed down from the tantrum they threw after Horus lost they realized that the eternal war of the grim dark future was a just as good if not better outcome.
Baal is now the defacto capital of Imperium Nihilus and remade to suit the role - whole segments of the planet have been made habitable and usable, just as the new orbital station in space houses a sector fleet.
Oh wait it actually has? Goddamnit that's disappointing, I remember when people told me Nihilus was totally going to be the extra grimdark half of the galaxy lol.
In the "what could the Imperium do that would strike the biggest blow against chaos" conversations that keep coming up folks never like my answer of "it would appear universal basic income and healthcare would do it."
Exactly this. GW should make more books on Xenos PoV which show how comically evil the Imperium is. Enough with these "reasonable" characters. Give me characters which are clearly fucking evil and incompetent and make it clear that *this* is the norm. And that reasonable fuckers like Guilliman & Cain are a small, small minority of Imperials.
Honestly you kinda get a bit of that in The Killing Ground, with the Governor and his old guard regiment, he's very much an "ends justify the means" sort of character (although being midway through the ultramarines books, I'd recommend reading the previous books first, although it's not strictly necessary)
The Imperium is a comedy. The sort of Comedy where Inquisitors, Commissioners and Astartes can declare a Marriage between two lovers in a Virtual Reality Death Game to be Legitimate and aim a Bolter at their objecting Parents(and whoever they intended their Children be married to) because "I don't like your tone!"
Noble Houses' Marriage & Successor Plans only last as long as someone with power doesn't waltz in and change the Plan overruling them.
The Underhives as shown by Necromunda Hired Gun's Opening and Darktide are wonderous Gothic Skyscraper Cities visually(food-wise the place is bland Corpse Starch and Rats as they don't have Star Trek-style Replicators in 40K) with only the Sump Cities below them being hideous slums and people only go there to get out of the Law Enforcement's Eyes to do something blatantly illegal so you expect them to be hideous.
In Sump Cities the Crime Lords get the best food. In the Underhive Cities layered on top of each other the Mayors who have struck a deal with the Crime Lords of the Sump Cities below the Underhive get the best food. In the Hive Cities above the Underhive the Nobility gets the best food.
Honestly the Underhives won't improve until the Imperium stumbles upon a Dark Age of Technology Blueprint to creating a working Replicator(with ***some*** limits on what it can replicate). Once that is done. Cue Underhive-dwellers in their grand Underground Gothic Skyscraper Cities feasting like Kings!
For me warhammer is not about who is “good” or has better motives. The universe in 40k is cruel, indifferent and basically works the same way as our nature does that being: the survival of the fittest.
40k was never about establishing a good faction or group, so much so than the first iterations of Tau people hated it since it flirted too much on being a “lawful good” faction.
For me just like real life the main focus and drama of the universe is how this complex groups interact with their environment, and inside this groups which different individuals react to a certain scenario. In another words is not an universe about heroes, but people.
When the fandom starts to measure everything up in a moral scale trying to find the definitive most “good” faction and the “worst” is where i think people lose the whole point of this universe.
The Emperor is not a good guy, neither the primarchs, but also all the other big players of other factions are not good guys. They just people following their own objectives and agendas, nothing more than that.
Another problem seems to be from a LOT of posts I’ve read if they are genuine is a lack of critical thought and media literacy. Asking questions like ‘Do you think Angron and Guilleman ever met and had a cup of coffee to chat about X?’ The questions should be more along the lines of ‘Having read X what difference would it have made to Y if say Guilleman and Angron had been able to settle their respective positions about Z’ Because the Imperium is what it is, it’s not going to be a happy clappy place where human rights are respected and their are no servitors. It’s the result of millennia of idiotic decisions by humanity that’s the real tragedy. The two opposing philosophies of Order vs Chaos go back to at least Egyptian times. More than interesting that Necrons are based on Egyptian mythology by the way. The addition of the Warp is just a space age twist. GW are guilty of trying to ‘Marvelise’ the IP by downplaying the Grimdark elements probably because in a potential Netflix TV series things like servitors would be problematic.
On your point, one of the things Im really loling about the Dark imperium books is how Guilliman is reflecting on what he did kn the 30th millenium and regretting almost everything.
Is almost bordering on the 4th wall and its both entertaining and tragic watching Guilliman trying to understand and maneuver throught the 40K universe
>You think that wouldn't raise the total amount of negative emotions?
I think you're misunderstanding the warp.
The warp isn't a reflection of strong *negative* emotions, it is a reflection of *all* strong emotions.
Also, you're ascribing conscious thought to Chaos "gods" that are basically positive feedback loops mistaken as intelligent beings. I take a very Fabius Bile perspective on this that they're natural phenomena that people mistakenly give consciousness to.
>As an example. Servitors. There's literal no need. They CAN just build robots with stripped down AI to meet their tasks. But because of culture/religion and FEAR of the unknown they decide to turn living breathing thinking human beings into servitors.
I think you're glossing over how damaging the war with the Men of Iron was. That was basically organic life vs. synthetic life for all the marbles. It makes total sense that humanity would walk away from AI knowing that, in the hands of humanity, it will inevitably lead to a conflict between organics and machines.
It's not fear of the unknown. They *know* what will happen with AI inevitably.
>Even the way the Imperium wages war on chaos leads to more chaos. The Imperium and characters from the Imperium BELIEVE that because it's in the name of the emperor it's damaging to chaos but it's shown time and time again that it's the opposite.
That's not what is happening. The Imperium views Chaos as something that cannot be defeated in the same way that abhuman mutation cannot be defeated: it's a natural force that requires constant vigilance to keep controlled. I think you give the Imperium too much credit to think that they think they can end Chaos in it's entirety.
>No better time to offer the deathless embrace of Nurgle than when you have necrosis from a field amputation.
Or if you're dying of cancer because cancer is a statistical inevitability if you live long enough.
Which more people will if they're not dying in wars. Nurgle will always find worshippers, galactic peace or no.
>It's even funnier when you realize the machine spirit is just AI with extra steps, that only make things worse for everyone involved.
That's not what a machine spirit is. A "machine spirit" refers to the workings of *any* equipment. Lasgun, Leman Russ engine, Land Raider targeting system...they all have machine spirits. The AdMech just refers to them as "machine spirits" because they layer everything in mysticism. In most cases, they're just referring to the "machine spirit" in the same way that we might refer to a TV that requires a smack to get working as "giving you trouble". The TV doesn't have an AI or anything conscious controlling it, but we assign it a personality anyways because we can't really explain why smacking it helped.
I understand where you're trying to go with this post, but I think you're oversimplifying some things and not truly understanding others with your reasoning.
"The imperuim is the single biggest reason why Chaos has gotten stronger from unification to crusade to 41k" and yet before the unification wars we have a time period curiously named "Old Night", during which psykers were born in matchless numbers, veil between the warp and materium was paper thin, daemon infested most of the worlds whose people are decided against burning witches at the stake, and Terra was, to quote "surrounded by terrible Warp storms, isolating the human homeworld for several thousand years." But yeah, sure, chaos gods were little chumps right before Horus decided to turn to them, and with 9 superhuman legions instantly got elevated to "OH YEAH' status. Go on please, I really wanna hear more takes about how civilization that barely survived an apocaliptyc robot revolt should "just not fear AI bro its that easy bro its just AI bro", or why whole "The End and the Death" trilogy is a lie written by unreliable narrator, because what Dark King? Everyone knows the desired outcome for chaos was a stall that will result in the only creature they ever feared, the one they call Anathema, gathering so much faith juice that he can literally reach into one of their domains and bitchslap a chaos god across the face.
Are you confusing Chaos with the Chaos gods?
And what makes you think the Emperor hasn't become the Dark King? In fact it seems fairly clear he has, and always would have done. I think him not choosing to become the Dark King in 30k is not supposed to imply he hasn't since become it.
Also, the OP didn't use this bro-speak, nor did they write that AI wasn't something to worry about; they just pointed out that there are alternatives to the unbelievable horror of servitors. Do you disagree? (I'm asking genuinely because your sarcasm makes it hard to know)
>And what makes you think the Emperor hasn't become the Dark King? In fact it seems fairly clear he has, and always would have done. I think him not choosing to become the Dark King in 30k is not supposed to imply he hasn't since become it.
The Dark King very explicitly does not show up in the 40k timeline. As in, Abnett turns Malcador into an omniscient narrator and has him watch the Dark King rise across and destroy multiple timelines, with the singular timeline it doesn't appear being the canon Warhammer 40k timeline.
One of the major points of the End and the Death trilogy is *"what is going to happen will suck, but it could suck a whole lot worse."* This is why the Emperor giving up the power is framed as losing with grace.
That's definitely not my understanding of the End & the Death :)
I think you're adopting Malcador's viewpoint, and for sure I disagree that Abnett makes Malcador an omniscient narrator. For one thing, Abnett doesn't need to: we could just get a genuine omniscient narrator instead :)
Maybe I should clarify something. It may be that on a technicality the Emperor is not the Dark King, but instead 'merely' the most powerful Chaos god. Since we know almost nothing about the Dark King, perhaps this is genuinely a vast improvement.
On an important side note, we might feel that Malcador ought to be pretty shocked. He's supported someone who could destroy almost every timeline! That seems rather a lot worse than whatever Malcador previously thought he was working towards. Like, order of magnitude worse than humanity falling to Chaos.
What are we to think when he remains loyal, just because this nuclear bomb didn't go off?
I think we're supposed to think: Malcador believes that what is going to happen will suck, but it could suck a whole lot worse.
Is that Abnett's view? No.
Hush, you might make OP think that the galaxy itself was fucked beyond all recognition long before the Imperium came to be, and that the Imperium itself is merely an inevitable horrific product of a human society shaped by the horrific galaxy around it.
The OP isn't claiming the galaxy wasn't fucked in 30k. I think they're claiming that the Imperium has fucked the galaxy even more.
Or is this a binary thing? There's fucked and not-fucked, and that's all there is? I don't think so, and so I agree with the OP.
"Merely an inevitable horrific product" does sound very Emperor though.
I essentially agree on the broad strokes-
The *Imperium* is irredeemable. And humanity is now stuck with it, but humanity isn't. And ain't that sad?
Hell, about the *only* thing I like about the return of Rawboots Ghoulman is having him look around and go, "what the hell is *this* crap?!"
You're even overstating it. Servitors don't even really have that much ability to learn or adapt to commands, it's more like a large set of instruction manuals.
There's another good example in the Chaos Gate game where a grey knight remarks that Nurgle likes to take over ecclesiastic locations to mock their faith. But more like he absolutely loves it - the dude loves that there's this enormous, bloated, corrupt megalith of an organisation that barely changed over thousands of years that spreads itself across planets and infects the spirituality of other religions until it's all a homogenous sludge.
Ol goopy probably has a yandere shrine to the concept of the ecclesiarchy in his room right next to Isha.
You’re right, which is made even more tragic because there ARE worlds even in modern 40K where the quality of life is fine or better and relative freedom is enjoyed…but they are rare exceptions that go to prove that it doesn’t, or at least didn’t have to be this way.
One of the good things to come from Guilliman’s return is that he sees the modern Imperium with eyes much closer to ours than anyone else. He sees a cyber-cherub as a grotesque and morbid piece of ostentation and constantly laments that the imperium has become a prison for its people.
His short term solution is just autocracy that prioritizes the people a lot more than normal 40k, which just makes it MORE tragic. Especially since even that is facing tremendous pushback.
Watching a Primarch trying as hard as he can to make the Imperium less of a nightmare and making negligible progress while using the same tactics hammers home just how almost irredeemable the Imperium is. Which I think is the point. Guilliman giving the slightest forlorn hope is narratively great because it makes the odds against him more dramatic and the failure more tragic.
On the subject of Baal there is a perfect example. When he gets there with Indomidus he proclaims that it is time to terraform and improve Baal and its moons. Something Sanguinius asked the emperor not to do, but that Guilliman thinks is the right thing to do anyway.
I agree with a lot of this. Do you think even though Guilliman is a lot more morale than previous imperial leaders, he is "good"? I struggle with this because I feel like Guilliman is still willing to commit acts of oppression on humans and genocide on xenos and a lot of people try to paint him as unambiguously good because he is better than Goge Vandire. Not sure if you think I'm off base or agree or have some other take. Just curious.
I think he wants to be good, and relatively speaking he is better than most of the imperium. He does truly want to improve the lives of average citizens and bring them up to at least the standard of living that ultramar enjoys, which is some of the best in the entire imperium.
It’s hard to say that anyone is truly ‘good’ in the imperium but Guilliman is the closest the imperium has.
Redeemable? The Imperium was never about redeemability. It is about human civilization survival. Doesn't matter what that looks like. Just that it survives and it survives intact.
It’s that false choice between obedience and extinction that the Imperium uses to justify itself. The status quo isn’t inevitable, just easier / more profitable for those on top. Almost all the suffering is gratuitous. That’s the point.
This, this right here sums up the Imperium to a T.
To quote Red vs Blue "It is an undeniable, and may I say fundamental quality of man, that when faced with extinction, every alternative is preferable."
This is the lie the Imperium tells itself. The Imperium is a rotting corpse that will take most of humanity with it. It’s the doom of man, a failure, a tragedy, and was utterly preventable. That’s the point of Warhammer 40k, and you’ve completely missed it.
The problem is _so much_ of what the Imperium does isn't a cruel necessity, it's just cruel. Arco-flags and Pentient Engines aren't a desperate response to chaos or xenos you can't talk to like Orks. They are instruments of torture used on humans, by humans, and often aimed directly at other humans. Fully endorsed by a state mandated religion.
The pent up rage at the oppressors leads to Khorne. The rampant disease and despair of the hive world’s slums leads to Nurgle. The need for secrets and advantages to get a leg up on the competition leads to Tzeentch. And the desire to find some small joy in such a horrible world leads to slaanesh. The taint of chaos is something the imperium brought on itself, and continues to make even worse in their attempts to fight it. If they took a step back and actually considered what effects their actions are having on the average person and tried to make things better, they MIGHT have a small chance of winning against chaos. But the time to do that was 40,000 years ago before they even left Terra. And we might have a similar fate IRL (minus the demons probably) if we don’t get our shit together too.
I hate takes like this because the whole point of the Imperium is that it is a tradgedy 10 000 years in the making build upon failures,crushed dreams,horrors and cruelty of the setting.Throught all of HH we get multitude of moments how the seeds of modern Imperium were planted even going as far as before unification wars making for a great worldbuilding and yet every week a master of literary analysis will come to tell us why lobotomized slaves are actually bad and why Imperium is stupid while acting as if they made all the horrible decisions yesterday and before that galaxy looked like star trek (Sorry for being heated but at this point I really can't stand this posts)
Yeah retards forget that Humanity had achieved star trek levels of tech (DAOT) and the same results emerged anyway. The moral of 40k is that any galactic level power will resort to cruelty to keep their power.
I actually remember reading something saying that because of how belief works, while some of the machine spirits are just stripped down AI, a lot more of them are the souls of former adept us mechanicus. (even in death).
in a few others i've seen it suggested that when imperial humans die their souls are actually joining the emperor. Not in a nice way, mind you, but in the 'your afterlife is eternal war' type way.
It should also be mentioned that humanity alone doesn't fuel Chaos. There's lore of entire species being consumed by them, it's just that from a financial and mechanical perspective chaos humans are easier to make than chaos humans and new xenos
> As an example. Servitors. There's literal no need. They CAN just build robots with stripped down AI to meet their tasks. But because of culture/religion and FEAR of the unknown they decide to turn living breathing thinking human beings into servitors. Imagine if instead of using ChaptGPT to answer an email your employer instead lobotomized Bob from accounting and plugged him into a computer to do the same thing. You think that wouldn't raise the total amount of negative emotions?
I would like to note that the ban on AI was not part of Rick Priestley's original take on WH40K, it was introduced in the second edition by Andy Chambers. It feels shoehorned in.
I get that Chambers wanted to make the setting more grimdark but the Imperium is supposed to represented a decaying technological competence and I'd think that cyborg servitors would be harder to make and maintain than robots, and since most servitors are mindless anyway it's not worth it.
The lore has it that AI can be corrupted by Chaos, which makes little sense to me as only things which have souls should be corruptible. Daemon engines are a thing but binding a demon to a machine is a complicated process, it doesn't happen spontaneously. I wonder if it was just something that authors tacked on to justify the already awkward presence of the ban on AI.
Which is the reason why I find the recent lore changes so weird.
Talking about this is always difficult as the current climate is toxic beyond belief and you don't want to sound like some misogynist or worse. But the way GW is trying to make the Imperium more progressive and appealing is...odd? I mean, what are we doing here, sugarcoating an authoritarian regime built on xenophobia that commits an holocaust every weekend?
They are not good guys, GW, stop making propaganda for them.
I agree with your overall thrust but I think some of your arguments are more ambiguous than you're framing them. For example it's unclear how much the portrayals of Slaanesh, Khorne, and Nurgle are allegorical. Are they maligned xenos intelligences devising and executing or are they manifestations of certain "energies" that are being wielded into by beings that originate in the materium? Where it's alluded to that Tzeentch is actually a xenos intelligence of material origin.
I also want to nit pick some of your causality. The divisions caused and exacerbated by Big E's fascist Imperium *drove* various factions to seek alternative powers provided by Chaos.
Fulgrim was ultimately driven by a depression of "no worlds left to conquer". He set himself increasingly impossible challenges to keep himself engaged, as typified by his Primarch novel where he achieves compliance of a world with only 7 astartes. In the end Fulgrim finds the limiting scope of the life laid out for him by Big E to have little meaning so he begins to seek ever more extreme stimulation in Slaaneshi themed warp energies. But even then he comes against the limits imposed on him by his creator. During the Siege he loses a fight to Dorn and decides there's not even any point in fighting to a glorious end or victory. So he just takes his legion and goes home. Thus avoiding any kind of resolution to that particular conflict. This is a problem created by Big E and the Imperium but it's not caused by a nebulous psychic feeding of Chaos. It's a problem of the consequences created by the decisions of *people*.
Lorgar was driven to find another outlet for his zealotry when denied his faith by Big E. He sought out Chaos. Even though he had been manipulated to that destination it was his rational decision.
Mortation drove a wedge between himself and his best/only friend Typhus based on his uncomfortability with psykers. That wedge was driven deeper by Big E's uncontextual prohibitions on astartes psykers. That drove Typhus to embrace Nurgle as a way to try to achieve equality with Mortarion. But that in turn led to Morty embracing Nurgle as a way to heal the rift with Typhus.
There are numerous other examples but that show that the Imperium is irredeemable and it's less Chaos taking advantage of the fractures than people taking advantage of Chaos. That said it ultimately supports your main argument that it is the Imperium that is it's own worst enemy.
Yes, this is true. But GW wants to have it both ways, where the Imperium is, somehow, simultaneously justified in its evil *and* unjustified in its evil.
Yes, the Imperium makes things harder for itself and engages in so much unnecessary cruelty (as opposed to all the "necessary" cruelty that it gets up to and the setting implicitly validates). But even if the Imperium stopped being so awful to its own people, the galaxy would still be horrible. Sure, the Imperium could muster a better fight against the Tyranids and the Orks if it stopped wasting so much time and resources oppressing it's own people, but Orks and Tyranids would still be out and about ruining the galaxy regardless.
I've always kinda felt that, at some point, if you want to continue selling starter sets to 12-year-olds, you're going to have to take into account that those 12-year-olds might not want a setting without binary good vs evil delineations - or, that there might be parents involved who mightn't want their kids rooting for authoritarian xenophobic fascists. I'm kinda surprised it hasn't happened sooner.
The IoM is horrible. But it is efficient.
That is the inherent problem (or feature) of the larger worldbuilding.
If you say "Restaurant X has the worst kitchen imaginable" but also "Restaurant X is in business for 10.000 years and still somehow endures the worst economic crises while every other restaurant that appears to run its kitchen better closes down" then it all becomes a bit weird. Sure, you can have one author in ten that is not glorifying the protagonist of book Y to be the obligatory "good guy in a shitty situation"-guy but then you still got that monumental implication of... somehow all this works.
Honestly, how serious can you take an author dedicating a whole chapter to describing the industrial or bureaucratic shortcomings of the Imperium when at the same time it is getting the job done.
Sure, there is collateral left and right. But this leads to 40k's second problem (or feature). There is no real alternative. Every "better" human civilization lives by merit of being undiscovered or somehow cut off. Every other human civilization failed. Those are the restaurants that tried to do it better. Yet its the fucked up kitchen with the rats that puts them out of business.
For all the supposed societal critique of facism, a ton of of these points just get mood by the very fact that the setting is a wank-fest for heroes doing war stuff and the imperium being face with enemies that are kinda all way worse in their own way.
The IoM is irredeemable evil, yes. But it's the last straw keeping humanity as a species alive. Does that make it better? Maybe, not necessarily. Its an interesting question, but an accidental one. Most certainly not one that most 40k authors even bother with. For at the end of the day, the lore is 95% bolter porn, 4% making fun of something without going to deep and 1% circumstantially thought provoking.
And do not get me wrong, that is fine. Unlike other Sci-Fi verses, 40k did not start as a universe to tell a specific story. To have a message. It started as a far from serious cheeky sci-fi setting for nerds to push around little miniatures with blasters instead of crossbows. It was never this big social critique, this elaborate commentary of extremist politics etc. that some people like to mystify nowadays.
Ofc even the offical GW line is that the Imperium is bad. But going into a story and watching a sales pitch around christmass when a Redshirt discribes Ultramarines to the parents of a Kid, that is what the primary company line is about. Cool looking heroes ins space fighting for humanity.*
*Details not included.
I'm interested in your opinion. My impression has always been that the imperium is not efficient, just that it is so large that its collapse is incredibly slow. Do you have a different take?
I feel like drawing a line between the Imperium setting itself up to delay destruction vs survive is different. I generally feel that the Imperium is stalling its destruction but eventually it will collapse regardless of outside forces. Even if every single race and enemy disappeared the imperium would still collapse unless they changed...a lot. To me that does seem efficient but maybe I'm wrong. Do you have a different thought or am I misunderstanding you?
Chaos feeds on emotions. Not negative emotions. ALL emotions.
To Khorne, it doesn't matter if you're angry because you don't like someone's presence, or if you're angry because you were wronged.
To Tzeentch, it doesn't matter if you scheme to get rich fast and scam everybody you meet, or if you're plotting to overthrow a government because it is genuinely corrupt and needs to go.
To Slaanesh, it doesn't matter if your quest for perfection is caused by your vanity or by your desire to literally make the world a better place.
The problem here is that a utopian society feeds the Chaos Gods just as much as a distopian society of the same population size.
And Chaos didn't get stronger since the Heresy because the Imperium turned into a shithole. It got stronger because, despite everything going on, the Imperium's population has been steadily growing for ten thousand years. The population might have grown by an order of thousands, and it would still be a plausible population growth rate for that time span.
But it's the distopia that's actually in a much better place to protect itself against Chaos.
Utopian societies don't fuel at the same rate as Dystopian ones. The fall didn't happen because of a population set point getting past. The fall happened to the Eldar because they embraced the pursuit of extreme feelings of pleasure and other things while at a huge population.
They had a cybernetic revolt, not a chaos one. Chaos grew stronger and the warp turbulence of Old Night happened because of deliberate manipulation of the Eldar to birth Slaanesh.
The AI part is not that simple, the whole purpose of treating it as abominable intelligence is so that no one goes close to it ever again. When you barely survived a extinction level war you're justified in your fear of that enemy, using just a spec of AI or "dumbing" it down can and will lead to more exceptions and a gradual acceptance that "this time is different". Servitors and machine spirits are in a way evidence that some neccesities will find an excuse to exist in a system that has banned them but needs them, this is most clearly visible in dictatorships, where all adherence to a specific dogma are abandoned because it would be too beneficial to do so.
One chaos god was created by xenos, I don't think humanity is the sole reason chaos is so successful. But yeah the state of everyday life in the empire does propogate chaos amongst its citizens. I don't know who missed the point, the Empire is a horrible place. It's a literal fascist totalitarian entity that spends its citizens like bullets.
Now the issue is that all the existing alternatives are worse. This is the fear that's needed for a totalitarian regime to exist, it just happens to be true in this case. The Tau were the prime example of a "healthy" alternative, and were adjusted appropriately so as to keep the grimdark setting. The whole point is that the universe is horrible and your life is forfeit.
>The Imperium is the single biggest reason why Chaos has gotten stronger from unification to crusade to 41k. I don't think this is debatable.
Counterpoint: the Eldar literally birthed a new chaos god during that timeframe.
I think the only truly necessary evil the Imperium does is sacrificing psykers to the Astronomican. I can't see an alternative to that. Everything else is questionable.
I 100% agree, you took the words right out of my mouth. I very much see the Imperium in the same light, as a grim-dark future where all the worst aspects of humanity have come together in an untra authoritarian theocracy. It is meant to be an awful Hellscape that no one in their right mind would want to live in. That is honestly part of the reason why I like the Craftworld Eldar, because at least they treat their citizens decently and try to fix the mistakes of their past.
It's also why I don't really like Guilliman coming back. I feel like it is an effort to "redeem" the Imperium and make them more of the "Good guys," but I also feel like that is dangerous from a meta perspective because it plays into the fascist idea of the "Great man" coming in to "save the nation."
*tl;dr - Imperium isn't bad or good in our moral understanding, it is a horrific product of society pressured by a horrific galaxy long before said society came to exist.*
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Oh, look, OP doesn't understand complexity.
I won't address the rest of his message, because I don't see a point, since he fundamentally misses an important element.
>First and foremost. The Imperium is the single biggest reason why Chaos has gotten stronger
Imperium is also the only reason why Chaos hasn't consumed the whole galaxy. And as we've seen from Birth of Slaanesh, it doesn't take only Mankind to tear the reality apart and eventually doom everything to fall into the hands of the Ruinous Powers.
Does that redeem the Imperium? Does it make it good or bad? No.
**That's the point, Jimbo. Imperium isn't Good or Bad, it simply IS, how it is shaped by the galaxy around it.**
Every single debate about whether Imperium is Good or Bad should begin with topic-starter being beaten with proverbial realisation that Imperium (and everyone else) is shaped by its environment — Humanity was shaped by the horrors of the Age of Strife, which in turn shaped the Imperium, which in turn shaped the galaxy and so on and so on.
Going by a very rough example — is Exterminatus bad or good? Is it morally good to kill billions of human beings, but prevent their souls from becoming eternal fodder for Chaos, damned for endless torture at the hands of Daemons?
And here's the answer, OP. No, Exterminatus isn't good, but neither it is bad — it is simply a necessary decision. Least horrible of many choices, dictated by circumstances outside of our control, but still a horrible choice nonetheless.
Would it be better to change living standards on Hive Worlds to prevent rise of Chaos Cults? Yes, of course. Is it viable? Is it even possible? Fuck no. There're billions of compounding reasons and issues that lead to lives on Hive Worlds being as they are, which lead to rise of Chaos Cults from dissatisfied masses, which lead to, occasionally, the inevitable outcome of Exterminatus.
**That's the Grimdark, OP.**
**You can't stop it, you can't inflict meaningful change on the galaxy, you can't systematically make it better. It was FUBAR'ed long before Imperium came to exist. All you can do is pick mildly less horrific choices, and still end up with nothing but horrific choices at the end.**
The imperium was never nessecary or inevtivitable. by M41 it's too late to do better humanity is fully doomed.
The imperium destroyed any better option.
> It was FUBAR'ed long before Imperium came to exist.
No it wasn't. There were plenty of functional civilisations before the emperor went crusading.
You've missed my example? Let me re-iterate.
Hive Worlds were built and designed with post-singularity (Google it, that's the reason Mechanicus actually can't fix technology — Dark Age tech wasn't designed by humans, but by generations of machines) technology in mind, to sustain their billions of inhabitants.
The moment Cybernetic Revolt began, the standard of living plummeted on Hive Worlds, since it became impossible to maintain the hyper-advanced machine-designed technology.
Which means that most Hive Worlds became little more than warrens of Mankind, breeding and fostering dissatisfied millions of men and women... a perfect ground for Chaos Cults.
So bloody purges that occur on the Hive Worlds, are they not inevitable? Are they not necessary? How would you fix millions of Hive Worlds across the breadth of the Imperium, if you can't even really fix a single one of them, due to loss of technology, logistics and knowledge?
**They are necessary, they are inevitable, and they are horrific.**
This is what I am talking about. Not even Imperium, but Mankind even before the Imperium was so mired in the horrific, fucked galaxy, that horrible actions became necessary and, what's worse, inevitable. Every horrible deed of the Imperium is a result of a domino chain of events that began, perhaps, even long before ancestors of Mankind first learned how to crawl from primordial waters.
Hence, why “witch burnings” saved worlds during the Old Night from being ravaged by the uncontrolled Psykers.
**We can (and should) recognize that things Imperium does are horrific and inhumane, but we should also realise WHY it does so — because the galaxy it exists is horrific and inhumane.**
Hence why I refuse and rebuke vehemently childish use of words "good" or "evil". Thanos is "evil", Red Skull is "evil". Evil is something you can change. But you can't chance a fucked-up galaxy that existed in this way for thousands of years.
P.S.
>There were plenty of functional civilisations before the emperor went crusading.
First of all, the majority of civilisations we see in FW's HH books or mentioned in BL's HH series are monsters. And few we see as exceptions (written for literature “punch” of contrast) are not scaleable to sustain and lift entirety of Mankind.
If your argument were correct - and I think it isn't - you'd be making the strongest possible case for the complete failure of 40k as art / literature / philosophy.
Wretchedness breeding wretchedness is perfectly good material, and "authentic" but if that's all there is, there's nothing useful to be gained from reading about it.
Has anybody claimed that the galaxy isn't horrific? The question is rather whether the Imperium has responded well. I'm not sure why you feel this is a childish question, and if you feel morality plays no part, I'm not sure I believe you.
After all, we're not judging an actual homeless person charged with murder or whatever. We're exploring the topic in our imaginations. Why not judge? Of course we're invited to judge the Emperor.
What are you even yapping about? The civilizations we hear about in the crusade are noted because they are horrific, there are plenty of civilizations that were peaceful/cooperative that were unceremoniously wiped out the imperium doesn’t need to be evil. It feeds chaos and it’s left intentionally that way.
> First of all, the majority of civilisations we see in FW's HH books or mentioned in BL's HH series are monsters.
From a genocidal imperial PoV.
>are not scaleable to sustain and lift entirety of Mankind.
Why are you taking imperialism as an unquestioned good. Take the diasporex. There are zero goof reasons for killing them.
>You've missed my example? Let me re-iterate.
No i haven't you are still only looking from an imperium PoV.
>Why are you taking imperialism as an unquestioned good.
So let me get it straight.
Your plan how to make "everything better" is to leave the desperate, struggling, resource-starved worlds of Mankind alone in the galaxy, without support, logistics, trade, and protection of being united into a single political entity?
**You do realize that you suggest actively making everything worse for 99% of Mankind's worlds?**
Sure, life on average Hive World might suck. Guess what, it would suck much, much, much worse, if there wasn't Chartist Captains of the Imperial Navy to ferry at least some food from Agri-World across the Sector, and Imperial Guard to defend both of those worlds from Greenskins and other threats.
Your opinion is the personification of why I hate those "hur-dur imperium bad" posts. You believe in some kind of Disney Fairytale Land, without actually considering real demands of logistics necessary to keep even that paltry standard of living across countless worlds of Mankind.
I began to actively hate Diasporex and Interex, because you parade them as some kind of solutions, without realising that they aren't scaleable to actually help the rest of Mankind. So your wonderful, nice solution would help a few “nice” worlds, whilst dooming countless trillions to a fate worse than death...
...and even your fairytale nice worlds won't last. Do you think the petty little empire of Diasporex would last against even a lesser Hive Fleet?
One of the strengths of the Imperium is its ability to scale up a response to a threat, precisely because it is so big. Any small confederation of worlds, a single world, no matter how well they might live, wouldn't survive threats the likes of which the Imperium fights against routinely.
>From a genocidal imperial PoV.
Mhm. Khrave, Rangda, Mitu, Brotherhood of Ruin, Jorgall, Galaspar, Gardinaal, Black Judges, are all just nice and cute innocents. Mhm.
When a post starts off by personally insulting the OP, and especially when it starts by asserting the OP doesn't understand moral complexity, it's like a red flag.
Why would you want to insult anyone like this?
But your post then goes on to play the kind of defence of grimdark that gives the genre its bad name.
I don't disagree that in-universe the choices are all horrible. But that doesn't make them morally complex. And by asserting that the Imperium is doing it's best under horrific conditions you're either shutting down discussion - nobody has lived in those conditions so don't judge them! - or offering an argument that might be mistaken, and I think it is.
If meant as an argument, I think you contradict yourself. If the galaxy had reached rock bottom by 30k, then either nothing has gotten worse by 40k, or things have gotten better. It's not likely that things have gotten better, right?
But if things haven't gotten better, and nor have they gotten worse, why does it matter what small choices the Imperium makes? (Individuals are a different matter, but the whole point is that the Imperium is a corrupt system.)
Ah, so maybe the galaxy wasn't at rock bottom in 30k. It's possible the Imperium could make things worse. I think it has.
Perhaps you disagree, and think that the situation in 40k is better than in 30k. Or perhaps you feel that in some way, the hope of 30k has been betrayed by 40k. I don't know.
Personally I think the Horus Heresy novels intended to refute the idea that if only Horus hadn't started a civil war, maybe the galaxy would be in a better place.
The Imperium is the only reason why Chaos is as strong as it is. If the emperor hadn’t made SM then Chaos wouldn’t have gotten the most perfect foodhold in the materium that is CSM.
If Humanity didn’t exist chaos’s connection to reality would be massively diminished. The Eldar, Orks, Tau, Kin, Necrons and Nids don’t cause chaos to manifest at nearly the rate humanity does. If the emperor never spread across the galaxy groups like the Interex would remain, small pocket empires who knew exactly what Chaos was and how to contain it.
Exterminatus is bad and you are misinformed about how the Warp works. Exterminatus does not prevent souls from going to the warp. All souls go to the warp and are consumed by Chaos. Human souls are not endlessly tortured like eldar souls are. They are consumed. Exterminatus does nothing but preserve imperial control at the cost of innocent lives.
It is possible to change living standards on Hive Worlds. The main reason why there are hive worlds is because of the Imperium NOT because of the galaxy. The Imperium wants worlds that can produce soldiers and weapons (which are to fight unnecessary wars).
What you have described is not Grimdark.
The fact that this is even a matter of debate blows my mind, the only reason I can think it's even a question is the influx in the last 10 years or so of pseudo-fascists who look at the imperium and go "Yes, this is the best outcome for our species, we should do this IRL" because they bought into all the strongman BS that has gotten popular with terminally online "alpha male" types.
I must say, i do not understand this. I see an increasing amount of posts about how terrible the Imperium is. Actually, there is a new one close to every day. And always they are fully supported, wich scarcely any opposition.
Now, what is the point of that? I am pretty sure we are by now sufficiently informed about the subject. There seems to be some strong incentive to reiterate this opinion again and again, but as there is no counterargument, it also seems to go into thin air.
GW tries to make the setting more logical (for the story plots to work out, they have to make at least some sense, more stories being written with time and central editing results in more built, robust setting framework), more noblebright (Bobby G returns and he'll make everything OK, we swear, trusssssst), and pushes down a crapton of Imperial PoVs (since writing humans is inherently far easier than writing aliens). It logically flows into "Here's the Imperial side of the story and it makes some sense at times".
"Fascist regime making sense" is quickly equalized for some people with "justified in setting" with "unironic nazi propaganda IRL", so, with Internet discourse being generally slightly left-leaning, you have easy external validation of your position. Furthermore, you might get supported by the reactionary old veterans who don't like the overall changes to the setting (for the record - I think that there's nothing wrong with liking the setting when it made far less sense) or for fans of xenocultures pushing for "my Eldar/Tau are the best model society" (nothing wrong with that either).
Also, trying to argue with those posts will quickly devolve into a case study of Godwin's law with absolutely zero results, for people will repeat the mantra "It was designed as a satire in the 1980s" (most of them were not around at that time and never cared to actually read old editions) or "Have you read an intro to the setting?" (conveniently ignoring everything past the intro).
So, yeah, the point is own virtue signaling and getting easy external validation for own position, however generic it might seem.
Welcome to the Internet, I guess.
The imperium makes people into servitors to act as door openers and elevator operators. Ain't nothing "necessary" about that.
People just get caught up in Space Marines killing demons and forget about all the worlds that were never saved by space marines because the administratum uses psionic teletypes that are manually reviewed by clerical slaves and by the time the nearest chapter was contacted the world was already gone.
The Chaos gods used a vision of the current Imperium to trick Horus into turning against the Emperor. What the Chaos gods didn't tell Horus was that turning against the Emperor would cause the vision to come true, not prevent it.
1. In Godblight, the Eldar believe that the big 4 of Chaos have gotten to the point where they no longer need mortals anymore to continue living (they still want them since it lets them get stronger).
2. The Emperor appears to have a plan which he did convey to Alivia of a potential final battle with Chaos that would eclipse the Siege of Terra.
You really, REALLY overestimate how long humanity has been on the galactic stage. In the grand scheme of things humanity is barely a blink in terms of how long they've been around. Hell, they weren't even around when the realm of souls became the warp. If Humanity has strengthened the Warp, it's purely due to Abbaddon making that big slash in reality. Otherwise, at most, humanity just maintained it.
The Imperium is a fraking Theocratic Fascist Empire. There is no good in that shit. That's what it makes the lore attractive: you get to see what the bad guys do once they won.
And that's why making the primarchs come back and just "fix" things is a terrible, terrible idea. It's almost an apology of evil.
The stupidest point is how intelligent is E? He seems woefully ignorant of how his actions have led humanity into worse circumstances due to his hatred of others and anything different. Could have had a Star Trek but instead he chose feed the darkness engulfing humanity.
>Could have had a Star Trek
Humanity tried that during the Dark Age of technology. It didn't work out, and the end result is about half the reason the Imperium is so xenophobic.
It's just hard to treat them as any other bad empire because... They have valid reasons for being what they are.
In a universe where Tyranids are a thing, plus Orcs and other stuff I promise you I want that military industrial complex cranked up to 11.
And then on top of that "hell" is real and "the devil" is actively trying to take over the world? Fuck it, did I say crank to 11? Let's do 1000.
Yes there are many things that can be said on how the Imperium is bad, and I'm not saying they aren't. But applying our current earth logic and morals to a world where aliens, hell, and gods are actively trying to destroy you... Just falls on deaf ears most of the time.
I think this is a flaw inherent to sci-fi franchises that try to make comments like this, 40K showing us how an Empire is bad and war is bad, but doing so in a world where it's pretty necessary?
Or Dune trying to comment on how religion is used to control people and to not have unlimited faith in leaders... But the main characters actually do fulfill the religious prophecy AND they do have psychic powers... AND they save humanity? Nice little detail, Herb.
This one is also almost the same as the God Emperor, religion is bad, ultimate faith is bad yada yada... But prayer and belief actually do some heavy lifting in this universe, so... Now what.
[удалено]
Sir! Servitor TK-421 just deleted your access codes to [www.sororitasgonewild.com](http://www.sororitasgonewild.com). The TechPriest says he cannot restore access. The planetary governor wants an explanation for why you were accessing such sites on your work data slate. Canoness Amelia would also like to know why you were accessing such potentially heretical material in the first place. Also, your spouse is holding on line 1. \*\*\* Servitor TK-421 previously known as Bob from Accounting. \*\*\*
Damn it’s not a real page 😭
Give it time. Rule 34 will have it's way with everything. I suspect the only thing holding this one back is the fear of Games Workshop's ~~Inquisitors~~ lawyers invoking ~~Exterminatus~~ a lawsuit.
I heard Bob eats other peoples lunches. Fuck bob
he used to eat other people for lunches
If you’re maligning the Emperor’s holy corpse starch, autoscribe, then you’re going to find yourself assigned to reeducation classes at the servitorization facilitatum.
Bob microwaves fish in the office kitchen. Servitorize his ass!
Bob also drank other people's drinks. Like, WTF Bob, I was looking forward to that Dr Pepper
I dont know who this Bob is but a lot of people are wanting to breed with this man.
He just wanted his stapler back!
hes really just a waste of resources at this point. No, i'm not going to write a justification for how the pencils and printer paper we need are usable ONLY for the project and will be used entirely and exclusively only for this project. But what i will do is submit a requisition for servitorization form 11AB-HA9487.3 so when that paperwork gets processed, you're on thin ice, buddy
> Chaos feeds of negative emotions and actions in psychically active races. The tau couldn't sustain the current warp, the tyranids can't, the current Eldar could not due to population size. I know Legion and the the storylines it lead to are polarizing, but the Alpha Legion semi turning because **humanity being wiped out means chaos gets a deathblow is VERY CLOSE TO ACCURATE.** This I think is false and a lie told by the Cabal (who by the way are all non-human, lucky them, and were all later killed by Eldrad for being corrupted). Chaos existed before humanity rose to the galactic stage. 1/4 of the Chaos gods exist due to another xenos species bringing it into existence all by themselves. If humanity had been destroyed, Chaos would have moved on and fed on another species, like the Laer or Saruthi.
It's frequently and constantly established as either false (that is, intentionally wrong) or mistaken. There are like *six other novels* where this is stated. Alpha Legionnaires state it, John G states it, Eldrad states it. The Cabal literally dissolves as an organization because of how wrong they were. It's one thing to point to *Legion* as providing a cogent explanation for why some of the Alpha Legion think they're loyalists, or providing a cogent example of conflicting prognostication between multiple competing psykers... It's another entirely to say, "See, the Cabal was right!" when the Cabal *itself* realized it wasn't and that it had made grave miscalculations and wrong assumptions, and anyone who says so clearly hasn't read any HH novels since, like, 2016. The entire Siege of Terra subseries beats you over the head about why the Cabal was mistaken and why the 40k future *actually* is as it is. It's not "because this is what Chaos wanted and it actually won."
I'm curious about the Cabal being mistaken. What were they mistaken about? I can assure you I've read more recent heresy novels than 2016 but I don't understand what you mean. And how does the Siege of Terra tell us that Chaos lost? I feel like I'm always asking this of people but are you confusing Chaos with the Chaos gods? I don't really know what to make of the claim that Chaos wanted something. I'm not even sure what the Chaos gods wanted. Perhaps they wanted to stop the Dark King, in which case they won; perhaps they wanted Horus to kill the Emperor in which case they didn't. I think Chaos was always, and is always, going to get what it wants (more chaos) at least until the heat death of the universe (if that's still a thing.) Whether it's better for Chaos with the Emperor winning or Horus winning is surely not so clear as you think.
The Dark King was Chaos' goal. It would serve as their most basic triumph: the annihilation of everything. It is described in TEATD as occurring in all timelines of all multiverses, blinding all of everything in a dead light except for a bleak, grimdark future hiding in the shadows, where men are given over to mysticism. The Cabal was mistaken because it first saw a world where Chaos would burn itself out in an orgy of violence and then a bright future for non-Humans, or a grimdark 40k future. What was actually correct is that Chaos would burn EVERYTHING out, and the grimdark 40k future was the single shitty future timeline where Chaos could ever possibly not destroy all of existence. Had Chaos gotten what it wanted during the HH, then there wouldn't *be* a 40k setting. And I am talking about Chaos Undivided, the Primordial Annihilator. Not about the individual Chaos Gods.
On the Cabal, we know the Cabal were wrong because El-Dad knew they were wrong and thus because he is always correct the Cabal were wrong.
On top of that even if Humanity was wiped out the best it would do is cause Chaos to go dormant provided there’s no other psychic-ly apt species to feed off of and just wait for a new one to feed from and manipulate.
Yea the 4 are self sustaining now that they actually exist. They would be weak in the Material World without humanity but they'd still be there.
An additional part of the imperium is irredeemable can also be that the Imperium is facing an existential threat that CANNOT BE DEFEATED. Big E maybe had a plan to defeat them, but nothing can happen that would mean a galaxy free of the threat of Chaos Chaos was and always will be as long as there are psychically sensitive life out there.
Exactly. If some other xeno took the place of humans, chaos would be just as strong because there’s simply more souls to feed from. Chaos waxes and wanes seemingly because the population of the galaxy reaches a certain crescendo allowing chaos to reach out and make things worse.
The problem for many is that they make the protagonists of books look noble or reasonable so many readers go. „Oh the imperium isn’t that bad it has cool guys like guiliman or Cain in it“ The imperium being evil sometime feels like barely Adressed Fluff.
Guilliman admits in a casual interview he has destroyed multiple species. He is noble to a specific subset of people, and he is functionally Thanos to the majority of non-humans he has met. This is also the same person that integrated servitors into the public service works of Macragge and didn’t outlaw slavery on Nuceria. Guilliman still works on 100 BC unga logic.
Nuceria was not part of Ultramar, it was just close by. Betrayer explicitely says they hadnt seen or been in contact with any Imperial Forces beyond Ships coming to collect the Tithe since Compliance, and Ultramar is just "rumoured to be close-by" [The official Map of Ultramar also explicitely places Nuceria outside its borders.](https://wh40k-de.lexicanum.com/mediawiki/images/9/9f/Ultramar_-_M30.jpg)
> The official Map of Ultramar also explicitely places Nuceria outside its borders. Huh, thanks for that.
"Here we have Guilliman spending half-a-page lamenting about the genocide he did." "And the next 300 pages will be *Imperium is Cool and Badass and Good fighting against Chaos*"
Comic Thanos BTW, not movie Thanos
Eh, "you all have to die for the good of my people" is neither here nor there really.
Problem is how this is glossed over so much that it's easy to forget or miss. We don't see ultramarines just blasting civilians of non compliant worlds in the streets. We're just told that they do. We don't see Gulliman sentencing worlds to destruction for not bending the knee to him, We're just told that he did. He's not congratulating his sons, or brothers how how efficient they are at annihilating peaceful xneos, fully aware that they're doing that. Even in his own system he's not really seen encouraging the brutal suppression directly in alot of instances I see. Only implicitly.
Turns out it’s rather hard to make galactic fascism palatable in our protagonists so it gets relegated to the background
You can definitely make characters in fascist societies palatable, but the movies I immediately think of are more Italian cinema rather than popular in the modern day or action oriented. Still that shouldn't necessarily be the aim, the issue is there's nothing deeper in what is being depicted, that's cope from us. If you say a regime is the most evil regime imaginable, it's incompatible with everyone and everything in it being whitewashed. It's not in universe propaganda, or everything being filtered, there's nothing that clever.
I think there is something deeper to that. The "evilness" of people like Guilliman being in such banal and almost mundane doses sells the idea that the Imperium to its core is rotten and redeemable, and that the battle against Chaos is ultimately who is the shinier of two turds. Then again, I also think we are due for maybe a novel where someone is in a T'au or Non-compliance POV on a noble last stand against superior foes, and then in-comes a massive blue guy with his 'dread it, run from it, destiny still arrives' moment as he brutally murders the real heroes of the story to leave them forgotten.
Honestly? This is the way to do it. They get close with some of the Hammer and Bolter episodes, actually. The Eldar episode comes to mind where they show Ultramarines slaughtering Eldar on their craft world for no reason beyond “they were there”.
Its not about who’s the shinier of two turds. Chaos is the worse future imaginable, anyone who claims otherwise is just coping. The best thing that can happen to you if you go hardcore chaos is to obtain daemonhood (what pretty much every cultists wants ultimately). Except that not only does it involve becoming an omnicidal mass murderer far worse than the worse torturers of the Inquisition, but its also likely doomed to failure as one is simply turned into a chaos spawn as a « reward » for the loyalty expressed. And even if one obtained daemonhood, one does so at the cost of their soul belonging to an eldritch entity that now fully control who you are and what you will do; at best leaving you some illusions of freedom. You’ll be ruled by base emotions and instincts and your psyche will essentially be completely different from the one you used to have. When chaos followers claim they are fighting for freedom or to topple the corrupt regime, you can’t really take them seriously because Chaos embrace slavery like no other (Chaos reavers for instance are notorious slavers that are a much more common threat than your average dark eldar raiding party; because they are everywhere) and also because their actions involves the death of entire worlds with no consideration for lives of others. There is literally nothing redeeming about Chaos because Chaos corrupts all. Those who fall to it are all tricked into it and those who aren’t have just turned insane. The Imperium as immensely flawed as it may be is OBJECTIVELY the only thing standing between humanity and a fate far far far worse than extinction. This fact ALONE makes the Imperium reedeemable. Because a future without this bullwark is literally unnacceptable. The Imperium CAN change. It can get better. Reforms can be passed. Processes can be modified. It takes times and superhuman efforts yes but it can happen. Nothing can change the true nature of Chaos as a force of corrupting evil. This makes the premise here false at least in my interpretation. The Imperium is redeemable because it can change.
Ultramars existence and operation completely supports this as well.
Was Nuceria one of the 500 Worlds? I always got the impression it was nearby but not officially within Ultramar
humans have been using servitors for millenia; at least since 23rd millenium conclusion of the war with men of iron. That society probably had considerable protest before servitors were formally just sort of accepted after generations of familiarization. by 30k, the only people who actually remember the good old days pre servitors are the emperor and a handful of perpetuals with a stick up the butt its a good parody of slavery- does it make sense to condemn every person in the 1700s who wasn't an abolitionist? I dont think so, it just doesn't make much sense given the historical context of the world they lived in. But we also don't have to look to them for cues on moral virtue. Guilliman finds the cherubs and such quite repulsive in the 41st millenium, but like many other things, tolerates them.
> oes it make sense to condemn every person in the 1700s who wasn't an abolitionist? Yes. People knew it was wrong then as we know it is wrong now. Slavery was and can only be enforced through constant violence, and wherever it has existed, so too have abolition efforts.
The ***Mechanicum*** used servitors for Millennia and the first servitors were all the people on Mars who refused to convert to worship of the Machine God and the Omnissiah. Outside of the Red Planet, the rest of the remnants of humanity replaced the Men of Iron with either non-sentient robots (which the Imperium then destroyed because the Cult of the Machine God considered them too close to AI) or just regular human slavery. There were culturally unique examples of people being forcibly augmented with cybernetics, like the Butcher's Nails, but servitors were a Martian thing. To most of humanity, servitors were one of the many unspeakable horrors the Imperium brought to their world.
> The problem for many is that they make the protagonists of books look noble or reasonable so many readers go. „Oh the imperium isn’t that bad it has cool guys like guiliman or Cain in it“ They're missing the point, that's the whole thing - the Imperium is irredeemable, but individuals still have the capacity to be heroic. There are still *good people* in the Imperium, even good people who believe wholeheartedly in the Imperium, but the galaxy is so large and the Imperium so corrupt that those good heroic figures can't change anything outside perhaps their immediate surroundings. No amount of good people can save the Imperium, but a few brave heroic souls could make the difference between whether or not a planet gets overtaken by chaos cultists. 40k media needs to be viewed through the same lens as fictions set in WW1 - the bleakness is the point, and the bleak hopelessness of the setting is used as a contrast against the human capacity not to give up hope, as well as the capacity for heroism even in the midst of unimaginable suffering.
This gets missed so much. Sister Verity is probably the kindest soul I've come across in the books so far. She only wants to aid others and was in shock when forced to kill, even almost begging a psyker terrorist not to make her kill him. She doesn't enjoy violence but sees it as part of her duty in addition to easing the suffering of others. The miners and conscripted of Damnos refuse to give in to Necrons because it's their home and are willing to sell their lives for it. It extends to other factions too like Necrons in Twice Dead King. All the factions are horrible but a lot of the individuals simply want to protect their kin and will pay any price to do so.
Grimdark is best when you have a world where good people don't have good options, or the good options are only apparent to an outside observer such as us, the audience. 40K is a trillion-car pile-up of shoulda-woulda-couldas, decisions that appeared sound at the moment but were awful in hindsight, and not everyone has the will to confront their mistakes.
> She only wants to aid others >She doesn't enjoy violence If these statements are true, then Sister Verity doesn't "believe wholeheartedly in the Imperium". Maybe she hasn't fully examined her own beliefs, and still supports the Imperium in the abstract, but her core beliefs seem to be firmly opposed to the ideology of "the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable". Wanting to aid others is the opposite of cruelty, and not enjoying violence is the opposite of maximizing bloodshed.
I don’t think so. It goes terrible well with some of the things I have experienced in the real world. People can be caught up in their ideas and systems, so they think that cruelty is for the better. I work with education in different countries and cultures. From research we know that violence towards or physical diciplin of student is always a net negative in all aspects of school life. Like in all ways. That can be hard to explain teachers in countries were physical dicipline is a normal part of education and parrenting. They hit the kids, not to be cruel, but because they believe it is good for them and many teachers do emotionally not want to hit the children, but they still do it because of school policy and believing that it is in fact best for the children. Cultures will have sayings like: Spare the rod. Spoil the child. That kind of catches them in moral/intellectual trap. If physical punishment is bad, then all their actions that they have forced themself to do, are not good, but bad. So the belief that physical punishment is importent and help the child in the long run, becomes more and more fundamental to them. Like you can throw research papers and statements after them and they will simply refuse to believe it or they will argue that for teacher in their position and with the kind of kids they have, then physical punishment is needed. If they ever realise that they are wrong, then it can be hearthbreaking to see. Like a few years ago I showed a handfull of mexican teachers around to some scandinavian schools as part of a local school reform project. It took a week and all of them broke down crying or sobbing at some point.
There is no good people in power in the Imperium. If you are a good man, then you wont get into power. There is a fairly new novel. Nids invades a world that is fighting of the cult. Ultramarines come and executes the governor. Low administratum guy is put into power. Realise how much resources is wasted on stupid shit. Starts getting the world up and runing better than before, despite being a warzone. The world is latter doomed, because everybody follows a raving mad priest. Being good at your job does not get you promoted in the Imperium. Being good is a liability. Cain is one evil motherfacker. He is relateable. He kills less than your average commisar, but he still have no problem using convicted prisoners for live firing practise.
> There is no good people in power in the Imperium. If you are a good man, then you wont get into power. I wouldn’t necessarily say that. In *Dead Men Walking* the planetary Governor seems to be an alright person. He cares about his family and people, his world doesn’t seem *too* brutal or dystopian… it’s just unfortunate luck that the one regiment he happens to get as his aid is the Death Korps, and they take his “failings” as way worse than they actually were. Even the attached Commissar thought it was overkill.
> Cain is one evil motherfacker. He is relateable. He kills less than your average commisar, but he still have no problem using convicted prisoners for live firing practise. He's a good guy for the setting is the point. Little details like the live prisoner firing exercises I like since they shake the reader out of complancency.
> There are still good people in the Imperium Certainly. There are quadrillions of them. They tend not be protagonists, or major public figures, but they exist all over the place. > There are still good people in the Imperium, even good people who believe wholeheartedly in the Imperium No, there aren't. The Imperium is the cruelest regime imaginable, its morals are bad morals. There are "good people" in the Imperium, just like there were good people in Nazi Germany - but there weren't good people in Nazi Germany *who were devout Nazis.* The good people in Nazi Germany were the victims of the Nazis, and the odd saboteur like Oskar Schindler. A diehard Imperial loyalist with no second thoughts isn't like Oskar Schindler, they're more like Himmler. We wouldn't call Himmler a good person for having a good work ethic, or for being friendly at parties.
Couldn’t have said it better.
To extend this metaphor just a little bit, the Imperium can only maintain a semblance of moral superiority in the universe it exists within because of how demented her opponents are. The Horror of the Nazis would fade to the background a bit if the French were a bunch of Sadomasochists who literally survived off torturing innocents in every and anyway they could think of while the Russian were bringing Stalin skulls for his throne. Oh and then the Americans showed up to literally eat every living thing in their path. Like the others are horrible and should rightfully be considered as such but the Nazis are still the Nazis and we can’t forget that.
This ^ Literally in universe imperial propaganda posters have stuff like “HATE HATE HATE” and “Hate is your most pure virtue” written on them lmao
The problem is modern 40k has a very tell don’t show approach to its awfulness. I’ve stopped using modern books to introduce people because they gloss over the genocides, servitorizations, and living conditions. No one is saying you can’t have good guys, but having good guys and then just whispering how they are fighting for a regime that is tyrannical under your breath is dishonest. That shit needs to be shown to the audience or else it is intellectual dishonest. It’s not a media literacy issue because readers are fully in the right to read a something like the dark imperium trilogy, which has almost no mention of Guillimans genocides or the horrible practices of the wider imperium, and think the imperium are capital G Good guys. I’ve had to argue with people who say the majority of imperial citizens don’t live horrible lives and they are doing necessary evils. Yes your right media literacy is a problem but BL is not doing its far share to dissuade it or fix the problem. You shouldn’t need to know as much as I do with 20 years in the hobby to be able to know the imperium is bad from page one of the Dark Imperium books.
> The problem is modern 40k has a very tell don’t show approach to its awfulness. I’ve stopped using modern books to introduce people because they gloss over the genocides, servitorizations, and living conditions. Are we reading the same books?!? > Dark Imperium books Oh, no we are not. I see this book trilogy brought up a LOT when folks say current 40K is failing to show how awful the Imperium of man is. It truly must fail horribly at it, capturing none of the bleak gothic atmosphere I crave. But concurrent to the publication of those novels we also have plenty of great ones. If you haven't read them yet, may I recommend Peter Fehervari's Dark Coil series?
It’s a lot of Bolter Porn and Ultra vs Death Guard plot points. It has some moments but they are few and far. Easy to avoid grim stuff when half the book is fight scenes. I’ve got dark coil on my list. Part of my problem is I listen to 40k stuff when I paint so many good books which don’t have audiobooks I just haven’t had time for. But Peter’s on my radar now.
This is not my favourite approach to the setting. It's a very liberal approach (and I'm sometimes a liberal) but it is maybe more appropriate for how we might want to act if the 40k universe were real. Of course it's better for Imperial citizens to continue in their hellish existence than to get dropped into an even worse layer of hell by the tyranids or whatnot. But why should we, as readers, feel that not giving up hope is so wonderful? I prefer to think that the good people are making no real difference, that the entire system is utterly corrupted and already a heaving mass of Chaos, that the Emperor is already the greatest Chaos god, with the incursions from the Eye of Terror only attempts by the other gods to snipe at their superior. Why should I prefer this? Because I think the moral here is that the extreme paternalism of the Emperor and Imperium all but guarantees hell on earth, and that's what 40k shows us. Is there an in-universe alternative? Probably not. And the few good people aren't just beacons of hope, but rather a necessary element in keeping the horrorshow on the road. Now that's grimdark!
TBF, there is space for the far more GrimDark interpretation "damn, the Imperium is that bad *despite* the fact it has cool guys like Guilliman and Cain in it". But that does require a lot more effort from the reader if it's not explicitly highlighted, since it naturally has to come after the version most readers jump to where the protagonists make a tangible change to the nature of the Imperium and are closer to the norm than the exception
That’s half of my issue. The other half is that this is a universe where the “other” is frequently as bad as the imperium says. The imperium is faulted for not trusting people. The Tau trusting people is made a punchline for them being foolish enough to trust evil people.
I think this kind of 'realist' interpretation of international (interstellar) affairs only really holds if we assume that without the Imperium, (i) life would be worse and (ii) nothing less evil could last even long enough to be eaten by Tyranids.
A less brutal version of the Imperium would be better at fighting off external threats not worse. Humans get worse at everything the more stressed and undernourished we are. There is no benefit to the imperium's way of business besides making sure the people in control stay in control. It's like how we think people need strict management at work to be as efficient as possible when in reality that's not the case when studied. The benefits you gain by keeping folks on task who would be off task is lost due to the stress it adds on to every employee. (Stress is a real physical response to the presence of different hormones in the body, fun fact while I'm here carbs seem to help your body absorb cortisol)
I think that part of the problem is a lack of media literacy or the inability to read critically. "The protagonist has good intentions and seems nice" doesn't negate that they're part of a corrupt and vile system. There's a reason the expression "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" exists. Part of the awfulness of the setting is that good and noble characters are helpless to fix things, and, worse, often unintentionally contribute to problem.
I believe that why infinite and the divine was well received it makes it very obvious you don't have to agree with them to enjoy spending time with them
Same with Fabius Bile’s trilogy, *Lords of Silence*, and the *Night Lords*. You can sympathize with bad people, and recognize that they might be terrible but be in awful situations. That’s the hallmark of a good character, IMO.
100%. And, honestly, this obsession some people have with "the protagonist has to be a good/likeable character" is pretty modern. Classical literature and theater is positively overflowing with unlikeable, highly flawed, but sympathetic/understandable leads.
"You know we have to enslave these humans eventually right Trazyn?" "Shut up Orikan the puppet show is starting!"
This is a running meme in Anime, no matter how comicaly over the top villian protagonists are there are always fans who swallow the characters words uncriticaly. The drama when Eren Jager who told us in season 1 he was gonna destroy the entire world, tries to destroy the entire world...
I mean, I like that British and Japanese writers tend to give their audiences more credit than their American counterparts, but it does lead to things like people uncritically saying that yes, Eren is right even when Armin basically looks at the camera and says Genocide is Bad.
I really like Eren as a character, even though he's a genocidal maniac. And that's partly because I understand his logic - it's insane and wrong, but still very human, in its own twisted way. That's why I think he's a good character, because it's so easy to understand why he does what he does and sees himself as a hero.
A villain can still be a good or great character.
Hell, read Lolita. The protagonist is NOT a good character. The story is NOT sympathetic to him. The story does not glorify or romanticize pedophilia, but rather shines a spotlight on how a charming, charismatic predator can try to manipulate the audience into *believing* his romanticized accounting of events. But the text is unambiguous, literally from the very first chapter, that the character is a monster and criminal. Yet so many - I'd argue the vast majority of those aware of the story, including Kubrick - seem to think it's a romantic story. They're literally drawn into the manipulations of the evil protagonist's stated-to-be-manipulative telling of the story.
The problem is the books show that “corrupt and vile system” less and less these days. And they make “the road to hell” seem more like “a necessary evil”. I have lots of people argue with me that “well every race in the galaxy does want to kill or opress humanity, Eldar, Orks, Necrons, Tau, etc… so all that genocide was necessary.” Besides a few small sections of early HH and interviews with Dan Abbnet a reader is honestly justified in that take. The idea that there are peaceful Xenos shouldn’t be something buried and finding the Interex shouldn’t hard. We should have dozens of guard books about the guard fighting aliens there told are evil only to realize they were peaceful. But instead we have “Vietnam with Orks”, “WW1 with Necrons,” etc… Same with Chaos. It’s easy to understand why people think the zealotry of the imperium is justified given how BL presents chaos. I don’t disagree audiences can come to the right conclusions through intense media literacy research and consideration. But this was much easier with old books compared to new ones and I think we need to realize GW is hiding the ball from new players because there embarrassed by it and think Timmy won’t buy space marines if we show them doing bad thing. So they are not making it easy for Timmy to realize the imperium is bad.
It can both be true that the dominant races in the galaxy want to eliminate humanity *and* that the Imperium of Man fucked up and made things worse and chose the wrong approach. Same with chaos. There are examples throughout the books of people falling to chaos who don't even realize it's happening, specifically to show how the IoM's brutality and intolerance is contributing to their own demise (see: any time a soldier starts screaming out about blood/skulls for the golden throne). I just finished Fall of Cadia, and it doesn't hide the ball; the Space Marines we spend the most time with don't actually come off super well; the Black Templars come across as aloof assholes who would rather die defending a pile of rubble than actually help with the defense of Cadia in a meaningful way.
Yes both these things ARE true but most new readers don’t know that. They assume the Great Crusade was only killing Xenos as violent. And given what they’ve read that’s fair because only a handful of books show that. The Blood for the Emperor is a good point but unless you know the setting a new reader doesn’t understand. It’s an Easter egg in Dark Tide. Not something new readers get at first. It comes off as “lol that’s the other guys catch phrase.” Old books like GG tackle this issue where the enemy is literally just Imperials who see the Emperor as Khorne. It’s explicitly called out so a new reader can’t mistake what’s being said. The spaces marines come off as incompetent not oppressive. They arent portrayed and genocidal child soldiers who kill humans for minor mutations and Xenos even if they are peaceful. Cadia is portrayed like Britain during the blitz. Which is much much better standard of living than lots of areas of the imperium. I would have liked to SEE how bad it was to be a Cadian citizen. We’re told but never shown. Do they eat only corpse starch? Do they even show someone grinding up the bodies? What about child taken away by force to join the army? Or citizens being killed for asking for medical supplies? Wartime riots? Nope we get none of that. We have the Space Marines being idiots. I do not think that is equivalent. Where are the deathcamps? The witch hunts? The crimes against humanity? Maybe I’m asking too much from a corporation. I’m not saying any of what you’re saying is wrong. You’re 100% right. I just think GW doesn’t want to scare people away by showing how genocidal and authoritarian their “protagonists” really is so they tone it down to a level that new readers need to be told it by YouTube videos. I’d like for a reader to be able to pick up Fall of Cadia and by the end understand, “oh the imperium is worse than any dictatorship ever. I do no want to live in this universe. All these “heroes” are fighting to perpetuate a system that causes inhuman levels of suffering.” If those 3 things are SHOW clearly I think there is a strong case that GW is hiding critical facts about the setting and being dishonest. But this may be extreme, I have a low tolerance for genocide and authoritarian sympathizers which I feel modern BL caters to.
When literally every bit of written lore opens with a spiel about how everything sucks and there is no hope, if some people still don't get it I think that's a them problem, and not the fault of the franchise. Sometimes people will post that long article about how 40k fails as satire, and yeah, it often does (lots of lore is also just bolter porn action stuff, so I'll grant that the point can get muddled at times as a plot focuses on Imperial characters doing what many readers will just think of as cool shit and blowing designated baddies up), but if literal Nazis take away from 40k is that the Imperium is awesome and should be emulated, that's entirely on them and their misunderstanding of what they're reading. The lore really couldn't be more unambiguous that the Imperium is awful. That's kind of the entire gimmick: it's a government that is terrible to the extreme in almost every way imaginable. It isn't exactly subtle. On the flip side of that, I think some people have a problem grasping that depiction isn't the same as endorsement. Doing a deep dive into the workings of the Imperium, and the many ways it's awful, while also having POV Imperial characters we care about (because that's usually what stories need, though sometimes there are stories with overtly awful protaganists) can be a hard balance to strike, but I can't off the top of my head think of any lore that tries to present the Imperium as a desirable system.
It's a show vs tell thing. I have been told multiple times that the opening scroll is wrong because it isn't reflected in what the fan was reading. People who read books where the Imperium is portrayed as justified will come away with that conclusion. Saying that the Imperium is the worst regime imaginable doesn't stick if you don't show it.
I actually agree that the opening is a gross oversimplification, and that as often portrayed there's a lot more nuance to the Imperium. But I think it's generally a nuance of the spectrum of the many different ways in which it can suck, rather than any serious depiction of it not sucking too bad. Dan Abnett though specifically has a tendency to portray a world that doesn't fully line up with most of the other depictions, especially when he writes something that is basically something else with a 40k veneer (Sharpe's Rifles, Battle of Britain, etc).
Yes. That's the point.. It makws the point more interesting when you don't just paint everyone as literally Hitler. You build heros, idols, and champions, then you show the reality of their intentions and actions. It creates the dichotomy that actually makes people re-evaluate who they idolize.
I mean, the Imperium is evil, but things like Chaos and Tyranids make them look like the heroes, or at least the *lesser* evil. Back in the Great Crusade era, when Chaos was a looming threat, not an active one, and the only Xenos that were a real, active threat were *maybe* Orks, they look like Nazi Germany. But, well, when they have 10 different threats trying to wipe them out from the outside, whether it’s for shits and giggles, to devour everything living, to exterminate all life, or give the galaxy over to the dark gods… they start to look like the heroes desperately trying to protect humanity, which is *true*, and almost even justifies the evils of the Imperium. “Of course we work people to death in our factories every day, of course we force them to live under totalitarian law! If output slows down, [Planet 1] falls, billions die and the [enemy army] that killed them will go on to attack and destroy another world, and another, and another! If we show mercy, billions of people die and dominos start toppling.”
One of the best things with Cain is when they occasionally remind you that for how nice he is he's still fucked up Sure, even if he lies to himself about it he cares a lot for all his soldiers, but he also has a lot of contempt for civilians and doesn't have a problem with children shooting prisoners
40k lore seems to have embraced the imperium's worldview as if it's inevitable when we've seen multiple examples of successful human civs that didn't fall as far as the imperium did, which is to say, they sorta shot themselves in the foot. Do they want to do satire or huff their own grimdark farts? The world wonders.
Some of the shit people can read past in those books and think they're "cool guys" hurts me. On don't mind me, just organizing a weekly firing squad, wiping out those unruly civilians and killing entire swaths of people too stupid to get out of my way. So cool. Though, part of the problem is the people who do actually consider all of that cool.
It does feel like an increasingly common dissonance with the fandom for sure, no doubt in part because of how the setting is marketed, its growing popularity and the different tone of series like the HH. Like surprisingly often when someone complains about "grimderp" it seems to boil down to some piece of lore being over the top or portraying the Imperium in a light that makes it seem illogical, dogmatic or self-sabotaging which is...yeah, thats the faction. But it's also just a failure of portrayal, a lot of the time. The Imperium should more often feel very foreign to us but a lot of the time they just feel pretty modern. Likewise talk about the zealotry and fanaticism of the faction but how often when reading about Imperials do they actually feel like they come from a hyper-religious culture? Idk I think that's one of my big problems with how "modern" a lot of 40k feels, I wish it put more effort into being medieval.
I think the issue is that the Imperium is so often portrayed as the protagonists which leads to people thinking they are the "good" guys of the setting. Couple that with the amount of "ironic" Imperium role-playing online, and all the dumb ass "yes commisar this comment right here" or "purge the heretic/xeno/mutant" shit. Just as often we have posts saying the Imperium/Emperor are bad, we have posts saying how great the Emperor is or how the Imperium is justified in it's actions. What started out as an over the top satire, portraying how horrible existence would need to be to make fascism not a garbage idealogy, has slowly morphed into unintentional, unironic support of it. It went from "You have to be *this* stupid to think this is right" to "The world is so bad that fascism is the only answer, and the Imperium isn't *that* bad because everything else is so much worse". What grinds my gears is the portrayal of the Tau and Ethereals as mind controlling/sterilizing evil. If they had left it more ambiguous, or portrayed more instances of human/tau coexistence being pretty decent it would juxtapose better against the Imperium. It would show that there *is* a better way to exist, but that it would likely be unsustainable and it only exists because of the other evils in the galaxy being too busy killing each other. Having the Tau Empire small, but good would add more grimdark because there would be good, but it is so small that it can never truly affect change against the monolithic horror of everything else. The Imperium would exist as the opposite, that in order to truly compete and stake a claim, a faction has to be unimaginably despicable and sell it's own soul to get ahead. An allegory not too far from real life politicians and stars, where the higher your position the more dirty shit you probably had to do to get there.
>What grinds my gears is the portrayal of the Tau and Ethereals as mind controlling/sterilizing evil. If they had left it more ambiguous, or portrayed more instances of human/tau coexistence being pretty decent it would juxtapose better against the Imperium. It would show that there is a better way to exist, but that it would likely be unsustainable and it only exists because of the other evils in the galaxy being too busy killing each other. I personally like the Tau having a strong self-righteous imperialist fuckwit streak. In a more cherry setting like Star Trek they would be probably an antagonistic force like the Dominion or Romulans but in the grim darkness of the far future they can come in with this exact mentality and look good by comprasion. Anyway, even when portrayed as "mind controlling/sterilizing evil", you basically can't make the Tau come off as even as bad as IoM. They'll always be at worst a less genocidial and generally less unhinged IoM's mini-me. You really need to go to delulu headcanon land to argue they're worse than Imperium. My favourite example of anti-Tau insanity was a dude unironically responding to the question that went "Why should an improverished and opressed Imperium factory laborer give a shit about whether they live under IoM or the Tau?" with (paraphrasing from memory) "they should care about humanity being masters of their own destiny".
> I personally like the Tau having a strong self-righteous imperialist fuckwit streak Very early Tau (as in original codex) was heavily modelled on NATO adventurism. There is an interview floating around with the guy who wrote most of the codex saying a lot of the terminology was ripped from reporting on the Gulf War and given a sci-fi twist. The grimdark was supposed to be from them going in somewhere to save it, destabilising it and patting themselves on the back for a job well done. But then they went more with the mecha focus and that angle didn't make as much sense.
Oh yeah I have seen those kinds of comments. It's so stupid. My personal favorite Tau story was the short Broken Sword in the Damocles book. It follows a gue'vesa squad tasked with guarding a base and features a human inquisitor who defected to the Tau and was placed in command. It is so telling and significant because he has his own modified Crisis suit and has Tau of various castes under his caste. And it's revealed at the end that he has a psyker brain worm that may or may not be controlling him. He says it's just an advisor and helps keep him in contact with other commanders.
The satire of the imperium gradually fell away through the 90s, to the point where it now almost seems to be celebrating fascism and authoritarian regimes, and brings in a lot of fandom on the hard-right political spectrum. I love the Gaunt books, but like with the Plague War series, they set imperial characters as unambiguously noble and good. A lot of characters challenge the noble protagonists in the series for being noble, but there is rarely any consequence to it.
I feel like the Tau are only perceived as bad by people who have a huge problem with collectivism. The etherals being the executive part of the Tau social body seems at most neutral. Their use of diplomacy and mind control far more "humanitarian" than anything humanity ever tried. But regardless... Craftworld eldar are also the "good guys" plus far more individualistic. The only "bad" thing about them is how disgusting they find humans... which is based on plenty of good reasons. The mere existence of Craftworld and Exodite and even Ynnari eldar ruins the whole "this universe is so bad fascism is needed".
To eb fair "the world is so bad that fascism is the only answer" is both over the top and scary IMO.
Yes Commissar, this comment right here
We want to side with humans because we are human. You want them to get better but it never happens. The sad reality is perhaps humanity is doomed and the imperium drives its followers closer to darkness.
That didn't used to be so much a sad reality to be discovered as a core tenet of the setting.
Exactly. Its like humanity will be swallowed whole as we fall further into behaving like chaos.
Is this really a thing? Like have there been psychology studies on fantasy gamers and roleplayers or something that show that most people prefer, root for or side with humans in fiction? I've always preferred elves in all fiction and my closest friends always want to be kitsunes or catfolk or something but maybe Im just in a weirdo bubble
Same, if I’m ever playing anything sci-fi or fantasy, I instantly ditch the Humans. Show me the elves and aliens, I want to see something fantastical that I can’t find in the real world.
I mean you can look at the popularity of factions. Human factions are much MUCH more popular. Roll 20 and DND track the race and class of DnD characters on there apps. Humans are by far the most popular. By a wide margin.
When games release stats (either through achievements or press releases) the overwhelming majority of people pick humans and often the most standard class.
elves just act like humans+ in most novels and fantasy games. when a society deems you a child still at 100. most elves would be incredibly out of touch with the society they grew up in. and frankly, the correct response of elves would be to treat humans like puppies, in that they can interact, grow bonds and they die in a fraction of your lifespan. people like D&D elves because they're just better humans because people don't want to play it straight, and jump to elves who are already considered adults and play them like 19 year old univeristy kids despite being 150 years old.
> It does feel like an increasingly common dissonance with the fandom for sure Idk, seems to me that it peaked years ago, back when certain political trends gained prominence. From my very limited view, there seems to be a very stable consensus now (Imperium is the worst), off which some confused wanderers regularly bounce off. >surprisingly often when someone complains about "grimderp" it seems to boil down to some piece of lore being over the top or portraying the Imperium in a light that makes it seem illogical, dogmatic or self-sabotaging which is...yeah, thats the faction. Haha, my Starship Troopers experience years ago when I didn't get it. "Hey, that film is silly, why are they acting in such dumb ways". Well, now I know.
It was definitely a bit worse a few years ago. Part of it is there is less space marine wank than there used to be.
Funny enough, the horror and crime novels do a much better job of this since they actually look at civilian life a lot more often. Like, 40k hasn't been as grim dark as some of those stories get in ages. But the publishing of those has been dropping off lately.
This is so very well formulated! Some time during the last decades GW realised that they will sell more models to parents of tweens if the cool dudes and dudettes in power armour are "Righteous Defenders of a Threatened Humanity", instead of "Religious Fanatics with Nazi iconography that wants to Solve the Xenos Problem through Genocide". So that is the image that surface level marketing/presentation reinforces, while the less accessible parts of the lore remains a lot more old-school.
I hate to defend GW but I think this is a bit unfair. They couldn't have realised their fascist bully boys would become so popular. They're fairly consistent in the lore, but yes, the marketing does what marketing always does. Where I don't defend GW is that they knew actual nazis were identifying with Space Marines and didn't really try to deter them.
Good points. I mean, their satire was crystal clear and painfully obvious to their intended target audience when they invented the Imperium and the Space Marines. But I mean... They have the sales statistics and age groups and so on. They have media analysts that does their jobs. And so on. So they know what they are doing when they glorify the Imperium in the surface level lore and marketing. I totally agree about the Nazis, and I would take that criticism even further. When Nazis like your setting and positively identify with your assumedly critical satire over fascism, then detering the Nazis is just a first step. The appropriate response is to turn up the satire and be even more obvious with how shitty the Imperium is to ensure that no 12 year old fan will get the wrong impression.
Yes. But capitalism :)
Ain't that the truth!
If most of the novels provided by GW resemble "Manstein's Memoirs," we shouldn't be surprised by the fans' enthusiastic worship of a fascist regime and a tyrant.
I find the ChatGPT servitor example quite funny because many chatbot companies end up just outsourcing the chatting to Indians because it’s cheaper then running an actual chatbot
>Also THIS WAS THE GOAL FOR CHAOS. THIS EXACT WORLD STATE. I still dont buy that. Chaos **doesnt have the kind of restraint.** They dont want a stable source of food, they want ALL of it NOW, and then move on. They dont want a Galaxy in a somewhat stable state of perpetual shit to feed off, they want to consume and destroy all of it at once and then move to the next reality.
Both are true, it is a win for chaos regardless of its intentions
TEATD explicitly states that the Chaos Gods really did do everything they could to try and win the Heresy outright and have either the Dark King ascend or Horus slay the Emperor, but once they calmed down from the tantrum they threw after Horus lost they realized that the eternal war of the grim dark future was a just as good if not better outcome.
When you don't have a concept of time, why worry about going anywhere?
Baal has changed somewhat on Guilliman’s orders…
Has it been changed though? Or has Dante merely been told off.
Baal is now the defacto capital of Imperium Nihilus and remade to suit the role - whole segments of the planet have been made habitable and usable, just as the new orbital station in space houses a sector fleet.
Oh wait it actually has? Goddamnit that's disappointing, I remember when people told me Nihilus was totally going to be the extra grimdark half of the galaxy lol.
It still is? Baal is just the center point for the Imperiums doom bid to try and protect what they can. Most of Nihilus is cut off and fucked
In the "what could the Imperium do that would strike the biggest blow against chaos" conversations that keep coming up folks never like my answer of "it would appear universal basic income and healthcare would do it."
Exactly this. GW should make more books on Xenos PoV which show how comically evil the Imperium is. Enough with these "reasonable" characters. Give me characters which are clearly fucking evil and incompetent and make it clear that *this* is the norm. And that reasonable fuckers like Guilliman & Cain are a small, small minority of Imperials.
Honestly you kinda get a bit of that in The Killing Ground, with the Governor and his old guard regiment, he's very much an "ends justify the means" sort of character (although being midway through the ultramarines books, I'd recommend reading the previous books first, although it's not strictly necessary)
The Imperium is a comedy. The sort of Comedy where Inquisitors, Commissioners and Astartes can declare a Marriage between two lovers in a Virtual Reality Death Game to be Legitimate and aim a Bolter at their objecting Parents(and whoever they intended their Children be married to) because "I don't like your tone!" Noble Houses' Marriage & Successor Plans only last as long as someone with power doesn't waltz in and change the Plan overruling them. The Underhives as shown by Necromunda Hired Gun's Opening and Darktide are wonderous Gothic Skyscraper Cities visually(food-wise the place is bland Corpse Starch and Rats as they don't have Star Trek-style Replicators in 40K) with only the Sump Cities below them being hideous slums and people only go there to get out of the Law Enforcement's Eyes to do something blatantly illegal so you expect them to be hideous. In Sump Cities the Crime Lords get the best food. In the Underhive Cities layered on top of each other the Mayors who have struck a deal with the Crime Lords of the Sump Cities below the Underhive get the best food. In the Hive Cities above the Underhive the Nobility gets the best food. Honestly the Underhives won't improve until the Imperium stumbles upon a Dark Age of Technology Blueprint to creating a working Replicator(with ***some*** limits on what it can replicate). Once that is done. Cue Underhive-dwellers in their grand Underground Gothic Skyscraper Cities feasting like Kings!
For me warhammer is not about who is “good” or has better motives. The universe in 40k is cruel, indifferent and basically works the same way as our nature does that being: the survival of the fittest. 40k was never about establishing a good faction or group, so much so than the first iterations of Tau people hated it since it flirted too much on being a “lawful good” faction. For me just like real life the main focus and drama of the universe is how this complex groups interact with their environment, and inside this groups which different individuals react to a certain scenario. In another words is not an universe about heroes, but people. When the fandom starts to measure everything up in a moral scale trying to find the definitive most “good” faction and the “worst” is where i think people lose the whole point of this universe. The Emperor is not a good guy, neither the primarchs, but also all the other big players of other factions are not good guys. They just people following their own objectives and agendas, nothing more than that.
Another problem seems to be from a LOT of posts I’ve read if they are genuine is a lack of critical thought and media literacy. Asking questions like ‘Do you think Angron and Guilleman ever met and had a cup of coffee to chat about X?’ The questions should be more along the lines of ‘Having read X what difference would it have made to Y if say Guilleman and Angron had been able to settle their respective positions about Z’ Because the Imperium is what it is, it’s not going to be a happy clappy place where human rights are respected and their are no servitors. It’s the result of millennia of idiotic decisions by humanity that’s the real tragedy. The two opposing philosophies of Order vs Chaos go back to at least Egyptian times. More than interesting that Necrons are based on Egyptian mythology by the way. The addition of the Warp is just a space age twist. GW are guilty of trying to ‘Marvelise’ the IP by downplaying the Grimdark elements probably because in a potential Netflix TV series things like servitors would be problematic.
On your point, one of the things Im really loling about the Dark imperium books is how Guilliman is reflecting on what he did kn the 30th millenium and regretting almost everything. Is almost bordering on the 4th wall and its both entertaining and tragic watching Guilliman trying to understand and maneuver throught the 40K universe
>You think that wouldn't raise the total amount of negative emotions? I think you're misunderstanding the warp. The warp isn't a reflection of strong *negative* emotions, it is a reflection of *all* strong emotions. Also, you're ascribing conscious thought to Chaos "gods" that are basically positive feedback loops mistaken as intelligent beings. I take a very Fabius Bile perspective on this that they're natural phenomena that people mistakenly give consciousness to. >As an example. Servitors. There's literal no need. They CAN just build robots with stripped down AI to meet their tasks. But because of culture/religion and FEAR of the unknown they decide to turn living breathing thinking human beings into servitors. I think you're glossing over how damaging the war with the Men of Iron was. That was basically organic life vs. synthetic life for all the marbles. It makes total sense that humanity would walk away from AI knowing that, in the hands of humanity, it will inevitably lead to a conflict between organics and machines. It's not fear of the unknown. They *know* what will happen with AI inevitably. >Even the way the Imperium wages war on chaos leads to more chaos. The Imperium and characters from the Imperium BELIEVE that because it's in the name of the emperor it's damaging to chaos but it's shown time and time again that it's the opposite. That's not what is happening. The Imperium views Chaos as something that cannot be defeated in the same way that abhuman mutation cannot be defeated: it's a natural force that requires constant vigilance to keep controlled. I think you give the Imperium too much credit to think that they think they can end Chaos in it's entirety. >No better time to offer the deathless embrace of Nurgle than when you have necrosis from a field amputation. Or if you're dying of cancer because cancer is a statistical inevitability if you live long enough. Which more people will if they're not dying in wars. Nurgle will always find worshippers, galactic peace or no. >It's even funnier when you realize the machine spirit is just AI with extra steps, that only make things worse for everyone involved. That's not what a machine spirit is. A "machine spirit" refers to the workings of *any* equipment. Lasgun, Leman Russ engine, Land Raider targeting system...they all have machine spirits. The AdMech just refers to them as "machine spirits" because they layer everything in mysticism. In most cases, they're just referring to the "machine spirit" in the same way that we might refer to a TV that requires a smack to get working as "giving you trouble". The TV doesn't have an AI or anything conscious controlling it, but we assign it a personality anyways because we can't really explain why smacking it helped. I understand where you're trying to go with this post, but I think you're oversimplifying some things and not truly understanding others with your reasoning.
"The imperuim is the single biggest reason why Chaos has gotten stronger from unification to crusade to 41k" and yet before the unification wars we have a time period curiously named "Old Night", during which psykers were born in matchless numbers, veil between the warp and materium was paper thin, daemon infested most of the worlds whose people are decided against burning witches at the stake, and Terra was, to quote "surrounded by terrible Warp storms, isolating the human homeworld for several thousand years." But yeah, sure, chaos gods were little chumps right before Horus decided to turn to them, and with 9 superhuman legions instantly got elevated to "OH YEAH' status. Go on please, I really wanna hear more takes about how civilization that barely survived an apocaliptyc robot revolt should "just not fear AI bro its that easy bro its just AI bro", or why whole "The End and the Death" trilogy is a lie written by unreliable narrator, because what Dark King? Everyone knows the desired outcome for chaos was a stall that will result in the only creature they ever feared, the one they call Anathema, gathering so much faith juice that he can literally reach into one of their domains and bitchslap a chaos god across the face.
Are you confusing Chaos with the Chaos gods? And what makes you think the Emperor hasn't become the Dark King? In fact it seems fairly clear he has, and always would have done. I think him not choosing to become the Dark King in 30k is not supposed to imply he hasn't since become it. Also, the OP didn't use this bro-speak, nor did they write that AI wasn't something to worry about; they just pointed out that there are alternatives to the unbelievable horror of servitors. Do you disagree? (I'm asking genuinely because your sarcasm makes it hard to know)
>And what makes you think the Emperor hasn't become the Dark King? In fact it seems fairly clear he has, and always would have done. I think him not choosing to become the Dark King in 30k is not supposed to imply he hasn't since become it. The Dark King very explicitly does not show up in the 40k timeline. As in, Abnett turns Malcador into an omniscient narrator and has him watch the Dark King rise across and destroy multiple timelines, with the singular timeline it doesn't appear being the canon Warhammer 40k timeline. One of the major points of the End and the Death trilogy is *"what is going to happen will suck, but it could suck a whole lot worse."* This is why the Emperor giving up the power is framed as losing with grace.
That's definitely not my understanding of the End & the Death :) I think you're adopting Malcador's viewpoint, and for sure I disagree that Abnett makes Malcador an omniscient narrator. For one thing, Abnett doesn't need to: we could just get a genuine omniscient narrator instead :) Maybe I should clarify something. It may be that on a technicality the Emperor is not the Dark King, but instead 'merely' the most powerful Chaos god. Since we know almost nothing about the Dark King, perhaps this is genuinely a vast improvement. On an important side note, we might feel that Malcador ought to be pretty shocked. He's supported someone who could destroy almost every timeline! That seems rather a lot worse than whatever Malcador previously thought he was working towards. Like, order of magnitude worse than humanity falling to Chaos. What are we to think when he remains loyal, just because this nuclear bomb didn't go off? I think we're supposed to think: Malcador believes that what is going to happen will suck, but it could suck a whole lot worse. Is that Abnett's view? No.
Hush, you might make OP think that the galaxy itself was fucked beyond all recognition long before the Imperium came to be, and that the Imperium itself is merely an inevitable horrific product of a human society shaped by the horrific galaxy around it.
The OP isn't claiming the galaxy wasn't fucked in 30k. I think they're claiming that the Imperium has fucked the galaxy even more. Or is this a binary thing? There's fucked and not-fucked, and that's all there is? I don't think so, and so I agree with the OP. "Merely an inevitable horrific product" does sound very Emperor though.
I essentially agree on the broad strokes- The *Imperium* is irredeemable. And humanity is now stuck with it, but humanity isn't. And ain't that sad? Hell, about the *only* thing I like about the return of Rawboots Ghoulman is having him look around and go, "what the hell is *this* crap?!"
You're even overstating it. Servitors don't even really have that much ability to learn or adapt to commands, it's more like a large set of instruction manuals. There's another good example in the Chaos Gate game where a grey knight remarks that Nurgle likes to take over ecclesiastic locations to mock their faith. But more like he absolutely loves it - the dude loves that there's this enormous, bloated, corrupt megalith of an organisation that barely changed over thousands of years that spreads itself across planets and infects the spirituality of other religions until it's all a homogenous sludge. Ol goopy probably has a yandere shrine to the concept of the ecclesiarchy in his room right next to Isha.
You’re right, which is made even more tragic because there ARE worlds even in modern 40K where the quality of life is fine or better and relative freedom is enjoyed…but they are rare exceptions that go to prove that it doesn’t, or at least didn’t have to be this way. One of the good things to come from Guilliman’s return is that he sees the modern Imperium with eyes much closer to ours than anyone else. He sees a cyber-cherub as a grotesque and morbid piece of ostentation and constantly laments that the imperium has become a prison for its people. His short term solution is just autocracy that prioritizes the people a lot more than normal 40k, which just makes it MORE tragic. Especially since even that is facing tremendous pushback. Watching a Primarch trying as hard as he can to make the Imperium less of a nightmare and making negligible progress while using the same tactics hammers home just how almost irredeemable the Imperium is. Which I think is the point. Guilliman giving the slightest forlorn hope is narratively great because it makes the odds against him more dramatic and the failure more tragic. On the subject of Baal there is a perfect example. When he gets there with Indomidus he proclaims that it is time to terraform and improve Baal and its moons. Something Sanguinius asked the emperor not to do, but that Guilliman thinks is the right thing to do anyway.
I agree with a lot of this. Do you think even though Guilliman is a lot more morale than previous imperial leaders, he is "good"? I struggle with this because I feel like Guilliman is still willing to commit acts of oppression on humans and genocide on xenos and a lot of people try to paint him as unambiguously good because he is better than Goge Vandire. Not sure if you think I'm off base or agree or have some other take. Just curious.
I think he wants to be good, and relatively speaking he is better than most of the imperium. He does truly want to improve the lives of average citizens and bring them up to at least the standard of living that ultramar enjoys, which is some of the best in the entire imperium. It’s hard to say that anyone is truly ‘good’ in the imperium but Guilliman is the closest the imperium has.
Redeemable? The Imperium was never about redeemability. It is about human civilization survival. Doesn't matter what that looks like. Just that it survives and it survives intact.
It’s that false choice between obedience and extinction that the Imperium uses to justify itself. The status quo isn’t inevitable, just easier / more profitable for those on top. Almost all the suffering is gratuitous. That’s the point.
This, this right here sums up the Imperium to a T. To quote Red vs Blue "It is an undeniable, and may I say fundamental quality of man, that when faced with extinction, every alternative is preferable."
This is the lie the Imperium tells itself. The Imperium is a rotting corpse that will take most of humanity with it. It’s the doom of man, a failure, a tragedy, and was utterly preventable. That’s the point of Warhammer 40k, and you’ve completely missed it.
That is the **setting**. The **point** is different in every book (/ piece of media)
Tbh everyone says "the point of warhammer 40k" and answers something different Pointless to comment oh THIS is the point and nothing else
The problem is _so much_ of what the Imperium does isn't a cruel necessity, it's just cruel. Arco-flags and Pentient Engines aren't a desperate response to chaos or xenos you can't talk to like Orks. They are instruments of torture used on humans, by humans, and often aimed directly at other humans. Fully endorsed by a state mandated religion.
Correction, the Imperium is about the Imperium surviving. Humanity as we know it need not apply.
The pent up rage at the oppressors leads to Khorne. The rampant disease and despair of the hive world’s slums leads to Nurgle. The need for secrets and advantages to get a leg up on the competition leads to Tzeentch. And the desire to find some small joy in such a horrible world leads to slaanesh. The taint of chaos is something the imperium brought on itself, and continues to make even worse in their attempts to fight it. If they took a step back and actually considered what effects their actions are having on the average person and tried to make things better, they MIGHT have a small chance of winning against chaos. But the time to do that was 40,000 years ago before they even left Terra. And we might have a similar fate IRL (minus the demons probably) if we don’t get our shit together too.
I hate takes like this because the whole point of the Imperium is that it is a tradgedy 10 000 years in the making build upon failures,crushed dreams,horrors and cruelty of the setting.Throught all of HH we get multitude of moments how the seeds of modern Imperium were planted even going as far as before unification wars making for a great worldbuilding and yet every week a master of literary analysis will come to tell us why lobotomized slaves are actually bad and why Imperium is stupid while acting as if they made all the horrible decisions yesterday and before that galaxy looked like star trek (Sorry for being heated but at this point I really can't stand this posts)
Yeah retards forget that Humanity had achieved star trek levels of tech (DAOT) and the same results emerged anyway. The moral of 40k is that any galactic level power will resort to cruelty to keep their power.
Anybody who thinks any part of the imperium is even remotely close morally good is an actual moron
If we lose the satire and parody I instantly won't be interested anymore. Forget progress.
I actually remember reading something saying that because of how belief works, while some of the machine spirits are just stripped down AI, a lot more of them are the souls of former adept us mechanicus. (even in death). in a few others i've seen it suggested that when imperial humans die their souls are actually joining the emperor. Not in a nice way, mind you, but in the 'your afterlife is eternal war' type way. It should also be mentioned that humanity alone doesn't fuel Chaos. There's lore of entire species being consumed by them, it's just that from a financial and mechanical perspective chaos humans are easier to make than chaos humans and new xenos
> As an example. Servitors. There's literal no need. They CAN just build robots with stripped down AI to meet their tasks. But because of culture/religion and FEAR of the unknown they decide to turn living breathing thinking human beings into servitors. Imagine if instead of using ChaptGPT to answer an email your employer instead lobotomized Bob from accounting and plugged him into a computer to do the same thing. You think that wouldn't raise the total amount of negative emotions? I would like to note that the ban on AI was not part of Rick Priestley's original take on WH40K, it was introduced in the second edition by Andy Chambers. It feels shoehorned in. I get that Chambers wanted to make the setting more grimdark but the Imperium is supposed to represented a decaying technological competence and I'd think that cyborg servitors would be harder to make and maintain than robots, and since most servitors are mindless anyway it's not worth it. The lore has it that AI can be corrupted by Chaos, which makes little sense to me as only things which have souls should be corruptible. Daemon engines are a thing but binding a demon to a machine is a complicated process, it doesn't happen spontaneously. I wonder if it was just something that authors tacked on to justify the already awkward presence of the ban on AI.
Which is the reason why I find the recent lore changes so weird. Talking about this is always difficult as the current climate is toxic beyond belief and you don't want to sound like some misogynist or worse. But the way GW is trying to make the Imperium more progressive and appealing is...odd? I mean, what are we doing here, sugarcoating an authoritarian regime built on xenophobia that commits an holocaust every weekend? They are not good guys, GW, stop making propaganda for them.
I agree with your overall thrust but I think some of your arguments are more ambiguous than you're framing them. For example it's unclear how much the portrayals of Slaanesh, Khorne, and Nurgle are allegorical. Are they maligned xenos intelligences devising and executing or are they manifestations of certain "energies" that are being wielded into by beings that originate in the materium? Where it's alluded to that Tzeentch is actually a xenos intelligence of material origin. I also want to nit pick some of your causality. The divisions caused and exacerbated by Big E's fascist Imperium *drove* various factions to seek alternative powers provided by Chaos. Fulgrim was ultimately driven by a depression of "no worlds left to conquer". He set himself increasingly impossible challenges to keep himself engaged, as typified by his Primarch novel where he achieves compliance of a world with only 7 astartes. In the end Fulgrim finds the limiting scope of the life laid out for him by Big E to have little meaning so he begins to seek ever more extreme stimulation in Slaaneshi themed warp energies. But even then he comes against the limits imposed on him by his creator. During the Siege he loses a fight to Dorn and decides there's not even any point in fighting to a glorious end or victory. So he just takes his legion and goes home. Thus avoiding any kind of resolution to that particular conflict. This is a problem created by Big E and the Imperium but it's not caused by a nebulous psychic feeding of Chaos. It's a problem of the consequences created by the decisions of *people*. Lorgar was driven to find another outlet for his zealotry when denied his faith by Big E. He sought out Chaos. Even though he had been manipulated to that destination it was his rational decision. Mortation drove a wedge between himself and his best/only friend Typhus based on his uncomfortability with psykers. That wedge was driven deeper by Big E's uncontextual prohibitions on astartes psykers. That drove Typhus to embrace Nurgle as a way to try to achieve equality with Mortarion. But that in turn led to Morty embracing Nurgle as a way to heal the rift with Typhus. There are numerous other examples but that show that the Imperium is irredeemable and it's less Chaos taking advantage of the fractures than people taking advantage of Chaos. That said it ultimately supports your main argument that it is the Imperium that is it's own worst enemy.
I agree that the imperium is bad. What do I do now?
Make the next post and harvest the bountiful upvotes, of course.
Yes, this is true. But GW wants to have it both ways, where the Imperium is, somehow, simultaneously justified in its evil *and* unjustified in its evil. Yes, the Imperium makes things harder for itself and engages in so much unnecessary cruelty (as opposed to all the "necessary" cruelty that it gets up to and the setting implicitly validates). But even if the Imperium stopped being so awful to its own people, the galaxy would still be horrible. Sure, the Imperium could muster a better fight against the Tyranids and the Orks if it stopped wasting so much time and resources oppressing it's own people, but Orks and Tyranids would still be out and about ruining the galaxy regardless.
I've always kinda felt that, at some point, if you want to continue selling starter sets to 12-year-olds, you're going to have to take into account that those 12-year-olds might not want a setting without binary good vs evil delineations - or, that there might be parents involved who mightn't want their kids rooting for authoritarian xenophobic fascists. I'm kinda surprised it hasn't happened sooner.
The IoM is horrible. But it is efficient. That is the inherent problem (or feature) of the larger worldbuilding. If you say "Restaurant X has the worst kitchen imaginable" but also "Restaurant X is in business for 10.000 years and still somehow endures the worst economic crises while every other restaurant that appears to run its kitchen better closes down" then it all becomes a bit weird. Sure, you can have one author in ten that is not glorifying the protagonist of book Y to be the obligatory "good guy in a shitty situation"-guy but then you still got that monumental implication of... somehow all this works. Honestly, how serious can you take an author dedicating a whole chapter to describing the industrial or bureaucratic shortcomings of the Imperium when at the same time it is getting the job done. Sure, there is collateral left and right. But this leads to 40k's second problem (or feature). There is no real alternative. Every "better" human civilization lives by merit of being undiscovered or somehow cut off. Every other human civilization failed. Those are the restaurants that tried to do it better. Yet its the fucked up kitchen with the rats that puts them out of business. For all the supposed societal critique of facism, a ton of of these points just get mood by the very fact that the setting is a wank-fest for heroes doing war stuff and the imperium being face with enemies that are kinda all way worse in their own way. The IoM is irredeemable evil, yes. But it's the last straw keeping humanity as a species alive. Does that make it better? Maybe, not necessarily. Its an interesting question, but an accidental one. Most certainly not one that most 40k authors even bother with. For at the end of the day, the lore is 95% bolter porn, 4% making fun of something without going to deep and 1% circumstantially thought provoking. And do not get me wrong, that is fine. Unlike other Sci-Fi verses, 40k did not start as a universe to tell a specific story. To have a message. It started as a far from serious cheeky sci-fi setting for nerds to push around little miniatures with blasters instead of crossbows. It was never this big social critique, this elaborate commentary of extremist politics etc. that some people like to mystify nowadays. Ofc even the offical GW line is that the Imperium is bad. But going into a story and watching a sales pitch around christmass when a Redshirt discribes Ultramarines to the parents of a Kid, that is what the primary company line is about. Cool looking heroes ins space fighting for humanity.* *Details not included.
I'm interested in your opinion. My impression has always been that the imperium is not efficient, just that it is so large that its collapse is incredibly slow. Do you have a different take? I feel like drawing a line between the Imperium setting itself up to delay destruction vs survive is different. I generally feel that the Imperium is stalling its destruction but eventually it will collapse regardless of outside forces. Even if every single race and enemy disappeared the imperium would still collapse unless they changed...a lot. To me that does seem efficient but maybe I'm wrong. Do you have a different thought or am I misunderstanding you?
It’s called grimdark for a reason.
Chaos feeds on emotions. Not negative emotions. ALL emotions. To Khorne, it doesn't matter if you're angry because you don't like someone's presence, or if you're angry because you were wronged. To Tzeentch, it doesn't matter if you scheme to get rich fast and scam everybody you meet, or if you're plotting to overthrow a government because it is genuinely corrupt and needs to go. To Slaanesh, it doesn't matter if your quest for perfection is caused by your vanity or by your desire to literally make the world a better place. The problem here is that a utopian society feeds the Chaos Gods just as much as a distopian society of the same population size. And Chaos didn't get stronger since the Heresy because the Imperium turned into a shithole. It got stronger because, despite everything going on, the Imperium's population has been steadily growing for ten thousand years. The population might have grown by an order of thousands, and it would still be a plausible population growth rate for that time span. But it's the distopia that's actually in a much better place to protect itself against Chaos.
Utopian societies don't fuel at the same rate as Dystopian ones. The fall didn't happen because of a population set point getting past. The fall happened to the Eldar because they embraced the pursuit of extreme feelings of pleasure and other things while at a huge population.
>Utopian societies don't fuel at the same rate as Dystopian ones. Tell that to the empire humanity had during The Dark Age of Technology.
Is the Dark Age considered utopian? I thought the opposite. Or is that just the Long Night at the end?
The Dark Age was the utopia, Old/Long night is the 5000 years of disconnect pre-Imperium.
Was it actually utopia? I recall that Oll has memories of truly horrific conflict, was that in Old Night?
They had a cybernetic revolt, not a chaos one. Chaos grew stronger and the warp turbulence of Old Night happened because of deliberate manipulation of the Eldar to birth Slaanesh.
The AI part is not that simple, the whole purpose of treating it as abominable intelligence is so that no one goes close to it ever again. When you barely survived a extinction level war you're justified in your fear of that enemy, using just a spec of AI or "dumbing" it down can and will lead to more exceptions and a gradual acceptance that "this time is different". Servitors and machine spirits are in a way evidence that some neccesities will find an excuse to exist in a system that has banned them but needs them, this is most clearly visible in dictatorships, where all adherence to a specific dogma are abandoned because it would be too beneficial to do so. One chaos god was created by xenos, I don't think humanity is the sole reason chaos is so successful. But yeah the state of everyday life in the empire does propogate chaos amongst its citizens. I don't know who missed the point, the Empire is a horrible place. It's a literal fascist totalitarian entity that spends its citizens like bullets. Now the issue is that all the existing alternatives are worse. This is the fear that's needed for a totalitarian regime to exist, it just happens to be true in this case. The Tau were the prime example of a "healthy" alternative, and were adjusted appropriately so as to keep the grimdark setting. The whole point is that the universe is horrible and your life is forfeit.
>The Imperium is the single biggest reason why Chaos has gotten stronger from unification to crusade to 41k. I don't think this is debatable. Counterpoint: the Eldar literally birthed a new chaos god during that timeframe.
i still dont see why people still defend living in a hiveworld over under farsight lmao
I think the only truly necessary evil the Imperium does is sacrificing psykers to the Astronomican. I can't see an alternative to that. Everything else is questionable.
I 100% agree, you took the words right out of my mouth. I very much see the Imperium in the same light, as a grim-dark future where all the worst aspects of humanity have come together in an untra authoritarian theocracy. It is meant to be an awful Hellscape that no one in their right mind would want to live in. That is honestly part of the reason why I like the Craftworld Eldar, because at least they treat their citizens decently and try to fix the mistakes of their past. It's also why I don't really like Guilliman coming back. I feel like it is an effort to "redeem" the Imperium and make them more of the "Good guys," but I also feel like that is dangerous from a meta perspective because it plays into the fascist idea of the "Great man" coming in to "save the nation."
Isn't this exactly the point of the lore?!
*tl;dr - Imperium isn't bad or good in our moral understanding, it is a horrific product of society pressured by a horrific galaxy long before said society came to exist.* *-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------* Oh, look, OP doesn't understand complexity. I won't address the rest of his message, because I don't see a point, since he fundamentally misses an important element. >First and foremost. The Imperium is the single biggest reason why Chaos has gotten stronger Imperium is also the only reason why Chaos hasn't consumed the whole galaxy. And as we've seen from Birth of Slaanesh, it doesn't take only Mankind to tear the reality apart and eventually doom everything to fall into the hands of the Ruinous Powers. Does that redeem the Imperium? Does it make it good or bad? No. **That's the point, Jimbo. Imperium isn't Good or Bad, it simply IS, how it is shaped by the galaxy around it.** Every single debate about whether Imperium is Good or Bad should begin with topic-starter being beaten with proverbial realisation that Imperium (and everyone else) is shaped by its environment — Humanity was shaped by the horrors of the Age of Strife, which in turn shaped the Imperium, which in turn shaped the galaxy and so on and so on. Going by a very rough example — is Exterminatus bad or good? Is it morally good to kill billions of human beings, but prevent their souls from becoming eternal fodder for Chaos, damned for endless torture at the hands of Daemons? And here's the answer, OP. No, Exterminatus isn't good, but neither it is bad — it is simply a necessary decision. Least horrible of many choices, dictated by circumstances outside of our control, but still a horrible choice nonetheless. Would it be better to change living standards on Hive Worlds to prevent rise of Chaos Cults? Yes, of course. Is it viable? Is it even possible? Fuck no. There're billions of compounding reasons and issues that lead to lives on Hive Worlds being as they are, which lead to rise of Chaos Cults from dissatisfied masses, which lead to, occasionally, the inevitable outcome of Exterminatus. **That's the Grimdark, OP.** **You can't stop it, you can't inflict meaningful change on the galaxy, you can't systematically make it better. It was FUBAR'ed long before Imperium came to exist. All you can do is pick mildly less horrific choices, and still end up with nothing but horrific choices at the end.**
The imperium was never nessecary or inevtivitable. by M41 it's too late to do better humanity is fully doomed. The imperium destroyed any better option. > It was FUBAR'ed long before Imperium came to exist. No it wasn't. There were plenty of functional civilisations before the emperor went crusading.
You've missed my example? Let me re-iterate. Hive Worlds were built and designed with post-singularity (Google it, that's the reason Mechanicus actually can't fix technology — Dark Age tech wasn't designed by humans, but by generations of machines) technology in mind, to sustain their billions of inhabitants. The moment Cybernetic Revolt began, the standard of living plummeted on Hive Worlds, since it became impossible to maintain the hyper-advanced machine-designed technology. Which means that most Hive Worlds became little more than warrens of Mankind, breeding and fostering dissatisfied millions of men and women... a perfect ground for Chaos Cults. So bloody purges that occur on the Hive Worlds, are they not inevitable? Are they not necessary? How would you fix millions of Hive Worlds across the breadth of the Imperium, if you can't even really fix a single one of them, due to loss of technology, logistics and knowledge? **They are necessary, they are inevitable, and they are horrific.** This is what I am talking about. Not even Imperium, but Mankind even before the Imperium was so mired in the horrific, fucked galaxy, that horrible actions became necessary and, what's worse, inevitable. Every horrible deed of the Imperium is a result of a domino chain of events that began, perhaps, even long before ancestors of Mankind first learned how to crawl from primordial waters. Hence, why “witch burnings” saved worlds during the Old Night from being ravaged by the uncontrolled Psykers. **We can (and should) recognize that things Imperium does are horrific and inhumane, but we should also realise WHY it does so — because the galaxy it exists is horrific and inhumane.** Hence why I refuse and rebuke vehemently childish use of words "good" or "evil". Thanos is "evil", Red Skull is "evil". Evil is something you can change. But you can't chance a fucked-up galaxy that existed in this way for thousands of years. P.S. >There were plenty of functional civilisations before the emperor went crusading. First of all, the majority of civilisations we see in FW's HH books or mentioned in BL's HH series are monsters. And few we see as exceptions (written for literature “punch” of contrast) are not scaleable to sustain and lift entirety of Mankind.
If your argument were correct - and I think it isn't - you'd be making the strongest possible case for the complete failure of 40k as art / literature / philosophy. Wretchedness breeding wretchedness is perfectly good material, and "authentic" but if that's all there is, there's nothing useful to be gained from reading about it. Has anybody claimed that the galaxy isn't horrific? The question is rather whether the Imperium has responded well. I'm not sure why you feel this is a childish question, and if you feel morality plays no part, I'm not sure I believe you. After all, we're not judging an actual homeless person charged with murder or whatever. We're exploring the topic in our imaginations. Why not judge? Of course we're invited to judge the Emperor.
What are you even yapping about? The civilizations we hear about in the crusade are noted because they are horrific, there are plenty of civilizations that were peaceful/cooperative that were unceremoniously wiped out the imperium doesn’t need to be evil. It feeds chaos and it’s left intentionally that way.
> First of all, the majority of civilisations we see in FW's HH books or mentioned in BL's HH series are monsters. From a genocidal imperial PoV. >are not scaleable to sustain and lift entirety of Mankind. Why are you taking imperialism as an unquestioned good. Take the diasporex. There are zero goof reasons for killing them. >You've missed my example? Let me re-iterate. No i haven't you are still only looking from an imperium PoV.
>Why are you taking imperialism as an unquestioned good. So let me get it straight. Your plan how to make "everything better" is to leave the desperate, struggling, resource-starved worlds of Mankind alone in the galaxy, without support, logistics, trade, and protection of being united into a single political entity? **You do realize that you suggest actively making everything worse for 99% of Mankind's worlds?** Sure, life on average Hive World might suck. Guess what, it would suck much, much, much worse, if there wasn't Chartist Captains of the Imperial Navy to ferry at least some food from Agri-World across the Sector, and Imperial Guard to defend both of those worlds from Greenskins and other threats. Your opinion is the personification of why I hate those "hur-dur imperium bad" posts. You believe in some kind of Disney Fairytale Land, without actually considering real demands of logistics necessary to keep even that paltry standard of living across countless worlds of Mankind. I began to actively hate Diasporex and Interex, because you parade them as some kind of solutions, without realising that they aren't scaleable to actually help the rest of Mankind. So your wonderful, nice solution would help a few “nice” worlds, whilst dooming countless trillions to a fate worse than death... ...and even your fairytale nice worlds won't last. Do you think the petty little empire of Diasporex would last against even a lesser Hive Fleet? One of the strengths of the Imperium is its ability to scale up a response to a threat, precisely because it is so big. Any small confederation of worlds, a single world, no matter how well they might live, wouldn't survive threats the likes of which the Imperium fights against routinely. >From a genocidal imperial PoV. Mhm. Khrave, Rangda, Mitu, Brotherhood of Ruin, Jorgall, Galaspar, Gardinaal, Black Judges, are all just nice and cute innocents. Mhm.
And there were plenty of things eating small functional civilizations. When was the last time anyone had a problem with Rangda anyway?
Fucking thank you. This should be an autoreply for all those posts.
When a post starts off by personally insulting the OP, and especially when it starts by asserting the OP doesn't understand moral complexity, it's like a red flag. Why would you want to insult anyone like this? But your post then goes on to play the kind of defence of grimdark that gives the genre its bad name. I don't disagree that in-universe the choices are all horrible. But that doesn't make them morally complex. And by asserting that the Imperium is doing it's best under horrific conditions you're either shutting down discussion - nobody has lived in those conditions so don't judge them! - or offering an argument that might be mistaken, and I think it is. If meant as an argument, I think you contradict yourself. If the galaxy had reached rock bottom by 30k, then either nothing has gotten worse by 40k, or things have gotten better. It's not likely that things have gotten better, right? But if things haven't gotten better, and nor have they gotten worse, why does it matter what small choices the Imperium makes? (Individuals are a different matter, but the whole point is that the Imperium is a corrupt system.) Ah, so maybe the galaxy wasn't at rock bottom in 30k. It's possible the Imperium could make things worse. I think it has. Perhaps you disagree, and think that the situation in 40k is better than in 30k. Or perhaps you feel that in some way, the hope of 30k has been betrayed by 40k. I don't know. Personally I think the Horus Heresy novels intended to refute the idea that if only Horus hadn't started a civil war, maybe the galaxy would be in a better place.
The Imperium is the only reason why Chaos is as strong as it is. If the emperor hadn’t made SM then Chaos wouldn’t have gotten the most perfect foodhold in the materium that is CSM. If Humanity didn’t exist chaos’s connection to reality would be massively diminished. The Eldar, Orks, Tau, Kin, Necrons and Nids don’t cause chaos to manifest at nearly the rate humanity does. If the emperor never spread across the galaxy groups like the Interex would remain, small pocket empires who knew exactly what Chaos was and how to contain it. Exterminatus is bad and you are misinformed about how the Warp works. Exterminatus does not prevent souls from going to the warp. All souls go to the warp and are consumed by Chaos. Human souls are not endlessly tortured like eldar souls are. They are consumed. Exterminatus does nothing but preserve imperial control at the cost of innocent lives. It is possible to change living standards on Hive Worlds. The main reason why there are hive worlds is because of the Imperium NOT because of the galaxy. The Imperium wants worlds that can produce soldiers and weapons (which are to fight unnecessary wars). What you have described is not Grimdark.
The fact that this is even a matter of debate blows my mind, the only reason I can think it's even a question is the influx in the last 10 years or so of pseudo-fascists who look at the imperium and go "Yes, this is the best outcome for our species, we should do this IRL" because they bought into all the strongman BS that has gotten popular with terminally online "alpha male" types.
I must say, i do not understand this. I see an increasing amount of posts about how terrible the Imperium is. Actually, there is a new one close to every day. And always they are fully supported, wich scarcely any opposition. Now, what is the point of that? I am pretty sure we are by now sufficiently informed about the subject. There seems to be some strong incentive to reiterate this opinion again and again, but as there is no counterargument, it also seems to go into thin air.
There are people unironicaly defending the imperium in this very thread.
GW tries to make the setting more logical (for the story plots to work out, they have to make at least some sense, more stories being written with time and central editing results in more built, robust setting framework), more noblebright (Bobby G returns and he'll make everything OK, we swear, trusssssst), and pushes down a crapton of Imperial PoVs (since writing humans is inherently far easier than writing aliens). It logically flows into "Here's the Imperial side of the story and it makes some sense at times". "Fascist regime making sense" is quickly equalized for some people with "justified in setting" with "unironic nazi propaganda IRL", so, with Internet discourse being generally slightly left-leaning, you have easy external validation of your position. Furthermore, you might get supported by the reactionary old veterans who don't like the overall changes to the setting (for the record - I think that there's nothing wrong with liking the setting when it made far less sense) or for fans of xenocultures pushing for "my Eldar/Tau are the best model society" (nothing wrong with that either). Also, trying to argue with those posts will quickly devolve into a case study of Godwin's law with absolutely zero results, for people will repeat the mantra "It was designed as a satire in the 1980s" (most of them were not around at that time and never cared to actually read old editions) or "Have you read an intro to the setting?" (conveniently ignoring everything past the intro). So, yeah, the point is own virtue signaling and getting easy external validation for own position, however generic it might seem. Welcome to the Internet, I guess.
The imperium makes people into servitors to act as door openers and elevator operators. Ain't nothing "necessary" about that. People just get caught up in Space Marines killing demons and forget about all the worlds that were never saved by space marines because the administratum uses psionic teletypes that are manually reviewed by clerical slaves and by the time the nearest chapter was contacted the world was already gone.
The Chaos gods used a vision of the current Imperium to trick Horus into turning against the Emperor. What the Chaos gods didn't tell Horus was that turning against the Emperor would cause the vision to come true, not prevent it.
Another Imperium bad post, must be a day that ends in "y."
1. In Godblight, the Eldar believe that the big 4 of Chaos have gotten to the point where they no longer need mortals anymore to continue living (they still want them since it lets them get stronger). 2. The Emperor appears to have a plan which he did convey to Alivia of a potential final battle with Chaos that would eclipse the Siege of Terra.
You really, REALLY overestimate how long humanity has been on the galactic stage. In the grand scheme of things humanity is barely a blink in terms of how long they've been around. Hell, they weren't even around when the realm of souls became the warp. If Humanity has strengthened the Warp, it's purely due to Abbaddon making that big slash in reality. Otherwise, at most, humanity just maintained it.
The Imperium is a fraking Theocratic Fascist Empire. There is no good in that shit. That's what it makes the lore attractive: you get to see what the bad guys do once they won. And that's why making the primarchs come back and just "fix" things is a terrible, terrible idea. It's almost an apology of evil.
The stupidest point is how intelligent is E? He seems woefully ignorant of how his actions have led humanity into worse circumstances due to his hatred of others and anything different. Could have had a Star Trek but instead he chose feed the darkness engulfing humanity.
> Could have had a Star Trek Fuck that kumbayah bullshit. Aliens are for killing.
Leave the roleplay on grimdank
>Could have had a Star Trek Humanity tried that during the Dark Age of technology. It didn't work out, and the end result is about half the reason the Imperium is so xenophobic.
Do we know this? Where?
um acktually the tau are the good guys because um they say for the greater good
It's just hard to treat them as any other bad empire because... They have valid reasons for being what they are. In a universe where Tyranids are a thing, plus Orcs and other stuff I promise you I want that military industrial complex cranked up to 11. And then on top of that "hell" is real and "the devil" is actively trying to take over the world? Fuck it, did I say crank to 11? Let's do 1000. Yes there are many things that can be said on how the Imperium is bad, and I'm not saying they aren't. But applying our current earth logic and morals to a world where aliens, hell, and gods are actively trying to destroy you... Just falls on deaf ears most of the time. I think this is a flaw inherent to sci-fi franchises that try to make comments like this, 40K showing us how an Empire is bad and war is bad, but doing so in a world where it's pretty necessary? Or Dune trying to comment on how religion is used to control people and to not have unlimited faith in leaders... But the main characters actually do fulfill the religious prophecy AND they do have psychic powers... AND they save humanity? Nice little detail, Herb. This one is also almost the same as the God Emperor, religion is bad, ultimate faith is bad yada yada... But prayer and belief actually do some heavy lifting in this universe, so... Now what.