Are Space MArines "monsters"?

Are Space MArines "monsters"?

A lot like an Ork, Space Marines are warriors and little else. Not necessarily "monsters" unless you're talking about real life good/bad standards.

Can we talk instead about the apparently amazing dental plan Blood Angels have?

Those pearly whites are amazing.

They're pretty monsterous. They're hypnoindoctrinated child soldier from death worlds that eat brains to gain memories, spit acid, punch people's heads off and get called Angels of Death. They're not just monsterous though. A lot of their more interesting stuff is fraternal bonds, cult rituals, choice and duty, mortality despite greatness, stuff like that. Very humanizing.

They are the Emprah's Fury!

Considering they're 8 foot tall post-humans with two hearts, spit acid, eat brains and exist solely as weapons, I'd think it is a fair assessment.

They look like the faces of 90's era WWE wrestlers who had their faces poorly shooped on shitty early era BL art.

They used to be crazy psycho monks but then when Horus Rising came out back in 2006 they gave the Marines much more human like personalities in order to show how much more sensible the Imperium was back then.

But now pretty much every Marine character is portrayed like Garviel Loken these days so the magic is lost and every Marine has to have a sensible/rational personality and female companion/waifu these days.

Are Space Marine metal head dots still canon?

Rogue trader marines were pretty human too. Ian Watson's Space Marine has all kinds of messed up stuff in it, but they're still humanized and conflicted.

Service studs were cannon in 7th, just much less common. No idea about on prime marines/8th though. They were always a bit wonky in terms of what they represented and how marines lived, being a stud screwed into your forehead for each decade or other measurement (sometimes square or other shapes for longer times), living for 300 years of war, but not wanting to have an entire head of metal dots.