After years of learning the lore of this setting piece by piece from random threads and posts, I decided to actually read some lore on it. I gotta say, this is the most nihilistic look at existence I've ever seen. The entire premise of the universe is a pointless struggle with the inevitable, and it effects all parties. Nobody will ever win, nobody will ever lose, and even the people who it seems you're supposed to cheer for are merciless, hopeless, and joyless machines of infinite repetition in the face of clear obsolescence, toward an end that nobody has any way of actually seeing through. When I started, at the beginning appropriately, things seemed alright. I can get behind the Emperor, he seems to have been a cool guy. But then the Heresy starts, a concept that before now I thought was just a humorous jab at the motives of humanity being idealistic and fueled by feverish dogma, and boy was I wrong. Everything goes to shit, and what's worse is that it's a clearly unavoidable step in the history of any species within the 40k universe as evidenced by the Eldar, and no doubt eventually by the Tau. Not the worst of all is that it's pretty much just Tolkien fantasy re-skinned again, but with Dwarves swapped for Tyrannids. All that said, I see the appeal of a universe flooded with endless war between heavy metal album art mixed together with 1980s sci-fi aesthetic, and I guess if you want to keep a series going indefinitely, the only way to do it is to set things up so that nothing changes, and nothing ever will. If anyone can think of a bleaker universe to want to imagine yourself in, please give it a shot.
PS, there's like a hundred something known chapters of the Space Marines, and only like four of them are cool.
Benjamin Perez
Orks are the only one that have fun. The galaxy was made for them.
Jonathan Adams
Did you not get the whole GRIMDARK thing?
Caleb Price
>Dwarves swapped for Tyrannids They had dwarves. They were called squats. Then they got erased.
Tyranids are their own thing.
Easton Smith
>Dwarves swapped for Tyrannids Please explain. Please.
Joseph Bennett
>but with Dwarves swapped for Tyrannids Is this an attempt at swapping discussion for (you)s?
Landon Baker
Yeah I'm not getting this, either.
Blake Morris
>Nobody will ever win, nobody will ever lose
That's because Warhammer 40k is a setting, not a story.
Caleb Lewis
/thread/
Mason Gray
It's definitely skewed grim-dark in the past decade or so but I always really liked the imperium as a representation of future humanity. When 40K started sci-fi was dominated by a view of humans having somehow matured a shed away all of our worst failings. Star Trek is the best example with the humans seeming to have gotten past ignorance and prejudice and where even their soldiers stop to argue moral philosophy in the middle of battle.
40K is taking all of the worst of humanity and turning up to 11. A galactic theocratic totalitarian fascist feudalism that practices eugenics that only stays united due to wild xenophobia for all things non-human and only survives because of their willingness to subject the vast majority of people to brutal serfdom or simply burn them up as just another strategic resource (men must die so that man endures)
This is the reason I always find it hilarious when people complain that there are no female space marines. Of all the horrible things the Imperium does the biggest complaint is that their genetically engineered child soldier warrior monks are an all boys club?
