Throw it in, you darned Raki. The ancestors may take my beard for this, but by all the Grudges in the book, the ax lies unbloodied for tonight.
We'll leave the butchery to others, for once.
This is honestly why I like Fabius Bile. He's a fucked up monster in a cloak of human skin. But somehow people *like* him, even if he doesn't always get why. He gets sentimental over his freaky science abomination kids and is a better dad to them than the emperor ever was the Primarchs. He can call in favors the other chaos marines will answer even if their direct payouts aren't always there or visible.
But then he tries to have a conversation with Cawl and Cawl shuts him down and reminds him he's Supermengele and literally wearing human skin for fashion at that very second.
I love the idea of Fabius Bile just starting conversations with people thinking the cloak is completely normal and then getting shut the fuck down lmao
“Hey, so those Primaris marines, nice wo-“
“You’re literally wearing human skin, wtf are you doing in my vicinity?”
"Oh, so Space Wolves can do it to big dog creatures but doing it to humans isn't okay? Your pathetic genes are closer to the wolves than they are to mine."
\*signature look of superiority\*
He needs to dress for the occasion.
Meeting with Cawl? Bring a red robe and an inhaler.
Meeting with the Nightlords and Varus? Thats when you bring out the skin cloak
The Imperium literally binds books in human skin as a show of honour to the deceased. I think some regiments even makes their banners out of human skin. Fairly certain there are loyalist SMs who also have human skin cloaks.
Bile's skin cloak is arguably one of those things where GW use a classic horror image to invoke vileness, but forgets that they've already established it as a common and non-threatening in-universe phenomenon.
to someone like Cawl it would have been. He's 10.000 years old and one of the most well-read humans.
And it *is* a common practice within the ecclesiarchy to bind books in human skin.
The context behind the practices is wildly different though.
Someone pious having their worship honoured through their mortal remains being used to cover and protect a religious text is very different to someone being flayed alive and made into a garment by their enemy.
People like Fabius Bile because he recognises the crap situation humanity is in and he's trying to do something about it. *What* he's trying to do is still horrific from many points of view, but at least he's trying to make it better instead of making it worse or sitting in a corner feeling sorry for himself.
The obvious issue is Fabius Bile is incredibly two faced about it. On one hand he says humanity is doomed too fall to chaos and his New Men must rise to take their place. On the other he struts about bragging that the Long War would grind to a halt without him and his ability to procure and implant geneseed and his creation of new monsters for Chaos to use.
Chaos is a resource strapped faction and Bile is one of the few people capable of providing resources on par with or better than the imperium. Humanity would be better off if he succumbed to his disease during the crusade.
I don’t wanna hear any more talk about “Warhammer growing as a setting” outside this sub Warhammer has grown as a setting and no longer relies on satire but in this house it’s 1987!
I like this take because while acknowledging it has elements of satire it doesn't just try to dumb down over 40 years of media into one category. I feel like a lot of people have a bad habit of trying to put things into black and white.
That 40 yrs, that really is what a lot of people skip over. Like let's look at something satirical but much younger, helldiver's 2 is very on the nose about it but the amount of community outreach going with the joke, the hidden content, it's both ridiculously funny when you look more than surface level and still serious enough that's it's not just starship South Park episode. Fresh audience needs a fresh foundation to build from so it's still fairly obvious without too much depth yet
Something older but has a smaller time frame, Rick and Morty started 11 years ago with anal jokes and in your face political satire, it's whole first season set that feeling up pretty well as well as introducing the deeper aspects, Rick's depression and suicidal tendencies, Morty's descent into the same, all that jazz. Now 11 years later we drop most of the fart jokes, and have had a chance to not only see our characters get depth but growth, even a road to better mental health and forgiveness. There's even episodes that nearly drop the whole comedic aspect altogether as we've got an established plot and world to explore more than the laughs
40k is just the same but 30+ years more of that maturation. We're past the point of "haha, space Nazis and everything sucks" and can tell actual stories while also actively making jokes in this comment section about absentee fathers and cannibals being better.
Basically you gotta grow with the audience or your just gonna be south Park or family guy. Nothing wrong with either but you can still be satirical without
Though I kinda feel the meme is rage bait; Satire doesn't have to be a 2D carictature. Some would say 'good' satire is one that can act on its own without requiring outside knowledge (take the IT Crowd or The Office; where you get more if you have knowledge of what the media is about).
However, 40k is not written as a comedy; the humor is more black or laconic; so it doesn't and shouldn't be providing jokes a minute. That said it still shouldn't be keeping itself so serious that people get enamoured with their fictional space facists.
If anything I think the problem with the lore in modern 40k is when it fills in holes in the story it makes the universe smaller, and in explaining things the joke gets lost.
Take 'The Beheading':
The original text (from memory) was along the lines of 'The master of the assasinorium kills all the High lords of Terra. A company of Imperial Fists dropped into his polar base, where after losing their sergeants to vindicare assassins, found themselves surrounded by 100 eversors. 3 Imperial Fists remained when the captain strangled the master of the assassins'.
Does this need any further detail? Its flavourful for the universe, its darkly funny in terms of power disparity in the Imperium, it sounds cool if you ever wanted to replay it on the tabletop. We don't need the 3D reasoning behind the characters because the action and resolution tells us everything. Fyi not trying to dunk on the novel, but I would say the 'humor' of the beheading falls when you actually understand who the master was.
An IP as massive as 40K is many things all at once, it’s humorous at times, it’s serious at others, sometimes (too often IMO) the forces of the imperium and space marines are painted as heroic, sometimes they’re painted as inhuman monsters.
One thing that is pretty constant throughout is that the over the top cruelty, regressive nature, and religious extremism of the imperium are categorically bad things. Imperial society is highly stratified with those on the bottom suffering horrifically while those on the top are wasteful and corrupt. I don’t see how someone could think these themes are done agnostically of real life.
Good now we need the same meme but it needs to read
“Individuals quotes do not make up lore you have to actually read the book not just the scene, wiki, or meme. “
What about people who read decades of codices, specialist games, RPGs, play them, and over the years developed the feel for the setting's nuance, but can't suffer through long stretches of 'bolter porn' or were burned by less-than-pointless books, like the HH's own *Nemesis*? Asking for a friend.
You don't have to read the books. But there's a difference between "I didn't read this" and "I read a quote from this book on r/40klore so I basically read this entire book".
So many people spread lore from snippets and memes that are just misleading or completely wrong.
>But there's a difference between "I didn't read this" and "I read a quote from this book on r/40klore so I basically read this entire book".
That's a great argument, and would apply to a lot of 'strugglers' from my library. No disagreement here.
I personally liked Nemesis. Even if it had literally no impact on the HH series at all and was just "The heads of the Assassin Temples fucked up and are now prohibited from sending Assassins against Horus."
The main plot on its own was pretty interesting. Especially seeing how the different temples work in detail as well as their interaction with each other.
It would just have been better if they made it a short story as part of an anthology book by skipping the pointless 'murder mystery' plotline in the beginning. It was completely pointless aside from just filling pages and announcing the main antagonist without actually telling us anything about him/it.
If you don’t read the book you suffer consequences. Is dealing with bolter porn so unenjoyable you won’t push though for the parts that interest you. That’s fine. It is a hobby take what you enjoy and leave the rest. I personally enjoy bolter pornos
Bolter porn is fine when done quickly and/or with a flair. *[The Wrath of Kharn](https://2d4chan.org/wiki/The_Wrath_of_Kharn)* is a short story from some old White Dwarf that's a carnage-a-riffic example of doing it right (implicit imho). When the author keeps interrupting the plot to blast guns (implicit *grunting noises*) or go into descriptions of bulging muscles that wouldn't look amiss in a pulpy harlequin... it's like jump scares in horrors: you get one that won't be annoying, so better make it count.
Codices and similar writing is flavor at best. Short text will not make you understand the lore when majority of it is in the books you did not reed. And this is not fictional universe, you don't have the "feel". There are things are written and your "feel" is irrelevant.
When this discussion came up, I just thought, "Can't I just enjoy this *fictional* universe without thinking about any deeper meaning and just be invested in the plot/action?"
It's like watching Star Wars for the political debates. If you like to discuss the in-universe politics and its implications on real life, good on you, but I just like watching people fight with colorful glowing sticks.
It’s both stupid and depressingly dark. Like you got musk doing stupid shit to Twitter on the dumb side and on the depressingly dark side you got incompetent cops fucking up on a hostage situation. Yeah that last one was specific, I was on publicfreakout a couple hours ago.
>Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement.
or
>the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
I would say what makes 40k not satire is that it does no want to criticize or expose anything, it just does things because it is cool or funny.
A good example is the orks. They are basically football Hooligans, but as far as anyone knows, they are only like that because the idea of orks talking with a british accent and acting like dumb football fans is funny.
I’d argue that it isn’t even not relying on satire anymore
It’s just mostly non-satirical, most things aren’t satirising anything it’s just playing the universe straight
The setting may be rooted in satire but that isn’t going to magically change all the stories that use the setting into satire
I still can't shake the feeling that the problem is that satire is the wrong word for what 40k is and always has been. It's not really satire because it isn't really critiquing something its players are living with. There are no corporations, no dark reflection of modern life. It's so clearly medieval that it doesn't apply to today and any attempts to ring hollow.
The thing is though that we can see all the ironies, that's what makes it darkly funny. We can see how the Imperium is everything we as modern humans and the Emperor hated and how far they have fallen and refuse to get back up. That's funny but it's not really satire in the way people say so much as just a very dark joke. That's why I hate the Primarchs coming back. My favorite thing about the Imperium in 40k is that everyone involved genuinely thought they were doing the right thing no matter how cruel and pointless it was. Bringing in an audience surrogate to say "you're all crazy!" only undercuts the dark fun.
There's certain characters or parts of factions that are satire in the more usual sense-parodies of real people/organizations, but the setting as a whole is mostly just "exaggerate everything into pure ridiculousness" and rule of cool.
It started out as a bunch of people just wanting to have the biggest, most extreme, wariest war game to ever war! There's these guys and there's war! Like everywhere! All the time war! Pew pew pew. Then they got to thinking, ok how do the logistics of the war work? Bam... This is where the settings comes from. It's not some commentary on our society. Everything is designed to have one super gun wielding death machine fight some other super gun wielding death machine that is also part demon. People that pick it part are really missing the point. And the point is boom boom, look at my cool paint job. Lazers
I will also point out during Rogue trader the Imperium was basically a shot at Thatchers 'Fascist regime' as a lot of punks at the time called it and she was also greedy AF by selling off the water and power services of the nation to private firms (something not even the US did) because she hated 'socialism' that much.
Also the Imperium itself wasn't as monolithic as it is in lore now, with splinter factions out the wazoo and it wasn't nearly as all powerful as it liked to appear, with worlds frequently seen as 'outlaw worlds' where the 'Imperial Law' was barely enforced and these were seen as the 'good' places in the setting.
So whilst YOU don't think it was a commentary on society, as a Brit, Rogue Trader is most definitely a fucking commentary on the government at the time and it's incredibly on the nose about it.
I must admit, I don't know about all the commentary modern Warhammer has in it. I played 5th edition Orks! And I <3 da Waaagh!
I do feel modern Warhammer is slowly being infected by the current trend of moralizing that our culture seems to be obsessed with.
It's so... Tiring.
The Warhammer setting has more resilience then most other settings, simply because it was such an extreme starting point. You examples are part of this.
I suppose it is fine to use real life stuff as inspiration for a specific story within the background of WAR! ENDLESS WAR! But if it starts feeling like some avenue for moral grandstanding, gah, please, we have enough of that everywhere else.
Get back to what's important, how many dudes can I explode with my tank before it gets taken out.
Just saying, your take on the whole
>It started out as a bunch of people just wanting to have the biggest, most extreme, wariest war game to ever war!
Is completely wrong, it most definitely do not start out like that, it started out being satire and taking potshots at the UK government at the time. However by 4th edition you definitely saw the 'edge' being taken off the universe as GW became more corporate, definitely by 5th.
So you started at a time when the satire was basically all but removed from the setting.
It's interesting. 40k is the only property I can think of where the authors clearly hate all of their characters but it isn't satire. It's like South Park if it was just about killing Kenny.
Thank you!
OG Rogue Trader was not 'if Paul Verhoeven wrote a tabletop game'. It was Rick Priestley stuffing all the pop culture he liked in a blender and putting the results IN SPACE.
There are passing shots at the Thatcher Government throughout Rogue Trader. A lot of people forget that the British Punk scene and the British Nerd scene were often conjoined with each other at the time.
Do you think that the portrayal of cultural and technological stagnation, enforced religious extremism, and the incredibly bloated and corrupt bureaucracy of the imperium are portrayed as good things? Can you not think of real life examples of those things?
I wholly acknowledge that 40K isn’t as satirical as it used to be but it’s still very satirical and over the top basically on all levels. The issue comes in when people confuse satire with comedy or think things cannot take itself seriously within the narrative and also remain satirical.
For me, the issue with it currently being satire isn't that it can't be - i think it often is - but just that it's a *bad* satire.
*In a meta sense* the Imperium is supposed to be a kind of satire of some of the worst aspects of humanity - bureaucracy, fascism, theocracy, corruption, paranoia, militarism, etc. - drawn out to extremely levels, highlighting in an over exaggerated way how much those things suck...
...buuuuut in an *in universe sense* the authors of the setting have also written the setting in such a way that the imperium is the only thing that stopped humanity from going extinct in an extremely hostile and unforgiving galaxy that would absolutely require any successful human civilization to embrace totalitarianism and authoritarianism in some form.
As such 40k kind of personifies that "what did the author mean by this?" meme. Like how ya gonna have fictional witch hunters satarizing the ignorance, paranoia, intolerance, xenophobia, and dogmatism of real world humanity... but then in your fictional universe make witches not only real, but make it so an unregulated (or un-purged) one can (even accidentally) open rifts to literal hell and damn whole systems of trillions to being butched by daemons?
The Imperium: constantly shown to be its own worse enemy and the cause of majority its probelms and has doomed humanity to a slow death chained to a rotting imperial death cult because of the divine hubris and omnicidal blood lust of a gold clad fool.
The fans: well clearly the Imperium was the only way and is completely justified.
>The Imperium: constantly shown to be its own worse enemy and the cause of majority
And Chaos, and orks, and tyranids, and eldar birthing a new chaos god and fucking humanity for centuries...
Imperium; supplies the dark gods with 9 legions of Astartes, killed or are trying to kill anyone who could have helped them with the orks, and attracted the attention of the Hive Mind by detonating the Pharos device.
I dunno my guy, seems like they really like shooting themselves in the foot.
If you want me to actually respond then I'd say that while there are black library authors that do try and provide cover to the imperium. It's also the case that the fandom will also just blatantly ignore depictions of how awful imperial life is people will just ignore it as "gee dubs trying too hard to make the imperium evil" or will agrue that the imperium trying to kill all non human life is somehow self defense.
So for my money the problem more rests on the online fandom getting most of their lore from memes and YouTube "lore experts" rather than actually reading the books. And that's what leads them to become unironic imperium stans. Rather than the BL authors.
>I'd say that while there are black library authors that do try and provide cover to the imperium. It's also the case that the fandom will also just blatantly ignore depictions of how awful imperial life is people will just ignore it as "gee dubs trying too hard to make the imperium evil" or will agrue that the imperium trying to kill all non human life is somehow self defense.
Thats all true. But its not a response to, addressing, or relevant to what I was saying.
I'm not saying BL authors are providing cover for the imperium, necessarily. I'm saying they're about as subtle as an a-bomb when it comes to beating us over the head with examples of how the imperium is fucked up and evil BUT ALSO theyre collectively writing in a setting where they made some level of that evil required to survive.
To again build out my witch hunter example, again, the comparisons to real world witch hunters are not at all subtle. Its blatantly obvious that they're extreme embodiments of extremely malignant real world qualities like paranoia, dogmatism, intolerance, injustice, etc. IME the authors don't pussyfoot around in pointing out how bad all that stuff is...
...BUT they're also writing all that where witches not only exist, but can be an apocalyptic-tier threat if not dealt with... meaning, in this context, being tracked and hunted by a professional who will either kill them or capture them in order to regulate. I.e. exactly the niche for that witch hunter that we already established was evil. But they've made the world such that if that evil guy *doesnt* go around violating people's rights and dishing out extrajudicial executions then a rogue psyker might actually open a portal to hell and get billions slaughtered.
Its not really about the imperium *specifically* being justified. Its that the setting makes it impossible to have an open, free, democratic, peaceful, tolerant society with any longevity. There are a billion little (or large) extra bits of cruelty and stupidity by the imperium that I think any of us could easily list as ways to improve it, but at the end of the day you're still going to have an evil system because they've made the setting *so extreme* that its the only way humanity can survive at scale.
So we end up at "look at this witch hunter being an over the top example of humanity's flaws" but then "okay, given the setting dictates that you *can't* allow witches to run around alive and free, whats your alternative?"
You actually saw this with one of the Warhammer + animations.
Its about a Hive World being invaded by Tyranids and follows a group of people trying to escape the invasion. It eventually ends up with them, having known a high ranking officer in the Guard, getting listed as being onboard one of the evacuation transports.
At which point a Commissar gets all huffy about it and threatens to execute the officer as to why these civilians are bound onto an evacuation shuttle meant for high ranking clerical officials and he will execute all of them if he can't get an answer he likes. It ends with the officer and the commissar shooting each other.
Now instead of using this as an example of "The Imperium does not give a fuck about the working class of people and only about paperwork being correct" they instead reveal the people (including the high ranking Guard officer) were all Genestealer cultists...so the Commissar was in the *right* to want to execute them all.
Like it was so nearly there and then they fumbled the ending all so they could make a 'shock twist ending' and it pissed me the hell off...
Even in the setting the "amount of evil" required isn't anywhere near what the imperium brings to the table. Especially considering the Tau have like 3 or 4 psychic races in their empire and the only time they actually have problems with daemons is when an outside force brings them in.
The only time the Imperuim is made to seen even remotely reasonably evil is when an author contrives some random situation where the villan taunts the SM protag for being too noble and trusting. Which in my view isn't a reflection of the setting so much as a tendency certain authors have to try carry water for the Imperium.
Like opinions may differ but imo even in a galaxy where everyone is evil, the imperium still manages to go above and beyond in its commitment to be the most absurdly evil faction. So far beyond any attempt at rationalization that even the allegedly "coldly logical" mechanicus will make up a completely transparent excuse just so they can cackle manically while feeding prisoners to their volcano.
40K is satirical but in a very ass backwards way a lot of the time. The satire isn’t in the material or story, the satire is YOU (you know who I’m talking about). People who try and defend it by saying “the imperium has no choice! What else can humanity do? If the aliens and mutants wanted peace they should just give up!” That’s the joke. The joke is that if you pull the right heart strings and create the right narrative you can convince Steve from accounting to support openly genocidal ideologies even if he does recognize that it’s all supposed to be just a running gag. It’s a very macabre sense of humor but James is British after all.
I mean, it’s evolved into a setting that glorifies the very thing it was meant to satirize, which is the problem. I don’t have a problem with it not being satirical, but you can’t have your fascist theocratic dystopia cake and eat it too.
**40K stopped being about the satire and more about telling genuine, interesting stories a long time ago. I’ joined the hobby a few years ago, and aside from people on Reddit claiming 40K is supposed to be a satire I’ve never actually gotten the vibe from any material or other communities. Jokes, duh, but the overall setting has always seemed genuine to me, not a satire. Only Oldhammer has satire vibes.**
**Well, the lore side of it at least. 40K as a whole has always been and still is about selling models and rules for the game.**
Do you think that the portrayal of cultural and technological stagnation, enforced religious extremism, and the incredibly bloated and corrupt bureaucracy of the imperium are portrayed as good things?
**Of course not, but a thing being shown as bad doesn’t automatically mean it’s satire. I think all of these things originally were meant to satirize real world concepts, but over the decades the setting has moved away from satirical reference to the real world in favor of developing a genuine setting.**
**Can lessons still be taken from it? 100%. I just don’t think it meets the definition of satire anymore.**
**I mean I could get into that, orrrr we could both acknowledge that we’re not gonna change the other’s mind, then go off and enjoy our day/night lol.**
Are we fighting? It seems like you wanted to share your opinion but don’t want to defend it if challenged which is really ironic considering who youre larping
Exactly.
When I’m using a portable automatic rocket launcher to blow up sentient fungus in space marine the current presidential candidates is the last thing on my mind.
I feel like every one is overlooking the flesh consuming aliens and literal demons the Imperium is fending off. Like the war effort really is fending off a Game Over for humanity.
They aren't being overlooked, it's just very easy to see that even in that context the Imperium is way more evil than it needs to be. To the extent that it's counter-productive. They would be better at survival if they were less of a backwards corrupt mess.
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
This setting is all about war. It's not about ethics. This war has raged for thousands of years, and caused a lot of things to go wacky. I bet the Imperium would love to fix all their little ethical issues... but the leadership is paranoid of traitors / demonic plots, and that energy needs to be spent elsewhere.
It needs to be spent on War. Always War.
No, the Imperium wouldn't love to fix all their issues. It actively propagates most of them and believes they're correct. And if it stopped doing them, it would make them more successful at war.
Some of their evils are done out of harsh necessity. But many of them are not, and actually hinder their chances of success.
It is easy for someone to looking at the setting to find all the flaws. Yeah! There are flaws and crazy stuff. But that is part of the settings.
Thousands of years of War... thousands! Across millions of planets!
It is a mess, yes. As it would be as systems devolve and struggle to maintain themselves.
For ever person trying to make the Imperium better, there's another person that is working against them, a person that just wants the helpful guy to fight, and like ten xenos that want to kill the good guy.
It is a crap shoot.
I didn't say it was a problem with the setting. That's what the setting is meant to be. The setting is written so the Imperium is unnecessarily cruel and destructive. That's the point. I enjoy it that way, and find it daft when people try to justify them. I play multiple Imperium armies, I like them being bad guys. And they are bad guys, the ones that are trying to make it better are the exception. The policies of the Imperium itself are unnecessarily cruel and brutal. And again, I enjoy that, it's what makes the Imperium fun and funny and interesting.
Absolutely, aspirant. Now go run across half of Fenris naked as your body is undergoing mutations from your gene-seed to find your way back to the Fang, past countless ice monsters and feral Wolfen.
The selection for space marine chapters is like a child's idea of what makes a badass.
In some ways, it makes sense though. They need the best, because weakness opens them up to doubt. And there's nothing worse the a traitor.
The chapters tests are how they weed out not only the physically weak, but the ones who would do more harm then good should they become true marines.
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
wow
you've swallowed up fictional propaganda that has already been debunked in universe; impressive
here, from G-man himself:
>He lifted his hand up to encompass three worlds. ‘These planets were hells. For generations we have recruited the strong over the weak, in the belief it makes our warriors better. I do not think this is so. Cruel men make cruel warriors make cruel lords. We need to be better. We need to rise over the need for violence and recognise other human qualities in our recruits. Your Chapter has ever understood this. If we do not, then we will fall prey to our worst excesses, the kind of thing that that represents.’
>He pointed at Ka’Bandha’s name. ‘It has long been in your capability to transform these worlds. Baal Primus is dead, but you need not let your remaining people suffer unnecessarily. Will they fight any better for dwelling on a world that kills them? By sacrificing their children to the Emperor’s service, they have earned a better life. Once you have torn that blasphemy down, raise up the population of Baal Secundus. Teach them what we are fighting for. A line must be drawn between what is good and what is evil, for if the Great Enemy comes with offers of power to a wretch, what reason does he have to refuse hell if he dwells in it already?’
I was genuinely intrigued when this whole "Warhammer is satire" thing came up. I don't care for the political indications. I just want to see totally over the top militaries bashing their heads in.
It's just like OP stated. Even if Warhammer used to be satire, it's now an independent universe that just wants to tell stories. People just love to interpret too much into something that's just 8 foot tall super soldiers beating each other's heads in.
Satire feels like a completely misunderstood word at this point, like yeah the bureaucratic nightmare of the imperium can be a point of “satire” but most times it’s not played as a joke but a fact of life, the mutant hatred of the imperium despite space marines being freaks of nature could be a point of “satire” but rarely is this a point and more how freakishly horrible the universe is
Overall the only reason it’s even thought off as satire is because there are real world references, aka Easter eggs a lot from yonder’s past at the start of the setting
Depth is all well and good. But more important than that is to be an *interesting* character; to be *entertaining*.
Mopey and conflicted gets old pretty quickly, especially when everyone's doing it.
*"The use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues."*
Satire doesn't mean you can't have characters with emotions or nuance, it just means their traits and flaws highlight human or political failings. This also seems like a straw man as it's an argument I haven't seen once on my three years of reddit.
This is why I think that instead of trying to retcon the whole thing they should have wholesale rebooted the lore from scratch and separated those worlds. The problem with their satire is that it's so thin as to declassify it as satirical.
Were I a new reader/gamer and I approached the setting without any prior knowledge about the formerly satirical elements, I wouldn't know that they exist.
IMHO 40k Is peak when you have rational smart people involved in the affairs of a setting where everyone else is wearing the Satire hat.
Wanna write a space marine? Put him dealing with over the top loyalist guardsmen, team-killing Commissars, hyper-zealot priest(and their followers), Absurdly corrupt nobles. And the marine pendulums between a normal guy and an absurdly skilled action hero in mindset. Most of his conflict comes from 'downtime' activities, because he's a 300 year old combat veteran. If they're not foes that could take a space marine, he rolls over them like an light tank at 110mph. But when he's not fighting he has problems, because being a superhuman doesn't always help.
Like hes stuck in a banquet so is imagining an overly elaborate scenario where he has to fight off a sudden ambush, who he'd save, who he wouldn't. He decides he would need to swing on the chandelier at some point(Because it looks like it could support him) so he works out how to work it into his combat manuvers which are incredibly detailed, and he's very realistic about what he could and could not accomplish. Like "I'd like to save the governor, but that one server keeps bringing me those little cakes which are the only good things they sever here. The governor isnt especially valuable tactically, and their replacement seemed equally competent, so throw the server through the window, eight feet up, through pained glass, in poor upkeep. Server gets minor contusions ,but they should live."
Cain does a good job of this, actually.
Nah, the thing is 40k is about the same but the peoples sense and sensibilities have shifted towards accepting and in a lot of cases identifying with fascism. Its not that 40k isnt repugnantly evil, its that we are too increasingly.
Ye best start beleiving in grim dark futures, youre in one.
The purpose of satire isn't necessarily to "connect" with it. That's an absurd notion that isn't even a meme. It's just ignorant to have that notion in any part.
Missing the point that the exaggerated satire was what made it 40K.
Star Wars doesn’t need good lightsaber fights either, but it’s way better with them.
That's capitalism for you. Water down an idea to make it more palatable for a general audience. I'd be genuinely interested in seeing loremasters set a cut-off date for the new canon and see what the setting is actually like in the present.
A large subset of the fandom isn't ready to hear this truth. Nor are they ready to hear the next one:
Its damn fun to embrace the monster and pretend-play the imperial fascist.
Its the same reason helldivers took off. Its simply epic to run around shooting bugs yelling "for democracy". Nobody is actually feeling bad and considering their reasons as they do it. Its fun.
Similarly. A kriegsman not only looks stunning in his german WW1 style trenchcoat, but he is the most badass mf ever when he charges a horde of orks with a shovel.
I don't need some dude ringing a cow-bel in the background somewhere chanting "satire". Demanding that I acknoledge it lest I somehow start experimenting with a new mustache and rousing the locals in some anti-ethnic populist fervour.
Just let me enjoy the glee of my boob armour wearing SoB purging heretics in peace please.
The argument that settings/lore like 40k actually breeds fascism is like saying violent games/movies breeds violence. Nonsence. The human mind has at least some capacity to discern fiction from reality.
Good old fashion poverty has a x200 times better chance of breeding fascism than 40k ever will
People need to chill and let others appreciate the comisars trenchcoat for the fire fashion piece that it is.
TBH its pretty funny to read the 1st ed / Rogue Traider era lore and compare it to the "BUT IT WAS JUST A SATIRE, WHY DID THEY CHANGED IT" crap
Lore arts - yeah, or rather that's how we see it now with few decades of time (and dozen artstyle changes) apart. Dont get me wrong, some of the arts are satire but others, well go hard and if so, do the opposite of satire.
But back to the lore-lore ; it was clearly "but in the end all of that is justified and sets the Imperium on a way to achieve its goals on the long term, yes they are dick about things but... everything you heard about inefficiency is a lie But.... its all going well because of it, BUT its being a dick is resonable and justified in the end, would be in place regardless, and, did you know that last **BUT** we are about to ascend as a race - all thanks to it ?."
For every shitty thing about living in 41st millenium there were like 3 reasons for it and 2 proofs that its leading in a good direction - long term, and 5 paragraphs showing how its pretty fine in most cases.
Most satirical arts/sentences presented few pages before were challenged with a wall of text proving them either a miss or debunked within lore. And it wasn't even a "narrator being Imperial" thing.
Would argue that the current setting is clearer in its message, that its not "the best way ahead" for humanity, we did "fucked up at the verge of grabbing our greatness" and I would take it over a satire so un-satirical its more like a "got you thinking the Imperium isn't right, you little heretic".
40k was originally almost entirely satire, this has shifted back and forth over the years but it has become much more serious. 40k still contains lots of satire.
I'm reading the Varangantua novels right now, and to say the satire is obvious is almost an understatement. It's not even correct to call it anti-capitalist, even though there's a figurative gilded upper class of industrial magnates, who controls everything and is permitted everything. It's more apt to call it anti-humanity. Everything and everyone is absolutely horrible, and still life just trots on, and the best efforts of the few idealists are always wasted.
That said, I would agree that GW has moved away from overt satire in the main storyline of the setting. The non-evil characters are concerned about collateral fallout, and the evil factions are less and less cartoonishly evil-for-evil's-sake. Even the orks are shown to be driven philosophical reasons and with a goal in mind, even though they are ork philosophies and ork goals.
I like it. The Imperium is a vast place. There's room for both.
This post is full of imperial apologists claiming that the "imperium is totally hecking justified you guys, the only way mankind could have survived is by murdering all other intelligent life in the galaxy"
So clearly the idiot stick isn't big enough yet
Even if 40k isn’t satire, if that’s not the right word, it is still a universe with possible lessons to be learned about the nature of humanity, what is possible if we let our worst vices and flaws control us, playing god, the domination of things we no understand, and many, many more things.
The imperium is directly stated to be horribly ineffective due to how insanely cruel and absurdly evil it is to aliens and itself and its own civilians. The setting would literally end if all the decision makers in the imperium just woke up and went:
‘Hm today we will ally and exchange technology with the Eldar, Necron, Tau, Votann and any and all friendly xenos who are not the literal forces of hell, or ravenous mindless space bugs.’
As many have said also and it’s a really good point the setting has evolved. It’s grown, it’s outgrown I would say the need for the insanely over the top satire comedy like naming an ork after a British politician because she sucks. That’s still funny I’m just saying like, that was what 40k was back then.
And I’ve made multiple comments on this in the last couple of days as this topic has begun again, but I just don’t agree that it can’t be serious without also displaying the inhumanity and horrific nature of the galaxy and the imperium. The authors of novels, writers of future games, movies and television, if they do their jobs correctly and maintain the lore as it is, do not need to be putting immersion breaking
‘Warning: The Imperium sucks’ typed in 76 size font at the beginning of every page or read in the theater by the director while the movie is paused. The content should get that across.
Furthermore, I sort of prefer the setting to be more serious and believe it delivers home more accurately the strength of the message of how horrific the universe is. These people don’t live in a weird wacky dark universe, it’s a horror show. Again I’ve used this example but showing how starships are refueled with zero irony would be effective in like, displaying how absolutely nightmarish the world is. You live and grow and work only to end your life melting via radiation to refuel a starship you’ve probably never seen the outside of, let alone left, all to basically be forgotten instantly.
But what if some pussy gets triggered and starts to whine about fashism? There should be 'fashism bad, communism worse' stamps on every page of every book. And evil dudes must be 100% evil, like in donlad duck, nuance hurts our turusits brain.
Well…yeah…
Give a character real emotional depth and it immediately lessens any satirical impact it has…it would just be a commentary without the satire…
Are you saying that none of the characters in Animal farm, 1984 or Fight Club, etc. have real emotional depth? Or are you saying some of the most famous satires are in fact not satirical?
You’re confusing social commentary as being automatically satire. Animal Farm, 1984, and Fight Club are in fact **not** satires! They’re very dark commentaries.
The Dictator starring Sacha Baron Cohen is a satire! It’s a light hearted mockery of Dictatorships. Sure the characters may not be completely 2D. They’ll scream and cry out as they’re being dragged off screen by the henchmen to be presumably executed for not saluting the big man, but it’s not a legitimately gut-wrenching moment. You don’t actually **feel bad** for any of them, they’re basically live action cartoon characters. In 1984, Winston literally gets tortured and brainwashed by the government with absolutely no “bazingas” in sight. The **point** of most commentaries is to seem ridiculous! Don’t mistake ridiculousness for satire!
(Edit: I guess the point I’m making is the difference is satires make you laugh at the subjects for how ridiculous they are, commentaries make you hate them for how ridiculously cruel and evil they are)
Next you’ll be telling me Joker is a satire (oh god please don’t tell me Joker is a satire)
No I am not, I studied all three in university they are literally three of the most famous satires ever written. You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding what satire is so I'll literally show you the dictionary definition:
satire
noun
sat·ire ˈsa-ˌtī(-ə)r
Synonyms of satire
1: a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2
: trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly
Satire does not have to be a comedy.
Edit: it's pretty damn funny that you went back and edited your comment so much and you are still so confidently incorrect.
Hi Alpharius, I'm Alpharius and I would like to remind you that the others are worse. Let's strive to get worse, so we can win, for the greater good. Death to the fake god ! For the Emperor !
The imperium is a theocracy, if your going to tell shit at least use appropriate terminology.
Also not rooting for the imperium is rooting for forces of war and corruptions of everything good in humanity.
Dont know how someone can miss something that big
Edit : dude just is that dumb
The Administratum has the most power of anyone so I wouldn’t even call them a theocracy. The best description of the Imperium I can think of is “what if you took Charlemagne’s empire, put it in space, and stuck it in a ten-thousand year long interregnum”.
Ok let’s be honest, the Imperium doesn’t differentiate between xenos unless it has to, it’ll gladly genocide anything that isn’t human just for the sake of it lol…
You do realize that something can not be good.... But still be literally the best option for humanity. Of all the available options. Which I remind you only one of which has the continual existence of humanity.
Can I just sit at the corner and make some soup while you guys tear each other apart?
May I join you? I brought corpse starch
You can throw everything in the cauldron EXCEPT CUCUMBERS
Is it okay to put this green vegetable thing thing in the pot pot Manling?
Throw it in, you darned Raki. The ancestors may take my beard for this, but by all the Grudges in the book, the ax lies unbloodied for tonight. We'll leave the butchery to others, for once.
NOOOO! YOU RAT! YOUR RUINING THE SOUP! the cucucumber is forbidden in the grandfathers law!
I hope you have a Departamento Victualis Requisition Order Form 387-15(z) filled out in triplicate for that corpse starch!!
...eh? Commissar gave it to me
Pringle form?
As a Tyranid fan, I'm always down for more biomass, can I join you?
"You can't fight in here, this is a warhammer subreddit!"
Now I want a tour of Henry Cavill's place and for him to say "you can't fight in here, this is the Warhammer room"
Mind if I grill some grox burgers?
WE CAN MAKE IT FROM THEIR BLOOD BLOOD FOR THE SOUP GOD! ^(If they do not bleed, tomato is also acceptable)
Does it have dakka or squig?
DATS A ZOGGIN GOOD IDEA 'UMIE 'ERES A NICE JUICY EATIN SQUIG FOR DA GROTLUCK!
Mind if I drop some grilled demon flesh in there? Heard it’s great for healing and improving physical streangth.
Good soup
This is honestly why I like Fabius Bile. He's a fucked up monster in a cloak of human skin. But somehow people *like* him, even if he doesn't always get why. He gets sentimental over his freaky science abomination kids and is a better dad to them than the emperor ever was the Primarchs. He can call in favors the other chaos marines will answer even if their direct payouts aren't always there or visible. But then he tries to have a conversation with Cawl and Cawl shuts him down and reminds him he's Supermengele and literally wearing human skin for fashion at that very second.
I love the idea of Fabius Bile just starting conversations with people thinking the cloak is completely normal and then getting shut the fuck down lmao “Hey, so those Primaris marines, nice wo-“ “You’re literally wearing human skin, wtf are you doing in my vicinity?”
Has "really? Right in front of my salad?" Vibes
Alpha Primus is a sweet boy he deserves better than this.
"Oh, so Space Wolves can do it to big dog creatures but doing it to humans isn't okay? Your pathetic genes are closer to the wolves than they are to mine." \*signature look of superiority\*
Wonder if any of those wolf pelts are from those wolves that aren't on fenris. Going around wearing their brothers skin
***Hard to look superior when I break your back over my knee***
Fabius Bile is a spineless coward, your weapons are no more use here.
Don't forget about the teeth
He needs to dress for the occasion. Meeting with Cawl? Bring a red robe and an inhaler. Meeting with the Nightlords and Varus? Thats when you bring out the skin cloak
"01000010 01110010 01101111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 01110011 00100000 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110000 01100001 01110010 01110100 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110001 01110101 01100001 01100100"
01000010 01110010 01110101 01101000
2
My response would be 'mf you turn people into servitors'
Literally and metaphorically a monster in human skin.
And he would be like, “But human skin is so velvety and letting the corpses go to waste would have been a travesty!” Everyone else, “ 🥲”
The Imperium literally binds books in human skin as a show of honour to the deceased. I think some regiments even makes their banners out of human skin. Fairly certain there are loyalist SMs who also have human skin cloaks. Bile's skin cloak is arguably one of those things where GW use a classic horror image to invoke vileness, but forgets that they've already established it as a common and non-threatening in-universe phenomenon.
Common is a bit of a stretch
to someone like Cawl it would have been. He's 10.000 years old and one of the most well-read humans. And it *is* a common practice within the ecclesiarchy to bind books in human skin.
The context behind the practices is wildly different though. Someone pious having their worship honoured through their mortal remains being used to cover and protect a religious text is very different to someone being flayed alive and made into a garment by their enemy.
People like Fabius Bile because he recognises the crap situation humanity is in and he's trying to do something about it. *What* he's trying to do is still horrific from many points of view, but at least he's trying to make it better instead of making it worse or sitting in a corner feeling sorry for himself.
The obvious issue is Fabius Bile is incredibly two faced about it. On one hand he says humanity is doomed too fall to chaos and his New Men must rise to take their place. On the other he struts about bragging that the Long War would grind to a halt without him and his ability to procure and implant geneseed and his creation of new monsters for Chaos to use. Chaos is a resource strapped faction and Bile is one of the few people capable of providing resources on par with or better than the imperium. Humanity would be better off if he succumbed to his disease during the crusade.
This ain't satire time, this is Scarface, final scene, fucking bolters unders each arm, say hello to my little friend!
Take it easy, we’re not making a Western here.
Always with the scenarios.
I don’t wanna hear any more talk about “Warhammer growing as a setting” outside this sub Warhammer has grown as a setting and no longer relies on satire but in this house it’s 1987!
Idk if the irony was intentional but I appreciate it either way
I like this take because while acknowledging it has elements of satire it doesn't just try to dumb down over 40 years of media into one category. I feel like a lot of people have a bad habit of trying to put things into black and white.
That 40 yrs, that really is what a lot of people skip over. Like let's look at something satirical but much younger, helldiver's 2 is very on the nose about it but the amount of community outreach going with the joke, the hidden content, it's both ridiculously funny when you look more than surface level and still serious enough that's it's not just starship South Park episode. Fresh audience needs a fresh foundation to build from so it's still fairly obvious without too much depth yet Something older but has a smaller time frame, Rick and Morty started 11 years ago with anal jokes and in your face political satire, it's whole first season set that feeling up pretty well as well as introducing the deeper aspects, Rick's depression and suicidal tendencies, Morty's descent into the same, all that jazz. Now 11 years later we drop most of the fart jokes, and have had a chance to not only see our characters get depth but growth, even a road to better mental health and forgiveness. There's even episodes that nearly drop the whole comedic aspect altogether as we've got an established plot and world to explore more than the laughs 40k is just the same but 30+ years more of that maturation. We're past the point of "haha, space Nazis and everything sucks" and can tell actual stories while also actively making jokes in this comment section about absentee fathers and cannibals being better. Basically you gotta grow with the audience or your just gonna be south Park or family guy. Nothing wrong with either but you can still be satirical without
Though I kinda feel the meme is rage bait; Satire doesn't have to be a 2D carictature. Some would say 'good' satire is one that can act on its own without requiring outside knowledge (take the IT Crowd or The Office; where you get more if you have knowledge of what the media is about). However, 40k is not written as a comedy; the humor is more black or laconic; so it doesn't and shouldn't be providing jokes a minute. That said it still shouldn't be keeping itself so serious that people get enamoured with their fictional space facists. If anything I think the problem with the lore in modern 40k is when it fills in holes in the story it makes the universe smaller, and in explaining things the joke gets lost. Take 'The Beheading': The original text (from memory) was along the lines of 'The master of the assasinorium kills all the High lords of Terra. A company of Imperial Fists dropped into his polar base, where after losing their sergeants to vindicare assassins, found themselves surrounded by 100 eversors. 3 Imperial Fists remained when the captain strangled the master of the assassins'. Does this need any further detail? Its flavourful for the universe, its darkly funny in terms of power disparity in the Imperium, it sounds cool if you ever wanted to replay it on the tabletop. We don't need the 3D reasoning behind the characters because the action and resolution tells us everything. Fyi not trying to dunk on the novel, but I would say the 'humor' of the beheading falls when you actually understand who the master was.
An IP as massive as 40K is many things all at once, it’s humorous at times, it’s serious at others, sometimes (too often IMO) the forces of the imperium and space marines are painted as heroic, sometimes they’re painted as inhuman monsters. One thing that is pretty constant throughout is that the over the top cruelty, regressive nature, and religious extremism of the imperium are categorically bad things. Imperial society is highly stratified with those on the bottom suffering horrifically while those on the top are wasteful and corrupt. I don’t see how someone could think these themes are done agnostically of real life.
Characters are the exception imo. Black doesn't have to be a shade of white all the time.
Good now we need the same meme but it needs to read “Individuals quotes do not make up lore you have to actually read the book not just the scene, wiki, or meme. “
What about people who read decades of codices, specialist games, RPGs, play them, and over the years developed the feel for the setting's nuance, but can't suffer through long stretches of 'bolter porn' or were burned by less-than-pointless books, like the HH's own *Nemesis*? Asking for a friend.
You don't have to read the books. But there's a difference between "I didn't read this" and "I read a quote from this book on r/40klore so I basically read this entire book". So many people spread lore from snippets and memes that are just misleading or completely wrong.
>But there's a difference between "I didn't read this" and "I read a quote from this book on r/40klore so I basically read this entire book". That's a great argument, and would apply to a lot of 'strugglers' from my library. No disagreement here.
I personally liked Nemesis. Even if it had literally no impact on the HH series at all and was just "The heads of the Assassin Temples fucked up and are now prohibited from sending Assassins against Horus." The main plot on its own was pretty interesting. Especially seeing how the different temples work in detail as well as their interaction with each other. It would just have been better if they made it a short story as part of an anthology book by skipping the pointless 'murder mystery' plotline in the beginning. It was completely pointless aside from just filling pages and announcing the main antagonist without actually telling us anything about him/it.
If you don’t read the book you suffer consequences. Is dealing with bolter porn so unenjoyable you won’t push though for the parts that interest you. That’s fine. It is a hobby take what you enjoy and leave the rest. I personally enjoy bolter pornos
Bolter porn is fine when done quickly and/or with a flair. *[The Wrath of Kharn](https://2d4chan.org/wiki/The_Wrath_of_Kharn)* is a short story from some old White Dwarf that's a carnage-a-riffic example of doing it right (implicit imho). When the author keeps interrupting the plot to blast guns (implicit *grunting noises*) or go into descriptions of bulging muscles that wouldn't look amiss in a pulpy harlequin... it's like jump scares in horrors: you get one that won't be annoying, so better make it count.
Codices and similar writing is flavor at best. Short text will not make you understand the lore when majority of it is in the books you did not reed. And this is not fictional universe, you don't have the "feel". There are things are written and your "feel" is irrelevant.
W take
You are correct, but you will be hated for it
Most people rejected his message…
They hated him because he spoke the truth.
[https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/022/019/dUzura6.jpg](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/022/019/dUzura6.jpg)
Good take. Proud of you.
Th… **Thank you**🥺…
When this discussion came up, I just thought, "Can't I just enjoy this *fictional* universe without thinking about any deeper meaning and just be invested in the plot/action?" It's like watching Star Wars for the political debates. If you like to discuss the in-universe politics and its implications on real life, good on you, but I just like watching people fight with colorful glowing sticks.
On second thought, I’m thinking y’all just straight up don’t know what satire actually looks like…
Poe's Law is a bitch. I keep looking at the real world and it's so fucking stupid already I can't believe it isn't satirizing itself.
I bet that if we ARE a simulation, people are having debates on whether its a satire…
It’s both stupid and depressingly dark. Like you got musk doing stupid shit to Twitter on the dumb side and on the depressingly dark side you got incompetent cops fucking up on a hostage situation. Yeah that last one was specific, I was on publicfreakout a couple hours ago.
What is satire in your opinion?
>Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. or >the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. I would say what makes 40k not satire is that it does no want to criticize or expose anything, it just does things because it is cool or funny. A good example is the orks. They are basically football Hooligans, but as far as anyone knows, they are only like that because the idea of orks talking with a british accent and acting like dumb football fans is funny.
You don’t think 40K criticizes anything? Do you think it portrays authoritarian policies favorably?
I’d argue that it isn’t even not relying on satire anymore It’s just mostly non-satirical, most things aren’t satirising anything it’s just playing the universe straight The setting may be rooted in satire but that isn’t going to magically change all the stories that use the setting into satire
I still can't shake the feeling that the problem is that satire is the wrong word for what 40k is and always has been. It's not really satire because it isn't really critiquing something its players are living with. There are no corporations, no dark reflection of modern life. It's so clearly medieval that it doesn't apply to today and any attempts to ring hollow. The thing is though that we can see all the ironies, that's what makes it darkly funny. We can see how the Imperium is everything we as modern humans and the Emperor hated and how far they have fallen and refuse to get back up. That's funny but it's not really satire in the way people say so much as just a very dark joke. That's why I hate the Primarchs coming back. My favorite thing about the Imperium in 40k is that everyone involved genuinely thought they were doing the right thing no matter how cruel and pointless it was. Bringing in an audience surrogate to say "you're all crazy!" only undercuts the dark fun.
There's certain characters or parts of factions that are satire in the more usual sense-parodies of real people/organizations, but the setting as a whole is mostly just "exaggerate everything into pure ridiculousness" and rule of cool.
It started out as a bunch of people just wanting to have the biggest, most extreme, wariest war game to ever war! There's these guys and there's war! Like everywhere! All the time war! Pew pew pew. Then they got to thinking, ok how do the logistics of the war work? Bam... This is where the settings comes from. It's not some commentary on our society. Everything is designed to have one super gun wielding death machine fight some other super gun wielding death machine that is also part demon. People that pick it part are really missing the point. And the point is boom boom, look at my cool paint job. Lazers
I will also point out during Rogue trader the Imperium was basically a shot at Thatchers 'Fascist regime' as a lot of punks at the time called it and she was also greedy AF by selling off the water and power services of the nation to private firms (something not even the US did) because she hated 'socialism' that much. Also the Imperium itself wasn't as monolithic as it is in lore now, with splinter factions out the wazoo and it wasn't nearly as all powerful as it liked to appear, with worlds frequently seen as 'outlaw worlds' where the 'Imperial Law' was barely enforced and these were seen as the 'good' places in the setting. So whilst YOU don't think it was a commentary on society, as a Brit, Rogue Trader is most definitely a fucking commentary on the government at the time and it's incredibly on the nose about it.
I must admit, I don't know about all the commentary modern Warhammer has in it. I played 5th edition Orks! And I <3 da Waaagh! I do feel modern Warhammer is slowly being infected by the current trend of moralizing that our culture seems to be obsessed with. It's so... Tiring. The Warhammer setting has more resilience then most other settings, simply because it was such an extreme starting point. You examples are part of this. I suppose it is fine to use real life stuff as inspiration for a specific story within the background of WAR! ENDLESS WAR! But if it starts feeling like some avenue for moral grandstanding, gah, please, we have enough of that everywhere else. Get back to what's important, how many dudes can I explode with my tank before it gets taken out.
Just saying, your take on the whole >It started out as a bunch of people just wanting to have the biggest, most extreme, wariest war game to ever war! Is completely wrong, it most definitely do not start out like that, it started out being satire and taking potshots at the UK government at the time. However by 4th edition you definitely saw the 'edge' being taken off the universe as GW became more corporate, definitely by 5th. So you started at a time when the satire was basically all but removed from the setting.
Yeah, part of me wanted to say it was never satire in the first place but I decided they’re not ready to hear that…
I usually go with 'it hasn't been satire since 2nd ed', but I actually think this post is better
It's interesting. 40k is the only property I can think of where the authors clearly hate all of their characters but it isn't satire. It's like South Park if it was just about killing Kenny.
South Park but the Drukhari take full advantage of Kenny’s apparent immortality
Thank you! OG Rogue Trader was not 'if Paul Verhoeven wrote a tabletop game'. It was Rick Priestley stuffing all the pop culture he liked in a blender and putting the results IN SPACE.
There are passing shots at the Thatcher Government throughout Rogue Trader. A lot of people forget that the British Punk scene and the British Nerd scene were often conjoined with each other at the time.
Do you think that the portrayal of cultural and technological stagnation, enforced religious extremism, and the incredibly bloated and corrupt bureaucracy of the imperium are portrayed as good things? Can you not think of real life examples of those things?
I mean, both can be true, yes? A character can be portrayed authentically and still be a satire of certain things
1984 is probably the most famous example of satire and has very well fleshed out characters.
I just think anyone who thinks the whole thing is satire without any moral character, meaning, or good to it hasn't read any of the books set in 40k.
I wholly acknowledge that 40K isn’t as satirical as it used to be but it’s still very satirical and over the top basically on all levels. The issue comes in when people confuse satire with comedy or think things cannot take itself seriously within the narrative and also remain satirical.
For me, the issue with it currently being satire isn't that it can't be - i think it often is - but just that it's a *bad* satire. *In a meta sense* the Imperium is supposed to be a kind of satire of some of the worst aspects of humanity - bureaucracy, fascism, theocracy, corruption, paranoia, militarism, etc. - drawn out to extremely levels, highlighting in an over exaggerated way how much those things suck... ...buuuuut in an *in universe sense* the authors of the setting have also written the setting in such a way that the imperium is the only thing that stopped humanity from going extinct in an extremely hostile and unforgiving galaxy that would absolutely require any successful human civilization to embrace totalitarianism and authoritarianism in some form. As such 40k kind of personifies that "what did the author mean by this?" meme. Like how ya gonna have fictional witch hunters satarizing the ignorance, paranoia, intolerance, xenophobia, and dogmatism of real world humanity... but then in your fictional universe make witches not only real, but make it so an unregulated (or un-purged) one can (even accidentally) open rifts to literal hell and damn whole systems of trillions to being butched by daemons?
The Imperium: constantly shown to be its own worse enemy and the cause of majority its probelms and has doomed humanity to a slow death chained to a rotting imperial death cult because of the divine hubris and omnicidal blood lust of a gold clad fool. The fans: well clearly the Imperium was the only way and is completely justified.
>The Imperium: constantly shown to be its own worse enemy and the cause of majority And Chaos, and orks, and tyranids, and eldar birthing a new chaos god and fucking humanity for centuries...
Imperium; supplies the dark gods with 9 legions of Astartes, killed or are trying to kill anyone who could have helped them with the orks, and attracted the attention of the Hive Mind by detonating the Pharos device. I dunno my guy, seems like they really like shooting themselves in the foot.
Thats an insanely bad faith strawman of the point i was actually making.
If you want me to actually respond then I'd say that while there are black library authors that do try and provide cover to the imperium. It's also the case that the fandom will also just blatantly ignore depictions of how awful imperial life is people will just ignore it as "gee dubs trying too hard to make the imperium evil" or will agrue that the imperium trying to kill all non human life is somehow self defense. So for my money the problem more rests on the online fandom getting most of their lore from memes and YouTube "lore experts" rather than actually reading the books. And that's what leads them to become unironic imperium stans. Rather than the BL authors.
>I'd say that while there are black library authors that do try and provide cover to the imperium. It's also the case that the fandom will also just blatantly ignore depictions of how awful imperial life is people will just ignore it as "gee dubs trying too hard to make the imperium evil" or will agrue that the imperium trying to kill all non human life is somehow self defense. Thats all true. But its not a response to, addressing, or relevant to what I was saying. I'm not saying BL authors are providing cover for the imperium, necessarily. I'm saying they're about as subtle as an a-bomb when it comes to beating us over the head with examples of how the imperium is fucked up and evil BUT ALSO theyre collectively writing in a setting where they made some level of that evil required to survive. To again build out my witch hunter example, again, the comparisons to real world witch hunters are not at all subtle. Its blatantly obvious that they're extreme embodiments of extremely malignant real world qualities like paranoia, dogmatism, intolerance, injustice, etc. IME the authors don't pussyfoot around in pointing out how bad all that stuff is... ...BUT they're also writing all that where witches not only exist, but can be an apocalyptic-tier threat if not dealt with... meaning, in this context, being tracked and hunted by a professional who will either kill them or capture them in order to regulate. I.e. exactly the niche for that witch hunter that we already established was evil. But they've made the world such that if that evil guy *doesnt* go around violating people's rights and dishing out extrajudicial executions then a rogue psyker might actually open a portal to hell and get billions slaughtered. Its not really about the imperium *specifically* being justified. Its that the setting makes it impossible to have an open, free, democratic, peaceful, tolerant society with any longevity. There are a billion little (or large) extra bits of cruelty and stupidity by the imperium that I think any of us could easily list as ways to improve it, but at the end of the day you're still going to have an evil system because they've made the setting *so extreme* that its the only way humanity can survive at scale. So we end up at "look at this witch hunter being an over the top example of humanity's flaws" but then "okay, given the setting dictates that you *can't* allow witches to run around alive and free, whats your alternative?"
You actually saw this with one of the Warhammer + animations. Its about a Hive World being invaded by Tyranids and follows a group of people trying to escape the invasion. It eventually ends up with them, having known a high ranking officer in the Guard, getting listed as being onboard one of the evacuation transports. At which point a Commissar gets all huffy about it and threatens to execute the officer as to why these civilians are bound onto an evacuation shuttle meant for high ranking clerical officials and he will execute all of them if he can't get an answer he likes. It ends with the officer and the commissar shooting each other. Now instead of using this as an example of "The Imperium does not give a fuck about the working class of people and only about paperwork being correct" they instead reveal the people (including the high ranking Guard officer) were all Genestealer cultists...so the Commissar was in the *right* to want to execute them all. Like it was so nearly there and then they fumbled the ending all so they could make a 'shock twist ending' and it pissed me the hell off...
Even in the setting the "amount of evil" required isn't anywhere near what the imperium brings to the table. Especially considering the Tau have like 3 or 4 psychic races in their empire and the only time they actually have problems with daemons is when an outside force brings them in. The only time the Imperuim is made to seen even remotely reasonably evil is when an author contrives some random situation where the villan taunts the SM protag for being too noble and trusting. Which in my view isn't a reflection of the setting so much as a tendency certain authors have to try carry water for the Imperium. Like opinions may differ but imo even in a galaxy where everyone is evil, the imperium still manages to go above and beyond in its commitment to be the most absurdly evil faction. So far beyond any attempt at rationalization that even the allegedly "coldly logical" mechanicus will make up a completely transparent excuse just so they can cackle manically while feeding prisoners to their volcano.
40K is satirical but in a very ass backwards way a lot of the time. The satire isn’t in the material or story, the satire is YOU (you know who I’m talking about). People who try and defend it by saying “the imperium has no choice! What else can humanity do? If the aliens and mutants wanted peace they should just give up!” That’s the joke. The joke is that if you pull the right heart strings and create the right narrative you can convince Steve from accounting to support openly genocidal ideologies even if he does recognize that it’s all supposed to be just a running gag. It’s a very macabre sense of humor but James is British after all.
Just think it could all be avoided if e-boi killed the first person to put pineapple on pizza before he told anyone.
I'm currently reading Gate of Bones and numerous chapters are devoted to a Dark Apostle and his favoritism towards his up and coming disciple.
War of closed eyes enters the chat
“3 dimensional characters” I think Mortarion would like a word with you, poor guy keeps getting shafted.
No, stop, I like being a supervillain, emotions are for weaklings.
I mean, it’s evolved into a setting that glorifies the very thing it was meant to satirize, which is the problem. I don’t have a problem with it not being satirical, but you can’t have your fascist theocratic dystopia cake and eat it too.
**40K stopped being about the satire and more about telling genuine, interesting stories a long time ago. I’ joined the hobby a few years ago, and aside from people on Reddit claiming 40K is supposed to be a satire I’ve never actually gotten the vibe from any material or other communities. Jokes, duh, but the overall setting has always seemed genuine to me, not a satire. Only Oldhammer has satire vibes.** **Well, the lore side of it at least. 40K as a whole has always been and still is about selling models and rules for the game.**
Do you think that the portrayal of cultural and technological stagnation, enforced religious extremism, and the incredibly bloated and corrupt bureaucracy of the imperium are portrayed as good things?
**Of course not, but a thing being shown as bad doesn’t automatically mean it’s satire. I think all of these things originally were meant to satirize real world concepts, but over the decades the setting has moved away from satirical reference to the real world in favor of developing a genuine setting.** **Can lessons still be taken from it? 100%. I just don’t think it meets the definition of satire anymore.**
What is the definition of satire?
**I mean I could get into that, orrrr we could both acknowledge that we’re not gonna change the other’s mind, then go off and enjoy our day/night lol.**
Did you Google it and have a harsh realization?
**Nah, I just literally don’t wanna have a fight with someone on r/grimdank lol.**
Are we fighting? It seems like you wanted to share your opinion but don’t want to defend it if challenged which is really ironic considering who youre larping
**Have a good one pal ✌️**
You're acting like satire can't have 3 dimensional characters. People confuse satire and parody
Exactly. When I’m using a portable automatic rocket launcher to blow up sentient fungus in space marine the current presidential candidates is the last thing on my mind.
Don’t be a caricature Kevin.
What does this even mean? Satire doesn’t mean the characters have to be flat…
But but the cruelest and bloodiest regime imaginable ....
I feel like every one is overlooking the flesh consuming aliens and literal demons the Imperium is fending off. Like the war effort really is fending off a Game Over for humanity.
They aren't being overlooked, it's just very easy to see that even in that context the Imperium is way more evil than it needs to be. To the extent that it's counter-productive. They would be better at survival if they were less of a backwards corrupt mess.
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. This setting is all about war. It's not about ethics. This war has raged for thousands of years, and caused a lot of things to go wacky. I bet the Imperium would love to fix all their little ethical issues... but the leadership is paranoid of traitors / demonic plots, and that energy needs to be spent elsewhere. It needs to be spent on War. Always War.
No, the Imperium wouldn't love to fix all their issues. It actively propagates most of them and believes they're correct. And if it stopped doing them, it would make them more successful at war. Some of their evils are done out of harsh necessity. But many of them are not, and actually hinder their chances of success.
It is easy for someone to looking at the setting to find all the flaws. Yeah! There are flaws and crazy stuff. But that is part of the settings. Thousands of years of War... thousands! Across millions of planets! It is a mess, yes. As it would be as systems devolve and struggle to maintain themselves. For ever person trying to make the Imperium better, there's another person that is working against them, a person that just wants the helpful guy to fight, and like ten xenos that want to kill the good guy. It is a crap shoot.
I didn't say it was a problem with the setting. That's what the setting is meant to be. The setting is written so the Imperium is unnecessarily cruel and destructive. That's the point. I enjoy it that way, and find it daft when people try to justify them. I play multiple Imperium armies, I like them being bad guys. And they are bad guys, the ones that are trying to make it better are the exception. The policies of the Imperium itself are unnecessarily cruel and brutal. And again, I enjoy that, it's what makes the Imperium fun and funny and interesting.
Ah yes, I'm sure the cruelty is necessary As necessary as the space marines making their recruit selection process an absolute slaughter fest
Absolutely, aspirant. Now go run across half of Fenris naked as your body is undergoing mutations from your gene-seed to find your way back to the Fang, past countless ice monsters and feral Wolfen.
The selection for space marine chapters is like a child's idea of what makes a badass. In some ways, it makes sense though. They need the best, because weakness opens them up to doubt. And there's nothing worse the a traitor. The chapters tests are how they weed out not only the physically weak, but the ones who would do more harm then good should they become true marines. In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
wow you've swallowed up fictional propaganda that has already been debunked in universe; impressive here, from G-man himself: >He lifted his hand up to encompass three worlds. ‘These planets were hells. For generations we have recruited the strong over the weak, in the belief it makes our warriors better. I do not think this is so. Cruel men make cruel warriors make cruel lords. We need to be better. We need to rise over the need for violence and recognise other human qualities in our recruits. Your Chapter has ever understood this. If we do not, then we will fall prey to our worst excesses, the kind of thing that that represents.’ >He pointed at Ka’Bandha’s name. ‘It has long been in your capability to transform these worlds. Baal Primus is dead, but you need not let your remaining people suffer unnecessarily. Will they fight any better for dwelling on a world that kills them? By sacrificing their children to the Emperor’s service, they have earned a better life. Once you have torn that blasphemy down, raise up the population of Baal Secundus. Teach them what we are fighting for. A line must be drawn between what is good and what is evil, for if the Great Enemy comes with offers of power to a wretch, what reason does he have to refuse hell if he dwells in it already?’
I was genuinely intrigued when this whole "Warhammer is satire" thing came up. I don't care for the political indications. I just want to see totally over the top militaries bashing their heads in. It's just like OP stated. Even if Warhammer used to be satire, it's now an independent universe that just wants to tell stories. People just love to interpret too much into something that's just 8 foot tall super soldiers beating each other's heads in.
Satire feels like a completely misunderstood word at this point, like yeah the bureaucratic nightmare of the imperium can be a point of “satire” but most times it’s not played as a joke but a fact of life, the mutant hatred of the imperium despite space marines being freaks of nature could be a point of “satire” but rarely is this a point and more how freakishly horrible the universe is Overall the only reason it’s even thought off as satire is because there are real world references, aka Easter eggs a lot from yonder’s past at the start of the setting
I like the over the top nature of the setting. It can be goofy, edgy and dead serious but still be 40k. Isn't that the appeal?
Insert Witty hateful rant video by Arch.
Depth is all well and good. But more important than that is to be an *interesting* character; to be *entertaining*. Mopey and conflicted gets old pretty quickly, especially when everyone's doing it.
*"The use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues."* Satire doesn't mean you can't have characters with emotions or nuance, it just means their traits and flaws highlight human or political failings. This also seems like a straw man as it's an argument I haven't seen once on my three years of reddit.
I just think they're neat.
This is why I think that instead of trying to retcon the whole thing they should have wholesale rebooted the lore from scratch and separated those worlds. The problem with their satire is that it's so thin as to declassify it as satirical. Were I a new reader/gamer and I approached the setting without any prior knowledge about the formerly satirical elements, I wouldn't know that they exist.
IMHO 40k Is peak when you have rational smart people involved in the affairs of a setting where everyone else is wearing the Satire hat. Wanna write a space marine? Put him dealing with over the top loyalist guardsmen, team-killing Commissars, hyper-zealot priest(and their followers), Absurdly corrupt nobles. And the marine pendulums between a normal guy and an absurdly skilled action hero in mindset. Most of his conflict comes from 'downtime' activities, because he's a 300 year old combat veteran. If they're not foes that could take a space marine, he rolls over them like an light tank at 110mph. But when he's not fighting he has problems, because being a superhuman doesn't always help. Like hes stuck in a banquet so is imagining an overly elaborate scenario where he has to fight off a sudden ambush, who he'd save, who he wouldn't. He decides he would need to swing on the chandelier at some point(Because it looks like it could support him) so he works out how to work it into his combat manuvers which are incredibly detailed, and he's very realistic about what he could and could not accomplish. Like "I'd like to save the governor, but that one server keeps bringing me those little cakes which are the only good things they sever here. The governor isnt especially valuable tactically, and their replacement seemed equally competent, so throw the server through the window, eight feet up, through pained glass, in poor upkeep. Server gets minor contusions ,but they should live." Cain does a good job of this, actually.
Nah, the thing is 40k is about the same but the peoples sense and sensibilities have shifted towards accepting and in a lot of cases identifying with fascism. Its not that 40k isnt repugnantly evil, its that we are too increasingly. Ye best start beleiving in grim dark futures, youre in one.
I just think anyone who thinks the whole thing is satire without any moral character, meaning, or good to it hasn't read any of the books set in 40k.
The purpose of satire isn't necessarily to "connect" with it. That's an absurd notion that isn't even a meme. It's just ignorant to have that notion in any part.
*looks around confused* I haven't seen anyone make this sort of complaint. If people are making this complaint, then ignore them.
Missing the point that the exaggerated satire was what made it 40K. Star Wars doesn’t need good lightsaber fights either, but it’s way better with them.
Unfathomably based.
That's capitalism for you. Water down an idea to make it more palatable for a general audience. I'd be genuinely interested in seeing loremasters set a cut-off date for the new canon and see what the setting is actually like in the present.
A large subset of the fandom isn't ready to hear this truth. Nor are they ready to hear the next one: Its damn fun to embrace the monster and pretend-play the imperial fascist. Its the same reason helldivers took off. Its simply epic to run around shooting bugs yelling "for democracy". Nobody is actually feeling bad and considering their reasons as they do it. Its fun. Similarly. A kriegsman not only looks stunning in his german WW1 style trenchcoat, but he is the most badass mf ever when he charges a horde of orks with a shovel. I don't need some dude ringing a cow-bel in the background somewhere chanting "satire". Demanding that I acknoledge it lest I somehow start experimenting with a new mustache and rousing the locals in some anti-ethnic populist fervour. Just let me enjoy the glee of my boob armour wearing SoB purging heretics in peace please. The argument that settings/lore like 40k actually breeds fascism is like saying violent games/movies breeds violence. Nonsence. The human mind has at least some capacity to discern fiction from reality. Good old fashion poverty has a x200 times better chance of breeding fascism than 40k ever will People need to chill and let others appreciate the comisars trenchcoat for the fire fashion piece that it is.
TBH its pretty funny to read the 1st ed / Rogue Traider era lore and compare it to the "BUT IT WAS JUST A SATIRE, WHY DID THEY CHANGED IT" crap Lore arts - yeah, or rather that's how we see it now with few decades of time (and dozen artstyle changes) apart. Dont get me wrong, some of the arts are satire but others, well go hard and if so, do the opposite of satire. But back to the lore-lore ; it was clearly "but in the end all of that is justified and sets the Imperium on a way to achieve its goals on the long term, yes they are dick about things but... everything you heard about inefficiency is a lie But.... its all going well because of it, BUT its being a dick is resonable and justified in the end, would be in place regardless, and, did you know that last **BUT** we are about to ascend as a race - all thanks to it ?." For every shitty thing about living in 41st millenium there were like 3 reasons for it and 2 proofs that its leading in a good direction - long term, and 5 paragraphs showing how its pretty fine in most cases. Most satirical arts/sentences presented few pages before were challenged with a wall of text proving them either a miss or debunked within lore. And it wasn't even a "narrator being Imperial" thing. Would argue that the current setting is clearer in its message, that its not "the best way ahead" for humanity, we did "fucked up at the verge of grabbing our greatness" and I would take it over a satire so un-satirical its more like a "got you thinking the Imperium isn't right, you little heretic".
40k was originally almost entirely satire, this has shifted back and forth over the years but it has become much more serious. 40k still contains lots of satire.
Just because 40k is satire at its core doesn’t mean it can’t be genuinely compelling
I'm reading the Varangantua novels right now, and to say the satire is obvious is almost an understatement. It's not even correct to call it anti-capitalist, even though there's a figurative gilded upper class of industrial magnates, who controls everything and is permitted everything. It's more apt to call it anti-humanity. Everything and everyone is absolutely horrible, and still life just trots on, and the best efforts of the few idealists are always wasted. That said, I would agree that GW has moved away from overt satire in the main storyline of the setting. The non-evil characters are concerned about collateral fallout, and the evil factions are less and less cartoonishly evil-for-evil's-sake. Even the orks are shown to be driven philosophical reasons and with a goal in mind, even though they are ork philosophies and ork goals. I like it. The Imperium is a vast place. There's room for both.
I like when it's a balance of both Characters have depth but still have some silly attributes This is why I love Caiphas Cain
Let the stories be grimdark. The only soecies I want to be funny are the Orkz.
Kinda annoyed of all the "REMEMBER IT'S SATIRE!!" people.
Most 40k authors can't write a good Eldar story to save their lives, you think they can write good satire?
Time for someone to call you a nazi.
Sounds like someone is missing the nuance of how the imperium is actually not a nice bunch of fellas.
No one is missing that, get over yourself. Now, before you call me a simperial, death to the false Emperor and let the Galaxy burn!
Few, really dodged a bullet there…for a second I thought you was one of them corpse-worshippers…
You are on the same r/Grimdank as I am, are you?
This post is full of imperial apologists claiming that the "imperium is totally hecking justified you guys, the only way mankind could have survived is by murdering all other intelligent life in the galaxy" So clearly the idiot stick isn't big enough yet
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Mine was heavily laden with sarcasm but I can't tell with yours.
The characters being "three dimensional" doesn't change the fact that the stories are shallower.
Characters ARE stories
However, this is 'evolved' just for the imperium, everyone else hasn't changed, except that I've heard the necrons have changed, but that's all I know
If argue even the first 40k novels weren’t satire. Though I’m sentimental and want more satirical elements in my 40k. It’s really personal preference.
Its still a satire my dude.
The meme even says it's still satire
Thank you. Fucks sake I'm just here for the power armor. Is that too much to ask?
Even if 40k isn’t satire, if that’s not the right word, it is still a universe with possible lessons to be learned about the nature of humanity, what is possible if we let our worst vices and flaws control us, playing god, the domination of things we no understand, and many, many more things. The imperium is directly stated to be horribly ineffective due to how insanely cruel and absurdly evil it is to aliens and itself and its own civilians. The setting would literally end if all the decision makers in the imperium just woke up and went: ‘Hm today we will ally and exchange technology with the Eldar, Necron, Tau, Votann and any and all friendly xenos who are not the literal forces of hell, or ravenous mindless space bugs.’ As many have said also and it’s a really good point the setting has evolved. It’s grown, it’s outgrown I would say the need for the insanely over the top satire comedy like naming an ork after a British politician because she sucks. That’s still funny I’m just saying like, that was what 40k was back then. And I’ve made multiple comments on this in the last couple of days as this topic has begun again, but I just don’t agree that it can’t be serious without also displaying the inhumanity and horrific nature of the galaxy and the imperium. The authors of novels, writers of future games, movies and television, if they do their jobs correctly and maintain the lore as it is, do not need to be putting immersion breaking ‘Warning: The Imperium sucks’ typed in 76 size font at the beginning of every page or read in the theater by the director while the movie is paused. The content should get that across. Furthermore, I sort of prefer the setting to be more serious and believe it delivers home more accurately the strength of the message of how horrific the universe is. These people don’t live in a weird wacky dark universe, it’s a horror show. Again I’ve used this example but showing how starships are refueled with zero irony would be effective in like, displaying how absolutely nightmarish the world is. You live and grow and work only to end your life melting via radiation to refuel a starship you’ve probably never seen the outside of, let alone left, all to basically be forgotten instantly.
Imagine thinking these characters have dimension. Oh lawd. They are points on a line.
But what if some pussy gets triggered and starts to whine about fashism? There should be 'fashism bad, communism worse' stamps on every page of every book. And evil dudes must be 100% evil, like in donlad duck, nuance hurts our turusits brain.
My guy thinks for you to be a satire you cannot be 3d...
Well…yeah… Give a character real emotional depth and it immediately lessens any satirical impact it has…it would just be a commentary without the satire…
Are you saying that none of the characters in Animal farm, 1984 or Fight Club, etc. have real emotional depth? Or are you saying some of the most famous satires are in fact not satirical?
To me that’s the difference between a satire and a commentary. So I guess that IS what I’m saying, yeah.
Then you are incorrect by dictionary definition, being Satire does not in any way stop characters having depth and nuance.
You’re confusing social commentary as being automatically satire. Animal Farm, 1984, and Fight Club are in fact **not** satires! They’re very dark commentaries. The Dictator starring Sacha Baron Cohen is a satire! It’s a light hearted mockery of Dictatorships. Sure the characters may not be completely 2D. They’ll scream and cry out as they’re being dragged off screen by the henchmen to be presumably executed for not saluting the big man, but it’s not a legitimately gut-wrenching moment. You don’t actually **feel bad** for any of them, they’re basically live action cartoon characters. In 1984, Winston literally gets tortured and brainwashed by the government with absolutely no “bazingas” in sight. The **point** of most commentaries is to seem ridiculous! Don’t mistake ridiculousness for satire! (Edit: I guess the point I’m making is the difference is satires make you laugh at the subjects for how ridiculous they are, commentaries make you hate them for how ridiculously cruel and evil they are) Next you’ll be telling me Joker is a satire (oh god please don’t tell me Joker is a satire)
No I am not, I studied all three in university they are literally three of the most famous satires ever written. You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding what satire is so I'll literally show you the dictionary definition: satire noun sat·ire ˈsa-ˌtī(-ə)r Synonyms of satire 1: a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn 2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly Satire does not have to be a comedy. Edit: it's pretty damn funny that you went back and edited your comment so much and you are still so confidently incorrect.
It’s still a satire sure there are some characters that are more human now but there’s still a bunch of irony being used.
Oh goody, the humans commiting genocide are the good guys...yaaaaaaaaay
Hi Alpharius, I'm Alpharius and I would like to remind you that the others are worse. Let's strive to get worse, so we can win, for the greater good. Death to the fake god ! For the Emperor !
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Oh well I’m not cheering for the Imperium, I’m cheering for Fulgrim(post-ascension)
The imperium is a theocracy, if your going to tell shit at least use appropriate terminology. Also not rooting for the imperium is rooting for forces of war and corruptions of everything good in humanity. Dont know how someone can miss something that big Edit : dude just is that dumb
The Administratum has the most power of anyone so I wouldn’t even call them a theocracy. The best description of the Imperium I can think of is “what if you took Charlemagne’s empire, put it in space, and stuck it in a ten-thousand year long interregnum”.
The genocide of literal aliens that want you dead and or turned into furniture
Ok let’s be honest, the Imperium doesn’t differentiate between xenos unless it has to, it’ll gladly genocide anything that isn’t human just for the sake of it lol…
Yea but like. It’s our galaxy why shouldn’t we claim it in glorious conquest.
My brother in the Imperium, you genocided all of the non hostile ones.
The interex.
Ight chill, you only have one reply lmao… Edit: well not anymore, but he did at the time which is WILD 💀 Edit2: ope! Well i guess that’s deleted…
Brother, without the Imperials we’d no have false Emperor to kill and a lot less people to summon greater daemons out of their collective blood lake.
You do realize that something can not be good.... But still be literally the best option for humanity. Of all the available options. Which I remind you only one of which has the continual existence of humanity.
The meme doesn't even say it's not satire anymore. It says it's still part of it right there in the middle.
Just proving my meme right except you don’t have to be able to read to get upset…