Why are Space Marines so popular? This is not "stop liking what I don’t like"...

They're very flexible conceptually (easy to project whatever you want onto them)
They dominate the artwork and other media.
They consistently get new models
They're never really underpowered or weak in game
They're easier to paint than most armies

I got into them because I like super soldiers, and I like big bulky ornate plate armor.

Still triggered about the Space Wolves wearing fur, huh Tumblr?

They have power armor.

That's literally it for me. I love super soldiers. It gets annoying, all the GW bias towards them that makes the fanbase hate them, because no other army holds to my tastes as well.

They're also extremely customization, which is another aspect of the hobby that I love.

They're just fucking cool. They're knights with football team names and coloring, in space with guns and chainsaw swords.

Every single reason in this thread is wrong except

I like them because it's a power fantasy. They're big cool super soldiers who can't feel pain and who look awesome (in my opinion)..

Power fantasy is my guess. I can see why people like them because they make humans so weak and easily pushed to the side in the lore. It's hard to have a special human main character that kicks ass when they are so much weaker. Human stories have to focus on smaller things and can't address some of the heavier hitting and more interesting antagonists.

Personally I think Marines are a bore and a big reason why I don't care for much of the fluff in the universe.

fpbp

They're big and strong and smart and secret and special and tough and space and shoot and big and blue and fast and good and cool.

>They're easy to make into "your dudes" and are indeed custom tailored to be good for that
This is why I like them so much. It helps that there are so many conversion parts for them to really customize them. IG could have the same potential, but I think the readily available conversion parts aren't in as wide a variety as rines. I'd imagine IG, Eldar and Deldar would sell more if they got more subfactions with a different looks, like Marines get with their different chapters.
Nids or Necrons are going to be just Nids or Necrons with your own color scheme.
Orks have extensive options for making them your dudes but I think a lot of players find them too comic relief.

Also all of and for myself personally.

Space marines are the standard "LOOK MOM I'M A TOUGH SOLDIER, AREN'T I STRONG?" of 40k.

Chaos is the "I DON'T NEED TO LISTEN TO YOU ANYMORE MOM" of 40k.

There are a lot of manchildren in 40k.

they are cool

because a space marine with a jet pack and a giant chainsaw sword crashing down on someone is probably the coolest thing i can imagine.

>They have a memorable and easily identifiable aesthetic
I'd say this is probably the biggest point. "Genetically engineered gothic warrior-monks in powered armor" has got to be the most distinct idea in 40k.

So glad I grew out of Space Marines and became a mature Guard player.

Power armour is cool desu

>They have a memorable and easily identifiable aesthetic

There's this, but there's also the fact that Veeky Forums is full of macho idiots who are deathly afraid of showing any kind of weakness. They have to be the smartest, the strongest, the best. This extends into their sense of aesthetics - they have to like the strongest option, the most practical option, the "winning" option. They can't like something despite, or even because of, its flaws.

Notice how, whenever discussions about the Tau, or the Orkz, or the Eldar, or anyone who isn't the Imperium comes up, the discussion is always crowded out by extremely vocal Imperium fans, who insist on pointing out all the myriad ways that the other factions suck. All the times in the fluff where said faction has lost a battle, or a war. Or how every other faction is doomed in the long run. Because god forbid people like these factions for other reasons than masturbatory power-fantasies.

The same happens with D&D (anyone not playing a Wizard is a pleb), WoD (Mages are the strongest, can beat anyone else), even discussions of history (guns > swords, knights > samurai, Rome > everyone else, Imperial Europe > everyone else, the entire Western world > everyone else). If you don't pick the "winning" side, expect to be shit on mercilessly.

Wish fulfillment.

Because they're asexual murder machines that have a high place in society but don't have to actually socialize.

What's fun or interesting about losing, user?

>big guns
>big armor
>manly yelling and screaming as the pound their foes
>are incredibly varied, and with many color choices
>your dude potential
>easy to learn, easy to paint

Eldar are the 'MOM I'M GAY' of 40k.
Deldar are the 'MOM I'M A WOMAN' of 40k.
Tau are the 'MOM I LIKE TO WATCH UNDERAGE JAPANESE GIRL CARTOONS' of 40k.
Tyranids are the 'MOM EVEN GIRLS CAN LIKE MINIATURES' of the 40k.
Squats are the 'MOM THOSE BOYS WONT PLAY WITH ME' of the 40k.

What's fun or interesting about knowing you were going to win all along, user?

>They don't even have a Blood Bowl team!
I've long thought that 40K should have a counterpart to Blood Bowl.

A 40K hockey game would work so well. The sticks double as close combat weapons, meaning chainsaw sticks would also be a thing. The goalies could be in whatever passes for the faction's version of heavy armour (Termies for space marines, naturally). And so on.

People could even jokingly call it "Space Marines on Ice".

What's fun or interesting about winning all the time?

I don't think anyone's talking about constantly winning with no challenge, but everyone would agree they like to win.

But wouldn't it be a lot more awesome to win as the small underdog, than to win as the big muscular superman? To not know whether you'd win to begin with, to not have it be a foregone conclusion, to fight for it?

name a single better supersoldier army in fiction

Yet apparently the user I quoted can't see anything interesting about being an underdog, or being under genuine threat of losing, or fighting nobly for a lost cause. Or even not caring about winning or losing in the first place! Just enjoying being there, in the moment!

though the SPARTANS would lose a straight fight against an astartes, they are much more well known and popular

Samus.

>army

But that's boring.

space marines are actually the underdogs as is all of mankind

Imperial Guard is the underdogs. Space Marines never were.

Yet you wouldn't know that from the fiction, or from the way fans talk about them.

>neo nazis
Spotted the german.
>muh nazi muh nazi
Why dont you get a commie friendly hobby? Like shooting up or eating shit.

at least imperial guard aren't often outnumbered so much, have aerial/artillery support, actually have defensive positions, aren't teleported into the thick of it on suicide missions, can act without time constraints

Because every kid who grew up watching star wars WANTED the strom troopers and darth vader to be the good guys.

Warhammer sells that fantasy.
Now the strom troopers are the main characters.

By that logic Superman is an underdog.

They are easy as fuck to paint, baby's first miniatures ideal for kids.

i was weird among my friends for wanting to be an X-wing pilot, and liking the design of the salad bowl blueshirts more than stormtroopers

being outnumbered isn't a weakness for superman

Nor is it a weakness for supersoldiers with the best guns and armor around.

but it is. a single marine death is a blow felt by the chapter

>tfw I started before Black Templars got their own codex and chose them because the colour scheme was easy to paint.

Meanwhile a single Space Marine in battle is said to be worth... what, a million Guardsmen?

"Oh no, we lost one of our precious, precious nukes! And after it only killed a few million people, too!"

Yeah, just like how everyone was all sad when Superman died.

depends
they go from gods of battle who are superior to all to infantry+ who are powerful but not invincible

Is that the downs guard?

Is the reason Veeky Forums hates on Space Wolves because the models are hard to paint, unlike other Space Marines?
I find the extra talismans, runes and pelts to be much harder to paint than smooth armor.

youtube.com/watch?v=m3p_VuPIS2c

Yeah, in that small handful of works that recognise that Space Marines being near-invincible makes them extremely boring.

Every other work wanks Marines as hard as possible, and the fans lap it up.

You know in movies where you have a few really bad dudes fight a whole shit load of not so bad dudes? People tend to like the few bad dudes, and Space Marines are those guys, IG are the fucking waves of bodies washing over you positions. As much as people like to sell the guards as the underdogs because they're just regular guys against space monsters, they're regular guys against space monsters which they outnumber a billion to one, they have more numerous and powerful artillery, and they have the biggest, baddest and mostest tanks too.

When Johnny Rico looks over the top of the walls and sees the entire fucking horizon is full of bugs? That's what it's like to fight the IG. Alternately, the guy just brought as many Valks and Vendettas as he could cram into his list, and suddenly you're a dink in Apocalypse Now who cannot into surf.

The thing that makes the Imperial Guard underdogs isn't anything to do with their equipment or structure. The thing that makes the IG underdogs is the Imperium itself.

The Imperium is a bloated, decadent, crumbling empire, with an ass-backwards bureacracy, a viciously-insular class of technocrats who barely understand how any of their hoarded tech works, an oppressive culture that punishes any independent thought among the unprivileged classes (99.99% of the population), and an aristocracy that is rampantly, nakedly corrupt.

That is the state that the IG defend, and the state that the IG relies on for its manpower and materiel. That's a shitty hand to be dealt. The IG's underdog status comes from the fact that they can still occasionally win, despite having feet of clay.

At least, it did before GW drank the kool-aid, and started gradually ignoring what a self-destructive mess the Imperium was originally written to be, in favour of giving the macho idiots the Imperium they wanted.

imperium does have 9/10 logistics though, even with warp being an asshole sometimes

It's a way for young teen boys to deal with the anxiety of adolescence.

Seriously, that's what all the implant shit is.

They do now. They didn't in the past, when GW still remembered that the Imperium wasn't supposed to win.

What about the Imperial Guard?

Imperial Guard are cool.

Space Marines are all the Rambos and Commandos and other lone eighties action heroes, going alone (or in small groups) againts an overwhelming force, yet you still know they'll win in the end. Their struggle is fun to watch, you can sort of pretend you're feeling some tension over whether they might be able to beat all those enemy forces, but in the end you won't need to be -too- anxious about it and can just sit back and relax and watch the fireworks.

You all can claim it's terrible and for kiddies, but secretly you love that shit.

I unrepentantly fucking love 80s action movies.

Theyre mythological heroes. Theyre super human fantasy. Theyre the huge badasses that drop in to help save humanity. Theyre integral to lore and are iconic. Theyre also humanity, we see things from their/ imperiums point of view.

They aren't my favourite, but when I was a kid I hated marines, thought they were just boring humans, dull and not exciting. Now im older I can totally see the appeal

>Spotted the german.
Not user, but why?

Because despite 40k supposedly being a dystopic setting, space marines are exempt from almost all of it.

>No one except those on the top have any freedom or rights in the Imperium
Space marines are almost universally treated as nobility, never answer to anyone, and never want for anything.
>The Imperium is in the vice grip of an incredibly dogmatic religion
Space marines have special insight, don't necessarily believe in said dogma, and have repeatedly given the Inquisition the middle finger.
>The universe is full of powers that outclass humans on a massive scale
Space marines are repeatedly stated to beat anything and have on more than one occation soloed shit like Avatars and daemon princes.
>The universe is full of horror
Space marines are literally immune to fear.

People complain about Tau disrupting the tone of the setting, but they have nothing on space marines.

I hate to say it but a space marine is a male power fantasy and they are the most popular because the players want to be them.

It's also why there is a such a bizarre focus on their penises in a lot of discussions

>It's also why there is a such a bizarre focus on their penises in a lot of discussions

Even though they don't ever even use them?

Much like their players.

>soloed avatars
particularly egregious form of fluff/crunch disparity, considering even terminators and honor guards would have difficulty not dying to one

Space Marines are the setting.

exactly

>There's this, but there's also the fact that Veeky Forums is full of macho idiots who are deathly afraid of showing any kind of weakness.
You are, by far, reading way too much into shit.

What he meant to say was that certain special characters (like Marneus Calgar) beat things like Avatars and Daemon princes in the fluff, not that every space marine could do it.

He's just letting his Marine hate show a little too hard.

He needs to invent reasons for why he's better than the people who like different groups of fake space men.

can MACdaddy beat an avatar 1v1?

They have the Maximus armor, which is the sexiest shit ever.

Does it somehow not count if the space marine has a name? 'Cause most special characers are just marines who happen to be really good at being marines.

not him but marines do seem to have weird power levels

an imperial guard is just an imperial guard unless you got bionics and the emperor's blessing but marines can go from pretty fucking good to marneus calgar - demiprimarch tier

kinda like if you're a good ork and don't die you're bound to only get better

they are simple yet powerful concept

they get plastered over everything numerous times

This is either projection of insecurity or a bad justification of ones preference. Sometimes a puddle is just a puddle user, don't dive head first into everything.

the "MOM I WANT TO BE A MAN!" of 40k

They look like angry robots, kids go nuts.

Necrons are the 'MOM I'M A WELL BALANCED ADULT WITH PERFECTLY RESPECTABLE TASTE' of the 40k.

This, and they shoot RPG machine guns.

Not really. They are the focus so rich kids will buy them.

>Not really.
Yes really. The old lead Imperial Marines are literally why 40k was made.

Then again, so do commisars.

Not really. They aren't the setting. They are the focus so rich kid swill buy them.

That would be amazing. there is a conversion mod for blood bowl called cross check that kind of does that but if GW would do something big and official like that it would be godlike to me as a quebecian.

Yes really. The setting was born out of them. They're at its core figuratively and literally.

But also no they aren't. The setting may have been born from them, but they are not "the core" and they are not "the setting".