Is 40k Grimdark, Noblebright or have we just grown-up

[chapter master 454]

Well, since it seems to be a sticking point in another thread and I do want to discuss it to some extent and see the voices of others, lets chat.

Reminder that we are trying to discuss the matter and not attack each other for what we like. So remember: Attack the argument not the person and remember the topic;

 

Is 40k becoming less grim-dark or have we just grown-up with it expecting something else?

 

Personally I find the new direction refreshing. While I have been a massive opponent of how they are doing Primaris Space Marines, my problem is with their methods and ulterior goals that are now plain to see of scraping old marines it was never with Primaris themselves. I like the idea of how Gulliman came back (though again, weak story and reason with little commitment to real actions have consequences) and how him coming back was a sign the Imperium was saved yet then the Cicatrix Maledictum happened and now, even with a full on Primarch trying to get things back on track, despite a 10,000 year gestating trump card, he is barely holding ground let alone rebuilding.

However despite that, even after a fairly big piece of reinforcement was given to the Imperium, enemy forces are getting amped now. Orks now have Ghaz whose meaner and greener than ever, Necrons are now pulling an ultra instinct Shaggy ("That was only 20% of my full power"), Chaos is...well chaos is just doing chaos things...anyone checked in on them recently but I suppose having a super motorway to anywhere in the Imperium is kinda nuts. Tau are starting to figure things out but at the same time realising how small they are, Tyranids are starting to get annoyed their food won't stop wriggling off the plate and...Eldar somehow haven't died yet (good job).

 

Personally, sounds fairly grimdark to me not to mention it seems like we have gone back to the status quo of "5 minutes before midnight" with the small change that progress of a larger overarching story is occurring but at a painfully slow pace.

 

Gone are the days of those short stories I did enjoy. However I did start to feel apathy towards them, they were nice but started to become less impactful as they had no meaning. After all, we expect guardsmen to die. However that being said, I found one of the more recent story articles referring to the greater good PA book was quite chilling with Tau performing something we have always thought they don't do: executing en mass others under SUSPICION (not proof) of corruption. For the alledgedly "noblebright" race, that was extremely dark.

 

I think really, there is an element of "seen it, done it, got the T-shirt, models and terrible fanfic for it" with 40k. After all, when you first meet the Imperium it is pretty dark until you become desensitised to it. Which may I add, that is grimdark in itself: a community who has as much apathy for the horror inflicted as the horror itself.

[Marshal Rohr]

40k is the Bronze Age in space, as ADB has pointed out several times. It as noble as Hector leading his men and as dark as Achilles dragging Hectors body around the city.

[StrangeGuy]

I might not be qualified to comment on this since I'm just starting to dip my toes back into the hobby after rage quitting over the whole Guilliman coming back thing, and I haven't been able to get my hands on any material from the last few years since everywhere seems to be sold out of it. BUT, I have always seen 40k as a nice mix of grimdark and "noblebright".Space Marines in particular seem to be the perfect example of this.

[CaptainMarsh]

So much of this is in the eye of the beholder. You see what you want to see. The setting as a whole remains as grim and foreboding as ever. The 'good' developments have been equaled or surpassed in magnitudes by the 'bad' developments. So little has actually changed in terms of how grim it is. 

What has changed is how GW has chosen to market it, but I think that is a good thing. The 40K universe may be as grim and overall as hopeless as ever but it is also more inviting and has a wider range of stories it wants to try and tell- while never stopping it from telling the stories that the universe id famous for. Same applies for marketing (now that it exists).

I think a clear example can be found in the trailers that announced the start of the new edition. You had a grim edition trailer featuring Guardsmen getting vaporized, a visual representation of the Shield of Faith, and what appeared to be a doomed (but intense) battle. You then had a cheeky rules video. One's response to this (and boy howdy what a response it was) is a pretty good indicator of where your blinders are and are not.

[Lucerne]

The narrative theming has taken a turn for the worse with further whitewashing of the Imperium (and Guilliman in particular) and glossing over the fact that maybeeeeeeeeeee the galaxy isn't better off with the Imperium around.

 

And it isn't just marketing- which matters since it bleeds through- it's in the lore as well, and the need to push Primaris hasn't helped either with the dilution of the backwards, self-destructive nature of the Imperium on the tech level either.

Edited July 12, 2020 by Lucerne

[Master Commander Ajax]

I think that, more than anything, the sense of jeopardy has been lost. All that build up to 13th Black Crusade and it’s potential universe ending consequences... and we gloss over it and skip a hundred year or so to the next ‘end of the universe’ scenario which is (apparently) even more terrible and hopeless. It’s exactly the same with the End Times for Warhammer Fantasy. It felt more like an afterthought rather than the event it should have been and the new scenario that both AoS and 40k presents just ends up feeling a bit ‘hollow’.

[Brother-Captain Gilead]

For me personally it is a mix of hits and misses, but overall more hits than misses. Like some already commented here I really like that they are taking some of the lore in new directions which is possible now that Black Library pushes new books out constantly. This broadening of their output enables experimentation like the more horror-focused stories and the somewhat more kid-friendly stories on the edges and that is great. You newer hobbyists have no idea what it was like when Black Library started and it published like 5 books a year. I remember how it was a big deal for me as a Dark Angels player that there was a book or an Inferno story or a Warhammer Monthly comic about the Dark Angels chapter and after every drop like that you had to wait a few years for the next story with Dark Angels in it. Now if I wanted to read everything Black Library has put out about the Dark Angels I probably could do it, but in the time I started reading several new books will probably come out.

 

As to whether the new lore is more grimdark or noblebright, I can't help but see a lot of the people complaining about the new direction also including the comment about how they haven't really read any of the new stuff, but they just know it is whitewashing the Imperium or some other thing. I haven't read any of the new books after I read the Rise of the Primarch stuff (it had Cypher in it, of course I had to know what was happening with him) so I can't comment on that with any certainty, but the short stories that they put out during the Vigilus campaign that I read were definitely on the grimdark side of the spectre (personal favorite was the one about squads of guardsmen being sent one after the another to ascend one of the spires and just being inevitably corrupted by the whispers they hear in the wind and the creaking of the spire). The one gripe I do have is that the reappearance of one Belisarius Cawl has suddenly jump-started Imperial technological progress, the stagnation and cargo-cultishness of which I considered one of the more interesting parts of the setting. I get that they are partially doing it to explain why the Primaris are getting all sorts of new gear and not just new versions of marine equipment, but I still don't like it and I would like to see the stagnation return (which it probably will when the primaris lineup is complete).

[Doghouse]

It's whatever it to be at the end of the day, I personally think the "grimdark" is an overused phrase these days. The game was tongue in cheek for so long that I'd say it was darker now then ever. It's certainly more a lot more varied and detailed because of all the different sources.

 

I know Grimdark gets attributed to us oldies but the truth is the term came into being over time. I clearly remember reading being shocked at the Ian Watson novels with the sex scene in Inquisitor and the marines farting on each other as they made their way up the backside of a hive ship and some of the stuff in the Death Wing anthology. But even then Black Library wasn't considered canon, it was a novelty.

 

Before all that it was pretty tame and extremely messy and unco-ordinated with so many different artists with different visions and it didn't start to come together till second edition with the suppliment Codex Imperialis which i know AD-B is hugely fond of. Before that it was a mix of 60s, 70s and 80s sci-fi and a lot of historical influences and hugely boring from Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and Rogue Trooper. In fact the only reason the game is called Warhammer 40,000 is because Rogue Trader sounded too much like the board game they were producing for Rogue Trooper.

 

I think the Realm of Chaos books get over quoted in terms of the dark setting. It was more an attempt to create a source book for both WFB and 40k in one book at at time, much like the Warhammer Sieges book. It was mostly army lists and things like make your own warbands. The main importance of it was that it gave each of the chaos powers identity and brought in the idea of chaos marines beyond being generic wfb interchangable chaos champions.

 

Even then second edition wasn't massively dark. Baroque or Gothic perhaps but certainly not a murderfest. It wasn't till 4th edition that the lore started to return, during the third edition someone at GW someone decided people wanted the codex's for rules not lore so we got effectively pamphlets with little descriptions in the boarders.

 

As the editions have passed a lot of the lore has been cut and pastes of second edition (especially marines) and I think that around 7th edition is when it started to take shape again. And this is around the time we saw the Black Library really come into it's own which is where up until late 8th the vast majority of the background material is rooted.

 

I think with 8th they are trying to cash in on the popularity of the Heresy novels but it felt rushed and there was the need to force in the Primaris which at the time felt clunky.

 

I do agree that the marketing aspect of the game like the store front and tongue in cheek trailers are fairly family friendly but to be fair even back in the day we had the White Dwarf and Black Gobbo acting in the same way for marketing purposes.

 

Any one one reading this that remembers Thrud the Barbarian and Goobledigook from White Dwarf can surely see the similarities between them and the web comics on the community site.

 

I personally don't think the game has ever truely been the Lovecraftian/Clive Barker style horror that people seem to associate the term Grimdark with. Maybe with the new Black Library horror books it may or some of the other BL novels.

[Vermintide]

I think the times have changed around us more than anything. 40k has always somewhat reflected the times, the glory days of RT and 2nd with their over the top heavy metal aesthetics, the gritty grimdark of 3rd and 4th reflecting the gothy, industrial fads of the mid 2000s, and then 2010 onwards seemingly taking more inspiration from video games.

 

I've had one line of thinking that I've mused on over time, that the setting hasn't gotten brighter, it has simply become more detailed, and more lived-in. Which, in a strange way, has taken away some of the ominous atmosphere it had before. The more we know about the way the setting works, the in-universe tech, the structure and order of society itself, the more we can place ourselves within it. The more sense it makes. That pulls back the curtain, and takes away some of that mystique it used to have before, where your imagination filled those gaps instead.

 

A small example: Nowadays you can find out exactly what a black carapace is, the different marks of armour, the creation process and gene seed implantation etc within about 10 minutes of browsing on Lexicanum. When I was younger me and my friends literally had hours long conversations about what exactly made Space Marines unique. Were they just guys in armour? Or were they something altogether less human? How long do they live? What do they eat? Do they really only sleep for three hours?! We didn't know, because we didn't have all that information at our fingertips- We just had the incomplete knowledge left by the books.

[Joe]

Grimdark as a concept is an utter meme, and should really be consigned to the dumpster bin - far too often it's utilised as a crutch for "ew, bad" as opposed to actual, decent writing.

 

More and more writers/authors have seen the light and gotten shot of it; hats off to them.

[Rogue]

Someone (maybe Chekhov) once said that in order to make tragedy work, you need to play up the elements of comedy; likewise, comedy is really just lots of tragedies happening to other people.

 

In a similar vein, the best tragedies work when we're able to identify with the protagonist; to identify with their goals as much as with their hubris. In part, we want them to succeed even as we know that they are doomed to fail.

 

We can't have a grim/dark setting without hope - there have to be noble (albeit flawed) characters, moments of brightness, so that when they fall and fail the darkness feels much deeper.

[Lucerne]

There's a difference between protagonists being sympathetic on some level and apologism for their worldviews and the organization they prop up. The latter is overtaking the setting and its writing to an unpleasant degree.

 

Or to put it another way: The IoM is a doomed, failed state regardless of the actions of the cogs in its machine in any given story- and the people in the setting would have been better off for its absence.

[Marshal Loss]

I love the old 3rd edition style OTT horrific grimdark; the Imperium is doomed, virtually everybody is awful, etc, etc. That's just my preference. These days I tend to ignore the metaplot in favour of the authors & books that present 40k the way I like it as a lot of the newer stuff, e.g. Guilliman's return, Cawl, etc, doesn't gel at all with how I view the setting. Others have different views and that's fine.

Edited July 12, 2020 by Marshal Loss

[Emicus]

It's as grimdark as ever, I think people have 'normalized' it. After all a severed head on a spike in every street corner is horrifying.. At first..

[Bryan Blaire]

It's as grimdark as ever, I think people have 'normalized' it. After all a severed head on a spike in every street corner is horrifying.. At first..

I was going to say something similar - if you think 40K is somehow the epitome or even a great example of grimdark, your imagination doesn't go near far enough.

 

The fact is, GW/BL does actually have rules for their writing specifically to keep it from going too far. Yes, those rules may have pushed the setting a little farther toward the "shiny" end of the spectrum (maybe, I haven't seen a ton of that, and people seize upon things I think are pretty shallow representations of nobility or brightness as examples of the setting getting shinier), but it sure hasn't gotten bright.

 

And the rationalization/justification of a horrible regime like the Imperium by members of it should actually enhance the horror for folks, make you think about what exactly is being seen as heroic by these people, etc. It doesn't make it less horrifying - it should make it more terrible because humans can accept and normalize horrifying conditions - seeing people that have done so should be equally horrifying.

[Gederas]

It honestly depends on what book or codex you're reading. To be honest, I think 40k is still Grimdark, but is leaning into "Grim Neutral" or "Neutral Dark". At it's BEST, I'd say it's GrimBright/NobleDark

 

I love the old 3rd edition style OTT horrific grimdark; the Imperium is doomed, virtually everybody is awful, etc, etc. That's just my preference. These days I tend to ignore the metaplot in favour of the authors & books that present 40k the way I like it as a lot of the newer stuff, e.g. Guilliman's return, Cawl, etc, doesn't gel at all with how I view the setting. Others have different views and that's fine.

See, the OTT horrific grimdark honestly only appeals to a specific group of people, and that's the ones who started during it.

 

For everyone else, it suffers from a thing called "Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy". For any writer the WORST thing you can have for your story is the reader or fan to say the Eight Deadly Words:

"I don't care about any of these people"

 

If the world is too dark and the characters unlikable, the audience won't care what happens next. Once those six words are said, you've lost the audience's care for the setting. 3rd Edition's OTT horrific Grimdark is a brilliant example of that.

Edited July 12, 2020 by Gederas

[Lucerne]

 

It's as grimdark as ever, I think people have 'normalized' it. After all a severed head on a spike in every street corner is horrifying.. At first..

I was going to say something similar - if you think 40K is somehow the epitome or even a great example of grimdark, your imagination doesn't go near far enough.

 

The fact is, GW/BL does actually have rules for their writing specifically to keep it from going too far. Yes, those rules may have pushed the setting a little farther toward the "shiny" end of the spectrum (maybe, I haven't seen a ton of that, and people seize upon things I think are pretty shallow representations of nobility or brightness as examples of the setting getting shinier), but it sure hasn't gotten bright.

 

And the rationalization/justification of a horrible regime like the Imperium by members of it should actually enhance the horror for folks, make you think about what exactly is being seen as heroic by these people, etc. It doesn't make it less horrifying - it should make it more terrible because humans can accept and normalize horrifying conditions - seeing people that have done so should be equally horrifying.

 

The point being that narration should not present the enablers as actually heroic in the larger scheme of things. Gaunt's literally the only sane man in most of Sabbat Crusade high command for most of the series and is still a product of his upbringing. Eisenhorn is not a good or sane person.

 

Guilliman is presented as Dudley Do Right by the narrative when he's a conniving tyrannical bastard who on his best day is an imperialist propping up a nightmarish system that even he admits doesn't deserve to exist.

 

40k is the nightmare future. The systems and leadership being callous monsters is the whole point.

 

Caring about the Imperium as a whole is a major misstep on a writing level and honestly can be kinda skeev. The Imperium was never worth wanting to "win", because its win condition is a never-ending bloodbath of senseless brutality, murder and torture. Even by the standards of the madman that started the mess, it's a failed state with no actual success state. That's the joke of Imperium vs Chaos: Chaos or "those dirty rebels turning on the 'legitimate' planetary government" can be a direct step up in quality of life!

 

If you want an unambiguous hero fighting for a worthy system in 40k, it's the nameless rebel being ground under the treads of a Leman Russ. It's the dissident that gets disappeared by the planetary governor's kill squads. It's the crew of the ship that defects to the Tau Empire. It's not the latest bland muppet parroting "fOr tHe emPeRoR" like it means a damn thing with context or the child-king with ambitions of galactic conquest.

Edited July 12, 2020 by Lucerne

[Dagoth Ur]

40k as a setting is defined by dystopian themes, cyclical reiteration, over-the-top parodies and the narratological dichotomy of the Overbearing Evil and the Dogged Good (well, "Good" in this case, but we'll get to that).

 

Dystopia: This one is simple - the universe is dark and to live in the 41st millennium is to live in the twillight of grand and vast empires. To be a conscious humanoid in the 41st millennium is to exist in a disfavorable state - be it knowingly or unknowingly. The Imperial Citizen grinds themselves to dust and ash as they work vast manufactoria and conduct pilgrimages that will see them dead, impoverished or worse. Thinking is discouraged - ignorance is the order of the day for 90% of Imperial citizens. To be a Space Marine is to be a monastic shadow of your ancestor-legions, a secluded order that - while powerful - exists solely for war and to ultimately die for His glory and conquests. A Space Marine is - speaking on a meta level here - the over the top exemplification of the toxic masculine warrior ideal - taken as a young adolescent, put through horrid trials, broken and remade in mind and flesh, bereft of their humanity and put to one sole purpose and that is war. He is the ideal warrior - and can never truly be anything more than that, for he stands forever apart from baseline humanity.

 

This rings true in a similar fashion for custodes - except their cross to bear is their failure. Once, they lived and breathed for the Emperor, remade on a cellular level to serve him as body guards and - in some capacity - even as friends. But they failed. The Emperor is a corpse and thus - for all their might and intellect - they are trapped in stasis, surrounded by an empire that they care exactly zilch for. The Imperial Guard dies day in day out, millions and billions of bodies heaped across thousands of worlds - not necessarily because they are bad at what they do, but because the odds against which they are pitted are so daunting. Life is rendered down to numbers. What does a whole regiment matter if a forgeworld can be regained? Bodies can be bred, the steel is precious after all.

 

The Adeptus Sororitas are a collection of orders that have seemingly been liberated from the deceitful rule of a man - by embracing their role as the supporting military pillar of a church that actively encourages this machinery of blood, martyrdom and evangelization. What more, this church was founded upon the words written by the Architect of Heresy - Lorgar Aurelian. Their church is - in some capacity - a lie and to quote Aldia from Dark Souls 2: "A lie will always remain a lie." On a meta-level, the Sororitas have become liberated and yet chose to enforce oppression themselves - unknowing deceivers and deceived in one.

 

The Eldar and Dark Eldar dug their own holes. The Craftworlds ferry a dying civilization across the stars that has to exist in a state of emotional sterility lest more horrors arise as a consequence - and the seemingly only out that remains is the Avatar of a deity that demands death. The Dark Eldar, in all their arrogance, dug the deeper hole. With each day, they feed Slaanesh - their own Destroyer - and with each sacrifice they seek to prolong their lives, but what good is that ultimately? Theirs is an existence of most wretched supplication, the acceptance that even the vilest torture is seemingly justified for one's own sake - and yet it too feeds the enemy.

 

The Tau are seemingly optimistic, yet they too are imperialists and colonizers for they pursue the Greater Good like any empire does - accept or have it enforced upon you eventually. What more, their own ruling caste seems to manipulate society on some chemical level. This is a civilization that is either being kept brainwashed by a relentless propaganda machine - like the IoM - or through more direct, biochemical means such as pheromones. A gleaming, optimistic orb built around a kernel of manipulative evil. Big Brother indeed.

 

The Necrons, despite their technological mastery, have been reduced to a society of nobles and those individuals deemed too important to be rendered truly mindless. They awaken in ever greater numbers, yes, and few forces in the galaxy can outmatch them on the battlefield, yes, but all they are is an immortal nobility presiding over legions of mindless automata. The majority of Necron society is dead and can never be retrieved again - millions and billions of minds deleted for the sake of war, the rest copied onto wafers and circuitry. What remains is a collection of lords that has either decided to pursue conquest, or to pursue a return to the flesh - but what good is either? The former will eventually rule over a silent galaxy - fundamentally mortal minds shackled to eternity. The latter may return to a state of flesh-being - but still be reduced to handfulls of nobles, bodyguards, vargards and the similar while the eternal legions remain mute.

 

Chaos is self-evident, because Chaos is delusion. Daemons, Primarchs, Chaos Space Marines, Traitor Guardsmen - all are the Slaves to Darkness. Once that hook is in you, you are gone and your soul is given to utter darkness. A flash of power for eternal servitude - be it knowingly or not. Even Bile, the chaotic super-atheist, feeds Slaanesh and does her bidding, no matter how much he rejects it. And what rewards is there? A chance at becoming a daemon prince - a truly eternal slave.

 

Funnily enough, the Orks are the true testament to the settings darkness. The only species that is truly prospering, mostly bereft of the Dark Gods influence and has little to fear from Chaos, Imperium, 'Crons or 'Nids - is the species that has been entirely engineered to be born, live by, and procreate through war. In the grim-darkness of the 41st millennium there is only war and the Orks prosper because of it. There is no moral quandry to them, no higher purpose, no true empire-building - even if all collapses, as long as there is an Ork and something they can krump, the Ork will have a truly good time.

 

And all of this still holds true. Some people argue that the return of Guilliman and the creation of the Primaris marines has turned this setting into a Noblebright setting and I - quite frankly - don't get it. Cadia has fallen - one of the most significant reality anchors and gates into the Eye, has fallen. A core piece of the Imperial War- and Propaganda Machine is gone. Abaddon broke free and through his machinations did not only deal a massive blow to the Imperial Image, but his actions tore the galaxy in half. The Astronomican flickered, billions of lives were lost in matters of moments, and whole chapters, convents, regiments, armadas, fleets and co. have been lost, destroyed or - worst case - have changed sides. Terra got invaded by daemons. Armaggedon is half daemon-world now. The Fenris system was shaken to its core. Baal nearly fell. The eastern half of the Imperium is still dark and the higher-ups in the IoM have entertained the idea of just writing the whole half of the Imperium as a loss.

 

Guilliman - saviour of the Imperium - hates the Imperium. He closes his eyes, dying from Fulgrim's poison and awakens in a galaxy that has become everything his father loathed as far as he knows. He fights and he fights, trying to pull things together - yet even a primarch cannot fully bend the Church's knee. His own thoughts after awakening say it all: "Why do I still live? What more do you want from me? I gave everything I had to you, to them. Look what they've made of our dream. This bloated, rotting carcass of an empire is driven not by reason and hope but by fear, hate and ignorance. Better that we had all burned in the fires of Horus' ambition than live to see this." This is the single most poignant line post 7th Edition. Guilliman - the Avenging Son, Lord of Ultramar, he who restructured the Imperium once before just to save it, who risked everything by creating Imperium Secundus as a safety net for the Imperium - sees that he and by extension his father, have failed. In a moment of weakness, he wishes that all had fallen to Horus' arrogance and consumed itself in the traitor's vainglory. A demi-god despairs at what he sees.

 

True, Guilliman and his pet-project have brought some relief, but it is still a candle held against the roaring tides of a whole ocean. This is what the setting has always been - the raging against the dying of the light. In a billion of futures, the Imperium of Man is doomed, but if there is even a sliver of hope then how much is humanity willing to sacrifice for it? Oppression, theocracy, flesh-smithing - how much is too much when the Soul of a species is at stake? Millions of innocents are put to the torch by the Inquisition and the Ecclesiarchy every other day, just so that potential hotbeds of heresy can be eradicated. Astartes waste tens of thousands of lives just to keep their chapters stocked. The Senate will turn a blind eye to most things as long as the taxes of flesh and iron are paid. Literal pogroms are being led against mutants, wrong-thinkers and diverging ideologies because they are seen as unexcusable by religion and because they genuinely can be vectors for chaotic corruption. Is survival worth all of this? Should we not better lay down and die against such insurmountable odds? Or revel in the dark and please the dark gods?

 

40k to me - as someone who writes papers on it and tries to fray out every single bit of it ad absurdum in the process - is as grimdark as it has ever been, because it still - be it deliberately or accidentally - asks such important questions. What could possibly justify the horrors that humanity has enacted in the past? What could possibly justify such a machinery of death, propaganda and oppression? And even in the 41st Millennium - the worst of all timelines - so much of it is still dubious. So much of it is still wrong. A lot of people will call this over-interpretation - but that is kinda what interpreting is. Seeking meaning by constructing it. I don't know if this is what all those designers have intended in the last 30 years, but it is what I see in it and that's what makes this setting so grimy, fascinating and awesome. Always has and always will.

[Bryan Blaire]

Caring about the Imperium as a whole is a major misstep on a writing level and honestly can be kinda skeev. The Imperium was never worth wanting to "win", because its win condition is a never-ending bloodbath of senseless brutality, murder and torture. Even by the standards of the madman that started the mess, it's a failed state with no actual success state. That's the joke of Imperium vs Chaos: Chaos or "those dirty rebels turning on the 'legitimate' planetary government" can be a direct step up in quality of life!

It's actually a beautiful and masterful method of writing - being able to so wholly present a character as having a completely rational world view that is so totally at odds with what "typical readers" would view as "a good thing" is fantastic writing mastery. Whether readers recognize the horror of the unreliable narrator is on them, not the author - and maybe what you're really having an issue with is that there's a segment of readership that doesn't get that Imperial narrators are all unreliable due to their mentality. Their "heroics" are just as horrible because of the system they are being heroic for. Characters like Guilliman and Cawl are automatically as suspect as any Chaos worshippers due to not even accepting the never-ending horror their "Dudley-Doo-Right" attitude engenders. No one should be held up as a beacon of anything in the Imperium - it isn't a good place, and thus, supporting it isn't good either.

 

The joke of the Imperium vs. Chaos vs. Xenos is that any one of them being in charge means a living Hell for "basic humanity" - hopefully folks don't miss that or are still trying to attribute noble aims to Chaos winning that fight as well. There may be some noble things inside small portions of the Chaos concept, but the end game by them would be just as or even more horrific for humanity as the Imperium is. It's laughable to present it otherwise as much as it is for it to be laughable that the Imperium is a good place. In the end, all of them would be/are terrible for humanity - none of them represent the "hope for a better future" that most think of through things like Star Trek and other optimistic "better place" SciFi.

[Lucerne]

It's a great worldview until the narrator starts to slip into sympathizing with a character that happens to be the protagonist, (which there are definitely shades of in some lore trends, more in overall treatment and narrative directions than in specific novels) and the noticeable segment that misses the point is an issue in itself.
 

Chaos as an overarching concept winning is a literal hell rather than metaphorical one, but let's be honest- on a case by case basis, being a Chaos worshipper has more prospect for escape than the Imperial counterparts even with peak "the Imperium isn't so bad really". (While Ciaphas Cain is skipping around, that planet's people are living in misery just offscreen with indirect mentions of just what the police state is doing to them and what he considers normal.)

 

Chaos, though? Is (skewed) meritocracy by way of warp-worship and backstabbing what the Imperium insists on treating it as? Not really on the "out of focus" level that isn't spikey bolters and dinobots- and that's without looking at the outliers like random renegade #2342525 that may or may not follow the generic Chaos pattern of sticking spikes on everything and getting out the ritual knives.

 

Well, the closest to actual, reliable improvement is honestly non-theistic secession or flat out signing up with the Tau.

Edited July 12, 2020 by Lucerne

[Dagoth Ur]

 

Caring about the Imperium as a whole is a major misstep on a writing level and honestly can be kinda skeev.

Counter-point: it's actually a genius thing to do in writing, because it lulls the reader in, provides them with something that is initially recognizable as a "good" protagonist, only to then come crashing down once you think more about it. It's the whole reason why Lolita works so fantastically well - a horrifying story that is wrapped in nice language and thus becomes much more entangling as a narrative.

 

I agree that the Imperium is dodgy at best and mind-numbingly terrible at worst, but by presenting it as a protagonist whom we "should" root for, makes thinking about the setting and deconstructing it far more compelling that "everyone bad, everyone also written muy bad." Granted, it's also somewhat of a technical limitation - properly bad and unempathisable characters are nigh on impossible to write. You need to give the reader a hook - be it language itself, writing or image. It's nice and great to read about Sanguinius and the Blood Angels as these good, nice and loyal fellas - and then you start thinking about how they put innoccent civilizations to the blade and have been used as the Emperor's bloody blade time and time again.

[Lucerne]

 

 

Caring about the Imperium as a whole is a major misstep on a writing level and honestly can be kinda skeev.

Counter-point: it's actually a genius thing to do in writing, because it lulls the reader in, provides them with something that is initially recognizable as a "good" protagonist, only to then come crashing down once you think more about it. It's the whole reason why Lolita works so fantastically well - a horrifying story that is wrapped in nice language and thus becomes much more entangling as a narrative.

 

I agree that the Imperium is dodgy at best and mind-numbingly terrible at worst, but by presenting it as a protagonist whom we "should" root for, makes thinking about the setting and deconstructing it far more compelling that "everyone bad, everyone also written muy bad." Granted, it's also somewhat of a technical limitation - properly bad and unempathisable characters are nigh on impossible to write. You need to give the reader a hook - be it language itself, writing or image. It's nice and great to read about Sanguinius and the Blood Angels as these good, nice and loyal fellas - and then you start thinking about how they put innoccent civilizations to the blade and have been used as the Emperor's bloody blade time and time again.

 

The problem is I feel things don't get around to "wow these people are horrible and would do the setting a favor by dying" nearly enough- we have comments in this very thread about how that's "darkness induced apathy" and there's pressure in terms of what's most palpable for sales to avoid such overt confrontation in lore or anything but the most indirect fashion.

 

So we have dissonance like "Vulkan, genocidal murderer" and "Sanguinius the compassionate who's a bloody handed warlord" or "Guilliman,lord and master of the supersoldier-dominated Imperium having his political rivals murdered"...But there's never actually recognition by narrative framework- let alone characters- that these acts are abominable and the people doing them are as well. We just have it as a tidbit of no consequence and codexes, stories, and lore blather on about the noble Space Marines sAViNG tHe dAy. Hell, in the specific case of Guilliman, there's an absence of meaningful opposing views (even by the standards of his deranged in universe personality cult) or narrative weight to opposition to him despite that being a logical followup for multiple reasons.

 

It's just a mix of complicated concepts handled by writers that aren't all up to the task, marketing pressure to whitewash "the ones that sell the best", and generally setting flanderization over time resulting in the writing missing the original point. We need more narrative focus on the fact the Imperium is, not, in fact all that great, even with the rest of the mess. It'd be nice to see more secessions or Nihlus have ex-Imperial worlds doing fine for the absence of Terran parasitism.

Edited July 12, 2020 by Lucerne

[tangoalphatwo]

Currently reading through the thread and you guys are making excellent points. I’m having a good time reading this thread. I just wanted to say, and couldn’t wait, that as someone in my mid 30’s currently having an existential crisis... the topic made me chuckle. Thank you!

[Dagoth Ur]

 

 

So we have dissonance like "Vulkan, genocidal murderer" and "Sanguinius the compassionate who's a bloody handed warlord" or "Guilliman,lord and master of the supersoldier-dominated Imperium having his political rivals murdered"...But there's never actually recognition by narrative framework- let alone characters- that these acts are abominable and the people doing them are as well. We just have it as a tidbit of no consequence and codexes, stories, and lore blather on about the noble Space Marines sAViNG tHe dAy. Hell, in the specific case of Guilliman, there's an absence of meaningful opposing views (even by the standards of his deranged in universe personality cult) or narrative weight to opposition to him despite that being a logical followup for multiple reasons.

To be fair, I think this is largely a consequence of a lot of novels and shortstories having some form of interdiegetic narrator, i.e. someone who is part of the narrative - which would explain why we rarely have full-on negative reactions to what is being done. If one is raised in a society where such things are and have been the norm for like forever, then it won't seem as horrible as it does to us. Quite frankly, I prefer it that way - I'd rather have my narrators be part of the world as I find that more interesting to read. The condemnation part I can very well do myself. I keep rolling back to the Lolita example - the protagonist there never condemns his own deeds either (he is also the narrator for anyone who hasn't read it), but he doesn't need to. That's what you as the reader are here for.

[Lucerne]

 

 

 

So we have dissonance like "Vulkan, genocidal murderer" and "Sanguinius the compassionate who's a bloody handed warlord" or "Guilliman,lord and master of the supersoldier-dominated Imperium having his political rivals murdered"...But there's never actually recognition by narrative framework- let alone characters- that these acts are abominable and the people doing them are as well. We just have it as a tidbit of no consequence and codexes, stories, and lore blather on about the noble Space Marines sAViNG tHe dAy. Hell, in the specific case of Guilliman, there's an absence of meaningful opposing views (even by the standards of his deranged in universe personality cult) or narrative weight to opposition to him despite that being a logical followup for multiple reasons.

To be fair, I think this is largely a consequence of a lot of novels and shortstories having some form of interdiegetic narrator, i.e. someone who is part of the narrative - which would explain why we rarely have full-on negative reactions to what is being done. If one is raised in a society where such things are and have been the norm for like forever, then it won't seem as horrible as it does to us. Quite frankly, I prefer it that way - I'd rather have my narrators be part of the world as I find that more interesting to read. The condemnation part I can very well do myself. I keep rolling back to the Lolita example - the protagonist there never condemns his own deeds either (he is also the narrator for anyone who hasn't read it), but he doesn't need to. That's what you as the reader are here for.

 

The issue comes in with the ongoing adventures of Humbert Humbert with his mug plastered everywhere with ever more screen time and advertising, and unironic talking points about him in fandom.

 

At some point you have to wonder if Humbert getting punched in the mouth a bit more often wouldn't be a useful bit of plot development.

 

I mean, I understand your points and can agree with "from the eyes of madness" to an extent in literature, but it's a tightrope I don't think GW as a whole or that all of its writing can always walk, especially with conflicts of interest with the preferred direction of things being safer and marketable.

Edited July 12, 2020 by Lucerne