Aside from the Lion king one, they don’t work outside any other medium so thought i’d dump them here.
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Peeve:
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY [banned word of 1930-40s German rightwing] IN WARHAMMER
AHHHH
Seriously whyyy? I find a hobby that I enjoy, painting little figures and playing happy games, and of course this community is packed to the brim with people screaming their lungs out about there being a dark-skinned space marine on a book cover.
Why can’t people just take a moment and look at themselves and ask if this is really how they want to live?
(Bonus points to Age of Sigmar for being absolutely HATED by people like that. I am pretty sure my third project will be something AoS because I am so sick of attack helicopter jokes and ‘fascism is good actually’ takes, and AoS makes the troublemakers gatekeep themselves.)
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Yeah… not gonna lie, Im tempted to massively dial back my Hobby Twitter because there’s just so many utterly trash humans and their ‘takes’. Also, and I hate to admit it, but the 40k discourse always ends up being people being massively salty or divisive or negative or just… Stop. It’s a HOBBY for feth sakes!!
And yeah, as much as I love Total Warhammer and look forward to the Old World, the WHFB diehard grognards are some of the worst.
Also the people claiming TW3 is ‘turning it into AoS High fantasy!!1’
-Inhale-
WARHAMMER WAS ALWAYS HIGH FANTASY, YOU WINDOW LICKERS!!! Learn what a term MEANS before using it!
When the extremely authoritarian and xenophobic empire with literal ubermensch is depicted as the good guy faction of the game, you shouldn’t be shocked that it attracts some people who view authoritarianism, zealotry, xenophobia and eugenics as good things.
But the Imperium aren’t the good guys of Warhammer! The whole point is that there are no good guys! In the grim dark future, there is only war!
That might be the official statement, but just look at how the Imperium is depicted. Angelic symbolism, halos everywhere, knights in shining armor, so many books and other pieces of media focusing on them as the protagonists fighting against the evil aliens and heretics and so on. Warhammer 40K absolutely glorifies the heck out of the Imperium, and Warhammer’s Empire of Man wasn’t that much better, back when it was a thing.
40k is, and always has been, satire. Parody. Piddle Taking.
Sadly, most of Those People are too dense to get that…
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Might’ve been once, but I refuse to believe that now. Modern 40K absolutely depicts the Imperium and its Space Marines as the good guys of the setting.
I have definitely noted that tonal shift after 7th edition. Words like heroic and noble are used in worrying quantities, by the omniscient narrator, to describe a horrific murdercult of child soldiers upholding what the lore has always spelled out as the cruelest, most bloody regime imaginable.
The WHFB community is if anything even worse because it is in large part defined by the people who didn’t want the setting with women, non-white people, modes of rule other than fascism, and other ‘political’ things.
I disagree; the Guilliman books, at least the bits I’ve read so far, are basically him going “This is horrific. You’re all terrible. What the hell did we create? We’d have been better off all dying to Horus.”
The fact so many ‘fans’ hate on Guilly make me realise that, yeah, they don’t get it.
The Imperium is literally the ‘White Knight’ trope, complete with murder.
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It really isn’t portrayed as being good at all. For all the use of words like
it’s quite blatantly obvious how f-ed up the Imperium is, and quite open about how f-ed up it is. The only way it is remotely portrayed as being ‘good’ is that it’s marginally better than being [REDACTED] by demons… which really doesn’t say much.
edit: however, sadly, there’s always going to be that/those guy(s) that blissfully ignore how messed up the Imperium is, much like how people do the same with other antagonist /anti-hero factions in other franchises (e.g., Scarlets in WoW).
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Unfortunately, some people even look at the Imperium and think it is something unironically good. :S
Especially since it’s in large part responsible for getting into this mess in the first place.
Fewer than the number of people that look at Hogwarts and think the same LOL
edit: I understand comparing a magical school in SEVERE breach of health and safety protocols to a genocidal interstellar empire is not quite the same thing.
But they are absolutely portrayed as the good guys of the setting, even if the more nuanced media might point out the flaws of the Imperium.
I mean, let’s have a look at how the official website presents the game, in a brief opening blurb:
Fight for the future of Humanity across a vicious, war-torn galaxy.
Welcome to Warhammer 40,000, the thrilling hobby of tabletop wargaming! The game is set in the grim darkness of the far future, where mighty armies clash on countless war-torn worlds and Humanity stands alone, beset on all sides by the threats of the heretic, the mutant and the alien. There is no mercy. There is no respite. Prepare yourself for battle.
That paragraph is going to be the first exposure that a lot of people have to that game’s story - and it suggests that the players of the game should fight for Humanity, against the evil aliens and heretics and mutants. Humanity are absolutely the good guys here and while some media might go into detail about the Imperium’s flaws, the surface level stuff that introduces new players to the setting totally depicts Humanity as the protagonists.
I am reminded of this.
https://i.redd.it/dhyu9zi69ns41.jpg
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I think there’s an extremely sharp difference in how the aesthetics of the Imperium are presented vs what life is like for the majority of Imperials.
There’s a reason the main sub-setting of the 40k setting is a squalid mega-slum where the average person is an illiterate gang warrior living in extreme precarity, subsisting on a mixture of gigantic rats and fat they scraped from a giant wall, with every resource controlled by tyrannical gangs out for everyone else’s blood, up to and including guilds who control the water supplies, and who will suck it out of you if you owe them enough money.
god i love necromunda. looking into necromunda for more than 2 seconds nukes any arguments about how the imperium is good. blessed.
But the main issue is that (imho) Warhammer has enormous discrepancies in engagement - the hobby ranges everything from people who skipped a Lexicanum article six years ago to people who’ve collected almost everything in the setting since the 1990s. A lot of people only understand it from random memes or heavily condensed (and biased, thanks Arch) videos about how the Imperium is good, actually.
I feel like the explanation for this is that a lengthy description about how every faction sucks probably didn’t do that well in marketing or getting new people involved, really.
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I’m sure glad the Von Carsteins are dead in my playthrough…
Meanwhile I still got a rat problem, I’ve been chasing Queek and his merry band from the north side of the map ( Hellpit) to the most southern part you can find (Teotiqua), and thanks to that mod he’s got Lord Skrolk, Throt the Unclean, and Deathmaster Snikch as well.
Damn Snickh keeps picking off my armies one by one by ambushing them. Damn rats 
objectively the greatest part of the 40k setting both as a part of the narrative, or as a whole subnarrative, and as a game… 
anyone that says otherwise can taste my Palanite shock baton
Doesn’t even need to be that. There’s ways they could have worded it without encouraging new players to fight for Humanity, without even informing them about that entails. They could have focused a little bit more on the grim darkness of it all, on how everyone is fighting to survive in a galaxy that knows no peace. There’s no need to put Humanity on that pedestal, especially when it’s only really represented by a horrific authoritarian hellscape.
I’ll never argue that the Imperium is actually good. I’m just saying that a combination of the aesthetics, the marketing and the human-centric perspective does a lot to push people into viewing the Imperium in a positive light, and to attract people who consider the Imperium’s traits to be positive in the first place.
40k also has the issues that everything opposing or even presenting an alternative to the Imperium is villain-coded.
The Tau appeared as a faction more morally just than the Imperium. The fanboys hated it. Now they got slapped with the grimdark baton because of it.
Meanwhile Chaos and Genestealer cults both draw upon imagery of the justified revolt of an oppressed populace, the workers throwing off their chains and overthrowing their tyrant masters - but 40k portrays both as at best horribly misguided and unwittingly inviting the doom of all through their actions.
It is rather uncomfortable how well that plays into the hands of the alt-right nutjobs drawing parallels with real life situations, even if that probably wasn’t intentional (just like how AoS making the ogres into the good guys of the setting probably wasn’t intentional either).
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Can appreciate that pain, having played Whack-an-Orc with Grimgor for ages, and currently trying to deal with my own rat problem later in the game.
However, consider;
Ironbreakers.
Laughs in explosives armed shield wall
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Players: “EA please put Mass Effect Legendary Edition on Steam”
[the monkey’s paw curls…]
EA: “Done. But it launches Origin from Steam”
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