Update: I played (space marine 2) with my friend, and yeah it’s a pretty solid game. I set the voices to Russian because it was silly.
arguing that the Imperium are the Good Guys despite the fact they are Space Fascists because The Universe Is Just That Bad
arguing the Imperium are the Good Guys because they have Space Commissars and are therefore Communists doing Galactic War Communism, being literally ruled by Psychic Lenin's Preserved Corpse after the Horus Revisionism. Space Marines are the True Volcel Vanguard.
their beef with the Tau is like a weird Sino-Soviet Split
they literally do colonialism and wealth inequality
That rambles on way too long, but it does make a salient point: Space Marines are weird and bad, and attempts to make them just big manly fighty dudes that grunt and fight instead of weird mutant battle-nerds suck and are bad. They shouldn't be relatable, they should barely be human, and they definitely shouldn't be "wot if ur normal soldier man was big and extra fighty?"
Not least of which because Orks already fill the niche of being big silly guys that like to fight.
I don't understand why people write like this. They've made their point in the first 3 paragraphs, and then it just goes on and on.
Is good games journalism back? 👀
Shout-out to aftermath and RPS for holding it down in the meantime
I see more ironic and comedic 40K material than I see actual 40K lore these days. Fuck I made a 40K lore joke post on here not to long ago and it was received well.
My point is, while there are actual fascists attracted to 40K lore, I think the phenomenon is overplayed more than a little. Fuck there are fascists in the My Little Pony fandom, fash dorks will latch onto anything. I think most 40K fans these days are fully aware it's tongue-and-cheek nature. I really don't think people who like painting goofy miniatures of armored dudes wielding chainsaw guns are any more predisposed to fascism than anyone else.
I really don't think people who like painting goofy miniatures of armored dudes wielding chainsaw guns are any more predisposed to fascism than anyone else.
Have you actually participated in 40k games, especially ones in large shared areas with actual maps set out?
I played Orks for years in local venues. Of course not everyone was a fascist or even "ironically" a fascist (Tau players were generally cool), but it sounds like unobserved knee-jerk presumption to say that there's no difference between the general population's fascist density and that of those coming to such organized games with their SPEHS MEHREENS and telling players a table or two away that might have dyed hair or even a rainbow bracelet that they are (slurs) that should be exterminatus'd. That isn't something I've ever heard from the general population outside of such games or related online material.
As long as those chuds pretended it was "just kidding" or "just getting into the mood" the organizers wouldn't do anything. I think I saw one such fascist actually get kicked out, but that was mostly for throwing things and having a tantrum, not necessarily the part where he was telling a (slur) that they deserved to burn in holy Promethium.
Meanwhile you try any of that shit in any of the places near me and you'd be thrown out instantly and would definitely not be allowed back. I think as it is with most things it depends on where you are and what kind of community the location builds.
And yes I have played 40k on tables in game shops full of people who were probably chuds, and they kept their damn mouths shut because they just wanted to play and knew they wouldn't be allowed to if they started talking about anything other than the game.
My local area gatherings were pretty lax, yeah. Crowded, in relatively small spaces, where passive-aggressive "in character" LARPs about how they want to hurt/kill other people present just... happened.
And yes I have played 40k on tables in game shops full of people who were probably chuds, and they kept their damn mouths shut because they just wanted to play and knew they wouldn't be allowed to if they started talking about anything other than the game.
I would have brought my Orks with me to my new home across the country if I knew how different it could have been.
Okay
what actual benefit is there to trying to downplay the issue? fascists aren't a target we should "lay off of". even when a space is devoid of them we should be vigilant and intolerant of their ideology and presence.
I'm all for chasing fash out of 40k, any My Little Pony, and the planet. I'm just saying I don't think there's anything inherent to 40k that makes it more attractive to fash than any other fandom. Fash are consumerist nerds, they'll glom onto anything. There are fash in the fucking Trek fandom for Christ sakes.
disagree, it's their blood libel genocide fantasy made universal
Then what are they getting out of My Little Pony?
no, you have a point about My Little Pony, but My Little Pony also can't be used for making "get the flamer, the HEAVY flamer" memes so it's different at a base level
True but I've honestly seen more explicitly Nazi MLP memes than explicitly Nazi 40k memes, surprisingly.
weird
Incredible
This is why it is neigh impossible to parody fascism while making its footsoldiers protagonists. Someone will always identify with them.
Fascists believe in embracing contradictions, lies, and hypocrisy. They don't really believe in anything beyond base carnal urges. So it's basically impossible to criticize or mock them because they can just edit the version of reality in their brain to make them feel cool again. This is why you just need to bash them out of existence, there's no "owning" them, they just have to stop being.
The way to satirize fascists is to make them stupid and incompetent. It's for this reason that the Nazis in the Indiana Jones movies are probably the only proper satirical portrayal of Nazis. It's that and the Three Stooges parody of Hitler and Mussolini. As we can see irl with Zionists, fascists revel in depravity. They do not give two shits that they are portrayed as inhuman because they fucking relish that shit with a shit-eating grin. But stupidity and incompetence? They hate being truthfully portrayed as the buffoons they are. Of course, space marines will never be portrayed as stupid and incompetent because who's going to blow their money buying overly priced figures of the stupid and incompetent faction?
I continue to have no interest in WH40k
They have a space comunsit faction. They are based on anime and after they got too popular the company changed it from space comunists to it all being secret mind controll. So that is intresting a little bit. Othe than that you aren't missing much
Ah yes the Lore that retroactively removed the only good faction despite them being basically irrelevant because they don't want non-Hitlerites to exist in their setting definitely isn't reactionary
Yeah. I think that is kinda intresting so see how the game started with Mar'gret Thatch'er being a demon of greed and how that progressed to mirror CIA propaganda about brain washed celestials. Just the arc of capitlaism and fascist co-opation is wild to see in microcosim.
Warhammer 40k came out of the same circles of comic artist nerds as Judge Dredd, and very much always embodied the same sort of left-lib brainrot where they're satirizing fascists and shitty government policy and all, but then turn around and whinge about communists and just unironically do fascist fearmongering about communist invasions and fifth columns and shit, like the Judge Dredd authors did with the Apocalypse War arc.
Like Warhammer 40k is at its core Dune and Judge Dredd and Tolkien all squished together and then inflated into something absurd and grotesque, as a joke. And then on top of that is 40 some years of different authors and artists painting it with coats of "trying to do real serious grown up worldbuilding in the silly space game world" until what's left is something weird and entirely incoherent.
It's concerning seeing how willing people are to enjoy fascism because it looks cool to them.
Darktide is the superior Warhammer game anyways. Who needs some dumb eight foot tall nerd wearing a tank as a business suit when you can play a 5' tall woman wearing a burlap sack, with the worst haircut you've ever seen, swinging a 6' long chainsaw around, who is diegetically too angry to die?
I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that online leftists just can't help but hit a brick wall when it comes to 40k
The crux of all these satire arguments boils down to "make the satire MORE obvious, MORE cartoonish, eliminate all nuance or three dimensional character development and most importantly make it NOT FUN" and I always ask, WHY?
Yes the heroic, relatable, goofy ass space imperialists serve an evil empire that destroys whole worlds, all while quoting war poetry and the unity of humanity....and sometimes they crack jokes, there it is, we found your satire on the hypocrisy and mundane evil of imperialism, is that not obvious enough, does every character need to shout "I'm a fascist!" every other line?
Do they need to make space marines literal cannibalistic vampires who thirst for blood and eat civilians alive before the satire becomes acceptable for high culture lefties?......OH WAIT that's literally a quarter of the space marine chapters
Subversion and nuance are fine in anti-fascist satire, you don't need to drop an anvil on the setting to get the point across
Do they need to make space marines literal cannibalistic
They do canonically eat people's brains to steal their knowledge. That's canon, that's the actual lore. Space Marines literally eat people in the official lore books describing the things Space Marines do.
Yes the heroic, relatable, goofy ass space imperialists serve an evil empire that destroys whole worlds, all while quoting war poetry and the unity of humanity....and sometimes they crack jokes, there it is, we found your satire on the hypocrisy and mundane evil of imperialism, is that not obvious enough, does every character need to shout "I'm a fascist!" every other line?
this is literally the most confusing way to do satire ever and it's obvious in your literal paragraph. They aren't just making them superficially look heroic, they literally created a cosmological structure where being anything except a war criminal ends up with you either corrupted or murdered, and despite this they consistently portray space marines doing generous and heroic things despite fundamentally being little Hitler meat mechs. It is not good satire to make the people you're satirizing actually material do good in your world even if you try to counterbalance it with obscure war crimes they do no one will read (in the contrary, it makes it look apologetic of war crimes)
That's a really really long idealist article, that dosn't say much in the end and might have been much shorter if the author had a materialist perspective on fascism.
Ugh, Warhammer is a friend’s special interest right now so I have to play this game with them so they won’t be suicidal.
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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