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We know the adult serfs fight tooth and nail though. That's not going to make the situation seem more "dire". Having not just the serfs and the Wolves present at the Fang fighting, but even the children of the serfs(who are potentially going to be the next generation of Wolves) fighting makes it seem a bit more "grimdark"--and also engenders a bit more of the conflict between the Wolves and Thousand Sons, as it's become something the children actually encountered themselves.

This is exactly what I mean by "turning it up to 11."

I think it's bad writing because there shouldn't be any children there unless they are aspirants. Serfs don't have kids. They're all male and live a similarily monkish lifestyle as Astartes.

Much worse things happen in 40k than children almost being flayed. Servants of slaneesh rape their victims before killing them (for their pleasure, as slannesh is the god of pleasure).
Blood angels consumed by the red thirst have drunk other people's blood (like vampires I guess). Tyrants ripper swarms spit acid on you then devour you within seconds.
Imperial guardsmen have raped stranded female citizens and female eldar.
40k is the grim, dark future after all.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:I think it's bad writing because there shouldn't be any children there unless they are aspirants. Serfs don't have kids. They're all male and live a similarily monkish lifestyle as Astartes.

Not all SW Thralls, note not serfs, are Male. The DA have all Male serfs because they are monastic SW are not, they're Vikings in Space not monks in space like the DA or UM or BT.

OverwatchCNC wrote:

KamikazeCanuck wrote:I think it's bad writing because there shouldn't be any children there unless they are aspirants. Serfs don't have kids. They're all male and live a similarily monkish lifestyle as Astartes.

Not all SW Thralls, note not serfs, are Male. The DA have all Male serfs because they are monastic SW are not, they're Vikings in Space not monks in space like the DA or UM or BT.

SW are a weird bunch but I've never heard of them having female serfs. By in large most serfs are failed recruits for most chapters.

KamikazeCanuck wrote:

OverwatchCNC wrote:

KamikazeCanuck wrote:I think it's bad writing because there shouldn't be any children there unless they are aspirants. Serfs don't have kids. They're all male and live a similarily monkish lifestyle as Astartes.

Not all SW Thralls, note not serfs, are Male. The DA have all Male serfs because they are monastic SW are not, they're Vikings in Space not monks in space like the DA or UM or BT.

SW are a weird bunch but I've never heard of them having female serfs. By in large most serfs are failed recruits for most chapters.

Failed recruits for the SW are Wulfen, Thunderwolves, or dead.

shudder

The Thousand Sons? They really were thinking along those lines?

Yikes. Would've expected it from the word bearers or Emperor's children, but not the sons.

It seems to mostly be boiling down to a matter of opinion if the scene worked for you or not. That is perfectly fine and having not read it I can't really judge.

However some people seem to be missing the detractors point, that the scene really didn't help the book accomplish a task. As it is described to me, these kids show up, are threatened, fight back, then disappear and are not mentioned for the remainder of the novel. The question on my mind then is why do we care about them?

There are a number of tricks writers use to enhance drama without actually working hard, in movies and books they can introduce tons of characters with little back story, hoping the audience can latch on to at least a couple of them emotionally. Another commonly used tactic is the threat or destruction of major landmarks (The Michael Bay tactic). The last and much more rarely used is the atrocity angle: Rape, and the torture/killing of children.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of the tactics, if done well, the problem here is it wasn't, if the goal here is to make the 1KSons look threatening and evil, then having them fail to kill these serfs certainly doesn't help that. But even if they had killed them, we still have no reason to care about them if they were introduced only for that scene, we already know CSM are nasty, that has been well established for us previously even in context of the universe, The very fact that they are attacking the Fang kind of makes it obvious, you don't attack the SW unless you are evil right? The serfs are barely mentioned in the book from what I can gather, no SW talks about them, there are no adult serf characters worrying about their children while fighting to survive, we don't even revisit the children. So to those of us who analyze such things (possibly too much) it becomes a meaningless scene poorly attempting to ad drama.

A common question asked by those doing editing is: "What gets lost if this scene isn't here?" If the answer is "Nothing." then it should probably be removed.

In a such a big galaxy, something like that is bound to happen;

hell its been always 100% implied that its happening anyways(tyranids eating entire worlds, Necrons destroying entire worlds, etc)

^ That’s his issue. It remains implied. He was upset at the explicit mention of it.

TBH, it didn’t bother me at all. It showed the obviously ‘evil’ nature of the Thousand Sons. The children carrying grenades bothered me more. Hell, the single use of the word ‘zombie’ in Luthor Huss by the same author bothered me more!

Responding to the OP:

IMHO, Black Library novels need to include this aspect much more than they already do, because the grimdark has increasingly become 'toned down' somewhat for younger readers. For instance, ADB adressed in a Void Stalker Q and A the blurring of the barrier between Octavia's conciousness and the Echo of Damnation's machine spirit. He was forced to edit out the mention of Octavia having to ignore a sensation between her legs during a void battle. This describes the enjoyment the corrupted machine spirit obtains from battle, and how it translates to human senses. However, due to common taboo, the publishers would not accept it. It was very implicit, and younger readers probably wouldn't even understand the reference. If they already did, they would already understand the concept of sex, so why would it be harmful in any way compared to the implied rape in Soul Hunter? It is, in my opinion, a rather disturbing notion that it will be intolerable for the most subtle sexual references to be exposed to children as old as twelve or thirteen whilst violence is all but condoned in action movies and novels that are written with the consumption of children in mind.

I have strayed of topic though. My original point was that Black Library needs to allow these concepts of animosity more than they already do in more recent novels rather than tone down the elements which define 40k and making it less grimdark in the process.

Deathly Angel wrote:It is, in my opinion, a rather disturbing notion that it will be intolerable for the most subtle sexual references to be exposed to children as old as twelve or thirteen whilst violence is all but condoned in action movies and novels that are written with the consumption of children in mind.

This kind of hypocrisy is something I've grown to find disturbing as well. Just look at today's computer games. Blowing people's heads off is perfectly okay, but lo and behold, show a tit and you get slammed with the censorship hammer.

Quite a sick society.

It is a big cultural difference between the US and Europe:

The USA is ok with violence, but against sex. Europe is much more lax on sex, and harder on violence.

Manchu wrote:@Ratius: The use of violence against children in a case like this seems like laziness on the part of the author. In so many modern stories, the writers let you know that someone is really bad because they abuse children or animals. Abusing children or animals is certainly vile but it's so overdone. I think TVTropes has an article on this -- "kick the puppy" or something.

Laziness? I think not. Many of these stories take place in cities, hives and other populated areas. By deliberately ignoring the presence of children to sanitize the story is a trope in itself. It is realistic to point out from time to time that not everyone who is killed during these battles is an adult. Dead Men Walking details some of the civilian deaths and I believe it is important to the feel of the story to remember that there are plenty of relatively defenseless people who get caught up in these fights.

I also have to compare the example given to a documentary I saw once on the battle of Okinawa during WWII where the Japanese Army handed out two hand grenades to each child. One was for throwing at the Americans and one was for killing themselves. Knowing that helps to show that everyone was involved whether they wanted to be or not and adds to our understanding of what the whole battle was like, not just the Marines against the Japanese Army.
The Fang is full of humans including civilians so it shows something of what some of them faced during the battle instead of just more marine on marine action and marines killing guard action; how is different boring?

d-usa wrote:It is a big cultural difference between the US and Europe:

The USA is ok with violence, but against sex. Europe is much more lax on sex, and harder on violence.

This is true. We lax our sex and get hard over violence.

What do you expect from super evil, spiky, nasty people?

This is 40k,

The galaxy is a living hell, and you care about this single, probably minor incident where the Chaos Lord makes a threat and doesn't even fulfill the action.

Best not tell you about Commeragh.

Dan Abnett's books deal with Chaos, both on the battlefield and as insideous cults.
He always explicitly mentions violence towards ch-oh.
No he doesn't.

Joey wrote:Dan Abnett's books deal with Chaos, both on the battlefield and as insideous cults.
He always explicitly mentions violence towards ch-oh.
No he doesn't.

Uh...I'd suggest you reread some of his books.

In one of the vignettes from "Ghostmaker", Corbec and the Ghosts with him are disgusted by the discovery that what they thought were children's dolls nailed to the wall of a hab block were--in fact--the children of the hab block.
In the "Ravenor" series, there's a cult handing out psychically charged narcotics to children of a hive to ensnare them as foci for a daemonic ritual.

Children are not left unscathed.

Kanluwen wrote:

Joey wrote:Dan Abnett's books deal with Chaos, both on the battlefield and as insideous cults.
He always explicitly mentions violence towards ch-oh.
No he doesn't.

Uh...I'd suggest you reread some of his books.

In one of the vignettes from "Ghostmaker", Corbec and the Ghosts with him are disgusted by the discovery that what they thought were children's dolls nailed to the wall of a hab block were--in fact--the children of the hab block.
In the "Ravenor" series, there's a cult handing out psychically charged narcotics to children of a hive to ensnare them as foci for a daemonic ritual.

Children are not left unscathed.

I've left all of abnett's books.
At no point did an evil dude go "LOL LET'S KILL SOME CHILDREN TO PROVE WE'RE EVIL".

You've left his books?
...
Am i missing something?

purplefood wrote:You've left his books?
...
Am i missing something?

That's how little attention I pay to what I type. Can't you tell?

Joey wrote:

purplefood wrote:You've left his books?
...
Am i missing something?

That's how little attention I pay to what I type. Can't you tell?

Clearly...

Bah! Murder and madness is acceptable all forms for me. It's just more honest. But doesn't every exterminatus/killing of a number of civilians greater than 10 imply the killing of a buttload of kids? And who ever kills 10 civilians? They're killed by the hundred million on a good day. It seems any bad-guy in the grim darkness of the far future can kill a million civilians with a single bullet.
As one crazy door gunner once said: "Ain't war hell?"

Exterminatus doesn't bother you, but attacking kids does?

And anyways, I wouldn't call what they did open combat, it is more along the lines of grimdark Home Alone

This is nothing like crossing the line. I can't rightly picture what would be.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Deathly Angel wrote:Responding to the OP:

IMHO, Black Library novels need to include this aspect much more than they already do, because the grimdark has increasingly become 'toned down' somewhat for younger readers. For instance, ADB adressed in a Void Stalker Q and A the blurring of the barrier between Octavia's conciousness and the Echo of Damnation's machine spirit. He was forced to edit out the mention of Octavia having to ignore a sensation between her legs during a void battle. This describes the enjoyment the machine spirit obtains from battle, and how it translates to human senses. However, due to common taboo, the publishers would not accept it. It was very implicit, and younger readers probably wouldn't even understand the reference. If they already did, they would already understand the concept of sex, so why would it be harmful in any way compared to the implied rape in Soul Hunter? It is, in my opinion, a rather disturbing notion that it will be intolerable for the most subtle sexual references to be exposed to children as old as twelve or thirteen whilst violence is all but condoned in action movies and novels that are written with the consumption of children in mind.

I have strayed of topic though. My original point was that Black Library needs to allow these concepts of animosity more than they already do in more recent novels rather than tone down the elements which define 40k and making it less grimdark in the process.

Toning down the grimdark for younger readers is intolerable.

If they're too young for true grimdark, go read enders game or dune, leave the more intense, profound reading to the people who DON'T still live with their parents, who AREN'T still umpteen years old.

I'll quote Colonel Sanders on this since it sums up my feelings on the matter nicely, even if in a rather derogatory manner ...

That friggin' ... outfit .... They prostituted every goddamn thing I had. I had the greatest gravy in the world and those sons of bitches-- they dragged it out and extended it and watered it down that I'm so goddamn mad!

KamikazeCanuck wrote:

OverwatchCNC wrote:

KamikazeCanuck wrote:I think it's bad writing because there shouldn't be any children there unless they are aspirants. Serfs don't have kids. They're all male and live a similarily monkish lifestyle as Astartes.

Not all SW Thralls, note not serfs, are Male. The DA have all Male serfs because they are monastic SW are not, they're Vikings in Space not monks in space like the DA or UM or BT.

SW are a weird bunch but I've never heard of them having female serfs. By in large most serfs are failed recruits for most chapters.

Chapters don't have enough healthy failed aspirants to act as serfs and there are references to serfs being 'decendants' of other serfs so female serfs should exist. It is very hard to know much about serfs as there is very little fluff about them.

There is also the problem that serf types vary massively depending on chapter:

DA- use captured people that 'know to much'
IH - hate human serfs so use servitors for all tasks.

Joey wrote:At no point did an evil dude go "LOL LET'S KILL SOME CHILDREN TO PROVE WE'RE EVIL".

Evil people don't do evil things to show people they are evil, they do it because they are evil. Evil people in general have very little care what others think about them. Just because you think its cliched doesn't mean it isn't an accurate description of a person.

IH hate human serfs? Literally, or they just prefer servitors?

Another step too far would be. the second Imperial civil war (By then the Imperial seat of Power was not in Terra but Orphellia VIII), i've read that a power abusin' religious figure tries to exert its power but Space Wolves doesn't recognize that power. thus the Fang had been invaded... again.

What do those wolves think of Post-Heresy politics? Do they really recognizes the 'government body' formed after the Emperor locked into the Golden Throne?