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?
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?
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”
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
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”