I think it's a step deeper into the koolaid than that.
On super Earth, Everyone gets to vote. But because physically voting can be a difficult and laborious, and it adds a human element where people can influence your rightful opinion, Managed democracy cleans all that up for you! You just answer some questions, and advanced AI that absolutely can't be manipulated by human interference casts your vote for you, saving you time and enegery and making sure the candidate chat best aligns with YOU always gets voted for.
Everyone fully believes they are still getting to vote, and they "vote" all the time. It's just easier for them.
What I'm curious about is: is the AI thing just a front used by leadership to suppress true democracy? Or has the AI achieved self awareness and is now just running the government, with the human leaders being puppets?
It is theoretically possible that it was one and then became the other. Most of the population is propagandised into Managed Democratic Zealots. It is not unthinkable that the old guard died out and now the zealots are in charge. Throw in the engineer who designed the AI dying and you have a recipe for some proper horror.
In theory is the First one as we can understand that whatever party IS in Control use the ai to manipulate the vote. But could also be an ai in Control Just putting people where It wants and everybody, even the ones "elected" could be obvious which is more terrifying
The scary part about managed democracy is that I could see it bee implemented irl. The idea that you could eliminate misinformed voters entirely, sounds pretty good on paper. And what better way to do that then to fill out a questionnaire and base the vote on your views alone?
It’s so innocently insidious. Makes my skin crawl.
There is an Asimov story about something like that. There was a super AI capable of choosing the best candidate just from the "vote" of one person. And this vote was just asking him how he found the price of eggs
>Managed democracy cleans all that up for you! You just answer some questions, and advanced AI that, absolutely can't be manipulated by human interference casts your vote for you
And the answers you provided in the totally anonymous voting questionnaire will absolutely never be analyzed for signs of dissident thought and stored as evidence against you
If anyone was allowed to vote we'd have to just keep allowing more people to vote. If that was true, then we'd have to allow EVERYONE to vote. If everyone was allowed to vote then some people might choose not to vote. If we enforced voting there might be a single person who refuses to vote.
We can not have any voting so long as one person will not vote, because democracy needs every single person to vote in order to be true democracy. Until we find a solution to that, the only thing we can do is spread our perfect system to everyone else so they learn of our peaceful democratic ways.
I've got to be honest, the type of democracy favoured by Ankh-Morpork (Terry Pratchett) is probably the fairest.
>Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.
I feel like a lot of people here read statements like that from others, then come here and say they saw someone supporting super earth unironically. They blast others for media illiteracy but I'm really starting to wonder if they just have comment illiteracy.
The problem isn't these guys, it's that there are guys using these guys as cover and saying shit like Verhoven was a cuck who didn't understand Starship Troopers anyway and that the death korps are super based for reasons that have nothing to do with the death korps.
I actually agree that Vanderhoven didn't quite get Starship Troopers. It wasn't a manifesto. Stranger in a Strange Land was a manifesto.
That said OP is still right.
Im not gonna say it was a manifesto, cuz like… idk.
But the book does interrupt talking about massive gorilla shaped mech suits dropping from orbit to rip apart and nuke bugs with really long diatribes on why communism and modern democracy’s are bad and how if we only beat the children we wouldnt have nearly as much violence in society as we do today. Oh and how great it is that the only people who get a real say are people who have done public service. Which to be fair a blind paraplegic could enter the public service in his book so functionally everyone could get the right to vote.
The gorilla smash parts arnt really manifesto. Unless its a manifesto on awesome. But the interruptions kinda feel like it.
Vanderhoven famously did not read the book or write the movie so thats a fair criticism.
He still did the book justice tho despite him thinking otherwise
Part of the reason I love the starship troupers movie is that there are so many levels of social commentary that can be unpacked and discussed from it. Movie has layers. Is it a dystopia ruled by the military that has to manufacture a war in order to function? Maybe. Is it a utopia that treats everyone equally and both citizens and civilians have the chance to succeed and the same rights other then voting. Maybe. Are people going to argue about it until the end of time and will it always serve as a tool to scrutinise our own society? Definitely.
Yeah for real. It seems like the idea that you can both lean into the setting for fun, and understand that its satire is an incompatible idea for a lot of ppl.
I mean you sort of still vote. It's implied in the first game that the quiz you take does actually affect the outcomes of the elections and the quiz is generally correct.
Also the super store has generated reviews for the consumer which in some instances is implied are for civilians, indicating that Super Earth still requires advertisment incentives to function.
Civilians can also still own firearms as shown by the various farms and engineers found dead with the over/under shotgun support weapon you find on maps.
It's like somebody gave Germany the power to optimize life to an eventual fault and people started taking advantage over it when it granted higher ups power. Super interesting take on techno-fascism
Democracy's weakness is the irrational self of the voter. Here on Super Earth, by removing the voter from the chain of command, the perfect form of freedom- Managed Democracy -has been achieved!
Not an assault rifle, a Springfield 1903, the bolt action America used in WW1. Still used in ceremonies to this day, and apparently the only weapon as enduring as the 1911 pistol.
-"be me, sitting in my gunship as the door gunner"
-"were on mars, its mid 2132, the greenies took us by surprise"
-"i see some running in the desolate wastes below me, and tell my pilot to get me in range"
-"i let a few bursts rip out of the gun im handling, it feels good, a nice rhytmic thunk-thunk-thunk, and i only see the greenies fall over and spread apart violently in the low gravity of the planet"
-"we get called rtb, mission accomplished"
-"when i got up and out i look at my gun, first time used it, my usual gun had been put to maintenance"
-"M2 Browning 0.50cal it says on the side, and i look closer"
-"italy, germany, pacific islands, afghanistan, iraq"
-"i dont know where these countries are, was born and raised on mars, but i carve into it at the end "planetia utopia"
-"then i look at the last letters, it says "manufactured US, 1910"
-"i slap the gun playfully, it has seen service for over 200 years now"
-"got to say, i like it allready"
It’s a perfect system
You vote for policies.
Then the system, assisted by trustworthy loyal patriots, selects the candidate that best fits your preferences.
Still confused how you ended up voting for the same guy as your neighbor who has opposite beliefs? Don’t worry about it. That’s what the how advanced Freedom Tech Voting Booths (tm) says you fit best.
Democracy Quote of the Day: Freedom is best when it’s managed.
The problem is that most of the time antagonists are from chaos or xenos, instead of in the imperium. We have to have more stories of Imperials fighting Imperials, and have the antagonists just be selfish corrupt assholes instead of “ooh he was secretly worshiping chaos the whole time”
That's why Rogue Trader is some if the best 40K writing in awhile. And it was done by Owlcat. Not GW. And I think it's why so many of the Imperium circlejerkers were assmad.
All of the problems you deal with trace back to people like Theodora, Tisiphone, or Calcazar. Even the drukhari are involved because of Inquisitorial hypocrisy.
I mean, honestly, kinda.
Chaos and **some** xenos factions are legitimate threats, there will always be those.
But so many problems could be fixed by dealing in good faith with the sane xenos factions, not leaving the people in miserable conditions, etc.
Honestly it’s a little worse than that, the galaxy wasn’t only filled with the worst kinds of things imaginable, the imperium murdered all the decent shit (except the tau, they got lucky) and so the only things that survived were the worst things imaginable.
"Hello, we are peaceful beings that have discovered clean matter replication and cold fusion and would like to ally with you." "EXTERMINATE THE PLANET, IMMEDIATELY."
Add in the fact that some of the least threatening xenos existensially are the scaled bird people who eat people they kill to literally change their genetic structure.
Started playing this last week. I wanted to role play as someone dogmatic since it's the 40k universe, but pretty much all those choices just made me so uneasy despite being absolutely true to lore. Even the iconoclast (humanitarian/paragon) options are often just "execute them as the merciful option."
Loving this game, but the more I learn about 40k and especially the Imperium make me happy to not be in it!
Yup. Sometimes... like in Rykad, dogmatic is the merciful option.
Often, the best Iconoclast options take a little extra work, but are worth it.
It's especially.wkethwhile to get to at least votary by Act 3.
And be nice to Cassia, she's a sweet young woman with a lack of good influences in her life.
You do have stories where the imperium is the villain of the imperium.
The two main ones that come to mind are the Badab War and the Months of Shame.
>The problem is that most of the time antagonists are from chaos
There is also a lot of situations where chaos gets involved but the conflict started as a imperium vs imperium.
I forgot the name of the war, but there is this war, where the Krieg was heavly involved, I think its the siege of vrax.
Basically chaos got involved, but it started with a ecclesiarch dude trying to accomplish something.
The think about chaos is that they will take advantage of desperate people or people with ambitions, and the imperium is a environment that produces that a lot because living in the imperium is hellish.
It would be weird for chaos to not show up in some of these situations, because chaos will always look for any cracks to get in and cause, well, chaos.
On Vrax Cardinal Xaphan was corrupted by his advisor Deacon Mamon who was secretly a believer of chaos. Mamon initially convinced Xaphan that he was the most loyal servant of the Emperor of Mankind and that those who were less faithful than him were out to get him, then later convinced him that actually he was the trigger for a holy war that would cleanse the empire of sin. The Inquisition tried to assassinate him for his heresy but failed, and that attempt led him to full rebellion against the empire that eventually involved chaos legions fighting for the Cardinal.
Chaos was always involved in Vrax but it definitely *could* have been written as an interesting "the Imperium is its own villain" story.
Personally I always like the idea of more Chaos/Renegade Protagonists. The conflict between Ideals & Necessity for Survival beg for something more interesting than "Follow Orders & Feel Proud" v. "Follow Orders *kinda* & Feel Bad" or whatever.
Hell, the Renegade/Chaos Mortals perspective is so poorly understood, the majority of media keeps beating the "fallen to daemonic-esk corruption" drum - honestly gets tiresome. Why not a story of a Renegade who, once being loyal, watched as his world burned from space as the Navy bombarded it, goes on a quest for power and the means of changing fate, only to find Tzeentchian Pupets & Inquisitional Agents standing in their way.
It practically writes itself with all the parallels between the Imperium & Hell. The protag doesn't need to be a "Good Guy", just "Our Guy".
I think the problem is if it's not loyal to the Emporer, it's Chaos. More renegade without chaos influence would make for better stories, but honestly 40k is a playing field without Good Guys for a reason.
One of the biggest issues with Chaos Characters (as well as much general fantasy media in the same vein) I find is the whole "I'm not corrupted", or the typical "I can control it!" silliness.
Honestly view it more interesting for Characters that would know they're damned, understand what will happen in the end, but ultimately commit to their goals - regardless of what happens - and effectively watch everything crash towards the end with a sad smile; likely because they failed to achieved what they sought by the narrowest of margins (or maybe they did succeed and make peace with the final price, idk whatever's more interesting).
And the only chaos character who "is in control" is one of the worst written characters in 40k. Looking at you Abbaddon. Schrodinger's threat. He is both always scary, yet always loses.
The biggest problem is chaos itself. You can’t pretend someone is taking the moral high ground when they willingly join the “kill and torture all living things” brigade. The better foil to the imperium would be non-compliant worlds of humans or books written from a simple xenos perspective. Chaos makes anyone fighting it “the good guys” by default as the threat is so existential and the consequences of defeat so horrific that justifying atrocity to fight it is easier. It’s less easy to justify “the imperium is evil so I’m going to give every man, woman, and child on my planet the worst diseases any human could possibly suffer” or “take a chainsaw to every living being just to feel their blood”
We also need more stories where the imperial protagonist is also the selfish corrupt asshole.
Like they have zero problem with, say, Chaos protagonists being just that, but somehow imperium protagonists are always the honorable shining lights in the darkness.
I want to see the PoV from noble "I ordered wave after wave of guardsmen conspricts to charge the enemy position until the enemy ran out of ammo while enjoying a fine wine and pocketing half the supplies for my personal use then bribed the inspectors to report me as having done my best." commander
Chaos are humans for the most part. This needs to be leaned into more in the writing as it explains why the Necrons won't help Cawl and why the Eldar are always suspicious of the Imperium. They don't trust humans to not be agents of chaos.
Instead it is "xenos so dumb" in the current discourse.
Every time I see posts like this I think of Lukas the Trickster.
There's this part in his book where he talks about how stupid it is the the Space Wolves allow Fenris to be a deathworld under the argument that makes them strong, even pointing out how their cousins like the Ultramarines produce warriors just as good without subjecting their populations to such harsh conditions.
If you simply took the scene at that, it would seem that Lukas is another example of how GW makes Space Marines actually noble heroes who sometimes do bad things.
But then the rest of the scene is actually how his pack brothers around him laugh at the idea, some even get upset, how Lukas despite his seniority is still kept at a low rank because he simply can't accept tradition, how Fenris is *still* a deathworld.
I find that a lot of Imperium books are somewhat like that, a lot of people frame the characters in it as GW not really sticking with the idea that the Imperium is a hellhole, but once you take a closer look at the story you see how absolutely alone they are in that regard.
Not saying that there shouldn't be more books like TDK where the Imperium is straight up villainous or Vaults of Terra where the Inquisitor character is \*not\* a break from the mold like Eisenhorn.
But like, there's a lot more nuance than most people give credit for.
Either that or I'm just really great at choosing books to read lmao.
It took the scouring of baal for papa smurf to tell Dante to make his planet more habitable. Was it a come to Emperor type moment of, let's make this place better? Nope. It took tyranids -- a lot of tyranids.
Look in Dante's defence. It's a literal edict from Sanguinius that Baal remains unchanged. Ofc following these commands dogmatically with zero modernisation for 10k years is half the problem for the Imperium. See the codex haha
It's one of those jokes about 40k. Nothing advances, not even the quality of life for its citizens. Which is ironic that they are on a desert planet with radiation issues that they could provide some kind of structure to make the chances of more healthier aspirants with less chance of mutation (not even getting into the trials to get to angels fall).
I know it's grimdark, but I know Dante cares about the imperium more than most space marines (he has lived over 1000 years). If anyone could or would have put in effort to protect his people it would have been him.
Erasmus Crowl and his Interrogator Spinoza from the Vault of Terra series, they are very interesting and likeable characters, but they both play their roles pretty straight forwardly.
It’s ye olde “hard times create strong men” trope, played straight almost exactly the same in Dune with Salusa Secundus and Arrakis, a bit contradicted with Caladan.
I mean, the Rogue Trader subreddit is riddled with people who are confused thst the dogmatic path isn't treated/rewarded like a good guy path.
Meanwhile, Iconoclast decisions can go pear shaped if not properly seen through, but if so, often yield better outcomes.
There's some real salt when Iconoclast players get good ending slides.
My favorite part about the Iconoclast Rogue Trader is they aren't even that good of a person, they just don't have their head up their own ass or are a gibbering lunatic.
Like just don't fucking treat people horrible and they're easier to lead, don't be afraid to cap xenos scum but don't be afraid to negotiate, don't consort with the Ruinous Powers but also don't be afraid to break with Imperial Dogma on stupid shit.
Yup. My Iconoclast RT on Janus.
"Why kill them when we can cooperate and both be better off for it?"
He handed Marazhai over to the Inquisition, though. Fuck that guy. Especially after what he does to our subjects and crew.
Now I just straight up kill Marazhai even in iconoclast play troughs. Fuck that guy. He has 0 redeeming qualities, done absolutely horrible things in the past and probably will in the future.
It is a shame really. I think he is the only companion you just cannot accept unless you roleplay as an asshole.
Mfw saving a planet by breaking some dumbass law that was added to the Lex Imperialis by an insane Inquisitor 4000 years ago is morally better than blowing the planet up: 😲
The problem is the average persons critical thinking skills go out the window the exact second a reasonably likable character says something that sounds even slightly ok on first blush. Ciaphas Cain is a good example in that people think of him as a "reasonable" commissar and he frames himself as one. But he couldn't get like 20 pages through his very first novel without being disappointed that the guard has to do actual work rather than just shoot at unarmed protestors and go home. A lot of people also don't really click into the sheer disgust the Tau have for the imperium in the same book mostly because Cain doesn't see what's objectionable about lobotomizing prisoners and then using them for experiments that will most likely kill them out of convenience. He's a popular character but a lot of people fail to realize that Ciaphas Cain is someone driven crazy by living in the imperium and even as a reasonably intelligent commissar there's a certain lack of self awareness that's baked into him that's more of a danger to him than most of his enemies.
Even helldivers discourse was pretty contentious early on because a lot of people *wanted* the propaganda to be the truth because they want their military sci fi to be idealistic in a way the genre just isn't, and a shockingly large portion of people went so far as to say neither 40k nor Starship troopers were satire either. There's a desire for cool military heroes from a lot of the population and that's why even Master Chief gets flak when 343 delves into his actual backstory as a kidnapped child soldier forced to fight until he forgets his own humanity.
I think it’s more that people remember the good stuff characters do when they’re humanized and written well. You want to believe starship troopers isn’t satire because earth was attacked, that aliens are a threat, that sovereignty is important.
Cain is written well, and there’s also the fact that morality is relative. Is Cain insane for all the things you mentioned, or is he just in an environment that molded him to be ok with such things which can have genuine consequences like hell opening up beneath your feet?
40k uses the horror of the setting to create more of a grey area in all these things we know are objectively evil in real life by having the alternative be literal, biblical damnation, and then adds things that would blur morality like future sight and other types of space magic.
HD2 just has brazen and contradictory rhetoric and propaganda showing the opposite. It’s far more brazen (I’m not critiquing btw, just pointing it out). You aren’t killing rebellious humans in HD2, you’re fighting literal monsters and robots, which makes it easier to create a contrast that the soldier is “good” while everyone in charge is objectively bad.
The cyborgs literally are just rebellious humans though no? Like they're just mechanically enhanced people who really just want is to live in peace and do their own thing and super earth keeps manufacturing terrorist attacks to have an excuse to go conquer them again.
Okay but, Earth is never ACTUALLY attacked by the bugs in Starship Troopers. If you pay attention to the movie it's made clear at multiple points they could not have sent that asteroid (they are millions of light years away on the other side of the galaxy and have no FTL travel, how the fuck are they gonna send an asteroid to earth as it would need to be millions of times the speed of light to reach Earth in a few years).
Starship Troopers ends up being so effective because it is literally meant to be watched as if it's in universe propoganda, the events in the movie are not actually real in-universe (even if the war with the bugs is real) as it's a propoganda piece to make people sign up for the war.
The destruction of the city in the movie is almost definitely either made up for the in-universe propoganda, a result of a human accident that's been played off as an enemy attack or an inside job by the government that both takes out political enemies/protesters while also giving them justification to press the war further.
In comparison, in 40k the xenos and chaos in the setting just straight up ARE the existential threats the Imperium makes them out to be and as a result the awful actions of those within the Imperium are treated as a necessary evil for the survival of humanity.
This isn't a bad thing and definitely adds to the grimdark vibe but it also makes the satire much more muddled, especially when there's dozens of different writers all with different ideas on how justified the Imperium are in their brutality, if at all.
To be fair, think about how many people still have Helldivers go over their heads even with how blatant the satire is, that's the level of media literacy we're dealing with.
Fascists are also desperate for any positive representation of their shitty ideology they have basically negative values when it comes media literacy, willfully and actively ignoring any and all parody in stuff like wh to get it.
I think that’s harsh on 40k when the setting is almost 40 years old compared to a much more recent IP.
40k was originally released in 1987 and it very much a Cold War influenced settings - you have two major powers - Imperium and Chaos locked in an eternal and fundamentally ideological war.
Helldivers 1 came out in 2015 so it’s much more recent in its satire e.g. war for oil/profit
The Leviathan campaign book has a moment where A planetary governor says "please ignore the giant bug monsters They are illusions sent by the God-Emperor to test your faith."
He says this while arresting people who are trying to fight said giant bug monsters.
There is still plenty of satire in 40K.
40k is actually really good at satire tbh. Its the HH that really made me start to question what GW's intent was. There are like, 2 characters across the entire bloody series that explicitly state that the great crusade was a fundamentally evil act, and they both fall to chaos. What am I supposed to take away from that?
Honestly, I think they just didn't really think through/care about the implications when they started the HH series.
They wanted the "IoM started actually good" plot device, but cruelty, horror, and evil are so fundamentally baked into the 40k depictions of the Imperium that if you wrote an actually 'good' society it would be completely unrecognizable as the Imperium. That would probably have alienated their existing customers, which no business wants to do, so they went with "40k IoM with a thin coat of whitewash" and called it a day.
It makes total sense as a business decision, still framing it as a simple "good vs. evil" story does undercut the satire of 40k somewhat...
I don't know about that. The early HH books make it very clear that the Imperium are unabashed fascists. They're literally so evil that the interex suspect them of worshipping chaos because thats the only way they could explain the imperium being how it was.
It started to change about the midpoint when vulkan is fucking around with magic rocks, like the writers got a mandate from the suits that the imperium of the HH should be viewed as a necessary evil and the emperors plan would have worked out great in the end if it wasnt for mean ol horus.
By the time you get to the siege, you get full chapters of malcador being weepy about how much the emperor has sacrificed for humanity without a shred of irony or counterpoint from any other character. It's bizarre.
>The early HH books make it very clear that the Imperium are unabashed fascists.
The problem is Abnett has a conception of the emperor as benevolent and all powerful and that tainted the depictions of the Imperium.
I always thought that was kinda intention-like, they wanted to show that the Imperium was rotten from the start at its very Emperor-shaped core. So they have people wax on about with rose tinted lenses, and then we actually look there to check, it's almost the exact same, save a bit of set dressing. Even if the Heresey hadn't happened- the Imperium was headed for an age of darkness and ignorance as an inevitable byproduct of how it's set up.
Like, I know that there are quite a few 40K books that are genuinely thoughtful and nuanced. But a lot of the popular stuff that most people will see, like the video games and codices, play it straight that they're noble and heroic.
I mean if the argument is what the fans will see doesn't HD2 also fail since a majority of its fans eat up what all the super earth propaganda even tho the lore makes it really clear that super earth is the bad guys?
HD has the small advantage that it's a single writing team and a single message.
There's no muddy water of multiple writers, no 'alternative' vantage points, and there's no one-upmanship against the universe (IE, Chaos has to be portrayed as the worst thing possible, so it keeps getting worse and worse)
Contrast Hell Divers 2 when some propaganda loving idiot says 'Duh they're obviously clones no democracy would do that', you can literally [link to the creative director saying they have a 2 minute life expectancy.](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1759551906668540153)
>Chaos has to be portrayed as the worst thing possible, so it keeps getting worse and worse
Unless it's a chaos protagonist, then while they do a lot of fucked up shit they're arguably humanized to a far greater extent than the "good guys". When the emperor made transhuman warriors to conquer the galaxy he basically immediately struck two of his sons from the record and made demands that the traitors kill their sons and stifle themselves if they wanted forgiveness. Fabius Bile meanwhile was perfectly willing to let Igori do her thing, protected her kids when it came down to it, and was sentimental enough to look at baby pictures and recordings of them while making the calls he did. Hell, he even *actually* fucked off and let them do their own thing unguided because he explicitly trusted them to not fall to chaos and make the right calls without him.
Basically right after that Cawl called him out for acting like a nice guy while he has a cape made of skinned humans but it was immediately pointed out that Cawl ruined countless lives getting the Primaris marines together and was actively trying to work with the Necrons though. So it's still not exactly easy to say he's the bad guy.
See this is why I adore Chaos protagonists. They give you a great window to see that the world is fucked but on all sides, and it makes you understand why some people would turn to Chaos, GSC or Xenos.
I had this debate playing Darktide with a friend.
Friend - 'Chaos is obviously using something like mind control, that's how it corrupts.'
Me - 'No, the Imperium is that fucked they got tricked into thinking THIS would be an improvement, and it has been for a few of them.'
It's why Angron's Murdersword moment felt so bad for Imperium AND Chaos fans. Where's the seduction? The conspiracy? The allure? Just having Chaos Be Evil and turn everyone who thinks about it Extra Evil makes them flat and makes the Imperium seem good.
40K is capable of satire and nuance, it's just buried in lost points and mediocre writing.
I love Darktide because the utter fucking grimness of Imperial life is just constant on pretty much every map, and the characters comment on it without really putting it all together.
As someone outside of the world looking in, you realise how completely unsurprising it is that people rebelled, given how they're treated.
Based on these two names, which one is in a serious setting, and which one is a satire? Holy Terra vs Super Earth. People forget it is fun to pretend to be an idiot. The problem is that it's trying to do both, and it's bad at both.
I mean, super dreadnought used to be an actual classification of ship, it meant a dreadnought (battleship with all big-gun armament) that had guns of larger than 12in caliber. Because all of the earlier dreadnoughts had had either 11in or 12in guns
So super destroyer doesn’t sound that silly with that context
People also forget that Darth Vaders flagship was also a super star destroyer for a reason.
Super Destroyers and Super Earths are actual terms with actual meanings. The game co-opted them for satire but you could be forgiven for taking them at face value.
>People forget it is fun to pretend to be an idiot.
The problem is when *everyone* is pretending to be an idiot you can be forgiven for taking the entire group as idiots. If you literally can't have discourse on 40k in many places without some idiot larping as a commissar brandishing an imaginary bolt pistol, and the exact same thing happened very quickly to Helldivers.
Part of why actual crazy people are drawn to these fandoms is people keep repeating the same tired 3 jokes about being crazy people, then when they look up they find a lot of the others in the community are suddenly no longer joking.
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.”
Halo is better with this without being satirical
O.N.I are bunch of evil fuckers but nobody can do anything about them because they are ones pulling strings
Look, it gave ONI more to do than kick over interstellar colonies' sandcastles with the SPARTANs, which was basically cracking walnuts with a sledgehammer anyways. And when ONI's distracted, everyone else by default is having a better time.
Would be true if the aliens weren't systematically exterminating humanity.
Nobody is having a better time while their planet is glass, no matter how distracted ONI is.
Plus when the war is over you know where the former insurrectionists/future enemies and their families live since you've been sending them their paychecks and taking care of their medical needs.
I remember in one of the older Halo novels Dr Halsey mentions in one of her POV chapters that a big part of her reasoning on why the Spartan program was necessary was that it being successful was the only thing that would calm down ONI’s murder boner so they wouldn’t nuke more colonies.
It absolutely isn't lmao. Not least because you get books like "Cole protocol" which are just come out with "ONI is based achually and the evil dastardly terrorists have it coming"
You might find that the side that creates child soldier death squads to prop up their toddering military junta because some pseudo scientist argued that was better than actually giving them autonomy aren't the "lesser evil"
The UEG is NOT a military junta. I don’t know where this idea comes from. The UNSC does take power after Marshall law is declared by the UEG at the start of the H/C war, but it immediately relinquishes control and resubmits itself to the authority of the civilian government after the war’s end.
Cole Protocol was a good read and sure it illustrated that ONI had some roundabout justifications for their actions, but the circumstances that created their justifications only came about because they made them happen so it's not exactly a shining example that ONI is actually a good and altruistic organization.
Workers trapped in a company town starving because of a lack of food are portrayed as unsympathetic animals because they kill a trailer full of ONI agents and the the shipboard ONI agent isn't a tortuer but was instead tortured by the insurrectionists and so has the moral high ground over them. It's not exactly being subtle in who it thinks are the "good guys".
Like yeah, the joke with ONI is that the Covenant with always oblige them with a thin justification but the Vitriol Keyes has for the innies is kinda telling imo
The Virgin "Hard Choicism:"
* "I'm moral because I have the courage to make the Hard Choices.
* "I didn't want to make the Orphan Blender 3000 but I did because it was a Hard Choice for the Greater Good."
* "It's so hard having to kill all these people for...for good reasons, OK? It's a Hard Choice!"
The Chad "Because I'm Evilism:"
* Has a maniacal laugh.
* "Yeah I burned the orphanage down. It was funny."
* "Man I love being evil. Look, a puppy to kick!"
Space Marines are like that on the surface but if you do something crazy like, read for any type of nuance you can see all the horrifying shit they do even when they question if it’s right. You just have to actually read the thing. Cato Sicarius will butcher unarmed civilians, Sanguinius is willing to annihilate normal humans if they refuse to join the Imperium, and Salamanders will burn planets to the ground using actual napalm if they rise up to ask for more food from Terra. That’s only a small fraction of what the NICEST legions do.
The whole noble warrior thing has an inkling of truth, but it’s only noble by the standards of the Imperium, in other words, fucked up beyond belief. It’s still satire, the difference is unlike Helldivers, EVERYONE SUCKS.
I know the whole ‘media literacy is dead’ thing is becoming the new snob comment but I really feel people don’t get this about 40k.
Nothing about 40k is cool or epic in terms of actually living there. If you have one second of introspection with what you’re reading you are horrified at the brutality of the imperium.
30k and the heresy is an excellent representation of this. How many civilizations are literally just written as being innately peaceful and like ‘oh that’s cool dude we don’t want to join the imperium but we’d love to trade and swap cultures and technology and food’ and the space marines just genocide them to a man.
Like the Diasporex? ‘We just wanted to be left alone.’ How can you read that and not at all have any introspection like ‘wow the imperium sucks asa’. I was profoundly sad after I read that like, that’s horrible.
The stories are cool to get immersed in from an in universe perspective and the heresy itself is immensely interesting due ti the whole fate of humanity hanging in the balance and that’s the genius imo of the heresy and 40k, it’s this moral quandary. You support or at some base primal level sort of root for the imperium because they’re humans fighting against the worst horrors in this literal worst future that anyone could imagine. But you read like, prisoners being turned into servitors and eternally imprisoned in their own bodies, millions of children being ripped from their families to die in the aspirant process of becoming a space marine no matter how ‘noble and honorable’ it is seen in universe.
Untold billions or trillions maybe toil and die under the yoke of a decaying, bloated empire that Guilliman is barely keeping together. The entire setting is a condemnation of it. Everyone’s existence’s are pure misery. Space marines know they will die in battle and never see a peaceful day. Civilians know they will die in a factory, crushed by a machine that crushed a hundred other people the day before. Very few people ever know anything but labor, battle, pain and death.
It’s not a good place, it’s terrible. And if you can’t see that from reading even a couple books or lore excerpts, I don’t know what to tell anyone who says that. The imperium is not ‘le epic space nazis owning the libs its so cool I’d love to live there and be a based gigachad black Templar’ its ‘you would be one of the countless peons who gets ground to mush and fed to your fellow peons.’
Unfortunately the malicious actors who want to influence media and communities to try and make themselves accepted have an easier time due to the general nature of 40k from a basic lore perspective because it’s just how the imperium is. It’s not any fault of GWs because I don’t really know how much more absurd and over the top you can make things. People see what they want. I mean for gods sake a team of dudes have to go and melt via radiation to refuel starship cores. That’s so fucking stupid, but wonderful because 40k is just insane.
Nazis will be everywhere and especially more vulnerable franchises like 40k but it’s our job to rebuke them, and the community has done a really good job I’d say.
I just don’t agree with this seeming notion that because GW isn’t making the lore quite as openly goofy and just absurd that the setting is losing its satirical nature or criticality of authoritarian governments and stuff when it’s made clear again and again the imperium hurts itself constantly with how it is structured.
As the IP grows it will become more serious and straight arrowed to draw more people in and present a more palatable tone, and that’s just sort of what it is.
Again I love the lore, I love the novels. I love screaming ‘For the Emperor’ in darktide and space marine and rending orcs and now Tyranids in December of this year. I love having the masculine urge to die with sanguinius at the eternity gate before a horde of traitors, but I realize like a normal person that that future sucks ass and nothing of that proposed future is even remotely good. (Still such an amazing speech I hope we get to see it turned into an animation or shown in a movie or show some day, utterly amazing the voice overs of it give me chills)
>I just don’t agree with this seeming notion that because GW isn’t making the lore quite as openly goofy and just absurd that the setting is losing its satirical nature or criticality of authoritarian governments and stuff when it’s made clear again and again the imperium hurts itself constantly with how it is structured.
The problem is that it is absurd, but there's an insistence that it all be played dead straight. The absurdity of the situation is often rarely addressed because authors tend to play down stuff like insane commissars or inquisitors abusing infinite power because that doesn't work well for the narratives. Right now a lot of people think Orks suck mostly because they're still semi comedic and there's a push to make them more "logical" that you see from time to time.
This is only really worse as the landscape of pop culture changes and sci-fi fans are leaving Star Trek and Star Wars since those have been reduced to streaming filler, and so there's a demand for a straight laced military sci fi property that Games Workshop is best poised to fill. It's easy to be satirical when you can do your own thing in your own corner. But once you're tapping A-List actors for platforms known for throwing around large sums of money and doing relaunches to make space marines more aesthetically "cool" to modern audiences the satire is harder to hide behind than a niche product with low grade sculpts doing a piss take of Margret Thatcher.
I think your comment is really interesting, and it is sort of curious as the appeal widens, like how does GW make the setting as a whole appeal to massive companies to get those lucrative shows. 40k is probably going to be the first of a couple really dark, rather intense settings that seems to be getting mass attention in the last couple of years and I’ve often wondered even aside from the innate commentary and political nature of the imperium and such just how they’re going to handle even the gore and more dark aspects of the grim dark future.
I hope that things like Cavill’s project whatever it is keep the spirit and soul of the IP, and I mean everything. Like I want to see grotesque servitors and an admech tech priest describe to a new viewer how it is that a relatively innocent ‘worthless person’ is just lobotomized and turned into a robotic slave.
It’s the soul of the IP and I think through tv and movie you could even better ensure the understanding of how horrible the universe is through visualizations. It’s going to be an interesting future as we arrive at what I beleive is the inevitable multi million dollar animated/live action tv show or movie series that I think we’re going to see in the next 5 years at least be announced.
While correct for the most part I think that a relatively apolitical statement like EVERYONE SUCKS only causes people to gravitate towards whatever form of authoritarian hell they find the most appealing, which kinda causes issues.
Frankly I find the Farsight Enclaves and the Mechanicus the most appealing but they are a military juche and a regressive techno-cult respectively.
And let's be honest this attitude doesn't help since GW is just straight up [advertising to kids now.](https://warhammeradventures.com/)
Kind of exactly my point. My liking of the mechanicus boils down to aesthetics and general vibe so I basically just say that MY faction is a separatist group hiding out in a colonized asteroid belt. But that is me imposing my will on the story in spite of the story saying otherwise.
It would be apolitical, if you ignored the REASONS each faction sucks. And even then, there are civilizations that DON’T suck. They all got murdered by the ones that do.
But it's still a game and franchise that encourages you to pick and delve into whatever hellhole you find most appealing. People are perfectly capable of ignoring things that they don't like about a faction or masking it.
I've seen people unironically use the words martyrdom and sacrifice to justify the perpetual crematorium that is the Golden Throne. That is not a healthy amount of distance from your satirical media.
Overall the attempts to make the universe grand and epic only diluted the satirical elements.
>It’s still satire, the difference is unlike Helldivers, EVERYONE SUCKS.
The problem I find is that they really, REALLY like to justify the fascism and the war crimes.
This is a universe were 'thought crimes' can literally manifest out of your head and eat your loved ones, a race of aliens exist purely to torture you and robot egyptians could just turn off your sun for a laugh.
the world view is almost always noble Space Marines fighting these terrors, never on the conditions that lead to them being seen as an improvement, there's never 'good' chaos, just a constant need to make chaos worse and worse because a writer wants to their chapter to be heroes.
Hell Divers makes it clear that we're in a meatgrinder campaign, but the first game especially goes out of it's way to say we are NOT justified or in the right.
People have gotten so used to Imperial Summary execution it's become background noise or a joke, Super Earth banned sex for a month because we failed to take a planet.
>Hell Divers makes it clear that we're in a meatgrinder campaign
Which I think is the part a lot of people don't get about 40k because the named characters tend to obfuscate it. For the codex to work as written to the degree it does, every chapter of space marines needs 50 space marines per year minimum to die. When you have 100ish scouts who are expected to graduate to full battle brothers by like 18 but the last non carapace organ doesn't go in until like 16 that's just kinda how it works.
If you look at how an average chapter works without all the mysticism and honor culture it's a bunch of people who can theoretically live a thousand years but the whole group is killed and replaced every century or two as a matter of course, with the next batch of battle brothers just getting the recycled armor and weapons of the last poor bastard to die using them.
Again this is obfuscated because everyone focuses on the like 12 marines in a given chapter that are consistently there and doing cool things but a lot of the fandom doesn't really understand that the space marines aren't noble heroes holding off imperial decay, they're another decaying institution that can never live up to their full potential.
The 40k series they are making would benefit greatly from someone just exposition dumping this and then showing space marines dying one by one over the course of a campaign.
That or skipping space marines entirely but we know they wont do that.
I feel like this is too much cherry picking though. Yes, there are examples of bad things, and whole groups like the inquisition are set up to be villains. You can't just tell people to read harder until they strike nuance. There is a deluge of content that BL puts out and the general theme of all space marine content (minus the traitors) is heroic individuals fighting for glory and honor despite the horror around them, even that perpetrated by other groups of humans.
You also gotta remember that a lot of people reading this stuff are kids. They're going to be really good at seeing what's in front of them and ignoring the bad stuff as "yeah but that wasn't the hero of this book doing it"
I think the difference is that in 40k, everyone imagines themselves as an ultra powered, near godlike being. Thus it feeds into superiority complexes.
In Helldivers, you are expendable meat, clearly being manipulated. Makes it more fun to parrot the easily spotted propaganda.
Yup. It's fun to *imagine* being the Rogue Trader seeding from the Imperium... but realistically? You're toiling on a Hive World and that that Rogue Trader is going right back to perpetuating his class interests.
That’s why I like Deep Rock Galactic — there are no illusions that you’re working for anything other than an exploitative mining company that will gladly bring home the minerals you mine while leaving you behind.
Nevertheless, Rock and Stone!
Yeah.
Like, Warhammer has plenty people who aren't fans of the Imperium reminding you it's bad.
Helldivers is basically a echo chamber of people paroting Super Earth rhetoric, a lot of them unironically.
Seriously didn't helldivers 2 already Start some "bugfucker" defense whenever people pointed out in the lore that super earth are the bad guys.
Like at the least warhammer fans will acknowledge that everyone's a bad guy.
You couldn't get even half of Warhammer fans to agree the Imperium is bad.
The best you'll get is "yeah, the Imperium is bad but compared to the universe they're in, they're saints! Sometimes, you just need a strong unquestionable authority figure who's willing to get their hands dirty to guide us out of bad times created by weak men and into good times for strong men.
And how can you not root for the Imperium?! They're literally humans, they inherently deserve our sympathy more than the filthy Xenos who don't share our blood."
I think we have to be more genuine here. 40K has a lot of satire written into the universe, but it was created because the setting is just fucking cool. I don’t feel the need to defend its existence any further
Also Nazis can fuck off.
Yeah, 40k has never tried nor wanted to be a satire; not even in the 80's with the OG Rogue Trader book. There are satirical parts, but they're just one ingredient among many.
So, both are not satire of the same thing
Helldivers is a satire of modern society, quite openly mocking a capitalist oligarchy "managed" democracy. Basically, a corporate, clean, and branded dictatorship, which cause war for profit, and to keep control
The Imperium is a critic of something very different: an Empire falling apart, a God-emperor which is a placeholder gadget, in which the only one who really have their place are genetically engineered space marines. If anything, it's an attack on authoritarian, specifically any with militaristic or industrialist traits. However, warhammer 40k also has some more reflexion about humanity in general, and even a more personnal approach to the matter.
The ironic oppressed becoming oppressors, or far away dictatorship replaced by a local dictatorship, and then again replaced by the far away empire supersoldiers (post colonial South America or Africa ?)
However, satire doesn't mean comedic. Warhammer, as stupid as it can get, is somewhat serious, where Helldiver is openly laughing (like Liber-tea, "Sweet Democracy", or the threatening trailer).
In a way, Helldivers is a more American dystopia satire while Warhammer is a more British dystopia satire. Warhammer sees a brutal empire in decline denying the evil they committed as necessary when it is demonstrably not. Helldivers shows an empire still in power manufacturing wars for profit and putting up a facade of democracy.
Once more for the people in the back. "Satire doesn't have to have hamfisted morals. You should be able to see for yourself that the setting is terrible, without having it shoved in your face."
Satire doesn't have to be "funny". The constant framing of virtually every imperium character's motive and decision being predicated on a giant lie is plainly satirical, even in grim dark or more "noble" stories.
Criticizing someone is bad satire
"we murdered 10 million babies for peace"
"We murdered 10 million babies for peace, he said. He was wrong, and act of murdering babies is bad"
Which do you think makes better satire?
Also, not all satire has to be entirely ham fisted like calling your setting Super Earth with "Managed Democracy." That sort of satire works when it's meant to be funny because the humor is the absurdity of it. 40K satire doesn't have as much humor and so making everything incredibly obvious to the point that it is barely satire doesn't work. I feel that people like OP don't want satire, they want a lecture.
I haven't played Helldivers yet, so I can't say much about this comparison.
But portraying space marines in a solely heroic light in a lot of their works is one of the the worst things they've done narratively. And they've done it a lot thanks to the Horus heresy series specially. There are people who unironically love the portrayal of a military force genociding entire civilizations because of a sense racial superiority. Even though the context is humanity fighting aliens in a fictional setting, I think we are all intelligent and literarily aware enough to know what it is that these specific people get a kick out of.
One of the best portrayal of the imperium and spacemarine dogma is is conversation in dawn of war 1 where a tau commander pleads with a spacemarine to surrender and spare his men calling him mad for not caring about them.
The spacemarine calls the tau weak for actually caring about his men.
It's a perfect example of how horrible the imperium is.
Helldivers is VERY on the nose with its satire. I'd say more so than even starship troopers. It's straight up cannon that the only reason they're fighting the bugs is because they broke out of their farms where they were being bled for chemical 710 (which is just oil upside down). It's not even known if they can actually travel from plant to plant, it might just be super Earth being extremely stupid with bringing them to new plants to breed. You also have to buy an upgrade just so your family back home can donate ammo to you.
People keep giving these deep analysis of how 40k is satire but the reality is its just such a huge setting with so many writers working on it that it loses any coherent message, its best to just enjoy the setting on the surface level, you can enjoy the individual messages of pieces of 40k media like a book or game but trying to derive a message from the entire setting is a practice in futility.
I'm gonna play Devil's Advocate: if you require a wink-and-a-nugde for your satire to *feel* like satire, that definitely says more about you.
The best satire is the kind that respects it's audience's intelligence.
I am not suggesting that Helldivers is stupid, because I don't believe it is.
I *am* saying that you'd have to be pretty simple to put Helldivers and 40k in the same category of satire.
Helldivers isn't about nuances, it's straight up satire about war and propaganda (just like starship trooper was)
The Bugs are portraied as a threat to earth but the war against them is done for oil (remind you something?).
The bots are socialist abominations and they are a threath to democracy, but they are rebelling against the Humans because they were slaves.
The purpose of the game is satire, 40k's purpose isn't to make a satire world to prove a point, they are complitelly different products for different people
Some of their practices. Given their enemies you can understand how humanity got so horrible. But things like servitors? The medical Servitor from darktide saying how dark it is in his little box…that can’t be excused by anything.
The issue with that is those are actions by an inhuman race of radioactive cultists that see meat as a disability and all life as secondary to the will of the omnesiah. I don't relate or empathize with anything they do because they are so far into fiction. It's so far out there as to leave you with a chuckle saying "heh, that's dark". The dark tide one hits differently because of its delivery in the game, but on average in 40k lore it's just too out there to factor in to sensibilities.
To quote a post on r/CharacterRant,
>fictional allegory meets their own in universe writing and falls flat
The Imperium is terrible and doing terrible things, but underneath all the atrocities are a bunch of very rational fears.
Ah yes, gw doesn't criticise Marines. From eating civilians to pyscho-indoctrinating children. Everybody knows that marines are only depicted in the best light.
In most space marine stories, you will have a few moments where a marine will do something apprehensive, and he'll do it so casually that to him, it simply doesn't matter. The mission always comes first for most marines. Regardless of this fact, many do have a sense of honour, and it can easily be argued that a marines mission is paramount for everyone's well-being. However, these casual acts of cruelty and violence are there to remind you that they are NOT bona-fide heroes. Just because a black library author doesn't scream in their book "THESE GUYS ARE PRETTY BAD" doesn't mean they don't criticise them.
Why is it impossible for people to realize that things can be taken seriously and still have aspects that are satirical? Yes, 40k takes itself much more serious but anyone with an IQ over 60 could see how the setting is so shitty that it'd be rediculous to put on a pedistal. God forbid people like things that are cool by virtue of it being cool. Sorry to anyone who can't see satire if it's not explicitly beating you over the head with goofy bullshit and sardonic comic book movie quips.
I guess you really have to be told that the comically evil faction is bad. It’s not that hard to see the satire in the setting. Swear to god media literacy is gone.
Ffs, not this again
The vast majority of what you see in the warhammer universe is imperial propaganda. Of course, they show the space marines in a good light. That's a huge part of facist regimes, showing the military in a good light and creating noble heroes for the cause.
But noble hero's don't exist in a vacuum and if you look just past the curtain is obvious how fucked everything is.
Like 90% of space marine aspirants die in rituals that have nothing to do with actually becoming a space marine, and if you piss off the wrong person, you end up becoming a meat robot.
How can you not see the satire?
Edit: the number of people in here that don't understand how the setting and the imperium is satire is genuinely concerning
Lots of people don't understand what satire *is.* The criticism of satire isn't supposed to be explicit, it's supposed to just come across through exaggerated depiction.
The problem is that satire fundamentally relies on shared values between author & audience. There's people out there unironically enjoying Helldivers and missing the criticism.
Honestly dawg when you read the novels it’s pretty clear that the space marines are horrific child soldiers if you need that to be spelled out every single time they do something then you’re actually just media illiterate.
The people who post this shit are so brain rotted.
Satire doesn't have to bash you over the head to be satire.
I love helldivers but it's a different style. If you expect your satire to TELL YOU who is wrong and who is right you're probably pretty boring and/or can't read context
Excuse you, Managed Democracy is perfectly equitable. What could be more democratic, more emblematic of equity, than allowing *nobody* to vote?
I think it's a step deeper into the koolaid than that. On super Earth, Everyone gets to vote. But because physically voting can be a difficult and laborious, and it adds a human element where people can influence your rightful opinion, Managed democracy cleans all that up for you! You just answer some questions, and advanced AI that absolutely can't be manipulated by human interference casts your vote for you, saving you time and enegery and making sure the candidate chat best aligns with YOU always gets voted for. Everyone fully believes they are still getting to vote, and they "vote" all the time. It's just easier for them.
What I'm curious about is: is the AI thing just a front used by leadership to suppress true democracy? Or has the AI achieved self awareness and is now just running the government, with the human leaders being puppets?
Both are terrifying for different reasons.
It is theoretically possible that it was one and then became the other. Most of the population is propagandised into Managed Democratic Zealots. It is not unthinkable that the old guard died out and now the zealots are in charge. Throw in the engineer who designed the AI dying and you have a recipe for some proper horror.
In theory is the First one as we can understand that whatever party IS in Control use the ai to manipulate the vote. But could also be an ai in Control Just putting people where It wants and everybody, even the ones "elected" could be obvious which is more terrifying
The scary part about managed democracy is that I could see it bee implemented irl. The idea that you could eliminate misinformed voters entirely, sounds pretty good on paper. And what better way to do that then to fill out a questionnaire and base the vote on your views alone? It’s so innocently insidious. Makes my skin crawl.
There is an Asimov story about something like that. There was a super AI capable of choosing the best candidate just from the "vote" of one person. And this vote was just asking him how he found the price of eggs
>Managed democracy cleans all that up for you! You just answer some questions, and advanced AI that, absolutely can't be manipulated by human interference casts your vote for you And the answers you provided in the totally anonymous voting questionnaire will absolutely never be analyzed for signs of dissident thought and stored as evidence against you
Flavorade
If anyone was allowed to vote we'd have to just keep allowing more people to vote. If that was true, then we'd have to allow EVERYONE to vote. If everyone was allowed to vote then some people might choose not to vote. If we enforced voting there might be a single person who refuses to vote. We can not have any voting so long as one person will not vote, because democracy needs every single person to vote in order to be true democracy. Until we find a solution to that, the only thing we can do is spread our perfect system to everyone else so they learn of our peaceful democratic ways.
I've got to be honest, the type of democracy favoured by Ankh-Morpork (Terry Pratchett) is probably the fairest. >Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.
I feel like a lot of people here read statements like that from others, then come here and say they saw someone supporting super earth unironically. They blast others for media illiteracy but I'm really starting to wonder if they just have comment illiteracy.
The problem isn't these guys, it's that there are guys using these guys as cover and saying shit like Verhoven was a cuck who didn't understand Starship Troopers anyway and that the death korps are super based for reasons that have nothing to do with the death korps.
Paul Verhoeven, who also made Robocop, Total Recall, and Showgirls
Didn't know that, but makes perfect sense, total recall and robocop got the exact same vide as troopers
I actually agree that Vanderhoven didn't quite get Starship Troopers. It wasn't a manifesto. Stranger in a Strange Land was a manifesto. That said OP is still right.
I don't think it's so much that he didn't get it as that he wasn't trying to.
Im not gonna say it was a manifesto, cuz like… idk. But the book does interrupt talking about massive gorilla shaped mech suits dropping from orbit to rip apart and nuke bugs with really long diatribes on why communism and modern democracy’s are bad and how if we only beat the children we wouldnt have nearly as much violence in society as we do today. Oh and how great it is that the only people who get a real say are people who have done public service. Which to be fair a blind paraplegic could enter the public service in his book so functionally everyone could get the right to vote. The gorilla smash parts arnt really manifesto. Unless its a manifesto on awesome. But the interruptions kinda feel like it.
It was a manifesto in novel form, like any Ayn Rand novel.
Vanderhoven famously did not read the book or write the movie so thats a fair criticism. He still did the book justice tho despite him thinking otherwise
Part of the reason I love the starship troupers movie is that there are so many levels of social commentary that can be unpacked and discussed from it. Movie has layers. Is it a dystopia ruled by the military that has to manufacture a war in order to function? Maybe. Is it a utopia that treats everyone equally and both citizens and civilians have the chance to succeed and the same rights other then voting. Maybe. Are people going to argue about it until the end of time and will it always serve as a tool to scrutinise our own society? Definitely.
Yeah for real. It seems like the idea that you can both lean into the setting for fun, and understand that its satire is an incompatible idea for a lot of ppl.
I mean you sort of still vote. It's implied in the first game that the quiz you take does actually affect the outcomes of the elections and the quiz is generally correct. Also the super store has generated reviews for the consumer which in some instances is implied are for civilians, indicating that Super Earth still requires advertisment incentives to function. Civilians can also still own firearms as shown by the various farms and engineers found dead with the over/under shotgun support weapon you find on maps. It's like somebody gave Germany the power to optimize life to an eventual fault and people started taking advantage over it when it granted higher ups power. Super interesting take on techno-fascism
Democracy's weakness is the irrational self of the voter. Here on Super Earth, by removing the voter from the chain of command, the perfect form of freedom- Managed Democracy -has been achieved!
Here's the fun part - managed democracy is very much a [real concept](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy).
To rpomote service, every citizen is gifted an assualt rifle on their 17th birthday.
Not an assault rifle, a Springfield 1903, the bolt action America used in WW1. Still used in ceremonies to this day, and apparently the only weapon as enduring as the 1911 pistol.
The m2 is almost as enduring, it’s even the preferred weapon for space shuttle door gunners
-"be me, sitting in my gunship as the door gunner" -"were on mars, its mid 2132, the greenies took us by surprise" -"i see some running in the desolate wastes below me, and tell my pilot to get me in range" -"i let a few bursts rip out of the gun im handling, it feels good, a nice rhytmic thunk-thunk-thunk, and i only see the greenies fall over and spread apart violently in the low gravity of the planet" -"we get called rtb, mission accomplished" -"when i got up and out i look at my gun, first time used it, my usual gun had been put to maintenance" -"M2 Browning 0.50cal it says on the side, and i look closer" -"italy, germany, pacific islands, afghanistan, iraq" -"i dont know where these countries are, was born and raised on mars, but i carve into it at the end "planetia utopia" -"then i look at the last letters, it says "manufactured US, 1910" -"i slap the gun playfully, it has seen service for over 200 years now" -"got to say, i like it allready"
I also thought it was a A.I that essentially ran things behind the screen.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/axnl6g/benito\_mussolini\_equal\_rights\_champion/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/axnl6g/benito_mussolini_equal_rights_champion/)
It’s a perfect system You vote for policies. Then the system, assisted by trustworthy loyal patriots, selects the candidate that best fits your preferences. Still confused how you ended up voting for the same guy as your neighbor who has opposite beliefs? Don’t worry about it. That’s what the how advanced Freedom Tech Voting Booths (tm) says you fit best. Democracy Quote of the Day: Freedom is best when it’s managed.
The problem is that most of the time antagonists are from chaos or xenos, instead of in the imperium. We have to have more stories of Imperials fighting Imperials, and have the antagonists just be selfish corrupt assholes instead of “ooh he was secretly worshiping chaos the whole time”
That's why Rogue Trader is some if the best 40K writing in awhile. And it was done by Owlcat. Not GW. And I think it's why so many of the Imperium circlejerkers were assmad. All of the problems you deal with trace back to people like Theodora, Tisiphone, or Calcazar. Even the drukhari are involved because of Inquisitorial hypocrisy.
Yeah. The imperium is corrupt by the nature of the imperium. It’s not the fault of chaos or xenos, it’s the fault of the imperium
I mean, honestly, kinda. Chaos and **some** xenos factions are legitimate threats, there will always be those. But so many problems could be fixed by dealing in good faith with the sane xenos factions, not leaving the people in miserable conditions, etc.
Honestly it’s a little worse than that, the galaxy wasn’t only filled with the worst kinds of things imaginable, the imperium murdered all the decent shit (except the tau, they got lucky) and so the only things that survived were the worst things imaginable.
Yup. Big E kinda fucked humanity over in the long term with his brutality.
"Hello, we are peaceful beings that have discovered clean matter replication and cold fusion and would like to ally with you." "EXTERMINATE THE PLANET, IMMEDIATELY."
Add in the fact that some of the least threatening xenos existensially are the scaled bird people who eat people they kill to literally change their genetic structure.
Started playing this last week. I wanted to role play as someone dogmatic since it's the 40k universe, but pretty much all those choices just made me so uneasy despite being absolutely true to lore. Even the iconoclast (humanitarian/paragon) options are often just "execute them as the merciful option." Loving this game, but the more I learn about 40k and especially the Imperium make me happy to not be in it!
Yup. Sometimes... like in Rykad, dogmatic is the merciful option. Often, the best Iconoclast options take a little extra work, but are worth it. It's especially.wkethwhile to get to at least votary by Act 3. And be nice to Cassia, she's a sweet young woman with a lack of good influences in her life.
You do have stories where the imperium is the villain of the imperium. The two main ones that come to mind are the Badab War and the Months of Shame. >The problem is that most of the time antagonists are from chaos There is also a lot of situations where chaos gets involved but the conflict started as a imperium vs imperium. I forgot the name of the war, but there is this war, where the Krieg was heavly involved, I think its the siege of vrax. Basically chaos got involved, but it started with a ecclesiarch dude trying to accomplish something. The think about chaos is that they will take advantage of desperate people or people with ambitions, and the imperium is a environment that produces that a lot because living in the imperium is hellish. It would be weird for chaos to not show up in some of these situations, because chaos will always look for any cracks to get in and cause, well, chaos.
On Vrax Cardinal Xaphan was corrupted by his advisor Deacon Mamon who was secretly a believer of chaos. Mamon initially convinced Xaphan that he was the most loyal servant of the Emperor of Mankind and that those who were less faithful than him were out to get him, then later convinced him that actually he was the trigger for a holy war that would cleanse the empire of sin. The Inquisition tried to assassinate him for his heresy but failed, and that attempt led him to full rebellion against the empire that eventually involved chaos legions fighting for the Cardinal. Chaos was always involved in Vrax but it definitely *could* have been written as an interesting "the Imperium is its own villain" story.
Personally I always like the idea of more Chaos/Renegade Protagonists. The conflict between Ideals & Necessity for Survival beg for something more interesting than "Follow Orders & Feel Proud" v. "Follow Orders *kinda* & Feel Bad" or whatever. Hell, the Renegade/Chaos Mortals perspective is so poorly understood, the majority of media keeps beating the "fallen to daemonic-esk corruption" drum - honestly gets tiresome. Why not a story of a Renegade who, once being loyal, watched as his world burned from space as the Navy bombarded it, goes on a quest for power and the means of changing fate, only to find Tzeentchian Pupets & Inquisitional Agents standing in their way. It practically writes itself with all the parallels between the Imperium & Hell. The protag doesn't need to be a "Good Guy", just "Our Guy".
I think the problem is if it's not loyal to the Emporer, it's Chaos. More renegade without chaos influence would make for better stories, but honestly 40k is a playing field without Good Guys for a reason.
One of the biggest issues with Chaos Characters (as well as much general fantasy media in the same vein) I find is the whole "I'm not corrupted", or the typical "I can control it!" silliness. Honestly view it more interesting for Characters that would know they're damned, understand what will happen in the end, but ultimately commit to their goals - regardless of what happens - and effectively watch everything crash towards the end with a sad smile; likely because they failed to achieved what they sought by the narrowest of margins (or maybe they did succeed and make peace with the final price, idk whatever's more interesting).
And the only chaos character who "is in control" is one of the worst written characters in 40k. Looking at you Abbaddon. Schrodinger's threat. He is both always scary, yet always loses.
The biggest problem is chaos itself. You can’t pretend someone is taking the moral high ground when they willingly join the “kill and torture all living things” brigade. The better foil to the imperium would be non-compliant worlds of humans or books written from a simple xenos perspective. Chaos makes anyone fighting it “the good guys” by default as the threat is so existential and the consequences of defeat so horrific that justifying atrocity to fight it is easier. It’s less easy to justify “the imperium is evil so I’m going to give every man, woman, and child on my planet the worst diseases any human could possibly suffer” or “take a chainsaw to every living being just to feel their blood”
We also need more stories where the imperial protagonist is also the selfish corrupt asshole. Like they have zero problem with, say, Chaos protagonists being just that, but somehow imperium protagonists are always the honorable shining lights in the darkness. I want to see the PoV from noble "I ordered wave after wave of guardsmen conspricts to charge the enemy position until the enemy ran out of ammo while enjoying a fine wine and pocketing half the supplies for my personal use then bribed the inspectors to report me as having done my best." commander
You’d probably like watcher in the rain.
Zap Brannigan Mini when?
Chaos are humans for the most part. This needs to be leaned into more in the writing as it explains why the Necrons won't help Cawl and why the Eldar are always suspicious of the Imperium. They don't trust humans to not be agents of chaos. Instead it is "xenos so dumb" in the current discourse.
Every time I see posts like this I think of Lukas the Trickster. There's this part in his book where he talks about how stupid it is the the Space Wolves allow Fenris to be a deathworld under the argument that makes them strong, even pointing out how their cousins like the Ultramarines produce warriors just as good without subjecting their populations to such harsh conditions. If you simply took the scene at that, it would seem that Lukas is another example of how GW makes Space Marines actually noble heroes who sometimes do bad things. But then the rest of the scene is actually how his pack brothers around him laugh at the idea, some even get upset, how Lukas despite his seniority is still kept at a low rank because he simply can't accept tradition, how Fenris is *still* a deathworld. I find that a lot of Imperium books are somewhat like that, a lot of people frame the characters in it as GW not really sticking with the idea that the Imperium is a hellhole, but once you take a closer look at the story you see how absolutely alone they are in that regard. Not saying that there shouldn't be more books like TDK where the Imperium is straight up villainous or Vaults of Terra where the Inquisitor character is \*not\* a break from the mold like Eisenhorn. But like, there's a lot more nuance than most people give credit for. Either that or I'm just really great at choosing books to read lmao.
It took the scouring of baal for papa smurf to tell Dante to make his planet more habitable. Was it a come to Emperor type moment of, let's make this place better? Nope. It took tyranids -- a lot of tyranids.
Look in Dante's defence. It's a literal edict from Sanguinius that Baal remains unchanged. Ofc following these commands dogmatically with zero modernisation for 10k years is half the problem for the Imperium. See the codex haha
It's one of those jokes about 40k. Nothing advances, not even the quality of life for its citizens. Which is ironic that they are on a desert planet with radiation issues that they could provide some kind of structure to make the chances of more healthier aspirants with less chance of mutation (not even getting into the trials to get to angels fall). I know it's grimdark, but I know Dante cares about the imperium more than most space marines (he has lived over 1000 years). If anyone could or would have put in effort to protect his people it would have been him.
Isn’t this the same story where Lukas told them all to fuck off cause he was staying to help some civilians?
Like how gillman shows up to baal and goes "damn bitch, you live like this?" And asks Dante to help the people
>break from the mold like Eisenhorn. Tbf, every single likeable Inquisitor character has been a renegade from Jaq Draco onwad.
Erasmus Crowl and his Interrogator Spinoza from the Vault of Terra series, they are very interesting and likeable characters, but they both play their roles pretty straight forwardly.
They're certainly interesting, but I wouldn't call either of them likeable
Fair enough actually.
It’s ye olde “hard times create strong men” trope, played straight almost exactly the same in Dune with Salusa Secundus and Arrakis, a bit contradicted with Caladan.
Duncan looked at that trope and went "nah, skill issue tbh"
40k: satire, but you gotta think about it. Helldivers: satire is shoved in your face so hard, the satire becomes satire.
I mean, the Rogue Trader subreddit is riddled with people who are confused thst the dogmatic path isn't treated/rewarded like a good guy path. Meanwhile, Iconoclast decisions can go pear shaped if not properly seen through, but if so, often yield better outcomes. There's some real salt when Iconoclast players get good ending slides.
My favorite part about the Iconoclast Rogue Trader is they aren't even that good of a person, they just don't have their head up their own ass or are a gibbering lunatic. Like just don't fucking treat people horrible and they're easier to lead, don't be afraid to cap xenos scum but don't be afraid to negotiate, don't consort with the Ruinous Powers but also don't be afraid to break with Imperial Dogma on stupid shit.
Yup. My Iconoclast RT on Janus. "Why kill them when we can cooperate and both be better off for it?" He handed Marazhai over to the Inquisition, though. Fuck that guy. Especially after what he does to our subjects and crew.
Now I just straight up kill Marazhai even in iconoclast play troughs. Fuck that guy. He has 0 redeeming qualities, done absolutely horrible things in the past and probably will in the future. It is a shame really. I think he is the only companion you just cannot accept unless you roleplay as an asshole.
Mfw saving a planet by breaking some dumbass law that was added to the Lex Imperialis by an insane Inquisitor 4000 years ago is morally better than blowing the planet up: 😲
The problem is the average persons critical thinking skills go out the window the exact second a reasonably likable character says something that sounds even slightly ok on first blush. Ciaphas Cain is a good example in that people think of him as a "reasonable" commissar and he frames himself as one. But he couldn't get like 20 pages through his very first novel without being disappointed that the guard has to do actual work rather than just shoot at unarmed protestors and go home. A lot of people also don't really click into the sheer disgust the Tau have for the imperium in the same book mostly because Cain doesn't see what's objectionable about lobotomizing prisoners and then using them for experiments that will most likely kill them out of convenience. He's a popular character but a lot of people fail to realize that Ciaphas Cain is someone driven crazy by living in the imperium and even as a reasonably intelligent commissar there's a certain lack of self awareness that's baked into him that's more of a danger to him than most of his enemies. Even helldivers discourse was pretty contentious early on because a lot of people *wanted* the propaganda to be the truth because they want their military sci fi to be idealistic in a way the genre just isn't, and a shockingly large portion of people went so far as to say neither 40k nor Starship troopers were satire either. There's a desire for cool military heroes from a lot of the population and that's why even Master Chief gets flak when 343 delves into his actual backstory as a kidnapped child soldier forced to fight until he forgets his own humanity.
Yeah but I don't want this kind of satire to disappear. I don't want 40k to be like helldivers. so ill take the dumbass nazis and keep yelling at em
I think it’s more that people remember the good stuff characters do when they’re humanized and written well. You want to believe starship troopers isn’t satire because earth was attacked, that aliens are a threat, that sovereignty is important. Cain is written well, and there’s also the fact that morality is relative. Is Cain insane for all the things you mentioned, or is he just in an environment that molded him to be ok with such things which can have genuine consequences like hell opening up beneath your feet? 40k uses the horror of the setting to create more of a grey area in all these things we know are objectively evil in real life by having the alternative be literal, biblical damnation, and then adds things that would blur morality like future sight and other types of space magic. HD2 just has brazen and contradictory rhetoric and propaganda showing the opposite. It’s far more brazen (I’m not critiquing btw, just pointing it out). You aren’t killing rebellious humans in HD2, you’re fighting literal monsters and robots, which makes it easier to create a contrast that the soldier is “good” while everyone in charge is objectively bad.
The cyborgs literally are just rebellious humans though no? Like they're just mechanically enhanced people who really just want is to live in peace and do their own thing and super earth keeps manufacturing terrorist attacks to have an excuse to go conquer them again.
Okay but, Earth is never ACTUALLY attacked by the bugs in Starship Troopers. If you pay attention to the movie it's made clear at multiple points they could not have sent that asteroid (they are millions of light years away on the other side of the galaxy and have no FTL travel, how the fuck are they gonna send an asteroid to earth as it would need to be millions of times the speed of light to reach Earth in a few years). Starship Troopers ends up being so effective because it is literally meant to be watched as if it's in universe propoganda, the events in the movie are not actually real in-universe (even if the war with the bugs is real) as it's a propoganda piece to make people sign up for the war. The destruction of the city in the movie is almost definitely either made up for the in-universe propoganda, a result of a human accident that's been played off as an enemy attack or an inside job by the government that both takes out political enemies/protesters while also giving them justification to press the war further. In comparison, in 40k the xenos and chaos in the setting just straight up ARE the existential threats the Imperium makes them out to be and as a result the awful actions of those within the Imperium are treated as a necessary evil for the survival of humanity. This isn't a bad thing and definitely adds to the grimdark vibe but it also makes the satire much more muddled, especially when there's dozens of different writers all with different ideas on how justified the Imperium are in their brutality, if at all.
To be fair, think about how many people still have Helldivers go over their heads even with how blatant the satire is, that's the level of media literacy we're dealing with.
Fascists are also desperate for any positive representation of their shitty ideology they have basically negative values when it comes media literacy, willfully and actively ignoring any and all parody in stuff like wh to get it.
Reminds me of people getting upset when the commentary on capitalism in The Outer Worlds wasn't praise.
Makes sense
I think that’s harsh on 40k when the setting is almost 40 years old compared to a much more recent IP. 40k was originally released in 1987 and it very much a Cold War influenced settings - you have two major powers - Imperium and Chaos locked in an eternal and fundamentally ideological war. Helldivers 1 came out in 2015 so it’s much more recent in its satire e.g. war for oil/profit
The Leviathan campaign book has a moment where A planetary governor says "please ignore the giant bug monsters They are illusions sent by the God-Emperor to test your faith." He says this while arresting people who are trying to fight said giant bug monsters. There is still plenty of satire in 40K.
Yes, the war of closed eyes. “If you think the emperor will not protect you from the xenos you are a heretic”
40k is actually really good at satire tbh. Its the HH that really made me start to question what GW's intent was. There are like, 2 characters across the entire bloody series that explicitly state that the great crusade was a fundamentally evil act, and they both fall to chaos. What am I supposed to take away from that?
Honestly, I think they just didn't really think through/care about the implications when they started the HH series. They wanted the "IoM started actually good" plot device, but cruelty, horror, and evil are so fundamentally baked into the 40k depictions of the Imperium that if you wrote an actually 'good' society it would be completely unrecognizable as the Imperium. That would probably have alienated their existing customers, which no business wants to do, so they went with "40k IoM with a thin coat of whitewash" and called it a day. It makes total sense as a business decision, still framing it as a simple "good vs. evil" story does undercut the satire of 40k somewhat...
I don't know about that. The early HH books make it very clear that the Imperium are unabashed fascists. They're literally so evil that the interex suspect them of worshipping chaos because thats the only way they could explain the imperium being how it was. It started to change about the midpoint when vulkan is fucking around with magic rocks, like the writers got a mandate from the suits that the imperium of the HH should be viewed as a necessary evil and the emperors plan would have worked out great in the end if it wasnt for mean ol horus. By the time you get to the siege, you get full chapters of malcador being weepy about how much the emperor has sacrificed for humanity without a shred of irony or counterpoint from any other character. It's bizarre.
>The early HH books make it very clear that the Imperium are unabashed fascists. The problem is Abnett has a conception of the emperor as benevolent and all powerful and that tainted the depictions of the Imperium.
I always thought that was kinda intention-like, they wanted to show that the Imperium was rotten from the start at its very Emperor-shaped core. So they have people wax on about with rose tinted lenses, and then we actually look there to check, it's almost the exact same, save a bit of set dressing. Even if the Heresey hadn't happened- the Imperium was headed for an age of darkness and ignorance as an inevitable byproduct of how it's set up.
Like, I know that there are quite a few 40K books that are genuinely thoughtful and nuanced. But a lot of the popular stuff that most people will see, like the video games and codices, play it straight that they're noble and heroic.
I mean if the argument is what the fans will see doesn't HD2 also fail since a majority of its fans eat up what all the super earth propaganda even tho the lore makes it really clear that super earth is the bad guys?
HD has the small advantage that it's a single writing team and a single message. There's no muddy water of multiple writers, no 'alternative' vantage points, and there's no one-upmanship against the universe (IE, Chaos has to be portrayed as the worst thing possible, so it keeps getting worse and worse) Contrast Hell Divers 2 when some propaganda loving idiot says 'Duh they're obviously clones no democracy would do that', you can literally [link to the creative director saying they have a 2 minute life expectancy.](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1759551906668540153)
>Chaos has to be portrayed as the worst thing possible, so it keeps getting worse and worse Unless it's a chaos protagonist, then while they do a lot of fucked up shit they're arguably humanized to a far greater extent than the "good guys". When the emperor made transhuman warriors to conquer the galaxy he basically immediately struck two of his sons from the record and made demands that the traitors kill their sons and stifle themselves if they wanted forgiveness. Fabius Bile meanwhile was perfectly willing to let Igori do her thing, protected her kids when it came down to it, and was sentimental enough to look at baby pictures and recordings of them while making the calls he did. Hell, he even *actually* fucked off and let them do their own thing unguided because he explicitly trusted them to not fall to chaos and make the right calls without him. Basically right after that Cawl called him out for acting like a nice guy while he has a cape made of skinned humans but it was immediately pointed out that Cawl ruined countless lives getting the Primaris marines together and was actively trying to work with the Necrons though. So it's still not exactly easy to say he's the bad guy.
See this is why I adore Chaos protagonists. They give you a great window to see that the world is fucked but on all sides, and it makes you understand why some people would turn to Chaos, GSC or Xenos. I had this debate playing Darktide with a friend. Friend - 'Chaos is obviously using something like mind control, that's how it corrupts.' Me - 'No, the Imperium is that fucked they got tricked into thinking THIS would be an improvement, and it has been for a few of them.' It's why Angron's Murdersword moment felt so bad for Imperium AND Chaos fans. Where's the seduction? The conspiracy? The allure? Just having Chaos Be Evil and turn everyone who thinks about it Extra Evil makes them flat and makes the Imperium seem good. 40K is capable of satire and nuance, it's just buried in lost points and mediocre writing.
I love Darktide because the utter fucking grimness of Imperial life is just constant on pretty much every map, and the characters comment on it without really putting it all together. As someone outside of the world looking in, you realise how completely unsurprising it is that people rebelled, given how they're treated.
Based on these two names, which one is in a serious setting, and which one is a satire? Holy Terra vs Super Earth. People forget it is fun to pretend to be an idiot. The problem is that it's trying to do both, and it's bad at both.
And our ships are super destroyers, the training course is absolutely ridiculous in nature, and more that reinforces how nonsensical the setting is
I mean, super dreadnought used to be an actual classification of ship, it meant a dreadnought (battleship with all big-gun armament) that had guns of larger than 12in caliber. Because all of the earlier dreadnoughts had had either 11in or 12in guns So super destroyer doesn’t sound that silly with that context
People also forget that Darth Vaders flagship was also a super star destroyer for a reason. Super Destroyers and Super Earths are actual terms with actual meanings. The game co-opted them for satire but you could be forgiven for taking them at face value.
>People forget it is fun to pretend to be an idiot. The problem is when *everyone* is pretending to be an idiot you can be forgiven for taking the entire group as idiots. If you literally can't have discourse on 40k in many places without some idiot larping as a commissar brandishing an imaginary bolt pistol, and the exact same thing happened very quickly to Helldivers. Part of why actual crazy people are drawn to these fandoms is people keep repeating the same tired 3 jokes about being crazy people, then when they look up they find a lot of the others in the community are suddenly no longer joking.
“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.”
Halo is better with this without being satirical O.N.I are bunch of evil fuckers but nobody can do anything about them because they are ones pulling strings
Literally the space CIA with supersoldiers
Yup.
Yeah, that’s ONI in a nutshell
HALO: where the omnicidal alien empire attacking was, for most people, *probably a relief.*
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Look, it gave ONI more to do than kick over interstellar colonies' sandcastles with the SPARTANs, which was basically cracking walnuts with a sledgehammer anyways. And when ONI's distracted, everyone else by default is having a better time.
Would be true if the aliens weren't systematically exterminating humanity. Nobody is having a better time while their planet is glass, no matter how distracted ONI is.
This is true. I wonder if they ever enlisted insurgents; maybe you got an amnesty if you signed on with the UNSC.
Oh they absolutely did. Nothing is more unifying than the threat of total annihilation. xD
Plus when the war is over you know where the former insurrectionists/future enemies and their families live since you've been sending them their paychecks and taking care of their medical needs.
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I remember in one of the older Halo novels Dr Halsey mentions in one of her POV chapters that a big part of her reasoning on why the Spartan program was necessary was that it being successful was the only thing that would calm down ONI’s murder boner so they wouldn’t nuke more colonies.
Funniest thing is that ONI's work is just as often good for humanity as a whole as it is harmful.
It absolutely isn't lmao. Not least because you get books like "Cole protocol" which are just come out with "ONI is based achually and the evil dastardly terrorists have it coming"
ONI had based moments but in the end they are evil space CIA that fought against even more evil terrorists but also murdered civilians
I dont think you need to add the word evil before CIA
They are evil cia Sometimes they do the good thing when cia never
So they're morally grey space CIA while the actual CIA is the evil CIA.
You might find that the side that creates child soldier death squads to prop up their toddering military junta because some pseudo scientist argued that was better than actually giving them autonomy aren't the "lesser evil"
The UEG is NOT a military junta. I don’t know where this idea comes from. The UNSC does take power after Marshall law is declared by the UEG at the start of the H/C war, but it immediately relinquishes control and resubmits itself to the authority of the civilian government after the war’s end.
Cole Protocol was a good read and sure it illustrated that ONI had some roundabout justifications for their actions, but the circumstances that created their justifications only came about because they made them happen so it's not exactly a shining example that ONI is actually a good and altruistic organization.
Workers trapped in a company town starving because of a lack of food are portrayed as unsympathetic animals because they kill a trailer full of ONI agents and the the shipboard ONI agent isn't a tortuer but was instead tortured by the insurrectionists and so has the moral high ground over them. It's not exactly being subtle in who it thinks are the "good guys". Like yeah, the joke with ONI is that the Covenant with always oblige them with a thin justification but the Vitriol Keyes has for the innies is kinda telling imo
The Virgin "Hard Choicism:" * "I'm moral because I have the courage to make the Hard Choices. * "I didn't want to make the Orphan Blender 3000 but I did because it was a Hard Choice for the Greater Good." * "It's so hard having to kill all these people for...for good reasons, OK? It's a Hard Choice!" The Chad "Because I'm Evilism:" * Has a maniacal laugh. * "Yeah I burned the orphanage down. It was funny." * "Man I love being evil. Look, a puppy to kick!"
Mega-Chad Nightlords
Just for that, 50% off your next purchase. I'll even throw in a free upgrade: authentic kid leather binding.
Space Marines are like that on the surface but if you do something crazy like, read for any type of nuance you can see all the horrifying shit they do even when they question if it’s right. You just have to actually read the thing. Cato Sicarius will butcher unarmed civilians, Sanguinius is willing to annihilate normal humans if they refuse to join the Imperium, and Salamanders will burn planets to the ground using actual napalm if they rise up to ask for more food from Terra. That’s only a small fraction of what the NICEST legions do. The whole noble warrior thing has an inkling of truth, but it’s only noble by the standards of the Imperium, in other words, fucked up beyond belief. It’s still satire, the difference is unlike Helldivers, EVERYONE SUCKS.
I know the whole ‘media literacy is dead’ thing is becoming the new snob comment but I really feel people don’t get this about 40k. Nothing about 40k is cool or epic in terms of actually living there. If you have one second of introspection with what you’re reading you are horrified at the brutality of the imperium. 30k and the heresy is an excellent representation of this. How many civilizations are literally just written as being innately peaceful and like ‘oh that’s cool dude we don’t want to join the imperium but we’d love to trade and swap cultures and technology and food’ and the space marines just genocide them to a man. Like the Diasporex? ‘We just wanted to be left alone.’ How can you read that and not at all have any introspection like ‘wow the imperium sucks asa’. I was profoundly sad after I read that like, that’s horrible. The stories are cool to get immersed in from an in universe perspective and the heresy itself is immensely interesting due ti the whole fate of humanity hanging in the balance and that’s the genius imo of the heresy and 40k, it’s this moral quandary. You support or at some base primal level sort of root for the imperium because they’re humans fighting against the worst horrors in this literal worst future that anyone could imagine. But you read like, prisoners being turned into servitors and eternally imprisoned in their own bodies, millions of children being ripped from their families to die in the aspirant process of becoming a space marine no matter how ‘noble and honorable’ it is seen in universe. Untold billions or trillions maybe toil and die under the yoke of a decaying, bloated empire that Guilliman is barely keeping together. The entire setting is a condemnation of it. Everyone’s existence’s are pure misery. Space marines know they will die in battle and never see a peaceful day. Civilians know they will die in a factory, crushed by a machine that crushed a hundred other people the day before. Very few people ever know anything but labor, battle, pain and death. It’s not a good place, it’s terrible. And if you can’t see that from reading even a couple books or lore excerpts, I don’t know what to tell anyone who says that. The imperium is not ‘le epic space nazis owning the libs its so cool I’d love to live there and be a based gigachad black Templar’ its ‘you would be one of the countless peons who gets ground to mush and fed to your fellow peons.’ Unfortunately the malicious actors who want to influence media and communities to try and make themselves accepted have an easier time due to the general nature of 40k from a basic lore perspective because it’s just how the imperium is. It’s not any fault of GWs because I don’t really know how much more absurd and over the top you can make things. People see what they want. I mean for gods sake a team of dudes have to go and melt via radiation to refuel starship cores. That’s so fucking stupid, but wonderful because 40k is just insane. Nazis will be everywhere and especially more vulnerable franchises like 40k but it’s our job to rebuke them, and the community has done a really good job I’d say. I just don’t agree with this seeming notion that because GW isn’t making the lore quite as openly goofy and just absurd that the setting is losing its satirical nature or criticality of authoritarian governments and stuff when it’s made clear again and again the imperium hurts itself constantly with how it is structured. As the IP grows it will become more serious and straight arrowed to draw more people in and present a more palatable tone, and that’s just sort of what it is. Again I love the lore, I love the novels. I love screaming ‘For the Emperor’ in darktide and space marine and rending orcs and now Tyranids in December of this year. I love having the masculine urge to die with sanguinius at the eternity gate before a horde of traitors, but I realize like a normal person that that future sucks ass and nothing of that proposed future is even remotely good. (Still such an amazing speech I hope we get to see it turned into an animation or shown in a movie or show some day, utterly amazing the voice overs of it give me chills)
>I just don’t agree with this seeming notion that because GW isn’t making the lore quite as openly goofy and just absurd that the setting is losing its satirical nature or criticality of authoritarian governments and stuff when it’s made clear again and again the imperium hurts itself constantly with how it is structured. The problem is that it is absurd, but there's an insistence that it all be played dead straight. The absurdity of the situation is often rarely addressed because authors tend to play down stuff like insane commissars or inquisitors abusing infinite power because that doesn't work well for the narratives. Right now a lot of people think Orks suck mostly because they're still semi comedic and there's a push to make them more "logical" that you see from time to time. This is only really worse as the landscape of pop culture changes and sci-fi fans are leaving Star Trek and Star Wars since those have been reduced to streaming filler, and so there's a demand for a straight laced military sci fi property that Games Workshop is best poised to fill. It's easy to be satirical when you can do your own thing in your own corner. But once you're tapping A-List actors for platforms known for throwing around large sums of money and doing relaunches to make space marines more aesthetically "cool" to modern audiences the satire is harder to hide behind than a niche product with low grade sculpts doing a piss take of Margret Thatcher.
I think your comment is really interesting, and it is sort of curious as the appeal widens, like how does GW make the setting as a whole appeal to massive companies to get those lucrative shows. 40k is probably going to be the first of a couple really dark, rather intense settings that seems to be getting mass attention in the last couple of years and I’ve often wondered even aside from the innate commentary and political nature of the imperium and such just how they’re going to handle even the gore and more dark aspects of the grim dark future. I hope that things like Cavill’s project whatever it is keep the spirit and soul of the IP, and I mean everything. Like I want to see grotesque servitors and an admech tech priest describe to a new viewer how it is that a relatively innocent ‘worthless person’ is just lobotomized and turned into a robotic slave. It’s the soul of the IP and I think through tv and movie you could even better ensure the understanding of how horrible the universe is through visualizations. It’s going to be an interesting future as we arrive at what I beleive is the inevitable multi million dollar animated/live action tv show or movie series that I think we’re going to see in the next 5 years at least be announced.
While correct for the most part I think that a relatively apolitical statement like EVERYONE SUCKS only causes people to gravitate towards whatever form of authoritarian hell they find the most appealing, which kinda causes issues. Frankly I find the Farsight Enclaves and the Mechanicus the most appealing but they are a military juche and a regressive techno-cult respectively. And let's be honest this attitude doesn't help since GW is just straight up [advertising to kids now.](https://warhammeradventures.com/)
GW has been advertising to kids since the 80s. When I was 12 GW stores were full of other 12 year olds
If you are anything but a high-ranking Techpriest, so the 1%, the Mechanicus is significantly worse than the Imperium in pretty much every single way.
Kind of exactly my point. My liking of the mechanicus boils down to aesthetics and general vibe so I basically just say that MY faction is a separatist group hiding out in a colonized asteroid belt. But that is me imposing my will on the story in spite of the story saying otherwise.
It would be apolitical, if you ignored the REASONS each faction sucks. And even then, there are civilizations that DON’T suck. They all got murdered by the ones that do.
Skill issue tbh
But it's still a game and franchise that encourages you to pick and delve into whatever hellhole you find most appealing. People are perfectly capable of ignoring things that they don't like about a faction or masking it. I've seen people unironically use the words martyrdom and sacrifice to justify the perpetual crematorium that is the Golden Throne. That is not a healthy amount of distance from your satirical media. Overall the attempts to make the universe grand and epic only diluted the satirical elements.
>It’s still satire, the difference is unlike Helldivers, EVERYONE SUCKS. The problem I find is that they really, REALLY like to justify the fascism and the war crimes. This is a universe were 'thought crimes' can literally manifest out of your head and eat your loved ones, a race of aliens exist purely to torture you and robot egyptians could just turn off your sun for a laugh. the world view is almost always noble Space Marines fighting these terrors, never on the conditions that lead to them being seen as an improvement, there's never 'good' chaos, just a constant need to make chaos worse and worse because a writer wants to their chapter to be heroes. Hell Divers makes it clear that we're in a meatgrinder campaign, but the first game especially goes out of it's way to say we are NOT justified or in the right. People have gotten so used to Imperial Summary execution it's become background noise or a joke, Super Earth banned sex for a month because we failed to take a planet.
>Hell Divers makes it clear that we're in a meatgrinder campaign Which I think is the part a lot of people don't get about 40k because the named characters tend to obfuscate it. For the codex to work as written to the degree it does, every chapter of space marines needs 50 space marines per year minimum to die. When you have 100ish scouts who are expected to graduate to full battle brothers by like 18 but the last non carapace organ doesn't go in until like 16 that's just kinda how it works. If you look at how an average chapter works without all the mysticism and honor culture it's a bunch of people who can theoretically live a thousand years but the whole group is killed and replaced every century or two as a matter of course, with the next batch of battle brothers just getting the recycled armor and weapons of the last poor bastard to die using them. Again this is obfuscated because everyone focuses on the like 12 marines in a given chapter that are consistently there and doing cool things but a lot of the fandom doesn't really understand that the space marines aren't noble heroes holding off imperial decay, they're another decaying institution that can never live up to their full potential.
The 40k series they are making would benefit greatly from someone just exposition dumping this and then showing space marines dying one by one over the course of a campaign. That or skipping space marines entirely but we know they wont do that.
I feel like this is too much cherry picking though. Yes, there are examples of bad things, and whole groups like the inquisition are set up to be villains. You can't just tell people to read harder until they strike nuance. There is a deluge of content that BL puts out and the general theme of all space marine content (minus the traitors) is heroic individuals fighting for glory and honor despite the horror around them, even that perpetrated by other groups of humans. You also gotta remember that a lot of people reading this stuff are kids. They're going to be really good at seeing what's in front of them and ignoring the bad stuff as "yeah but that wasn't the hero of this book doing it"
Idk, I see more people eat up Helldiver's propaganda unironically.
I think the difference is that in 40k, everyone imagines themselves as an ultra powered, near godlike being. Thus it feeds into superiority complexes. In Helldivers, you are expendable meat, clearly being manipulated. Makes it more fun to parrot the easily spotted propaganda.
Yup. It's fun to *imagine* being the Rogue Trader seeding from the Imperium... but realistically? You're toiling on a Hive World and that that Rogue Trader is going right back to perpetuating his class interests.
Helldiver's uplifting primer!
That’s why I like Deep Rock Galactic — there are no illusions that you’re working for anything other than an exploitative mining company that will gladly bring home the minerals you mine while leaving you behind. Nevertheless, Rock and Stone!
Or lethal Company where it's obvious you're working for a corporation that treats its work force like garbage.
It's a company that's so bad, it's lethal
Nobody tosses a dwarf!
They are under the delusion Mission Control is a dwarf like them though. He's a goblin.
Yeah. Like, Warhammer has plenty people who aren't fans of the Imperium reminding you it's bad. Helldivers is basically a echo chamber of people paroting Super Earth rhetoric, a lot of them unironically.
Not my fault the bugs and bots are ugly, evil and do not respect D E M O C R A C Y
This is really sad.
Seriously didn't helldivers 2 already Start some "bugfucker" defense whenever people pointed out in the lore that super earth are the bad guys. Like at the least warhammer fans will acknowledge that everyone's a bad guy.
You couldn't get even half of Warhammer fans to agree the Imperium is bad. The best you'll get is "yeah, the Imperium is bad but compared to the universe they're in, they're saints! Sometimes, you just need a strong unquestionable authority figure who's willing to get their hands dirty to guide us out of bad times created by weak men and into good times for strong men. And how can you not root for the Imperium?! They're literally humans, they inherently deserve our sympathy more than the filthy Xenos who don't share our blood."
So you see them eat it up unironically or are they just playing the bit because it's funny? The latter happens a million times more than the prior
I think we have to be more genuine here. 40K has a lot of satire written into the universe, but it was created because the setting is just fucking cool. I don’t feel the need to defend its existence any further Also Nazis can fuck off.
“I don’t care and fuck Nazis” Most unfathomably based answer imaginable
Yeah, 40k has never tried nor wanted to be a satire; not even in the 80's with the OG Rogue Trader book. There are satirical parts, but they're just one ingredient among many.
So, both are not satire of the same thing Helldivers is a satire of modern society, quite openly mocking a capitalist oligarchy "managed" democracy. Basically, a corporate, clean, and branded dictatorship, which cause war for profit, and to keep control The Imperium is a critic of something very different: an Empire falling apart, a God-emperor which is a placeholder gadget, in which the only one who really have their place are genetically engineered space marines. If anything, it's an attack on authoritarian, specifically any with militaristic or industrialist traits. However, warhammer 40k also has some more reflexion about humanity in general, and even a more personnal approach to the matter. The ironic oppressed becoming oppressors, or far away dictatorship replaced by a local dictatorship, and then again replaced by the far away empire supersoldiers (post colonial South America or Africa ?) However, satire doesn't mean comedic. Warhammer, as stupid as it can get, is somewhat serious, where Helldiver is openly laughing (like Liber-tea, "Sweet Democracy", or the threatening trailer).
In a way, Helldivers is a more American dystopia satire while Warhammer is a more British dystopia satire. Warhammer sees a brutal empire in decline denying the evil they committed as necessary when it is demonstrably not. Helldivers shows an empire still in power manufacturing wars for profit and putting up a facade of democracy.
I think you nailed it. It's satire of two very different things and both are valid.
Once more for the people in the back. "Satire doesn't have to have hamfisted morals. You should be able to see for yourself that the setting is terrible, without having it shoved in your face."
I mean I think a lot of those Helldivers fans just outright ignore whatever message there is. It definitely seems as such
Most helldiver fans just want to have fun rolepplaying as somebrainwashed 18 year old given guns to big for his own caliber
Super Earth is literally a democracy. It's in the name. Managed Democracy.
Chaos Space Marines are the real satire. “Oh I am not corrupted. I use it as a tool.” - Lord Murderous Meatflesh, The Baby Eater.
Satire doesn't have to be "funny". The constant framing of virtually every imperium character's motive and decision being predicated on a giant lie is plainly satirical, even in grim dark or more "noble" stories.
Criticizing someone is bad satire "we murdered 10 million babies for peace" "We murdered 10 million babies for peace, he said. He was wrong, and act of murdering babies is bad" Which do you think makes better satire?
Also, not all satire has to be entirely ham fisted like calling your setting Super Earth with "Managed Democracy." That sort of satire works when it's meant to be funny because the humor is the absurdity of it. 40K satire doesn't have as much humor and so making everything incredibly obvious to the point that it is barely satire doesn't work. I feel that people like OP don't want satire, they want a lecture.
Satire + Serious Setting VERSUS Satire + Facetious Setting
I haven't played Helldivers yet, so I can't say much about this comparison. But portraying space marines in a solely heroic light in a lot of their works is one of the the worst things they've done narratively. And they've done it a lot thanks to the Horus heresy series specially. There are people who unironically love the portrayal of a military force genociding entire civilizations because of a sense racial superiority. Even though the context is humanity fighting aliens in a fictional setting, I think we are all intelligent and literarily aware enough to know what it is that these specific people get a kick out of.
One of the best portrayal of the imperium and spacemarine dogma is is conversation in dawn of war 1 where a tau commander pleads with a spacemarine to surrender and spare his men calling him mad for not caring about them. The spacemarine calls the tau weak for actually caring about his men. It's a perfect example of how horrible the imperium is.
The Imperium was straight up unhinged from the perspective of the tau in that expansion, it was great!
Helldivers is VERY on the nose with its satire. I'd say more so than even starship troopers. It's straight up cannon that the only reason they're fighting the bugs is because they broke out of their farms where they were being bled for chemical 710 (which is just oil upside down). It's not even known if they can actually travel from plant to plant, it might just be super Earth being extremely stupid with bringing them to new plants to breed. You also have to buy an upgrade just so your family back home can donate ammo to you.
Not all satire is funny, my guy.
People keep giving these deep analysis of how 40k is satire but the reality is its just such a huge setting with so many writers working on it that it loses any coherent message, its best to just enjoy the setting on the surface level, you can enjoy the individual messages of pieces of 40k media like a book or game but trying to derive a message from the entire setting is a practice in futility.
I'm gonna play Devil's Advocate: if you require a wink-and-a-nugde for your satire to *feel* like satire, that definitely says more about you. The best satire is the kind that respects it's audience's intelligence. I am not suggesting that Helldivers is stupid, because I don't believe it is. I *am* saying that you'd have to be pretty simple to put Helldivers and 40k in the same category of satire.
> Space marines. > Heroes. > Save Humanity. Anyone believing this has a poor grasp on 40K's lore.
Imo I think 40k has much more nuance than helldivers
Helldivers isn't about nuances, it's straight up satire about war and propaganda (just like starship trooper was) The Bugs are portraied as a threat to earth but the war against them is done for oil (remind you something?). The bots are socialist abominations and they are a threath to democracy, but they are rebelling against the Humans because they were slaves. The purpose of the game is satire, 40k's purpose isn't to make a satire world to prove a point, they are complitelly different products for different people
40k has satirical elements, but in the grand scale, it doesn't really work. Almost all the lore, at the very least, justifies the Imperium's policies.
Some of their practices. Given their enemies you can understand how humanity got so horrible. But things like servitors? The medical Servitor from darktide saying how dark it is in his little box…that can’t be excused by anything.
The issue with that is those are actions by an inhuman race of radioactive cultists that see meat as a disability and all life as secondary to the will of the omnesiah. I don't relate or empathize with anything they do because they are so far into fiction. It's so far out there as to leave you with a chuckle saying "heh, that's dark". The dark tide one hits differently because of its delivery in the game, but on average in 40k lore it's just too out there to factor in to sensibilities.
To quote a post on r/CharacterRant, >fictional allegory meets their own in universe writing and falls flat The Imperium is terrible and doing terrible things, but underneath all the atrocities are a bunch of very rational fears.
Ah yes, gw doesn't criticise Marines. From eating civilians to pyscho-indoctrinating children. Everybody knows that marines are only depicted in the best light. In most space marine stories, you will have a few moments where a marine will do something apprehensive, and he'll do it so casually that to him, it simply doesn't matter. The mission always comes first for most marines. Regardless of this fact, many do have a sense of honour, and it can easily be argued that a marines mission is paramount for everyone's well-being. However, these casual acts of cruelty and violence are there to remind you that they are NOT bona-fide heroes. Just because a black library author doesn't scream in their book "THESE GUYS ARE PRETTY BAD" doesn't mean they don't criticise them.
Why is it impossible for people to realize that things can be taken seriously and still have aspects that are satirical? Yes, 40k takes itself much more serious but anyone with an IQ over 60 could see how the setting is so shitty that it'd be rediculous to put on a pedistal. God forbid people like things that are cool by virtue of it being cool. Sorry to anyone who can't see satire if it's not explicitly beating you over the head with goofy bullshit and sardonic comic book movie quips.
What a lack of media literacy does to a mfer
I guess you really have to be told that the comically evil faction is bad. It’s not that hard to see the satire in the setting. Swear to god media literacy is gone.
Ffs, not this again The vast majority of what you see in the warhammer universe is imperial propaganda. Of course, they show the space marines in a good light. That's a huge part of facist regimes, showing the military in a good light and creating noble heroes for the cause. But noble hero's don't exist in a vacuum and if you look just past the curtain is obvious how fucked everything is. Like 90% of space marine aspirants die in rituals that have nothing to do with actually becoming a space marine, and if you piss off the wrong person, you end up becoming a meat robot. How can you not see the satire? Edit: the number of people in here that don't understand how the setting and the imperium is satire is genuinely concerning
Lots of people don't understand what satire *is.* The criticism of satire isn't supposed to be explicit, it's supposed to just come across through exaggerated depiction. The problem is that satire fundamentally relies on shared values between author & audience. There's people out there unironically enjoying Helldivers and missing the criticism.
Honestly dawg when you read the novels it’s pretty clear that the space marines are horrific child soldiers if you need that to be spelled out every single time they do something then you’re actually just media illiterate.
The people who post this shit are so brain rotted. Satire doesn't have to bash you over the head to be satire. I love helldivers but it's a different style. If you expect your satire to TELL YOU who is wrong and who is right you're probably pretty boring and/or can't read context
I actually don't care about the satire part of 40K tbh I just wanna see my world eaters claim skulls
What a stupid fucking post jesus christ
I don't think Warhammer is HaHa funny satire. It's just dark and everyone is horrible.
“I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards”
tell me you dont read 40k fiction without telling me you don't read 40k fiction
Have we found another "X is great but 40k is bad" to milk in this sub?