JcDent

JcDent

@JcDent

A T-55 experience

Military history, video games and miniature wargaming.

RPGs, single player FPS, RTS and 4X, grog games.

Passionate about complaining about Warhammer.

Catholic, socialist, and an LGBT+ ally.

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JcDent
@JcDent

Why I like Warhammer 40,000

Maybe some people are mystified as to why I complain about it so much.

So, bearing in mind that a lot of it solidified when I was 15 and that starting with Space Marines would be cheap...

The Imperium of Man

It's a shitass place to live! It has only ever become more shitass as I turned more leftist.

BUT!

It is a welcome breakaway from a lot of sci-fi universes where the Default Human Faction is Space US: "we're blue, we do diplomacy, we have science going." It's an ossified stereotype, it's Star Trek's Federation without the communism.

The Imperium of Man is decidedly none of that.

It holds the galaxy in its grip. Its nominally ruled by a dead god. It doesn't do diplomacy - it either consumes (if you're human) or destroys (if you're non-human or annoying-enough human).

Instead of bland, featureless sky-scrapers, the cities are cyclopean gothic monstrosities festooned with skulls (real and artificial) and gargoyles - or exist as hives where billions cram into spires reaching into the atmosphere. Instead of gunmetal grey ships that could fit into a dozen similar settings without anybody noticing, it has kilometers long flying cathedrals fortified for ramming. Instead of bland, smooth tunics, everyone looks like they katamari'd through a museum.

The masses aren't clean-cut mostly-white people taking automated pavements to manicured parks. They're wretched, transformed by crude bionics (sometimes to the point of becoming less man and more of a tool for a singular task), and they're dressed in heavy baroque clothing. Still mostly-white. Everyone has tattoos, weats religious trinkets, and carries gadgets you could only guess at the function of. Zealous preachers in mobile pulpits, cloned babies converted into bionic cherubs and skulls float over them.

Whereas most sci-fi human armies are just USMC in Space, the Imperial armed forces are decidedly not that. From the apex superhuman killers of the Space Marines to the lowly Guardsmen faced with foes that almost always outclass them one-to-one, they wage wars on scales unseen anywhere else with a mix of technology that's either ancient, misunderstood, or a mixture of both.

Those forces are additionaly augmented by warrior nuns, weird tech cultists, and yet stranger stuff. There's an entire sector of the internal security apparatus designed to combat literal demons.

If most settings define progress as "liberalism with increasingly faster space ships," 40K measures it in dead enemies. Imperium's weapons have been passed down via generations, developed in a prosperous age log gone, rediscovered and repurposed.

The whole human civilization is living on cannibalizing the remains the remains of past golden ages just like post-cold war societies exist on eating the socialist benefits put in place when Communism was a threat and you needed to placate people. It's like Rome: crumbling, sure, but still extremely big - and extremely dangerous.

The Imperium spits on "rationality" and "common sense", it's gleefully atavistic and anachronistic in a way that's usually reserved for the ones opposing Vanilla Sci-Fi Humanity - and yes it has been around for ten thousand years.

Nothing in the Imperium works the way that sci-fi taught you to expect a future human society would work. Fuck you.

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in reply to @JcDent's post:

IkomaTanomori
@IkomaTanomori

You can also end the sentence as "Nothing in the imperium works." My favorite example is Ciaphas Cain, who became hero of the imperium by doing exactly the opposite of anything a heroic commissar is supposed to do. He and Inquisitor Amberly come across in Sandy Mitchell's wonderful prose as the only sane people on any given planet they end up visiting at the same time. For "coping with an insane galactic system" values of sanity.

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melinoe
@melinoe

i adore how much ciaphas cain feels like the most plausible bit of canon to me lol. like everyone feels like people, i can almost recognise them as modern, until something like "ahh yes the prisoners for live fire target practice have arrived" (and we quietly remember how punishment in the imperium is grossly arbitrary and they're probably 90% very innocent).

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GCU-Grey-Area
@GCU-Grey-Area

Sandy Mitchell produces genuinely decent pulp sci-fi with the Cain series that would do well even if it didn't have association with 40K. As compared to his peers in the 40K novel space (e.g. Abnett, Haley), he writes genuinely compelling characters. Cain works so well because, as you say, he's an isolated sane man in a fundamentally dysfunctional system. The structure of his memoirs being edited and commented upon in-setting by Vail is also a great narrative tool that Sandy Mitchell makes expert use of.

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IkomaTanomori
@IkomaTanomori

I think my favorites are his "blue moon -> Hawk & Fisher -> blue moon again and they turned out to be the same characters whaaaat" series (something he retconned in somewhere in the Hawk and Fisher short stories and novels when he realized it would be fun), but Deathstalker is worth a reread I'd agree.

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dante
@dante

good post. i'm not a 40k person per se (i've dabbled in some of the games and also like a fair bit of the lore that i've seen in bits and pieces) but i totally understand the attraction toward a setting like this. i've talked about this a lot with friends, but i think there's something refreshing about a Kind Of Dumb Sci-Fi universe that doesn't try and pretend to be the Future Liberal Paradise, the sort of thing that just annoys you as a leftist the more you realize that they're usually just sweeping shit under the rug. 40K (and, imo, other meathead stuff like Halo, which i love) don't try and pretend they're anything other than they are, really. They tend to show a future full of war and bad times, and i think that paradoxically opens them up to more interesting, weird, brutal types of storytelling, some of which turns out to be Actually Good.

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GCU-Grey-Area
@GCU-Grey-Area

I'd argue that 40K and Halo actually go in different directions here. They both present truly awful social systems to live in, but whereas the Imperium is understood by author and reader to be unabashedly awful ("the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable"), we're presented the UNSC in Halo as if we're supposed to like them. As JcDent puts it in the original post, it's the kind of sci-fi that glorifies American militarism. It's also hard not to read Halo as post-Cold War interventionist propaganda - the parallels between the Covenant and an orientalist view of the Middle East are obvious (besides arguable aesthetics, the Arbiter's original name was Dervish).

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dante
@dante

Yeah, I think I didn't phrase that exactly right -- I think Halo is a politically conservative work writ broadly, and I think the way that manifests is a sort of liberal Eternal Space Marine concept. Why I like Halo is that I think there's still interesting stuff within the seams there.

I think 40K is similar in the sense that it is (at least broadly understood as) a politically conservative work that nonetheless has really interesting stuff in the seams of that fantasy, though I'll concede that I'm less learned on the specifics there. The 40K Imperium Space Marine is iconic for a reason, and I think a lot of that reason is "it looks fucking badass".

What I think is cool about both of those settings is that both of them GENERALLY present a world that has very interesting political implications if you look at them through a certain lens -- the UNSC in Halo are causing all their own problems, more or less; and the Imperium of Man is, as JCDent put it, a vast, eternally crumbling but eternally dangerous empire.

edit: ALSO i think there's something to the fact that 40K came about in the Thatcherite era and Halo came about in the Bush era -- there's these tensions inherent in the work that I think are fascinating. In both, the [Empire] is eternal but the [Empire] is deeply flawed.

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JcDent
@JcDent

40k at inception is like 50% Nemesis the Warlock ripoff, with the non-Imperial bits bolted on by borrowind heavily from Warhammer Fantasy. Space Marines didn't become the superhuman killing we know from the fluff till like 3rd edition, I think.

I don't know how overt Halo games are about their society being bad. I played all the PC games save ODST, and it says very little about the society.

But in Halo 1, mankind is underattack by a multicultural religious society that struck first and hates our freedom. I dunno how political later developments are, and by the time it's 343 industries, I don't know if they have goals beyond another GOTY (granted, you would know more).

That's not to say that 40K didn't lose it's satirical roots along the way. 40k may not be written with the idea that fascism is cool, but Space Marines are 100% canonically heroes par excellence. Anyone still claiming that 40K is satire is in denial.

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dante
@dante

I don't know how overt Halo games are about their society being bad. I played all the PC games save ODST, and it says very little about the society.

lmao yeah ok i'll admit my opinion here is mostly colored by the huge swaths of dumb external lore that has been added onto the series over time.

But yes! I think they're both fascinating franchises obv. i think hyper-militarized fantasy stuff is always interesting

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