What if 40K had good guys?

[Osteoclast]

1 hour ago, siegfriedfr said:

Compared to almost every faction in the Galaxy, Space marines are as close to good guys as it gets.

 

They are the protagonists and defend mankind against all kind of threats.

Do remember that, aside from aside from being the loyal enforcers of a regime that makes Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot look like humanitarians; Space Marines (generally) are slave owners who take pre or barely pubescent children, preferentially sociopaths or hardened killers (American school shooters would be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that they’re usually too old), turn them into brainwashed child soldiers through a surgical and recruitment process that kills the vast majority of them (often intentionally), and half the time are the threat to humanity. 
 

Protaganist just means that they’re the focus and main character of the story, it doesn’t mean that they’re a good person. 

[The Yncarne]

“What if we’re the baddies?” asked the commissar in his skull cap. 

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

3 hours ago, siegfriedfr said:

Compared to almost every faction in the Galaxy, Space marines are as close to good guys as it gets.

 

They are the protagonists and defend mankind against all kind of threats.

 

The empire administration is still a nutty theocracy, but space marines largely operate outside of this madness, and Roboute distanced himself from it.

 

Tbh when i read the «everyone bad» mantra to describe 40k, it feels more like dellusion and clinging to the pre-2017 lore situation. 

 

If you define bad by the standards of chaos tyranids orks dark eldar, then everyone else looks more neutral and simply defending their own agenda. 

I mean GW has come out and said there are no good guys in the last like 2 years or so iirc…

 

1 hour ago, Osteoclast said:

Do remember that, aside from aside from being the loyal enforcers of a regime that makes Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot look like humanitarians; Space Marines (generally) are slave owners who take pre or barely pubescent children, preferentially sociopaths or hardened killers (American school shooters would be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that they’re usually too old), turn them into brainwashed child soldiers through a surgical and recruitment process that kills the vast majority of them (often intentionally), and half the time are the threat to humanity. 
 

Protaganist just means that they’re the focus and main character of the story, it doesn’t mean that they’re a good person. 

Yep even with my own beloved blood angels we call them noble…but really?

 

like good job, you’re not slaughtering innocent people to drink their blood. What a noble struggle.

 

and then there’s the fact that blood angels are one of two chapters/gene lines specifically called out for actually caring about base line mortal humans, meaning the vast majority of marines don’t actually care about us little guys and are fighting and ‘defending’ us out of pure brainwashing resulting in some ineffable sense of duty without understanding what that duty is.

 

4 hours ago, sairence said:

I believe the actual phrase GW uses us

 

"Everything is canon, not all of it is true."

 

Which is really just the short hand for "it's a big setting and your stories are part of it."

 

It also means that every piece of lore we find out has the caveat of the unreliable narrator, meaning it is conveyed from the narrator's point of view, with their biases, their lack of information. The narrators telling us a story that they believe to be true, but whether it actually is, or they get the details right is a whole different matter.

 

So yeah, we have the Shaman lore, we have the star child lore, we have the perpetuals lore, etc etc. And they are likely all true...as far as the narrators of those stories were concerned. That makes them canon. Whether they actually are true, well....that's always been and always will be up for debate.

That’s still stupid.

my chapter is not canon, and we can all recognize that. My chapter is my own creation as are the stories surrounding it.

[Evil Eye]

On 8/1/2025 at 1:21 PM, Inquisitor_Lensoven said:

my chapter is not canon, and we can all recognize that. My chapter is my own creation as are the stories surrounding it.

See the thing is, back in the day before GW turned the franchise into the MCU with more skulls, most of the "canon" events weren't terribly important because they only existed to give context to the setting and to the most important characters in the series- your dudes. The entire point of the setting was to allow for a sandbox to create your own stories with their own characters. The Horus Heresy was a massively important but barely-remembered event, with the truth lost to the mists of time, whereas now every single detail has been laid out in black and white; and IMO at least the setting has suffered for it.

 

40K is (or was) a setting, not a story.

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

5 hours ago, Evil Eye said:

See the thing is, back in the day before GW turned the franchise into the MCU with more skulls, most of the "canon" events weren't terribly important because they only existed to give context to the setting and to the most important characters in the series- your dudes. The entire point of the setting was to allow for a sandbox to create your own stories with their own characters. The Horus Heresy was a massively important but barely-remembered event, with the truth lost to the mists of time, whereas now every single detail has been laid out in black and white; and IMO at least the setting has suffered for it.

 

40K is (or was) a setting, not a story.

Still is a setting, and canon was still important 20 years ago.

[Karhedron]

7 hours ago, Evil Eye said:

40K is (or was) a setting, not a story.

 

Going even further back though and 40K was originally a story. There was Armageddon 2, that introduced Ghazkull and Yarrick as 40K's very first special characters. Then after some build up there was Armageddon 3. The war in the Gothic sector led into the big summer Eye of Terror campaign and Adaddon's 13th Black Crusade. We were promised that the outcome of the campaign would determine the direction of the lore going forward. 

 

Then GW changed their mind at the start of 4th edition. They froze the ongoing storyline and turned it into just a setting with no progression. That remained the case for over a decade until GW finally picked up the storyline again with Gathering Storm at the end of 7th edition. 

 

Whether people prefer setting or story is up to them but in becoming a progressing story again,  40K is actually going back to how it originally was.

[Scribe]

40K with a 'really folks' good guy? It ceases to be 40K at that point.

 

As it is, its gotten perilously close several times, and you have people who wrongly think 'noblebright' is OK for 40K in small doses.

 

40K is 40K because its grim, dark, hopeless, and the post boy faction is a bunch of emotionally stunted child soldiers brainwashed, tortured, and psycho-conditioned into believing that the genocide of the 'other' is good.

 

That's not even getting into the darkest faction of the setting also being Imperial: Sisters of Battle.

 

[Urauloth]

On 8/1/2025 at 12:41 PM, The Yncarne said:

“What if we’re the baddies?” asked the commissar in his skull cap. 

As I recall Horus himself had a moment of this. He had Erebus on hand to ensure the answer was a resounding "yes" of course.
The idea that the cognative dissonance of this line of thinking actually helped set him up for his fall is pretty great irony though. It's very tragic in the classic sense if having the wits and the humanity to consider these issues was something that was ultimately exploited to rob him of those qualities completely.

That's waxing philosophical about the Heresy of course, not really addressing the topic of the thread, but I don't need to do that. There's no "what if" because 40k already has Mortarion, who is a perfect angel who never did anything wrong in his life. 

[Antarius]

I really hope people don't consider the Imperium actually good. At best, if you want to go with "there's really no alternative to what they're doing" it's a massive (darkish) grey area. Either that or, to put it bluntly, people haven't been paying attention.

As for the canon discussion, I think one way of putting it might be "there's a lot of canon, but very few "word of god" truths". To me, a big part of the appeal of the setting is that both factions and individuals have their own perspectives, axioms and reasons for their actions, which make it possible to see things from their point of view, identify with them and even buy into them as "heroes" (from a certain perspective), while simultaneously being able to do the same thing with their opponents.

I mean, my Chaos Marines might be tragic heroes to themselves, betrayed by their fathers and creators and only desiring freedom and (the primordial) truth. At the same time, my Space Marines might be the last line of defense for humanity against the daemon-worshipping maniacs seeking to overthrow order and plunge the galaxy into madness and Death. If one of these factions were unequivocally right it would cheapen the setting enormously - but both of them being wrong as well as right (in their own way) doesn't.
In fact, I would say it makes it both more engaging and "realistic" (in so far as that word makes sense in the context of 30/40K).

As for story/setting it has always been a little from column A and a little from column B. The dial has shifted somewhat towards storyline, which I personally think is a mistake, but honestly that might mostly have to do with the writing and the content of the stories they have chosen.
In general, though, I would say that I think it would always be difficult, if not impossible, to handle all the different things pointing towards something climactic (probably the end of it all) that they'd lined up for the year 40.000 in a satisfactory manner.

[Robbienw]

The Imperium as a whole is good - it’s the only thing protecting mankind from extinction.

 

It’s pretty much objective that there is no alternative to what they are doing.  The previous versions of human federations/empires/alliances etc were all tried and tested before 30k and lead to mankind on the brink of extinction.

 

Of course it has bad and corrupted parts, it’s an unimaginably massive empire.

[Antarius]

Assuming that is true, it still doesn't make them good guys. I mean, torturing someone in order to get them to reveal where they hid a bomb (or whatever other example we can think of) might be your only option, but it hardly makes that torture a heroic act. I honestly don't think this is controversial.

Regarding the Imperium, the corruption and bad parts are completely central to it. One of the central parts of the lore is that they sacrifice a thousand innocents to the Emperor every day. Again, even if this is absolutely the only way, it's not heroic stuff. But that's fine, because the beauty of the setting is that it does not have traditional heroes and villains. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but it just objectively doesn't work on traditional good guy/bad guy dynamics.

[sairence]

42 minutes ago, Robbienw said:

The Imperium as a whole is good - it’s the only thing protecting mankind from extinction.

 

It’s pretty much objective that there is no alternative to what they are doing.  The previous versions of human federations/empires/alliances etc were all tried and tested before 30k and lead to mankind on the brink of extinction.

 

Of course it has bad and corrupted parts, it’s an unimaginably massive empire.

Just because it's working for the survival of mankind doesn't make it good. Every faction in 40k is fighting for the survival of its constituent species, but doesn't make them good in the moral sense.

 

That's not even getting into the gory details of how callously the Imperium spends human lives and how little regard it has for the individual wellbeing of its people.

[Osteoclast]

35 minutes ago, Robbienw said:

The Imperium as a whole is good - it’s the only thing protecting mankind from extinction.

 

It’s pretty much objective that there is no alternative to what they are doing.  The previous versions of human federations/empires/alliances etc were all tried and tested before 30k and lead to mankind on the brink of extinction.

 

Of course it has bad and corrupted parts, it’s an unimaginably massive empire.

Quite a few problems with this here:

1) Even if we grant the preservation of mankind, that is not an inherently justifying good in and of itself, that’s merely the self-interest of members of humanity. The Inquisition’s claim that the ends always justify the means, aside from not having a proper end, is simply an inversion of traditional moral theology, which goes so far as to say that it is better that the whole of creation perish rather than one willfully commit even the smallest sin (St Anselm of Canterbury).

2) The Imperium is wildly counterproductive; the Great Crusade both greatly empowered the Chaos Gods through Genocide Tuesday but also granted them their greatest ability to act in the material realm via the Traitor Legions. 
3) There is no “objective” that there was no alternative. We know that the previous interstellar governments fell during/due to the men of iron rebellion and the warp storms of the Age of Strife, but that’s our sum total knowledge. I would note that the Imperium wouldn’t fair any better and likely worse under the same circumstances. What we do know is that the Imperium was one of the first, and was the most powerful and likely most militant, of the post-Strife expansionist surviving powers. 
4) From an out of universe perspective: the writings and sourcebooks constantly hammer home that the Imperium is a straight up evil institution. The HH black books mention the Great Crusade propaganda using a paraphrased slogan from 1984 for goodness sake. 

[Urauloth]

Even if the Imperium was the only thing protecting humanity from extinction (which I'm not prepared to grant without qualifiers) that's a direct result of the Imperium spending 200 years destroying all the other human civilizations that survived the Age of Strife. "There's no alternative" isn't a very sound justification when you're the reason there's no alternative, especially when you'd rather blow up whole planets than countenance any alternative existing. The Great Crusade forced all of humanity's eggs into one basket and then dropped that basket on the uncarpeted floor of the Dark Gods, bouncing it off the table corner of the Pharos on the way down.

[Scribe]

4 hours ago, Robbienw said:

The Imperium as a whole is good - it’s the only thing protecting mankind from extinction.

 

It’s pretty much objective that there is no alternative to what they are doing.  The previous versions of human federations/empires/alliances etc were all tried and tested before 30k and lead to mankind on the brink of extinction.

 

Of course it has bad and corrupted parts, it’s an unimaginably massive empire.

 

Nope.

[Cleon]

I guess it really depends what you mean by good.

 

Is it moral and just by the standards of 21st century humans? hell no.

 

Would it be considered good enough 'within the bounds of a monarch's remit' by a medieval King/court? Maybe.

 

Is most of it better than what would happen to those worlds under the thrall of Chaos or Genestealer cults? Yeah, mostly.

 

To put things another way - What is a 'good' faction? The first that comes to mind as even trying to live up to that moniker (in sci fi, rather than in a simpler fantasy setting) is the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek and even for them the highest of moral standards are a target or a starting position, not a final outcome. Fiction is a set of trolly problems 'Do the right thing by your rules and allow suffering, or bend your principals to achieve a better outcome', otherwise it wouldn't really be interesting - who wants a story where doing the right thing always leads to the right outcome with no grey areas? (it'd be lovely in real life, but a boring story).

 

Not really sure where I was going with this, but I might as well leave it now I've typed it.

Edited 2 hours ago by Cleon

[Robbienw]

4 hours ago, Antarius said:

Assuming that is true, it still doesn't make them good guys. 

It does make them good guys.  Protecting mankind from corruption and extinction is an unalloyed good, there is no greater goal.

 

As I said earlier there are bad parts in the imperium, due to the scale of the empire they aren’t able to stop all corruption and infiltration, but overall as a faction they are the good guys.

 

Much of the terrible stuff done is out of necessity because the galaxy is so harsh and the opposing factions really are horrifically bad.  Survival trumps being nice to everyone all the time.  Being extreme and sacrificing parts for the whole is the only way to the ultimate goal at this point.  
 

These are human beings, it’s not realistic to say a faction can only be good if they do good things all the time.  The human race would be gone in seconds if that were the case.

 

You can argue 2 or 3 of the xenos factions are good guys, from their perspectives maybe they are, but every single xenos faction has negative intentions towards humanity, so to us they are still bad. 

 

It’s clear from the lore there is no alternative to the imperium now.  It could have been better of course if it weren’t for Magnus 

[Antarius]

26 minutes ago, Robbienw said:

It does make them good guys.  Protecting mankind from corruption and extinction is an unalloyed good, there is no greater goal.
 

(...)

 

You can argue 2 or 3 of the xenos factions are good guys, from their perspectives maybe they are, but every single xenos faction has negative intentions towards humanity, so to us they are still bad.

Okay, this is my last attempt. These two paragraphs from your post are saying pretty much exactly what I've been saying so far: every faction is "good" from their own point of view and the other factions are "bad" to them, because they are hostile to their goals. 
But "Protecting mankind" is no more an objective moral good than say, "protecting the hive mind" or "protecting Orkdom" etc., etc., you're just choosing one faction and giving them a pass on their actions, while saying the others are "bad" for performing similar (or in some cases, rather less horrible) actions.

Everybody wants to achieve their own goals and everybody has reasons that make sense from their point of view, but that doesn't mean that they're "good" in any objective sense and there's absolutely no "word of god" type statement anywhere in the lore or from any GW writer, saying that the Imperium is morally good. On the contrary, there are plenty of such statements to the effect that the Imperium is supposed to be seen as a horrible dystopian tyranny.

[Robbienw]

I think you are wilfully misunderstanding what I’m saying here.  Perhaps because you like the idea of there being some kind of moral equivalence between the imperium, and objectively horrible factions like chaos for whatever reason.

 

There is no such equivalence.  Some of the other factions, chaos for example, are obviously objectively bad, no matter what they think of themselves.

 

The imperium is good because it protects mankind.  The setting is ultimately about mankind’s survival, we are humans, human survival is the only thing that matters.

 

 

 

[Urauloth]

What makes a faction objectively bad, and why is there no equivalence?

 

If the survival of the human species is the only metric to your morality, where's the objection to, say, the Iron Warriors? Their planets are full of humans. Humanity isn't extinct in the Eye or the Maelstrom, human populations thrive there, and they're significantly less at risk from many xenos threats like the hive fleets. What makes Huron worse than any of his Imperial counterparts? He has an enormous number of human followers.

[Marshal Rohr]

46 minutes ago, Robbienw said:

I think you are wilfully misunderstanding what I’m saying here.  Perhaps because you like the idea of there being some kind of moral equivalence between the imperium, and objectively horrible factions like chaos for whatever reason.

 

There is no such equivalence.  Some of the other factions, chaos for example, are obviously objectively bad, no matter what they think of themselves.

 

The imperium is good because it protects mankind.  The setting is ultimately about mankind’s survival, we are humans, human survival is the only thing that matters.

 

 

 

You have brought your own goalposts. You are talking a function of the Imperium being good, which is like saying arresting thieves is good. 

[Scribe]

1 hour ago, Robbienw said:

The imperium is good because it protects mankind.  The setting is ultimately about mankind’s survival, we are humans, human survival is the only thing that matters.

 

Nope.