Josh Reynolds no longer works for BL

[DukeLeto69]

As I don’t read AoS or WHF I have not actually read a lot of Josh Reynolds. However, I do follow him in Twitter and I felt that him tweeting out all his rejected pitches was in the context of “see all you budding BL authors even us established folks get rejected, a lot! So just keep at it”

[Scribe]

The ECs were all great, the Harlis, great. His New Man, all great.

 

Hey, not everything works for everyone, but if we are offering up sacrifices.

 

I'll let Abnett walk, and get Reynolds back. :D

[WARMASTER_]

Wait...The view on the EC and word bearers wasn't nuanced? You have a ton of characters that were more than "orgymaster" or "chaos zealot" and really help round out the various legions, especially when combined with some other authors takes (which are also often referenced).

 

Idk, his EC in Fabius have more nuance and depth than ADBs word bearers or black legion.

 

And also Savonna is clearly not a female space marine. She's a chaos champion that wears power armour, a concept that comes straight out of WFB with how someone can attain power from the gods.

As I said man it’s personal preference no right or wrong, I would strongly disagree though when you compare ADBs black legion to his EC work

 

And I know as previously stated I’m not talking about that character I never says I was I’ve not zero problems with that character, it’s not even from WFB it’s well established humans can wear PA as regards inquisitors or sisters

[DarkChaplain]

As I don’t read AoS or WHF I have not actually read a lot of Josh Reynolds. However, I do follow him in Twitter and I felt that him tweeting out all his rejected pitches was in the context of “see all you budding BL authors even us established folks get rejected, a lot! So just keep at it”

 

That, and he made it clear multiple times that the rejections weren't necessarily unjustified at all, for one reason or another. He was clear on it not being meant to take a dump on BL or to show off his amazing ideas that the editors just didn't get or whatever.

 

On top of that, the slew of rejected pitches he shared was entirely down to him underestimating the attention his initial tweet actually got. He pretty much ran out of discarded pitches in the end.

 

To attribute malice to that is pretty disingenuous, when he made it clear from the outset what his intentions were, and that he didn't believe he'd actually have to share more than a handful.

 

-------

 

As for comparing AD-B's Black Legion work and Josh's Emperor's Children? Josh wins by a country mile. So far, we've barely seen jack all of the "Black Legion" in the first place. We saw some dudes from different warbands that'd join with Abaddon, then crushed Fabius and the Emperor's Children with a freakin' spaceship in the style of Starkiller from The Force Unleashed, and then the second novel followed one of those guys mostly doing his own thing at Abaddon's behest, while the Black Legion was a thing that supposedly existed but was never truly prominent in that book. It was more about Abaddon's rival than the Black Legion itself. 

 

In that sense, until Book 3 actually shows the Black Legion properly, I can't say the series so far has made me care one bit about the Black Legion. It made me care well enough for a handful of characters with varying degrees of screentime, and it made me care for Abaddon, but there's 10 millennia of culture and obvious changes to the Black Legion that AD-B hasn't even remotely touched - and what we've seen so far is still far removed from what the end results will be.

 

Meanwhile, Josh has shown the Emperor's Children at their peak, Fulgrim at his best and worst, the decline of the Legion as well as its hope for recovery.

Edited October 19, 2020 by DarkChaplain

[cheywood]

 

In which works has he inserted his personal bias? That’s a common, unjustified complaint with ADB, but I’ve never heard that about Reynolds. I haven’t read his whole oeuvre, but what I have read has been well-researched and equally well presented so I’m surprised to hear that claim.

I agree it’s a unjustified complaint of ADB especially with woman characters! But for me it’s in most of his work he’s stated on multiple occasions he’s finds Space marines boring, so IMO you never see a nuanced view of any chapter or legion through his eyes they are always the archetype or most obvious version of what they should be

 

And then his subtle political views mentioned in the Fabius bile series on female space marine (let’s leave that well alone though, as it just starts very heated arguments)

 

There’s definitely mostly JR fans in this thread and I’m not trying to just ruffle feathers intentionally it’s all just my opinion on an Ex BL author

Oh it’s all good! I really like what I’ve read of Josh’s writing as a whole (especially his more recent work), but not everything he’s written is to my taste. His non-space marine works are generally better in my opinion, though I’d say the same about every author except ADB (and that’s largely because he almost exclusively writes about Marines).

 

Josh’s early Space Marine work from years ago, to my memory, fits your description of being rather generic. I think that’s arguably due more to editorial control than a conscious effort by Josh to depict space marines as boring and one-dimensional, as the dozens of painfully similar novels about space marines can attest to. Once Black Library’s editorial constraints seemingly loosened his work became, at least to my eyes, excellent. I finished Apocalypse the other day and it does a fantastic job of examining the Imperium and the Word Bearers. No sense of antipathy towards space marines in sight. Happy to agree to disagree there though.

 

One minor point I would like to make: Josh never said his ideas were incredible and BL needed to commission them in his twitter thread. He said the exact opposite as I recall, mentioning that a lot of his ideas were rejected for good reasons such as similarity to other stories being written or different plans for characters.

Edited October 19, 2020 by cheywood

[WARMASTER_]

Oh it’s all good! I really like what I’ve read of Josh’s writing as a whole (especially his more recent work), but not everything he’s written is to my taste. His non-space marine works are generally better in my opinion, though I’d say the same about every author except ADB (and that’s largely because he almost exclusively writes about Marines).

 

Josh’s early Space Marine work from years ago, to my memory, fits your description of being rather generic. I think that’s arguably due more to editorial control than a conscious effort by Josh to depict space marines as boring and one-dimensional, as the dozens of painfully similar novels about space marines can attest to. Once Black Library’s editorial constraints seemingly loosened his work became, at least to my eyes, excellent. I finished Apocalypse the other day and it does a fantastic job of examining the Imperium and the Word Bearers. No sense of antipathy towards space marines in sight. Happy to agree to disagree there though.

 

One minor point I would like to make: Josh never said his ideas were incredible and BL needed to commission them in his twitter thread. He said the exact opposite as I recall, mentioning that a lot of his ideas were rejected for good reasons such as similarity to other stories being written or different plans for characters.

I’d agree with you on that, although I believe Chris wraight and Dan Abnet do great work with marines! their best work is when you see them through human eyes though as you get the sense of how different they are

 

That’s fair man me too if we all liked the same thing the world would be a worse place, maybe my bias comes from his early work

 

Again that’s fair mate, I came away thinking he seemed much more like a disgruntled employee but I can see your point of view happy to agree to disagree also :)

[WARMASTER_]

 

As for comparing AD-B's Black Legion work and Josh's Emperor's Children? Josh wins by a country mile. So far, we've barely seen jack all of the "Black Legion" in the first place. We saw some dudes from different warbands that'd join with Abaddon, then crushed Fabius and the Emperor's Children with a freakin' spaceship in the style of Starkiller from The Force Unleashed, and then the second novel followed one of those guys mostly doing his own thing at Abaddon's behest, while the Black Legion was a thing that supposedly existed but was never truly prominent in that book. It was more about Abaddon's rival than the Black Legion itself.

 

In that sense, until Book 3 actually shows the Black Legion properly, I can't say the series so far has made me care one bit about the Black Legion. It made me care well enough for a handful of characters with varying degrees of screentime, and it made me care for Abaddon, but there's 10 millennia of culture and obvious changes to the Black Legion that AD-B hasn't even remotely touched - and what we've seen so far is still far removed from what the end results will be.

 

Meanwhile, Josh has shown the Emperor's Children at their peak, Fulgrim at his best and worst, the decline of the Legion as well as its hope for recovery.

 

I don’t know man I think you missed the point of the Black Legion novels, it’s on origin story! What we saw was the founding of the black legion... some of the best chaos characters ever put to pose, his depiction of a WE in Lheorvine Ukris was the best I’ve seen to date,

 

He manages to excellently flush out the big bad of 40K in Abaddon showing and his brutality and relentlessness in his goal of being the only chaos warlord still on goal (to destroy the imperium not war in the eye for power) but also his honour and his yearning for brotherhood and possibly the best death seen in any 40K novel when he duels Sigismund

 

We also only see the black legion throughout both books there’s constant mention as it’s tied to the entire story, even while we’re fallowing Khayon in the second book? so I’ve no idea where your arriving at that conclusion of us seeing Jack all of the legion

 

 

As regards to 10 millennia of culture and changes his not touched on. it’s because he can’t it doesn’t exist! No one in the legion is 10k years old they’re hundreds of years old, it’s the time dilation of the eye that’s warped there time compared to the imperium, ADB time line isn’t cut missing millennia we’ve seen or his given us most of the back story now and mentioned the future civil war quite a lot, all we’re missing is a few hundred years of there time and some black crusades which aren’t that far apart to the traitors just to the imperium

 

I would argue the EC are far less flushed out in Josh’s writing but again that’s just mu opinion on the subject we clearly have very differing views on the subject so I’m happy to leave it here as we definitely won’t see eye to eye and there’s zero point arguing over preference

[DarkChaplain]

Sure, it's an origin story - but precisely because of that, I do not for a moment believe it to be truly reflecting the Black Legion or their Marines. We see exemplars of the early founding days, not the Legion. Even what little we know has become of Khayon by M41 makes it very apparent that we've basically seen nothing at all yet, that the real Black Legion story hasn't happened yet.

 

As such, I cannot in good conscience call the series, as of now, a good showing of the Legion - merely some leading figures, some of which won't be around for long into their history, others still a far cry from their later incarnations. In the second book in particular, most of the BL action happens far off-screen, with Khayon handwaving it in his narrative. As a pair of eyes into the Black Legion, he's about as far removed from the meat of it all as he could be.

 

As for the Sigismund duel, sure, it was a spectacle that awes you on first reading, but I'd hardly call it the best death. A ton of others come to my mind that I found more memorable, emotionally impactful, or just more badass. Heck, I'd count David Guymer's sendoff for Koorland in The Last Son of Dorn among them.

 

It's nice to see you acknowledging that the actual Black Legion and their culture don't yet exist in the two novels so far, though. I'd make the comparison that what we got out of the books so far is akin to the childhood on Baal chapters from Guy Haley's Dante, with a little bit of narrative hindsight. Those chapters on their own don't tell you much about who Dante the Hero is on their own, without the rest of his career, or his endpoint, though.

 

AD-B might get there at some point, covering the Black Legion in their totality, but that may yet be a Song of Ice and Fire or two away from happening yet.

 

Josh did more to establish the lost nobility of the Emperor's Children in his short novel about Fulgrim, featuring only a handful of Marines, though. He showcased their excellence in various disciplines, the beginnings of their arrogance, the pressure put on them by the other Legions/Primarchs and themselves, and their Primarch's way. Legion culture is well established, as are their hangups and reasons to like them anyway.

 

And when you then get to Fabius Bile? You get three novels both harshly criticising the Legion as well as a sense of nostalgia for days lost. In Primogenitor alone, you have conflicting viewpoints on the Legion, where it is and where it should be again via Oleander and Fabius. You see what has become of them, under what leadership, and how there's still a desire to piece things back together despite it all. And Josh did it with a protagonist that is both as deeply intertwined with his Legion's history, both rise and fall, as he wishes to be gone from it and its politics.

[SkimaskMohawk]

I feel like a lot of us have no problem debating our likes and dislikes of various works. Saying an author does mediocre X work and that Y is better, but not wanting to continue the conversation further is pretty pointless.

 

To talk about the black legion series; it basically has nothing on the black legion as a legion. You get to know a lot of their warlords and abbadon himself, but the legion is...nebulous in terms of character. Is firefist a fantastic secondary character? Yes. Do I find him more enjoyable to read than Arrian? Yes. Does that mean that ADBs black legion has more depth and nuance than JRs emperor's children? Not by a long shot.

 

It sounds like you're conflating individual character work and readability with an examination of the legion and if it's nuanced or generic. They're really not the same; firefist doesn't add anything to the black legion being fleshed out, and neither does telemachon or falkus kibre or ashur-kai or vortigern or the rest of the ezekarion.

 

Edit, basically ninjad.

Edited October 19, 2020 by SkimaskMohawk

[Cleanse And Purify]

I have quite liked everything I have read from Josh. His Gotrek and Felix novels were stellar, the best since the first few King ones IMO, and Dark Harvest was the best Warhammer Horror novel yet. Indeed, it's so good I think one could recommend it to non-Warhammer fans with zero qualms. An excellent bit of folk horror, with a Laird Barron-esque quality to it at times (which is the highest compliment a contemporary horror author could receive IMO).

 

As to his Twitter posts: I got the exact opposite interpretation. It seemed to me he was quite gracious to Black Library and was posting all those ideas simply as examples to aspiring authors that even slamdunk ideas by established dudes get rejected all the time.

 

As an aspiring author, I can attest that it's a message worth reading from time to time ;)

[Scribe]

I didn't think much of Firefist at all, and I'm both an ADB and World Eaters fan boy...

[StrangerOrders]

If you have a wholistic take on the novels and sourcebooks, I'd say that ADB has established very well what the Black Legions characterization is.

 

Namely that it doesnt have one.

 

Its a barbarian horde crossed with a personality cult held together by extremely vague principles and a supreme leader with a circle of groupies baying for each other's blood while espousing brotherhood.

 

Otherwise known as the Sixteenth Legion. Right down to said leader going out of his way to makeup myths about his origins to buildup hype.

 

Its a pretty clever thing I'd say. 

 

As for Reynolds, he might not like marines but I kind of it laughable to read Lukas, Palatine Phoenix or the Fabius books and to then say he doesnt get them or write them interestingly. I also think he is in the bracket of writers that goes out of his way to be considerate of others and to do his homework.

 

Fun fact, he usually pulls alot of ideas from FW books and twists them to create really cool dissonances. My favorite thing he added to the Wolves was to actually extrapolate on their changing character with Lukas and to position them in the exact opposite place to the BAngels in terms of their history. Where the BAngels erased the Revenants, Josh introduced the idea that the Wolves actively enshrined and preserved the first and most humiliating part of their history as a permanent reminder of what they needed to fear. He then built on that by having the main conflict in the book be that the Wolves have steered so hard into avoiding becoming monsters that the social constructs they built to avoid that fate is now actively killing them. That to me as a Wolf fan does alot more for me than any other SW book I've read.

 

The Palatine Phoenix manages to both converge and build on every facet of the EC at once while making them something to be mourned. I've said this before but I feel like almost all of BL forgot that the EC were supposed to be admirable before their fall, and instead made them insufferable twits. Reynolds took that and confirmed both things, making them arrogant twits with a literally self-destructive sense of noblesse oblige while showing a spectrum of reactions to that idea in the Legions. From the contemptuous Telmar who is already showing a fascination with violence but goes out of his way to talk rebels down because he is actively sympathetic to them to the clearly partly-broken but deeply wise and disciplined Abdemon to the butt-of-all-jokes brute Quin, who yet also breaks the 'strength-obsessed marine' archetype by being outraged at the incompetence of unworthy nobles and being the first to stand up for mortals that show that they are trying. Thats... thats a pretty far cry from the pre-chaos EC which I struggle to not name a 'collective of uncomfortable gay jokes and arrogant twits'. Heck, it even deconstructs alot of the ideas around Space Marines.

 

Fulgrim himself is sort of a masterwork for me. Like, he is a man-child like his brothers but you get why he and his brothers are like that. Pyke summarizes it pretty well when noting that their circumstances almost universally would have robbed even a normal person of a chance to be well-adjusted, we often celebrate Guilliman as stable but its worth noting that 'watch your home light on fire, father murdered and then you kill everyone involved' is not something a normal young person deals with. Fulgrim on the other hand displays this really cool mix of childishness and self-awareness, the book is riddled with moments where you see him tugging himself back and chiding himself for his tendencies. The book does a good job of making the guy a coiled spring, constantly having to clamp down on doing what he wants to do because he feels like he cant. Its a really good way of building for his fall in a way more nuanced than 'and then he picked up the second plot-sword'. 

 

I guess the general idea is that I perceive Reynolds as having taken the concept of a marine and Primarch and moving on from their starting position beyond the usual 'child soldier' and 'man child' angle Chaos (and loyalists more often than not) seems to stuck with when they dont revert to 'normal soldier but tall'. His Posthumans do genuinely strike me as someone who has lived with those abilities and those experiences for centuries, they dont think like normal people but not in a strictly good/bad or underdeveloped way. They seem genuinely alien to me, not something that will always be a somewhat sigh-inducing child soldier, but rather something that started as that and then developed in a way that became something doesnt have an easy comparison. 

 

That sort of writing does appeal to me. Because I think its often forgotten that the gene-seed implantation overlaps with puberty, that point where between hormones and physical changes really differentiate sexes and people. A marine isn't Peter Pan but metal because they grew into bodies that dont have the same hormones, the same dimensions, their brains dont work the same way and to a degree its weird that they dont show that more often.

 

I like bits like WBs being fairly comfortable generating controlled bioelectricity, its useless in combat but their precision over their bodies control lets them generate it so why wouldn;t they use that day to day? A marine's relation to sleep is more in line with a dolphins than a human, so its cool to see scenes where they flick parts of their minds on and off or how Fabius has learned how to completely fracture his focus. I like that Fulgrim's traits do make it so that he almost recognizes people by heartbeat patterns and that marines notice people's weight displacement. These things arent treated as just fodder for action scenes like alot of BL or almost all western comics/media, they are treated as integral but uninteresting things in an Astartes day-to-day life.

 

Because you don't really need to dwell that much on breathing, despite it being sort of essential to your existence. So I love it when Astartes utilize but dont think much about things that are essentially natural to their bodes.

 

And that really resonates with me.

 

I'm not saying he is perfect by any means or giving an opinion on his personal feelings, but I struggle to see the PoV where he doesnt 'get' marines.

[DarkChaplain]

Frankly, the big takeaway I got from Firefist is that he doesn't like to be called Firefist.

I got a far better characterization out of an ex-War Hounds/World Eaters Space Marine by way of Josh's rendition of Endryd Haar in a mere three audio dramas (not having read the Black Book sections about him).

[Volt]

 

Imagine thinking that a super humble author who is understandably miffed about being skipped over for years, having a bunch of his stories left unpublished for years, getting taken off projects he was planning to wrap up on short notice and shuffled about while still being the fixer-upper anyway, commissioned to write not what he pitched over and over and over again but some by-the-numbers short notice boxed set / studio release tie in novels, is having an inflated ego.

I don’t know man the only side of the story you’ve got is his and he was clearly angry at BL so I’d take it all with a pinch of salt, there’s definitely reasons for book cancellations and pitches being rejected, probably lack of sales

 

And for me yes the Twitter rants of he’s all my amazing book ideas they had the cheek not to take seemed very egotistical, the whole list had one idea in it that sounded like a really good book the rest were very meh

 

We’ve got different opinions of quality of work has I wouldn’t sacrifice one of ADB Wraights or Abnetts for his in a millions years but as you say it’s a mute point now he’s gone

 

That's the bloody problem. Everything is just a feedback loop so we just get endless bolter porn crap instead of anything with even a shadow of being decent literature. GW mass markets bolter porn and sidelines most projects that have some value, then wonders when they take the occasional experiment it doesn't perform as well, while they've been cultivating a bolter porn reader-base exclusively for years. In the modern Black Library if you tried to pitch Eisenhorn you'd get it shot down for being silly and never selling well.

 

[WARMASTER_]

To talk about the black legion series; it basically has nothing on the black legion as a legion. You get to know a lot of their warlords and abbadon himself, but the legion is...nebulous in terms of character. Is firefist a fantastic secondary character? Yes. Do I find him more enjoyable to read than Arrian? Yes. Does that mean that ADBs black legion has more depth and nuance than JRs emperor's children? Not by a long shot.

 

It sounds like you're conflating individual character work and readability with an examination of the legion and if it's nuanced or generic. They're really not the same; firefist doesn't add anything to the black legion being fleshed out, and neither does telemachon or falkus kibre or ashur-kai or vortigern or the rest of the ezekarion.

 

I don’t think I’m conflating anything to be honest..

 

The entire point of the black legion is they’re not really a legion at all, they're the traitors still on mission that’s it!

 

they’re still a host of individual war bands with there own agendas, goals and structure but as long as they bend the knee and heed the call to war when abandon calls that all he requires of them.

 

There’s no legion structure beyond its commanders and separate war bands that follow Abaddon the black legion doesn’t need fleshing out more than the fact if we see why it was founded and how it came to prominence we see all of this in the books

 

I think you’re misinterpreting his reasons for flushing out the characters so deeply in this series instead of the “legion” itself, it’s because it’s the most important aspect of the Black Legions founding and why they exist at all! They crave brotherhood, they crave a higher purpose than just waring amongst themselves in the eye, they want to see the imperium fall! without flushing out the characters we wouldn’t understand why there’s even a black legion in the first place

 

ADB’s nuance takes its form in this, instead of giving us the easy (here’s a legion of black armoured space marines as they raid x world or are on x black crusade) which you seem to want. He instead gives us the reason they’re founded, why they fight and what it means to be part of a fractious grouping of Warbands that call themselves a legion. Much more of a nuanced take in my Opinion

[SkimaskMohawk]

Man, you're making a lot of assumptions about what I want from a book. I said I wanted a less generic look at the legion than the codex "they dont like the primarchs or their parent legions and want to get stuff done" .

 

And I feel like you couldn't have read the fabius books if you're praising ADB for showing fractious warbands trying to cling to some identity past the infighting and achieve a higher goal, but then go to say reynolds style is less nuanced. He literally has that same stuff going on, on top of building various aspects of a "cult" legion.

[Volt]

 

To talk about the black legion series; it basically has nothing on the black legion as a legion. You get to know a lot of their warlords and abbadon himself, but the legion is...nebulous in terms of character. Is firefist a fantastic secondary character? Yes. Do I find him more enjoyable to read than Arrian? Yes. Does that mean that ADBs black legion has more depth and nuance than JRs emperor's children? Not by a long shot.

 

It sounds like you're conflating individual character work and readability with an examination of the legion and if it's nuanced or generic. They're really not the same; firefist doesn't add anything to the black legion being fleshed out, and neither does telemachon or falkus kibre or ashur-kai or vortigern or the rest of the ezekarion.

I don’t think I’m conflating anything to be honest..

 

The entire point of the black legion is they’re not really a legion at all, they're the traitors still on mission that’s it!

 

they’re still a host of individual war bands with there own agendas, goals and structure but as long as they bend the knee and heed the call to war when abandon calls that all he requires of them.

 

There’s no legion structure beyond its commanders and separate war bands that follow Abaddon the black legion doesn’t need fleshing out more than the fact if we see why it was founded and how it came to prominence we see all of this in the books

 

I think you’re misinterpreting his reasons for flushing out the characters so deeply in this series instead of the “legion” itself, it’s because it’s the most important aspect of the Black Legions founding and why they exist at all! They crave brotherhood, they crave a higher purpose than just waring amongst themselves in the eye, they want to see the imperium fall! without flushing out the characters we wouldn’t understand why there’s even a black legion in the first place

 

ADB’s nuance takes its form in this, instead of giving us the easy (here’s a legion of black armoured space marines as they raid x world or are on x black crusade) which you seem to want. He instead gives us the reason they’re founded, why they fight and what it means to be part of a fractious grouping of Warbands that call themselves a legion. Much more of a nuanced take in my Opinion

 

The problem with the Black Legion books is that they aren't about the Black Legion or about Abaddon. They're about the donut steel self-insert of Khayon who is the greatest Thousand Son marine we've never heard about, complete with the most special and unique friends, the special and unique weapon, and the most special and unique feats of making Magnus supposedly bend the knee. It reads like bad fanfic that's a dime a dozen where some completely special never-heard of original character is just crammed into the story and pushes out the actually interesting characters. A story about the Black Legion should be a story about Abaddon and, if smaller characters are involved, just run of the mill marines. Not some 4th in line for the title of most powerful psyker ever with a personal pet Eldar that makes no bloody sense. ADB's at his best when he writes normal people, but whenever he touches marines he feels the need to make them the most special and unique marine ever instead of just managing to craft a story about a regular boot. They're already a space marine :cuss, there's no need to get ridiculous by slapping excess powers on them that clashes with the norms of the universe as well by being too big for their breeches. And being Horus Heresy veterans to boot.

[WARMASTER_]

That's the bloody problem. Everything is just a feedback loop so we just get endless bolter porn crap instead of anything with even a shadow of being decent literature. GW mass markets bolter porn and sidelines most projects that have some value, then wonders when they take the occasional experiment it doesn't perform as well, while they've been cultivating a bolter porn reader-base exclusively for years. In the modern Black Library if you tried to pitch Eisenhorn you'd get it shot down for being silly and never selling well.

 

I’m sorry but no,..

 

You’re waaaay off on this!

 

Some of the best current books are CW Vaults of Terra series,They’ve just started Warhammer crime to show the domestic 40K, Warhammer horror has some great reads, ADB’s black legion is mostly character driven point of view perspective into chaos warbands likewise his spears of the emperor was another point of view novel looking outside in at a chapter and it’s culture from the eyes of a serf too name only a few

 

Most of the good writing now from BL’s best come from character driven plots expanding lore or exploring character motives rather than bolter porn which was rife 15 years ago

 

Not to be confrontational but I really can’t see what you mean by they just print bolter porn?

[Kelborn]

A D-B can't write Marines?

*laughs in Helsreach, Spears and Ragnar Blackmane, Night Lords with a little accent of Emperor's Gift*

 

Seriously though, let's continue his Black Legion related discussion elsewhere.

 

In here, we lament about Josh. Let us have our place of grieve. ;)

Edited October 19, 2020 by Kelborn

[DarkChaplain]

While I don't agree on the premise that AD-B "can't write" Marines, or compelling ones, I do agree that he's got that special snowflake going on in most of his books.

Khayon is a prominent example, of course, but then there's Sevatar, who is not just a leadership figure but also a gunship-surfing suppressed psyker who is the only one who "gets" Curze and is totally in charge until he isn't, and may have been at some point implied to maybe become a Grey Knights founder until he was forgotten / scrapped when he couldn't get around to writing Nightfall.

Then there's Hyperion in the Emperor's Gift, who is not only a Grey Knight, but also a superduperpowerful one who can shatter Angron's Black Blade after the bloke gorged on the vast majority of Grey Knights that went to stop him and his daemon buddies. Oh, and he also turns out to be a fan-favorite character from way back when and gets to be buddies with Bjorn.

And remember Argel Tal, the bloke who'd pretty much become the first possessed Space Marine dude, with a deeply intimate relationship with Lorgar Aurelian, sidelining Erebus and Kor Phaeron both, and becoming best friends with Khârn and a blind saint, and ends up killing a bunch of Custodes in rage, while also being the subject of prophecy?

 

It's certainly not that I want him to write boring, run of the mill characters. But I honestly would like if his "originals" (to which I'm counting characters that only had names and maybe a random cart artwork for the HH TCG) wouldn't sideline established characters so much, while becoming the new best bud of character X and Y, or having special privileges.

 

And that's one of those things I prefer about Josh's works. His characters simply don't have those power creep issues. They're Marines, they're special, they may even be unhinged, but they still work next to one another. They're not nearly as defined by acts of supposed badassery, or having the ear of a Primarch. He makes those special, unique characters in the Fabius Bile novels to feel like they belong, like what they're doing and achieving, and what they represent, are par for the course for the setting. A female gifted warlord of Chaos who beats her way up the pecking order? It's something remarkable, but not something to get hung up on. Everyone, including the crazies, feel a lot more grounded around a common base level for Space Marines, being special as characters without needing to one up the competition.

 

Damn, I so dearly wish Josh had a Warhammer Horror novel coming for this Halloween season. It upsets me to know that we won't be seeing a Blackwood sequel, or more of his shorts in anthologies. The Beast in the Trenches was a hell of a novella to kick off the Imprint with, too.

[StrangerOrders]

A D-B can't write Marines?

*laughs in Helsreach, Spears and Ragnar Blackmane, Night Lords with a little accent of Emperor's Gift*

 

Seriously though, let's continue his Black Legion related discussion elsewhere.

 

In here, we lament about Josh. Let us have our place of grieve.

Yeah, I'm fairly critical of ADB but I admit that this is a weird place to draw direct comparisons with.

 

I don't think that comparisons are wrong per se, but it is very different subject matter we are discussing. It honestly makes more sense to discuss Josh in the context of how his writing compares to others writing the same characters/factions.

 

My hot-take is that the chaos Legions is too broad a category to call a 'faction', and I am willing to duel to the death with sporks over this point.

 

Its fair to discuss ADB's understanding of the WE with Reynolds but the Black Legion as a whole is a bit much imo. Although I wont apologize for being relentless in comparing Horus and Abbadon with Alaric because they are both Alaric with fancy armor and different hairstyles and I will similarly argue that one to the death!

 

That being said, respectfully, its a poor argument form for folks to say 'I dislike X author because I like Y author better', since thats really just stating your preference as opposed to being very specific as to why you dislike/like the author being discussed. At the very least the onus is to take two writers writing the same subject and going into detail as to why you prefer one style over the other.

 

Quick note though, Khayon might be snowflake-y but boy is it nice to have a TS character that has a semi-functional grasp of pattern-recognition. Its a pet-peeve of mine how almost every TS has almost exactly the same character flaw with little to no variance, Legions tend to have similar flaws within themselves but with the TS its literally always the same cast repeating the exact same mistake in literally the most unsubtle fashion. Its so frustrating sometimes

Edited October 19, 2020 by StrangerOrders

[mc warhammer]

you can't really argue someone's tastes in authors

 

there are a few B&C specific buzzwords and terms i've noticed that get flung around like "nuance" and "making the universe smaller" that are applied in...interesting ways. add those to the usual internet terms that...lack nuance... like "snowflake" and "mary sue" and i start tuning out, so apologies if i miss some of the nuance of this conversation...

 

but josh crowing about how great his ideas are...has he? i've missed the bits where he's self proclaimed his brilliance (they might exist). i did read the ideas and pitches that he put out in public, which is a very humbling and self expository thing for any artist to do. it's frightening to put your undeveloped ideas for the internet to judge. it's also just bts stuff.

 

there's a big appetite for bts out there. alan moore's "twilight of the superheroes" comes to mind. nick cave's "gladiator 2" as well (superior to number 1 in every way).

 

i've honestly not come across much in the way of overbearing ego from any BL authors. i've come across a lot of fan conjecture on an author's ego, tho...

[Scribe]

Behind the Scenes?

[mc warhammer]

ah yeah, soz. that's the acronym

not the amazing k-pop band

[Xisor]

For what it's worth, I thought Wrath of N'kai was amazing. Proper pulp, but better than most BL stuff in sticking straight to the core story, but with the feel that it's meandering, even though it's pacy and done in a nice and fairly tight style. Like you feel the benefit of a nice wandering, expansive, introspective varied story - but on reflection it's a still a pacy riot of an action-packed story.

 

Best of both worlds, so to speak. Highly recommended.

 

---

 

I wonder if the problem was less a direct relationship issue with an editor or colleague or two at BL, but more that people elsewhere in the organisation were muscling in on it, either by putting pressure on the editors or Josh's agreed workload.

 

Like if someone from sales (whom I think BL still have to get on-side to actually green light a novel?) has a bee in their bonnet about how only Josh's 'straight arrow Space Marine books' sell well, and how 'every time he puts jokes in, it bombs', then that could be a huge, draining burden on the author and editors both - making it a damn hassle to work 'professionally' where no-one else is being tormented on the same basis.

 

Speculation, of course, but I could see it being the sort of thing that really makes a job slip from 'nice, I could do this for ages' to 'actually, I'd take a pay-cut and risk reputation damage just to avoid this'.

 

I don't think needlessly tormenting (or even boring) oneself constitutes professionalism.

 

(And still, it's also credible that it could be 'an impulsive change'. Like no straw that broke the camel's back, just some things that were a little annoying and a lust for something a bit more... exhilarating. Leaving a fairly cushy, comfortable gig where the only burden is 'fewer jokes, more professional' would fit that neatly.)

Edited October 20, 2020 by Xisor