To these kinds of people, nothing is political until their views are challenged. Politics dominates every facet of their life and they only notice when a necessary change is pointed out.
The Tomb Kings are an allegory for spooky in warhammer fantasy.
They followed it up with:
Where’s the gender dysphoria in warhammer then?
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.
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 suuucksI 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.
Mostly
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 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.
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.
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.
It’s going to blow their minds once they figure out who the Empire in Star Wars was an allegory for.
I’d like to have this person watch Starship Troopers and then write an essay on what it’s about.
I found his essay
“Cool soldier guys cleanse the galaxy of unholy xenos”
That’s all it says, he turned in the same paper for the Warhammer essay too.
Damn, F 10% for correctly identifying the movie and writing name and date at the top of the paper
killing bugs duh
While listening to “Dixieland” on electric violin.
The actual Robert Heinlein novel is very much about “fascism is good.” Bob Heinlein was this kind of weird mix of Ayn Rand libertarian, military-fetishist, pedophilic and incest obsessed futurist who also liked cats but not non-white people. The movie was a parody of the ideas in the novel, but Heinlein took those ideas very seriously and they cropped up time and again in his books. He embraced bisexuality while still thinking that the man-woman relationship was what nature intended. There’s a lot to not like about the guy - like fathers being seduced and bedded by their thirteen year old sexually aggressive but still meek and mild daughters, with said daughters proceeding in their quest with the active help of the mother. And so on.
Anyway, I don’t know how many people that enjoyed the movie knew that it was not only a parody, but one that intentionally and in great detail directly mocked the book it was based on.
They’d probably think it was about how fascism is good. It doesn’t go far enough imo.
You can explicitly make the fascists into cartoon villains like Star Wars and still get people doing the “empire did nothing wrong” larp and unironically making support for fascists their identity through it.
The funniest part of Disney acquiring Star Wars has been them putting on unironic fascist parades for their space nazi IP. Like, kids in theme parks watching storm troopers demonstrate their discipline in full regalia for the people to share in their display of strength. And then they have a fascist gift shop at the end. It’s super unhinged.
To be clear I want a 20 minute long presentation and the start and end of the movie explaining that the federation are the bad guys, why their systems do not work, as well as an overview of the horrors of fascism. During the movie, the fascists must be depicted to be fundamentally wrong. Bonus points for them also constantly being portrayed as incompetent, by eg slipping on a banana peel every 20 seconds (and then being eaten by a bug, which are explicitly communist and also good).
EDIT: This unironically
I think the issue is that you shouldn’t make fascists “fun” or “cool” in any way whatsoever.
In both Star Wars and Troopers the fascists are undeniably fun and entertaining to ride along with. Fun, cool or entertaining things inevitably make people want to imitate or copy-cat them for funsies, and this rubs off into personal identity.
The only movies that portrayed Nazis correctly are the Indiana Jones movies and Come and See. One for portraying the Nazis as a bunch of incompetent buffoons and the other for portraying the Nazis as a bunch of incompetent genocidal buffoons.
This is totally correct and nobody wants to imitate being those nazis as a result.
Reposting one of my old comments:
Fundamentally satire of fascism doesn’t work because fascist ideology revolves around the idea that you’re a loser made weak by the removed other but can be made strong and cool by doing all the violence.
If fight club had a scene where Tyler Durden tried to ask a girl out in queue to the McDonald’s breakfast menu, pissed himself out of nervousness, and then broke into tears in front of everyone. All that would change is there’d be a fascist org called Piss Boys whose initiation would involve drink a lot of water before queuing up for the world’s greasiest hash browns.
I entirely agree, if fascists are to be portrayed at all it should be as buffoons and idiots, because nobody will want to be seen as a buffoon and idiot.
The Mel Brooks strategy
Which is why my biggest critique of 40k will always be James Workshop are too much of cowards to let another faction be a decent fucking foil for the satire of the Imperium. So long as the fash-inclined fans can circle back around to “Well the Imperium may be bad, but it’s worse everywhere else!” you’ve lost as a satirist. Stop ass-pulling Ws for the blueberries so they always come out on top smelling like roses so you can sell more toys, and actually stand by the idea that there is a viable alternative to human fascism in your fictional setting; instead of leaving that to the interpretation of the most media illiterate people in the history of the concept.
The Monteverdi/Shakespeare school of Prologue writing. “We are the muses, sit down and shut up as we take 10 min to explain to you exactly what this story is about and what moral lesson you should take from it. We will be back at the end with a chorus illustrating this, There will be an exam.”
That’s actually what the book is about, though! Heinlein was a classic example of a libertarian-turned-fascist. He wrote a book about how war is cool and the military is a necessary part of an ordered society. The book reads like satire because you would have to be a very dumb Nazi to read it and think “Of course we should be constantly at war with a faceless and dehumanized enemy, and create a society around that principle. This makes sense and is good.” but that’s literally what Heinlein was trying to say, or at least present as a possibility in the book.
There’s some argument that he was being ironic and leaving things to be interpreted by the audience, but if you look at his work on the whole, and his political opinions, it’s clear that he’s just a bog-standard American conservative who likes war, racism, and misogyny, but doesn’t like the government or taxes.
you have to be the most uninspired lazy writer in existence if you add modern day mentality and political thoughts in a fucking fantasy game set in a different universe/era
True. This is why in my hopepunk future setting, humans no longer have any concept of sex or gender. Most humans are raised in communal creches and having two parents is extremely rare. Most people are also gestated in tubes, and live birth is seen as a bit old-fashioned. The human genome has been completely tampered with to make self-modification a much simpler affair, as part of the Compromise of 2189 between genemodders and children’s rights activists. Humanity has eschewed the libertarian idea of terraforming Mars and are instead demolishing Ceres to make dozens of space habitats with a genetically modified ecosystem that makes predation completely unnecessary.
Or is that still too modern-day? It’s kind of hard to come up with this stuff when authors have already written about voluntary human hiveminds and non-sentient human-level intelligences. Oh who am I kidding, a girl kissing another girl is probably scifi to this freak.
Oh who am I kidding, a girl kissing another girl is probably scifi to this freak.
That’s allowed but only if it’s for the pleasure and for the sake of the cishet ego insert senpai that the girls are actually pining for all along.
Warhammer Fantasy != Warhammer 40K. In Warhammer Fantasy I think the Empire is more of an allegory for early capitalist imperialism/colonialism coming out of Europe but I’m not an expert on that setting.
I would say you could point to it being more like a portrayal of the HRE.
Colonialism isn’t really a big part of the The Empire, that’s more of a Ulthuan/High Elves (stand-in for the British Empire) thing, and The Empire is portrayed as a feudal/pre-capitalist mercantile economy. The proto-capitalists I would say are located in the city-state of Marienburg, which is a sort of stand-in for somewhere like 15th-16th century Lübeck.
Marienburg has more dutch influence, most of the local languages is like fantasy dutch instead of fantasy german of the empire.
That’s a good catch, and you’re absolutely right.
There’s not a ton of modern day allegory in WH:F. 40k obviously is dripping in it, but Fantasy is mostly just “we stole Tolkien’s shit and then combined it with a heavy metal poster and tossed in the HRE for good measure. Now watch this dwarf break a Daemon Prince’s kneecaps with his bitchin’ warhammer.”
It’s army to army, for sure. Tomb Kings are ripped straight from Egyptian history, including the horsemen being a mercenary company, Skaven are just nazis, Bretonnians are a bunch of knights and peasants, etc…
I remember the first time I saw (and loved) There Will Be Blood I had an argument with a friend about it. He hated it and said he didn’t understand who could enjoy a movie like that–“everyone was so shitty, who am.i supposed to root for?” I was kinda floored by that, because I remember thinking it was amazing and near-perfect. To me it was like a surgical diagram, delving much deeper than some trite ethical parable into the minds of the powerful and the power-seeking, and demonstrating the world they perpetuate.
Not saying I was right when I disagreed, but I realized we were watching movies for different reasons. I had my foot in the real world, enjoying media for how it interacts with it, while he was enjoying movies as something to utterly submit yourself to. If a movie doesn’t have a good slot for him to sit in, he’s homeless in it. In some ways he probably enjoyed media more than I do.
Sometimes similar people to that revel in “everyone is an asshole” stories if what they get out of it is “therefore status quo good, pick your favorite ruling class monster to quote and emulate.” You can often tell when those stories come about and how they’ll be received when the supposed worst character is the one that is trying to improve society somewhat instead of just oinking and rolling in shit like everyone else in it.
“These are bad guys, good thing that’s not us” stories hit different than “nobody can be good actually” stories, sure
“nobody can be good actually”
This can sometimes miss its audience as the intended message. Look at how many people idolize and imitate Walter White
or even fucking Patrick Bateman. 
Tony Soprano is probably the best example. Undeniably a compelling character, constantly wavering in a sort of moral blind spot and making you think about the reliability of the signifiers we look for in figuring out who to trust. For some he’s just an awesome dad who kicks ass and gets shit done
For some he’s just an awesome dad who kicks ass and gets shit done
The worst chuds in my biological family directly quote that character, including to their own wives. Yes, they’re also wifebeating fascists.
Ulysses hows do you know so many terrible people?
Location, location, location!
I work where I have to meet lots of people that are generally not happy to see me because I’m talking to them about problems their kids are having in class. Also, I have coworkers that I am friendly enough with (it makes the day more bearable) that I just sort of quietly listen to their terrible takes. Also, bookstores and other hangouts around here tend to have very opinionated people that don’t hesitate to talk up strangers about their “ideas” (they want to sell you on some “hustle” or startup, both of which are abundant here).
Well, that and having a very chuddy biological family (in-laws are a lot better and that’s where I go for the holidays now).
IT’S AN ALLEGORY FOR FASCISM
IT’S LITERALLY WORD-OF-GOD AN ALLEGORY FOR FASCISM
IT COULDN’T BE ANY MORE CLEAR-CUT
YOU CAN LITERALLY GOOGLE THE PHRASE “WHAT IS WARHAMMER AN ALLEGORY FOR” AND YOU WILL GET THAT AS A FRONT-PAGE RESULTprime contender for one of the most “no investigation no right to speak” a g*mer has ever embodied
I know basically nothing about Warhammer, so I typed it into image search to see if it was super obvious and this was on the first page of results.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s probably not a subtle allegory lol.
yeah top result on google is “it’s an allegory for germany” (the empire)
a little further down I found this: https://br.ifunny.co/video/warhammer-is-an-allegory-it-s-a-commentary-on-fascism-yd0RLTL29
Might be some confusion there. In warhammer fantasy, the empire is very much supposed to be the HRE: a bunch of squabbling states that are only nominally subservient to the central authority of the emperor. The Imperium of Man in 40k on the other hand is just fascism. Love to have two settings that use similar names, definitely not confusing, thank u james workshop.
Yeah they literally copied Mussolini artworks and replaced him with the god-emperor.
But see Krieg Imperial Guard have gas masks and I like gas masks and you know the swastika is really just religious imagery and well you know war is brutal so you really have to just do whatever you can against the fake plastic armies of Chaos and space elves and undead robots and green men and those weird things that spit acid at you so actually YOU’RE the fascist for even bringing it up to begin with!!!
No you don’t understand Krieg is inspired by a combination of all the forces from WWI which is why it’s okay for someone to paint theirs like the afrika korps and add swastika transfers.
Oh God that reminded of some chud that was trying to argue that his afrika korp “inspired” imperial guard army (complete with custom afrika korp emblems but with the swastika replaced with an imperial aquilla) wasn’t fascist and didn’t make him a fascist. Spoiler: the rest of his account was wheraboo-level Nazi tank worship including pictures of a whole-ass shrine to them he made complete with anime girl nazi officers
Yep, guard players are mostly chuds. GW should nuke every guard subfaction but valhallans and then make them communist rebels.
Yep, guard players are mostly chuds.
I still won’t give up my guard army, but honestly 40k in general has too many chuds. Gone are the days of it being satirical and people understanding that the clearly theocratic fascist imperium aren’t The Good Guys™. Now a days GW hides behind the shield of “it’s satire guys, don’t be fascist!!1!1!” while writing the hundredth book about how it’s actually cool and good for a
ubermenschsuperhuman dictator to slaughter billions in the name of some fictional past glory daysYeah, I know. Some pig lives matter themed ultramarines would be a funny bit of satire to me. You’ve already got the blue and the skulls and the fascist oppression. However, warhammer fans would see it as unironically supporting fascist super cops. So I’d never paint it because warhammer is the wrong fandom to do it in. Same with trans masc space marines. Getting juiced up on super testosterone is something you can do a lot of gender themes with, but warhammer is too fascist to do it right.
I think I’ve seen blue lives matter themed space marines before, so you’re unfortunately late to that party. Satire is truly dead
Like Krieg looks like ww1 france come on.
Warhammer Fantasy is different from Warhammer 40k, but it’s pretty much just a piss take on how horrific and shitty sword and sorcery fantasy worlds really are, cutting away all the anachronistic romance and replacing it with horror and filth. It’s basically satirizing fantasy monarchist apologia and romanticism in the same way 40K directs that towards fashy sci-fi.
Neither setting does a particularly good job with the satire though, imo, to the point that I’d almost say 40K is more “what if Judge Dredd went back into space and we took this to a whole new level of silly? Like we could do a Judge Dredd/Dune crossover with like elves and shit, lmao,” than it is even the sort of tepid and still-brainwormed satire that Judge Dredd was.
I mean, it still has to sell miniatures and is owned by a corporation that has many incentives to cut away anything particularly biting.
Politics must mean something else to them, like perhaps some form of packaged good or a fruit.
This is like my fifth time reading this and the psychic damage is still immense.
I saw that r/gamingcirclejerk post about that thing when idly lurking. Replies are a cess pit of
elite stormtrooper culture.It’s just sexy big men adventuring in space with big guns, just like Starship Troopers
How dare they make Fallout and BioShock political… I love games with no social commentary on them at all, like Resident Evil… The Pharmacy being evil is just fun pretend stuff, it’s not a commentary on capitalism in medicine at all! /s
All art, all stories are an expression of one’s own thoughts and ideas. All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters’ goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view. No fascist will ever write about a communist utopia positively. No communist will ever uncritically write about a great man pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a billionaire. If you’re an “apolitical gamer” you will unquestioningly write about whatever you’re finding in the trash can of ideology at the moment. Similarly, everything you write will be tainted by “modern day thought” because everything we have ever experienced has happened in the modern day, including learning about the past. Every fantasy world is merely a reinterpretation of ours and every sapient fantasy race is allegorical to humans in some way, whether you intend it to be or not. We cannot comprehend non-human conflict and thus human conflict is all we can write about.
These people really do believe the curtains are blue, huh?
No communist will ever uncritically write about a great man pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a billionaire.
This is mostly true but I will state that as a communist one of my major stories I’m working on does have heroic monarchs in it.
To be fair this story is something I’ve been working on since before I became communist, and I’ve added revolutionary themes to it since, but the main “heroic monarch” character is one I created after becoming a communist. Like to be clear she’s a heroic monarch in a society where feudalism is every country, and I plan for the world the story takes place in to go through historical materialism stages of development over time. She’s a proactively progressive character that makes positive developments for the society she rules. She’s also one of my favorite characters I’ve developed.
But ngl I do kind of like Gambo/CKII dynastic stuff aesthetically and one of my two major works features it heavily. And features characters that are part of dynasties that are better or worse than others. And also feudal countries that are more progressive than other ones in the world.
I do worry that i’m letting my special interest make me too ideologically incoherent but its the story I wanna write so
All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters’ goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view.
This explains why I’m terrible at writing anything, or coming up with good overarching plots whenever I want to run a TTRPG. Because I don’t really understand other people very well.
I found a lot of success in joint-DM ventures with somebody who is great at telling ground-level stories. I do all the world building, they handle all the people stuff.
One of my favourite settings I built was a world where magic flows out of nexuses of power built by an ancient civilization that’s now lost to ruin. (Spoiler warning for my son if he reads this.) The world is a polar-shifted Earth, post-climate change and post-nuclear war. The power nexuses are the locations of nuclear power plants, and the island chain the story takes place on is a flooded European continent. I did a whole bunch of math and simulations in a GIS thingy, and figured out where the floodplains would be, and what would still be above water if sea level rose by X meters. Then I rotated it, just to make it even less recognizable.
It’s one of the ways I came to grips with the limitations of being Autistic, and how I can lean into the strengths I have instead.
that is such an awesome concept for a fantasy setting!!!
These people really do believe the curtains are blue, huh?
I once had a prolonged and fruitless argument in a video game guild chat with someone that insisted the 1980s GI JOE cartoon was perfect because it “had no politics and no political agenda.”
He even topped it off after a while with “did anyone ever tell you… the curtains are FUCKING BLUE?”
I have no idea what it means to say the curtains are blue anymore.
At first, I thought it was meant to poke fun at people who over analyze or really reach when discussing literature, but I don’t think it means that.
Can someone explain?
At first, I thought it was meant to poke fun at people who over analyze or really reach when discussing literature, but I don’t think it means that.
It still means that, though the extension is generally mocking the over-reaction against the idea of over-analysis by people that dogmatically claim that no message should be allowed to be derived from their treats.
I think it’s funny when people explain it using examples where the author legitimately did have well-documented cultural associations with certain colors. It’d be like in 100 years someone saying “Batman’s suit is dark because he’s supposed to be mysterious and operates in the shadow” and another person responding, “have you ever thought that maybe he just had a dark suit???”
He was the dark knight because his suit was fucking dark!
Or also, if the author didn’t want to draw attention to the curtains, they wouldn’t have mentioned them!
So it’s used to describe people who over analyze but also people who don’t read into media at all (example: the curtains are just blue, and that has no meaning)?
it might help to think if it like “the curtains are just blue!” being anti-over analysis vs “tHe CuRtAiNs ArE jUSt BlUe!!!” being anti-anti- over analysis
Hah okay.
It’s interesting how language develops. A word can mean something but also the exact opposite of that thing.
Advertising, or “capitalist propaganda” as the kids call it, is famously non-political and incites the audience to no action or thought that could possibly influence the structures of power we’ve surrounded ourselves with.
Absolutely wild
Not just the genre of fantasy, or any one genre of media for that matter. All narrative-oriented phenomena are the manifest arms of ideology: novels, movies, games, religion, advertisements, propaganda, etc. Their actual form is not what is important, but more how they fit into the bigger picture of social communication – like how the same concept can be indicated with many different words within a language and across languages.
I don’t know why compulsory reeducation is so often considered far too “authoritarian” and cruel. Anyone who ends up like this as an adult was clearly and utterly failed by their first education. In situations like these, the most humane thing we can do to course correct is to provide them with a second education, all expenses paid. If reeducation can produce a positive outcome for the last emperor of China, then I’m sure it can do the same for gamers.
