Been hearing a lot of rumblings from normal people in the warhammer community they are tired of fascists worshipping the imperium of man in their community.
is it like a human supremacist group in the lore or something like the empire in Star Wars?
another thing that nobody mentioned yet is that the imperium has the space marines who are the heavily-armoured genetically-modified superhuman special forces guys, and then the vaaaast majority of the army are the imperial guard who are mostly just conscripts with shitty guns who get sent in human wave style to die en masse
there are various themed imperial guard regiments that have distinctive uniforms and fighting styles of their planet. the most popular amongst warhammer nerds are the death korps of krieg, who resemble gas-masked wwi soldiers with a german-style helmet. purely coincidentally, they seem to be most commonly painted in feldgrau colour schemes
Fascists are morons who are too stupid to understand they’re being made fun of
It really doesn’t help that GW constantly oscillates between “the theocratic fascism is really self-destructive and stupid and is why the imperium is a decaying wreck, and having an autocrat and his large adult sons in charge of everything totally fucked it all up in the first place”, “the fascism isn’t great but it’s necessary and justified because it’s the only thing saving humanity from unimaginable horrors that vaguely resemble whatever ethnic group you’re most afraid of”, or “the space marines are unambiguously good heroes with honour and piety who keep everyone safe, yay for the good guys”
whatever ethnic group you’re most afraid of
ooh! don’t forget gender or sexual minority either! scary gender-indeterminate slaanesh demon :cri:
And don’t forget, Slaanesh was created by the Eldar having crazy sex. Sounds exactly like fascist allegory, saying that “removed” will destroy society… somehow.
slaanesh as a monsterous evil always made me really uncomfortable, and what makes it quadruple uncomfortable is how apparently one of the evil things they can do is make you enjoy fighting which is evil in a world where people fight all the time (???)
like theres no actual philosophical critiques of hedonism inherent to slaanesh, its just “:le-pol-face: pleasure bad”
They’ve tried to change it recently, by making Slaanesh more a “god of perfection and artistic obsession” but really that’s just a way of making the drugs and the rock and roll cover up all the sex.
lmao that’s not even like what that’s actually better
like actual, selfless monks are perfectionists that do artistic expression
if you read like any of the popular W40k novels everything about the Imperium of man seems like unfettered dogshit
the majority of the people live in decaying hovels eking out a miserable agricultural existence or in enormous planet sized slums that have all sorts of issues (rampant crime, gangs, mutants, etc.)
if you’re part of the actual government you are like an undying heavily bio augmented freak with an incredibly long lifespan (iirc Inquisitor Ravenor is like 300 years old lmfao) stemming back a tide of literally incomprehensible horrors that you aren’t fully equipped to deal with
like in Caiphas Cain the entire point of the series is that he’s a regular commissar who frequently stumbles into absolutely insane, fucked up situations and spends most of his time trying to run the fuck away because getting turned into some mutant freak by Tyrannids is in no way cool or exciting
god help you if you’re part of the regular ass army
ive read way too many 40k novels lol (yeah i read theory) and theres a huuuuuge disconnect between the different writers. youre absolutely right that the eisenhorn/ravenor books in particular are all about how incredibly dogshit the imperium is, and other books do make this clear as well
but with a lot of the space marine focused ones you can just feel the authors jerking themselves off as they write (someone should compile all the bits from the horus heresy novels where they first describe each of the primarchs in particular lol) and they are often really uncritical or apologetic about not just the space marines but the imperium itself
and of course the video games mostly go no deeper than “yay space marines”
I like the Grey Knights novels because everything they deal with is shown to be a nightmarish shitshow lol, I couldn’t get into the Horus Heresy books
also the moment in Gaunts Ghosts where the Chaos Space marines get fucking merc’ed by the indigenous people of a planet because they were too full of pride and hubris to wear helmets is 10/10 writing
is it like a human supremacist group
Yes and it’s also meant to be a satire of them and the obviously horrifying implications of fascism drawn out on a 40 thousand year timeline.
They don’t get sarcasm. Art in general totally evades them. I remember looking at some Nazi poster from the 30s of the ideal German family and there was a 3 year old with the proportions of an adult man, like the kind of shit you’d see in Medieval illuminations. It was like looking at a version of American Gothic painted by an alien who had only met The Duggars.
The Imperium of Man is a space empire run by Earth (or Terra). It was formerly ruled by the Emperor, an autocrat with superpowers, but because of a combination of him being a terrible dad, his failsons being unable to communicate, and just fuckery from evil gods throughout the universe, he was brainkilled by one of his sons, and half of his sons turned evil. But his corpse still has JUST enough superpowers within that it’s able to power transportation throughout the galaxy
Now, officially, his corpse still rules the Imperium, but now, there’s a state religion devoted to him, and multiple bureaucrats pretend to speak for him, and of course, everything he wants is in the interest of the capitalists and the imperialists. It’s implied that one guy sneezing wrong in his throne room would destroy him, making the galactic transportation impossibile, thus destroying the Imperium, if it’s not destroyed by either it imploding on itself or destroyed by an external forcem
Now, it’s supposed to be an obvious satire of fascism. The Imperium sucks. The one thing it’s supposed to do, destroy all external threats, it’s terrible at. But fascists either don’t see the satire or don’t care.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the writers are not completely innocent here. First off, the marketing is almost exclusively Space Marines looking awesome. And many of the writers can’t decide between three different, contradictory messages:
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The Imperium is a shitshow, and it’s all because absolute power was given to an autocrat and his failsons.
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The Imperium is pretty bad, but it’s necessary for mankind to exist.
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The heroic Space Marines save the humans from danger.
This obfuscates the satire pretty hard. Another thing is obsession with making it “gramdark enough”. Like, originally, the Tau Empire was another faction that was as close as 40k had to good guys. It was not fascist. It wasn’t perfect, but it had a good place in the story. It had the message “even though the Tau Empire isn’t perfect, it’s proof you don’t need to be fascist to survive the universe of 40k”. But people complained it wasn’t grimdark enough, so it was made more evil (personally, I disagree that the concept is not grimdark, it makes the universe seem bleak that the one good faction stands no chance against the Imperium). But here’s the thing: Fascists claim they like grimdark. They do not. What they think grimdarkness is is cruelty to the others. It’s not. Probably the most famous story described as grimdark is George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and it’s not just mindless cruelty. It’s a highly nuanced story in which you look into all sides. Fascists don’t like that.
(As a side note, a fun way to make people who say the Imperium is fine because they’re justified is to remind them that the Dark Eldar are much more justified.)
the Dark Eldar are much more justified
Wait, why?
Dark Eldar are kind of like cars that run on souls. They need to torture others to fill up their tank to keep going. And of they run empty their own soul is sucked out of them and is tortured for all of eternity by the hedonistic God of excess.
Ah, thanks
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Everyone here is talking about the stories, but I want to add a point about how the hobby itself makes you really buy into the universe.
There’s this concept in tabletop that sometimes called “Your Dudes”, which basically describes how incredibly attached you get as a player to an army if you take the opportunity to customize them. My own Sisters of Battle aren’t just pixels on a screen that I spawn in when I have enough command points, I remember painting literally every single on of their guns, liveries, and armored corsets. I’ve thought of names for each of the squads and applied little color variations to them so I can tell them apart on the board. I know the names of the sergeants and exactly what bits and pieces of wargear I attached to each of them so I can swap them in and out based on my army list. I have a whole backstory about how they come from a feudal planet and their liveries are super colorful because it’s their family’s banner.
Anyway I think that people who actually play the game get way more attached to the universe than in other hobbies, and that drives them to want to bend over backwards to explain why their faction is the Good Guys, actually.
Look at this nerd, painting their miniatures (I kid).
I’m under no illusions that my spiky space elves are not the good guys. They are hyper-individualist anti-buddhists, completely unable to see any interaction as anything other than a zero-sum game and have discovered that by feeding off the suffering of others they can live forever.
I think you can actually do philosophically interesting things with 40k, but usually it’s just fanfic level fash-worship and glory (ironically or usually not).
I also think that the format of 40k, wherein you build and paint your army and then competitively duke it out with other players, lends itself to identifying with your army and seeking out your “clan” in a way that MtG or RPGs does not. Certainly some players in MtG will identify with a particular deck or build, but the game doesn’t connect you with the lore of the cards you’re using in the same way. I remember being a Dark Eldar player before 2009 (when the DE reboot happened), there was a level of camaraderie between Dark Eldar players as the unloved sons of GW in a way that I don’t think existed for, say, green-black players in MtG.
Combined with the overtly fascist imagery of “the good guys”, means that you wind up with a lot of unironic Imperium stans talking to a lot of other unironic Imperium stans. Obviously for GW, this is good business as they can sell lots of merch and miniatures.
Its numberless legions of soldiers and zealots bludgeon their way across the galaxy, delivering death to anyone and anything that doesn’t adhere to their blinkered view of purity. Almost every man and woman toils in misery either on the battlefield – where survival is measured in hours – or in the countless manufactorums and hive slums that fuel the Imperial war machine. All of this in slavish servitude to the living corpse of a God-Emperor whose commandments are at best only half-remembered, twisted by time and the fallibility of Humanity.
Warhammer 40,000 isn’t just grimdark. It’s the grimmest, darkest.
The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of Humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in. Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man is satirical.
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/11/19/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not/
Jesus Christ.
The difference between the empire in Star Wars and the Imperium is that the Imperium is essentially inescapable.
It has endured for 10,000 years, it has a million worlds. Non-human intelligence is mistrusted at absolute best. Separatism is not tolerated, Alderon was just Tuesday morning, and probably literally a quadrillion people thought they deserved it anyway. Communications and travel can take hundreds of years depending on the conditions, so a response fleet might not even arrive in your lifetime, or your children’s lifetime, but it will come, and even a low estimate of the Imperiums levy would mean they command around a trillion soldiers.
Basically the Imperium of Man is a suffocating, unstoppable, grinding hate machine.
It is human society twisted into eternal, nightmarish, inescapable horror.
The Imperium of Man is simultaneously invincible and on the brink of collapse at the same time. It’s one of the disadvantages of a setting meant for wargames instead of a tabletop game where you create your own narrative: because the players don’t want their preferred faction to become obsolete, the setting is in stasis. Nobody can win or lose in any way which matters.
…Old figurines become obsolete anyways due to better stuff coming out. Gotta make the dosh.
The Imperium of Man is simultaneously invincible and on the brink of collapse at the same time.
Ironically (or probably not a coincidence) the fascist propaganda; “We’re powerful and unbeatable” but also “We’re falling apart and being destroyed”.
