this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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They followed it up with:
Good stuff.
I think I know this one. There's at least one cosmic entity, Slaneesh, that is some kind of genderfluid, but she/he/it is portrayed as evil or something. I don't know the lore well The 40k humans though are like an exaggerated parody of the worst attributes of fascists, medieval crusaders, and British colonizers. They were initially parody but nerds completely lost their ability to detect satire, but I've read the devs haven't been so great about indicating the humans are not supposed to be admired.
I remember back in the 2014 times when slaneesh was considered to be the cause of “lgbt+ people” by “corrupting” heteros. Like the fash pipeline was huge back then. As someone who loves warhammer, it was almost impossible to find creators who weren’t in alt-right pipeline.
All the choas gods are neither good nor evil. They're just manifestations of latent sentient psychic power.
I see them as symptomatic of the suffering of mortal beings in the setting, many of them specifically suffering in Imperium of Man hive worlds and crushed under the weight of oppression and servitude. The Imperium tries to fight the symptoms because the High Lords of Terra benefit from the disease and always have. :Sigmarxism:
The only pushback I would offer is that they're empowered by strong emotions generally. Like Slaneesh from love, or pleasure. Is that pleasure from non consensual sadism? ~~Sometimes~~. Mostly, lol 40k suuucks
I could add a mostly to it, because so much empowerment of Chaos seems to come from negative emotions, such as hate, fear, greed, and yeah non consensual sadism.
yeah I agree.
However it would be possible to generate the gods from a 40k that was ordered differently, like a communist choas god that arose from an abundance of self actualization.
In the pleasant brightness of the far future, there is only comradeship and community ping pong tournaments.
I kinda wish the writers would have a more nuanced view of Chaos, but Chaos just seems to be "spiky Imperium" and easily identifiable bad guys. Ain't nothing about the God of Death and the God of Life having a relationship being a mythical version of a circle of life. >:(
I'd prefer a Liberation Chaos Theology take if the writers werent pandering to their big spending SPEHS MUHREEN cryptofascist whales.
I'm always baffled by nerds on various 40k groups asking about what "really" happened in some event or other. And apparently that shit sells given the popularity of the horus heresy books. Bleh
Some of the most insufferable "measure Star Wars characters in 'who would win in a fight based entirely upon imagined midi-chlorian count" nerds tend to be not only accepting but pleased with the retcon where the Imperial Guardsman who fought and died alongside the Emperor against Horus is sort of pushed out of canon history because his magic space eugenics power level was too low to matter.
To be young again. Looking back, what shit pit of a first online community to interact with
I used to be very earnestly naive and thought it'd exciting nerd talk about X-Wing technical specs and maybe exploring the mysteries of the Force...
But no. The most active ongoing threads daily were "who would win in a fight" pissing contests that were all debated entirely on midi-chlorian count. Some even did nerd accountant "fantasy football" style team matchups that compared the sum of these midi-chlorian counts to these midi-chlorian counts to decide who won. They even did body mass percentage deductions for Darth Vader's missing limbs as part of their magic microbe math.
I remember "energy output of a turbolaser based on this effect of an asteroid being destroyed" with some spurious pixel counting. And how it would totally destroy the Star Trek ship. Or vs 40k stuff. Gotta make sure your fictional guys can beat up their fictional guys.
The most exhausting versions of those "X vs Y" debates were "dae le Q would just kill everyone in enemy universe" which is nothing like the character or what they would do. They'd have started the versus match to watch if anything.
Games Workshop sucks but in recent years their writing team has done a lot to push back against this. They brought back a Primarch, a son of the Emperor the Imperium worships as a God, and any time he's talking to someone in private he's basically the
wojack.
The Primarch Guilliman is an enlightened despot type in the Roman sense. He generally wants what's best for his people (the Imperium) but is still willing to kill and do bad things to get it. He wakes up after 10,000 years in stasis and finds that the Imperium has gone straight to hell (some parts literally) and he has to put all of it back together. There was a series of novels where he had to deal with politics on Earth and he was complaining hard about how awful every institution is.
The funniest example of this is that Guilliman woke up after 10,000 years in Stasis and asked "what year is it?" The best answer anyone can give him is "we think it's the first year of the 41st millennium". Guilliman does his own calculations and as best as he can tell its probably the 41st millennium, with a margin of error of a thousand years. So he sets up a small organization to catelogue the history of his absence and their efforts to refine and apply Guilliman's dating system immediately causes them to get into a covert civil war with a faction of the Inquisition (exactly what they sound like) that deals with time-related heresy. It gets so bad that Guilliman has to personally step in to get them to stop killing each other.
It's not exactly leftist, but reintroducing a straight man (ayyy) into the setting is exactly what they needed to do to point out the absurdity of everything.
That sounds fantastic. I might have to read this, and the Ciaphas Cain novels.
The Indomitus Crusade books starting with Avenging Son have a lot of the Guilliman grumbling scenes but a lot of it is just fairly generic Space Marine schlock. Watchers of the Throne is about a Custodes and a Sister of Silence in almost a buddy cop kind of match up and the second book delves a lot into the machinations of Imperial politics following Guilliman's return.