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.