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Hi all

i've recently been re reading "let the galaxy burn", a collection of short stories that came out in 2006 if i'm correct however the majority of the stories are from 1999 to 2002.

last time I read it was before I had got into the hobby proper and befoe I had read quite so many BL books, and while reading it the following occured to me.

are the races getting more Stereotyped?

The marines in the shorts, form the above mentioned book, seem far from the movie marines that seem to appear in a lot of the newer books. Admittedly they are still not correct in game terms but they do not appear to be tha same unstoppable juggernaughts they are now.

Guardsmen seem to populate a middle ground between the throw away eat shields in morst books and the comandos depicted in gaunts ghosts.

I'm interested in what some of you have been in the hobby longer than me have you noticed a change in the way races a presented?

Thanks
Spank

Different writers will always present the 40k universe in their own way...I don't think there's some conscious decision to change things.

Couldn't the change be an unconscious one?

This is just different authors writing what serves the story really. There have always been stories where Space Marines were fearless murdermachines and other stories where they were very human, sometimes by the same author. Aaron Dembski-Bowden has some deep characters in his Night Lords books who are very interesting to read about, regardless of the fact that they are Chaos Marines. Pretty much everyone has written Guardsmen as a competent military force or alternately as a bunch of bumbling idiots with flashlights who die in droves, based solely on what works for the story. If you want to have a book where Space Marines look awesome, you have Guardsmen die like chumps. If the story is from the regular infantryman's perspective, they tend to be more competent and intelligent. This isn't really anything over time, it's pretty much always been this way.

Stereotypes seem to be the safest bet for BL authors imo. The different races or groups have to conform to a narrow list of ideals and abilities or the nerds will rage "X can't do Y!" Daemons, for example, have to be invincible on their own turf and anyone who can consistently beat them is spat upon and all Grey Knights have to be this, this and this or else they're bloodthirsty maniacs (see Kaldor Draigo and Sisters of Battle). In a universe with defined absolutes, new things are not always welcome.
I find the opposite though. Old ideas are being expanded upon to break out of some of the absolutes, especially in the Horus Heresy novels.

Gone are the golden days when races were characterized as squat beer happy bikers or "arrgh must torture everyone" elves or "arrgh must kill all life forms" necrons. We will miss those subtle backgrounds

for background, I can't say, but in the game itself, armies have been getting less stereotyped over time.

Nah, they're just as stereotyped as they've always been