so many god damned factions, fractals of factions within factions, yet not a SINGLE communist space marine chapter? what the hell.
tbh Games Workshop has been doing this themselves for ages. I’m not up to date on the books but in all of the ones I’ve read the humans are mainly Good People dealing with Hard Times using their Grit and Determination. The lore about humanity being a bunch of highly superstitious fascists? Well that only applies to the designated Bad Humans, and not our Boys in Blue.
Peak 40k was when it was a series of heavy metal album covers and sourcebooks full of over-the-top descriptions of how awful the future was, once they started trying to portray it through the lens of pulp science fiction/fantasy the heroification of humanity was more or less inevitable.
It’s sad but it does at least speak to the quality of the satire in the original design of the setting that you’d have to really carve out its fundamentals to totally erase it. The idea of warp and chaos being an unresolvable problem, an enemy that will always meet whatever escalation thrown at it, at the heart of the imperium of man is cool, it captures the character of fascism as a sort of society-scale suicidal death spiral. GW may try everything it can to paper over it, but the truth is that if they truly made the setting completely unambiguous, it would lose the last of its appeal.
The old books went hard, they were so gleefully on-the-nose about it being a setting centered around a decaying fascist empire and its murder-golem space marines all trying to out-scowl and out-tantrum the spectres of decay/defeat/being outsmarted/gayness that are just getting more powerful the more they screech at them.
They are yassifying the only thing keeping the UK economy afloat
The only good guys in 40k are the World Eaters who in my head canon are himbos who help people work out and provide body positive encouragement
They are patrons of the arts too .
Oh wait, no wrong lot
Slaanesh (all of the Chaos gods really) only exist because of living beings and their psychic connection to the Warp
This is the reason why the war is eternal, because to stop it, you’d have to sever every living things psychic potential somehow and so far, that means killing them
This is the problem with 40K, they want to sell stuff and the easiest way to sell stuff is to have Good v. Bad
This is why there is very little material outside of lore snippets where the Imperium is unapologetically bad
You’ll never see a video game where the Imperium puts down a planet for refusing to pay tithes, you’ll never see a movie where a Space Marine eats the brain of a suspected cultist to find out the truth and you’ll never see a TV show where political dissidents are lobotomized and turned into servitors
A lot of the T’au book has abject horror in reaction towards the Imperium. I sort of understand and like (not their execution of) the idea that this shit has been going on for so long it’s so “normalized” that when you read outside of the “Imperium books” it shows their nature. You read some of the T’au stuff and it really does shine.
Rogue Trader: Faith and Coin has some absolutely brilliant excerpts that show how fucked up humanity really is at this time. A Rogue Trader with a damaged ship landing on a world ruthlessly exploiting a primitive, stone-age species and forcing the entire planet of theirs to give tribute while indoctrinating them into the Imperial Creed so that they are so religiously blinded to the exploitation that is occurring. The crew then disappears into space entirely with a ship full of goods. These “Anthropolatrists” would now be taking their first steps into the stars, using human design, technology and first meeting the IMPERIUM believing that they were their beneficent gods.
That right there is a lore snippet, yes; a heavily paraphrased and shortened version but it truly shows the absolute evil that the Imperium is. How horrible the universe is that this young species will meet their “gods” they’ve worshiped for thousands of years only to be exterminated entirely in a vile hatred of the “xeno”.
Another one with an Inquisitor literally using Nazi-style propaganda to turn the humans on a world that they existed on peacefully with DAoT tech and other xenos into literal zealots that tore apart their entire fully developed, peaceful civilization that existed for thousands of years for the sake of a “God-Emperor” that only appeared in their minds decades earlier.
That’s the kind of shit that’s fucked up to me and they don’t hold back on that sadly, you’re right. They will never show that kind of shit on TV or in movies. It’s gonna be generic shit that depicts the Imperium as “DAE STARSHIP TROOPERS BUT GOOD!!!”
You can’t like own a family or planet, maaaaan. If you think you can youre the badie
what even is a tourist in this context?
Someone who is only faintly aware of the property
Like someone who watched an episode of Batman: The Animated Series trying to speak about the decades of Batman comics
Casual fan, someone who just arrived, overconfident but ill informed
generally in my experience is someone midst a super hero entrance, arriving to fight the woke
