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 Haighus wrote:
I maintain that a big part of the issue is that 40k lore has definitely shifted from "look at these idiots who deliberately make their empire an inefficient mess and worship a toaster" to "blind faith is a survival requirement to ward off daemons and everything the Imperium does is required to survive".

As soon as your evil empire actually needs to be horrifically oppressive to survive, rather than simply thinking it does but actually makes everything worse, your setting now justifies totalitarianism rather than satirising it.

I think this shift really began around 5th edition, but the seeds are earlier. The Horus Heresy is a big part of this with stuff like saints overtly defeating daemons through faith.

Agreed.

Tyel wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
On Guilliman? He is part of the overall satire and social commentary.

A Literal Demi-God of humanity. A being of near unlimited potential. Reduced to toeing the Imperium’s line. The slow corruption of who should’ve been a shining beacon of hope and renewal.

Gone from standing for mankind, to standing for the mere status quo. And perhaps reflection that, just perhaps, that’s what he’s always done since being reunified with his creator. The scales falling from his eyes that, just perhaps, The Imperium isn’t that far from the Great Crusade, just in a hyper religious wrapper. Because whether you’re forcing a religion or enforcing atheism, your tools and oppression remain the same. You’re still trampling all over a right to self determination and spiritual succour.

I think kicking this on isn't going to get an answer, as people just disagree.

But how is this "satire"? What is this sending up?

I mean I'm fairly versed on contemporary UK politics (....where to begin with the latest madness?). But a knowledge of that doesn't give any hidden meaning of 40k. Who in 40k is say the stand in for Boris, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, Corbyn (or Cameron, Brown, Blair, all the way back to Thatcher) etc? Ditto US politics - is Guilliman meant to be Trump? Or Biden? Not obviously. "Its a take on Imperialism, or the Cold War or the Iraq War, Guilliman is George Bush" - but again, it just isn't. A knowledge of these things doesn't give you any special insight into why Guilliman is a bit miffed the Imperium is being overwhelmed by its effectively infinite enemies.

I mean its perfectly possible for GW to write a story where there is an obvious 1:1 with contemporary real people/politics. But they don't.

In the olden days, presumably before GW realised they had an IP worth billions, they were happy to just steal things. "Hey, its Alexander the Great but in Spaaace". And if you know about Alexander the Great you can go "I see what you did there, its Alexander the Great in Spaaace". But even that's not obviously "satire" exactly. Unless we are meant to think its a criticism of Alexander the Great, which it doesn't seem to be.

I feel your view of satire is a bit narrow. Stuff can satirise current events, but they can also satirise concepts. Whilst early GW had a fair few examples of satirising current events, it was mostly satirising concepts of authoritarianism (which I agree were heavily inspired by 2000AD, a setting which is much more consistent in this). The satirisation of authoritarianism has slowly given way to justification in my view as I outlined in my previous post in this thread, and which isn't surprising as GW became a big corporation.

 Haighus wrote:
I maintain that a big part of the issue is that 40k lore has definitely shifted from "look at these idiots who deliberately make their empire an inefficient mess and worship a toaster" to "blind faith is a survival requirement to ward off daemons and everything the Imperium does is required to survive".

As soon as your evil empire actually needs to be horrifically oppressive to survive, rather than simply thinking it does but actually makes everything worse, your setting now justifies totalitarianism rather than satirising it.

I think this shift really began around 5th edition, but the seeds are earlier. The Horus Heresy is a big part of this with stuff like saints overtly defeating daemons through faith.

The question becomes, is that the belief of the characters in the setting, or the message the writers are to get across. It's certainly the former, but the latter is debatable, can is very likely different from author to author.

I do see your point on the HH faith angle, however I do still see this as satire based on a few things.

1) This entire situation in the first place was caused by their own regime being so messed up that Chaos didn't look that bad to some involved, especially when they started out only having a cursory understanding of it. It was Big E's totalitarianism that pushed many of the Primarchs to that point.

2) The nature of the faith that repels Daemons ISN'T actually related to the Emperor at all, any personal belief will work if the conviction is strong enough, if a character honestly believed in themselves to the extent many believe in Big E, they would be just as effective at smiting Daemons. The people of the Imperium were just in such a dire fractious and vulnerable state that they latched on to this half-truth like a drowning man and have been clinging to it for 10,000 years. Their society had already indoctrinated them into a single truth mentality, so when this came along, they never even bothered to think there could be another solution or explanation.

3) We do see that the Imperium is not the only alternative to Chaos thanks to the Tau. While I'm still on the fence about Ethereal lore, (time will tell what they do with that) we can clearly see there are other ways to combat the Warp then religious devotion. The Tau's belief in the Greater Good, a concept and ideal rather than a dogmatic figurehead, created their own (as far as we know) benevolent warp entity from the minds of the humans they had converted. We see their foil here, if The Imperium was as likeminded and tolerant, could the warp be calmed and the Chaos Gods defeated without an ocean of blood? It's left unanswered, but the idea is certainly implied.

Obviously this doesn't cover all 40k lore and YMMV depending on the writer. I do however think that overall, 40k has maintained it's satire, it's just a lot more subtle about it than directly parodying real world people like it did back in the day.

 Tawnis wrote:
The question becomes, is that the belief of the characters in the setting, or the message the writers are to get across. It's certainly the former, but the latter is debatable, can is very likely different from author to author.

Agreed about that last point- it varies from author to author- but they gave the authoritarian ubermensch enlightened despot a literal fething halo on the cover of the 9th Ed rulebook.

I've seen a lot of people express that they like 40K because it's 'about how far you're willing to go to survive' or something to that effect, essentially that the Imperium is doing really bad things because they're necessary. If there are authors at GW who feel that their product is a satire of authoritarianism, it's sufficiently subtle that it goes right over the heads of half the fanbase.

It also doesn't help that the drive to explain has created internal justifications for things that might otherwise be satirical. 'The Inquisition killed everyone who saw a daemon because they're blinkered idiots' is satire. 'The Inquisition killed everyone who saw a daemon because they might actually become possessed and it's a perfectly rational thing to do' is not. 'The AdMech pray to machine spirits and reject technological development because they're a cargo cult that doesn't understand what they're doing' is satire. 'The AdMech pray to machine spirits and reject technological development because everything actually has a sliver of machine intelligence thanks to the DAoT and much of it is corrupted so they're actually perfectly rational' is not.

At some point if your setting is justifying the things it's supposed to be satirizing more than it's making fun of them, it isn't satire anymore.

 Haighus wrote:

As soon as your evil empire actually needs to be horrifically oppressive to survive, rather than simply thinking it does but actually makes everything worse, your setting now justifies totalitarianism rather than satirising it.

I can think of one thing recently that undermines the "necessity" thesis, but I think overall, you might be on to something.

So think back to Gathering Storm.

Eldrad and Yvraine cook up a scheme to get rid of Slaanesh through a great big ritual. Obviously, the Imperium would be better off without Slaanesh.... But the deathwatch happen to be on the planet where the ritual is taking place, and Artemis be like, "Hey, there's an Alien, I should shoot him!"

And so now we're stuck with Slaanesh.

The DW didn't NEED to take out Eldrad, and the Imperium as a whole would have been better off if he had left Eldrad alone. Even after Artemis shot him it didn't take him out- it just botched the ritual, which just compounds the sheer stupidity of the action.

I don't know if it exactly constitutes satire- it doesn't reference a single real-world directly, but it is the type of mistake government bureaucracies of the 21st century make on a regular basis.

Catbarf nails it for me. And I also agree the shift happened back in 5e, around the time the background started being written by fans of the setting rather than it's original creators.

I remember being annoyed about it at the time. The shift from "the machine spirit is how the mechanicum explain stuff they don't understand because they're a stupid cult" to "machine spirits are for real a thing actually, they're not as stupid as you might first think!" to "because of the warp everything actually DOES have tiny spirits in it, because people think they do!" is traceable as just one example. There's far too much "belief makes stuff happen" in modern 40K (and modern fantasy as a genre altogether).

On the satire point, I'm not sure it was always really intended to be a satire as such. There were mild satirical elements, but a lot of it was just jokes and humorous takes on how the world works. There was some satire, and it was heavily influenced by 2000AD and the like, but other parts were just taken from history with a humorous spin.

And there was always a bit of "Yeah these guys are the baddies, but they're pretty cool too!" in it, because back in the 80s people were a lot less morally pious about their entertainment. Nowadays, a lot of people seem to have difficulty just liking something "problematic" and have either drop something or explain away the things that they don't agree with.

Most 40k fiction is pulp science fantasy adventure with elements of satire.

 PenitentJake wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

As soon as your evil empire actually needs to be horrifically oppressive to survive, rather than simply thinking it does but actually makes everything worse, your setting now justifies totalitarianism rather than satirising it.

I can think of one thing recently that undermines the "necessity" thesis, but I think overall, you might be on to something.

So think back to Gathering Storm.

Eldrad and Yvraine cook up a scheme to get rid of Slaanesh through a great big ritual. Obviously, the Imperium would be better off without Slaanesh.... But the deathwatch happen to be on the planet where the ritual is taking place, and Artemis be like, "Hey, there's an Alien, I should shoot him!"

And so now we're stuck with Slaanesh.

The DW didn't NEED to take out Eldrad, and the Imperium as a whole would have been better off if he had left Eldrad alone. Even after Artemis shot him it didn't take him out- it just botched the ritual, which just compounds the sheer stupidity of the action.

I don't know if it exactly constitutes satire- it doesn't reference a single real-world directly, but it is the type of mistake government bureaucracies of the 21st century make on a regular basis.

I regularly see narrative excuses made for this. I do get why people want to as it makes playing Deathwatch feel really foolish at times, particularly in stories like this where applying the DW's xenophobia to something as human as the Eldar feels much worse than when its applied to things like Tyranids or even Orks. I think that's one of the core issues with the satire of the setting. The satire itself isn't.... fun... anymore. There's too much real hate and sense of being ground down by an inhumane system in the world to make a lot of the ironic slogans fun to repeat.

This story is nearly a decade old, but even then it was kind of the death of the satire for me. The scales are so lopsided but still fall on the side of petty hate and while that's very much the point its so egregious that its not fun anymore. I'm honestly not sure how to end this thought, but I just know this story really made me feel like the setting just couldn't survive on the kind of nihilism that fueled it to that point.

 catbarf wrote:

 Tawnis wrote:
The question becomes, is that the belief of the characters in the setting, or the message the writers are to get across. It's certainly the former, but the latter is debatable, can is very likely different from author to author.

Agreed about that last point- it varies from author to author- but they gave the authoritarian ubermensch enlightened despot a literal fething halo on the cover of the 9th Ed rulebook.

I've seen a lot of people express that they like 40K because it's 'about how far you're willing to go to survive' or something to that effect, essentially that the Imperium is doing really bad things because they're necessary. If there are authors at GW who feel that their product is a satire of authoritarianism, it's sufficiently subtle that it goes right over the heads of half the fanbase.

It also doesn't help that the drive to explain has created internal justifications for things that might otherwise be satirical. 'The Inquisition killed everyone who saw a daemon because they're blinkered idiots' is satire. 'The Inquisition killed everyone who saw a daemon because they might actually become possessed and it's a perfectly rational thing to do' is not. 'The AdMech pray to machine spirits and reject technological development because they're a cargo cult that doesn't understand what they're doing' is satire. 'The AdMech pray to machine spirits and reject technological development because everything actually has a sliver of machine intelligence thanks to the DAoT and much of it is corrupted so they're actually perfectly rational' is not.

At some point if your setting is justifying the things it's supposed to be satirizing more than it's making fun of them, it isn't satire anymore.

I would argue that many of those internal justifications are just a change in what is satirical about the topic. To use your examples:

The Inquisitors: Either way you slice it, the Inquisitions still acts out of fear. The fear has changed from an ignorant fear to an somewhat informed fear, but it's still mass murder based on fear. It still has the same effect of commenting on the horror of persecution based on imagined or possible "crimes" in this case ones that are not even under the victims control. You can still draw a lot of parallels to this and many uncomfortable chapters in human history and non of the Inquisitions reasoning makes it more acceptable.

The Admech: I'd actually argue that the tech having a sliver of machine intelligence is even more satire than the original, they're just a crazy cult interpretation. While it's only a small fraction of it, they are essentially worshiping the proscribed AI technology that they so vehemently claim to abhor without even realizing it. The faction that's on the surface seems like it's all about science and reasoning are actually so indoctrinated into their beliefs that they are revering what they think they despise out of ignorance. That certainly has some real world parallels.

What I like about the current state of 40K satire is partially what makes it so hard to see as true satire and what makes it a razors edge to walk, that not all authors successfully achieve. Relatability. It's easy to write off the blinkered Inquisition or crazy admech and know that we could never be like them, but in understanding their motives and the universe they live in, we see how and why they are led to these actions. These actions are still terrible, but in relating to these characters, it's a stark reminder that the slope is a slippery one, and that we may not see how far down we've slid until it's too late.

Of course the flip side to this is that if it's TOO relatable, then it becomes an advocate for what it's trying to satirize, which is why as I said, this line to walk can be razor thin.

 catbarf wrote:

 Tawnis wrote:
The question becomes, is that the belief of the characters in the setting, or the message the writers are to get across. It's certainly the former, but the latter is debatable, can is very likely different from author to author.

Agreed about that last point- it varies from author to author- but they gave the authoritarian ubermensch enlightened despot a literal fething halo on the cover of the 9th Ed rulebook.

I've seen a lot of people express that they like 40K because it's 'about how far you're willing to go to survive' or something to that effect, essentially that the Imperium is doing really bad things because they're necessary. If there are authors at GW who feel that their product is a satire of authoritarianism, it's sufficiently subtle that it goes right over the heads of half the fanbase.

It also doesn't help that the drive to explain has created internal justifications for things that might otherwise be satirical. 'The Inquisition killed everyone who saw a daemon because they're blinkered idiots' is satire. 'The Inquisition killed everyone who saw a daemon because they might actually become possessed and it's a perfectly rational thing to do' is not. 'The AdMech pray to machine spirits and reject technological development because they're a cargo cult that doesn't understand what they're doing' is satire. 'The AdMech pray to machine spirits and reject technological development because everything actually has a sliver of machine intelligence thanks to the DAoT and much of it is corrupted so they're actually perfectly rational' is not.

At some point if your setting is justifying the things it's supposed to be satirizing more than it's making fun of them, it isn't satire anymore.

The problem is a lot of the bad things ARE neccesary, at least to some extent. Which is why I agree it is a bad satire of fascism. I think it wants to be but a lot of the world logic is at odds with it.

It’s also now part satire, part tragedy.

When the worst possible incarnation of fascism, jingoistic enforced ignorance has persisted for 10,000 years, to the put a son of your widely worshipped god ends up powerless to correct the course in any meaningful way? That’s your tragedy.

That Guilliman (Lion remains to be seen, but I’m not going to special plead here) is now part and parcel of that awful status quo, despite lofty ideals and being The One Thing In Existence It’s Really, Really Hard For Anyone Involved In That Religion To Overrule has resorted to selling out said ideals? That’s your satire.

Neither has to be funny, neither has to be Punk or counter culture. Both remain tragic and satirical.

Dai wrote:


The problem is a lot of the bad things ARE neccesary, at least to some extent. Which is why I agree it is a bad satire of fascism. I think it wants to be but a lot of the world logic is at odds with it.

Are they though?

There is a lot of fascist propaganda that plays their actions off as necessary too. Much of their arguments are based off of (very warped) logic and reasoning. They posit that A and B are true and if that is the case then logically, what we need to do is X,Y and Z. The logic behind it all makes sense if you believe A and B, the problem is that A and B are always bs.

It is the same setup in 40k, the beliefs that the Imperium holds are used to justify their actions and make them seem necessary to some extent. However, also in lore, we can verifiably say that the core beliefs that underpin this are wrong, hence it still at its core being good satire IMHO.

The problem is twofold however. 1) The universe is so expansive that just picking up a single book, it's often hard to tell that this is the case. 2) Imperium books sell the best, but have the hardest to get through perspective on this. If we had more Xenos lore with other viewpoints on the Imperium, Chaos, and the universe in general, this would be much more apparent. (It would also play into the satire of the us vs them if we had a lot more relatable Xenos for the Imperium to go around purging, but that's another topic.)

At the end of the day, they're balancing a lot of plates, and sometimes they drop some, but the act overall is still satirical. .

Things I’d argue are necessary for good reason - at least in the short term?

Culling Psykers. Each and everyone is a potential portal to Actual Hell where Actual Daemons exist.

Wariness of the Xenos. Not universally so, but there’s a lot of genuinely hostile Other out there.

Xenos books tend to be better at the satire because they serve as in-universe outsiders to the insanity that is the IoM (instead of Imperial characters drunk on Imperial kool-aid), and their narratives don't need to bow to Imperial nonsense.

I belive that GW, over the course of the years, has become convinced that grimdark is inherently more appealing to large parts of their customer base than satire when it comes to getting invested into their setting and narrative. The problem now is that they maintain their settings are satirical at their core, while their products (as well as licensed 3rd party products) largely suggest otherwise, which rightfully leads to the alienation of certain parts of their customer base, and a still somewhat problematic public image.

This isn't exactly helped by the more recent trends of conflating fiction with reality, on either end of the spectrum. Whether it be people unironically supporting the implementation of the Imperium's dogma in our societies, or erasing any notion of "problematic" concepts in fiction altogether to shield people from harm. GW as a company and Warhammer as a product are relics of a time in which there was a lot more nuance involved both in the portayal and the reception of media, and they are trying to adapt to a world that is seemlingy no longer interested in nuance.

I would argue that grimdark is inherently satirical, and that works that have lost the satire aspect are no longer grimdark. They are just dark, some are not even that just mindless bolter porn.

Yeah, people used to just be more chill about this stuff. It was okay to like fictional bad guys. I dunno what it is about the current zeitgeist, some people seem to really need the fiction they are into to be morally bulletproof. I wonder if it has something to do with the increase in consumerism, and therefore ascribing more importance to the things you "consume" (urgh) along with the social media age requiring everyone to broadcast their virtue to others for brownie points.

Is it because we spend so much time and money and passion on this trivial crap that we need to convince ourselves it's somehow meaningful, a commentary on society, rather than a bunch of stuff slapped together because the people making it thought it would be funny or cool?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Things I’d argue are necessary for good reason - at least in the short term?

Culling Psykers. Each and everyone is a potential portal to Actual Hell where Actual Daemons exist.

Wariness of the Xenos. Not universally so, but there’s a lot of genuinely hostile Other out there.

That's the thing, though - those might not be necessary, and they're arguably self-reinforcing. Sure, psykers are potentially dangerous, but the kind of abuse and persecution that the Imperium does to them is not going to make psykers want to show up voluntarily for training, is it? It also gives Chaos an easy W since it's hard for any rational person to look at the Black Ships and go "yeah, I should ignore the guy with the weird tattoo telling me he can help me control my powers and go get fed to the Emperor instead". Likewise, the xenophobia of the Imperium is universal, which means that few xenos would be dumb enough to try allying with them except under the direst circumstances. As a result, there's nothing preventing the less hostile xenos (Tau, Eldar) from treating humans the way that humans treat them, which then gets used as justification for the universal xenophobia, and round and round we go.

Basically, the Imperium is the guy who beats his dog and then is surprised that the dog bites him, so he beats his dog for biting him. I'm not sure how subtle is too subtle, but modern GW lore feels a bit less like someone pointing at that and saying "Look at this muppet, perpetuating the cycle of violence like it's going to help" and more like someone shrugging and saying "But the dog bit him, though".

I had the idea from pretty early on that the Imperium was metaphysically self defeating as well - like, that they created Chaos in the form that it's in, because their regime was so horrible and oppressive that all the misery, repression and rage on a massive, galactic scale soured the Warp and turned it into a sea of emotions that was predominantly negative, rather than positive. If the Imperium was a nicer place, it's Warp reflection would also become nicer. The Imperium creates the Chaos it's afraid of.

I think it's been clarified by now that that is NOT how it works, more's the pity.

 Da Boss wrote:

I think it's been clarified by now that that is NOT how it works, more's the pity.

It may not be the actual reason, but the constant misery and desperation is absolutely contributing to the situation, at least to the Nurgle side of things.

 Da Boss wrote:
Yeah, people used to just be more chill about this stuff. It was okay to like fictional bad guys. I dunno what it is about the current zeitgeist, some people seem to really need the fiction they are into to be morally bulletproof. I wonder if it has something to do with the increase in consumerism, and therefore ascribing more importance to the things you "consume" (urgh) along with the social media age requiring everyone to broadcast their virtue to others for brownie points.

Is it because we spend so much time and money and passion on this trivial crap that we need to convince ourselves it's somehow meaningful, a commentary on society, rather than a bunch of stuff slapped together because the people making it thought it would be funny or cool?

IMHO it is modern social media and the need to be "right" (be it either morally, politically and the best of all technically ) plus the advantage of internet anonymity.

I mean, has any of us been approached in real life about the "problematic" nature of 40k lore? Or had to deal with idiots that believed that the IoM is a role model? Sure there is that fascist dumbass in that Spanish tournament a few years ago, but the fact that it was news shows it isn't a common occurrence.

I would like to believe that most of the 40k player base is functional and sane and nice people instead of the gak show that is social media.

I think the "it's satire!" thing is broadly a defense against people saying "it's fascism apologia!"

It's got satirical elements, and sometimes they also write background that shades into fascism apologia (I think by accident).

But it's not a big deal either way, is it? Like, someone's hour long video essay in either direction is not some sort of political win or activism, it's just a trivial waste of time. The entire hobby is a trivial waste of time.

No time you enjoy is wasted, Boss.

Fair point! That was too negative a way of phrasing it.

 Da Boss wrote:
I had the idea from pretty early on that the Imperium was metaphysically self defeating as well - like, that they created Chaos in the form that it's in, because their regime was so horrible and oppressive that all the misery, repression and rage on a massive, galactic scale soured the Warp and turned it into a sea of emotions that was predominantly negative, rather than positive. If the Imperium was a nicer place, it's Warp reflection would also become nicer. The Imperium creates the Chaos it's afraid of.

I think it's been clarified by now that that is NOT how it works, more's the pity.

It still somewhat is. We know that Humans that follow the Greater Good of the Tau have inadvertently created a (as far as we know) benevolent warp entity that saved one of their ships from destruction in the warp.

I agree that modern 40k is not devoid of satire, that would be unlikely in such a sandbox setting, but it has become increasingly rare and I fully agree with Catbarf. It is a problem when a straight read is all to apparent to a substantial segment of the player base.

 kodos wrote:
came across a similar discussion on reddit recently and the intresting part here is that for people to understand the satire of 40k one need to understand Britain of the 80/90ies, need to read the old books and read some old novels

Like a big part of that discussion was what are Orks in 40k
if one only know the gaming material and some novels, they are the comic relief of the setting (meaning everything else is serious), some see them as symbol of the African communities (opressed by imperialism) and others as the true fascist of the setting (as there is some german WW2 style in the art and models).

The internet will tell you that the original Orks were modeled after Hooligans, but without knowing the details of the british football hooligans this does not mean much and the connections are not made


If one needs to read certain novels to relise that 40k is satire and the rulebook is not enough to make that point than 40k has already lost that aspect

This highlights one of the problems of corporatised art when it used messaging (Satire, political commentary etc) in its original creation.

Satire isn't a one and done thing. For it to work the fact that it's satire needs to be relevant to the reader, which makes the concept more important than the example. Thus the satire would evolve with the times to remain relevant.

With an IP, they decide that the example is what was popular and that's what they need to sell, so the satire is frozen as one image of one particular time and the meaning is lost.

Which is basically flanderisation, where the original nuance is lost as specific aspects are over promoted.

 Tawnis wrote:


There is a lot of fascist propaganda that plays their actions off as necessary too. Much of their arguments are based off of (very warped) logic and reasoning. They posit that A and B are true and if that is the case then logically, what we need to do is X,Y and Z. The logic behind it all makes sense if you believe A and B, the problem is that A and B are always bs.

This is it guys. We can just /thread.

Fascism is literally built on creating enemies are justifying doing horrible things to them. This is their perpetual state, they will always find someone to persecute; even down to self-segregating and demonizing smaller and smaller demographics within themselves if they have to. More over, it's built on making "hard choices" to defend from these supposed enemies.

That GW has created a scenario where the fascist behavior is unironically seem as "the right thing" to do is pretty much the death knell of any attempt at satire, because that's the point of satire. That it's not necessary or required, but an object lesson in how not to do things / the results that happen when some variant of something (let's just blanketly call it "stupidity") is allowed to run too far. And so 40k, for well over a decade now, has not had more than the occasional drop of satire.

Furthermore, this is reinforced by the Horus Heresy. Previous 40k was kind of a post-apocolyptic distopian nightmare satire because the age of enlightenment and plenty had failed to take off, plunging everything into this awful spiral of satirical fascism with only war and genocide to reap. Where the golden age was pushed away by the mad dash for greed and power, and ignorance had continued to perpetuate from there because doing the right thing is scary.

Now we have the HH written out.. And the golden age of enlightment was just as full of fascism and genocide. So no longer is 40k the result of history gone satirically awry and poking fun at what happens when fear, hatred, and conservatism run rampant; now it's just the fascist genocide dark future version of the failed fascist-genocide golden age.

Again, satire does exist in the form of individual authors penning it into their individual works. But in terms of a cohesive vision, and a setting wide tongue-in-cheek / poking fun at anything, satire is well and truly dead in 40k. It has been for a long time.

 morganfreeman wrote:

 Tawnis wrote:


There is a lot of fascist propaganda that plays their actions off as necessary too. Much of their arguments are based off of (very warped) logic and reasoning. They posit that A and B are true and if that is the case then logically, what we need to do is X,Y and Z. The logic behind it all makes sense if you believe A and B, the problem is that A and B are always bs.

This is it guys. We can just /thread.

Fascism is literally built on creating enemies are justifying doing horrible things to them. This is their perpetual state, they will always find someone to persecute; even down to self-segregating and demonizing smaller and smaller demographics within themselves if they have to. More over, it's built on making "hard choices" to defend from these supposed enemies.

That GW has created a scenario where the fascist behavior is unironically seem as "the right thing" to do is pretty much the death knell of any attempt at satire, because that's the point of satire. That it's not necessary or required, but an object lesson in how not to do things / the results that happen when some variant of something (let's just blanketly call it "stupidity") is allowed to run too far. And so 40k, for well over a decade now, has not had more than the occasional drop of satire.

Furthermore, this is reinforced by the Horus Heresy. Previous 40k was kind of a post-apocolyptic distopian nightmare satire because the age of enlightenment and plenty had failed to take off, plunging everything into this awful spiral of satirical fascism with only war and genocide to reap. Where the golden age was pushed away by the mad dash for greed and power, and ignorance had continued to perpetuate from there because doing the right thing is scary.

Now we have the HH written out.. And the golden age of enlightment was just as full of fascism and genocide. So no longer is 40k the result of history gone satirically awry and poking fun at what happens when fear, hatred, and conservatism run rampant; now it's just the fascist genocide dark future version of the failed fascist-genocide golden age.

Again, satire does exist in the form of individual authors penning it into their individual works. But in terms of a cohesive vision, and a setting wide tongue-in-cheek / poking fun at anything, satire is well and truly dead in 40k. It has been for a long time.

I agree with all your points, but have to disagree with the conclusion drawn from them.

Yes, 40k is not the satire it used to be, that much is obvious, but I'd argue that it's just changed from Menippean Satire to a dark Juvenalian Satire.

The points you make about the Horus Heresy are correct, but they don't account for the shift in the universal narrative. The Golden age that used to be portrayed before the Horus Heresy still exists, it was just pushed back much further in the timeline to before the Emperor's rise to power. After the fall of the age of prosperity, Big E raises this interstellar empire based on fear, hatred and ignorance, is given every conceivable advantage and still fails, creating a universe arguably worse than the one he was trying to fix. The lesson here is that no matter what, this style of governance and rulership is doomed to collapse. That's the lesson of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy.

As I mentioned before about the warped logic. We are given a universe where (both in universe as propagandists, and from a meta writers sense) they control what we see and believe about everything. They show us what A and B are, and in so doing, we think, "okay, in that context X, Y, and Z make sense" and suddenly we're relating to genocidal madmen. It's a fine line to walk, and it's not always done well, but the point I believe is to have people look at how little it really took to get them to see the "logic" behind these atrocities, and hopefully take that knowledge back with them and be far more cautious about the justifications of their own actions (and by extension, the actions of those they support).

Yes, gone is the obvious digs and political figures and clear 1-1 parallels, but I believe it's been replaced by something a lot deeper. A cautionary tale of the kind of decisions that lead to a universe like this. The story is no longer, "ha ha, look at those backwards idiots" it's now "look how easy it could be to start thinking like them, you need to be careful" Now I fully agree that not every lore writer gets this, and YMMV greatly depending on the individual work, but as a whole, I believe the opposite as you. As a cohesive vision, this is the kind of grim satire that 40k is now and that non-satirical straight takes are occasionally penned by individual authors.

 Da Boss wrote:
Yeah, people used to just be more chill about this stuff. It was okay to like fictional bad guys. I dunno what it is about the current zeitgeist, some people seem to really need the fiction they are into to be morally bulletproof. I wonder if it has something to do with the increase in consumerism, and therefore ascribing more importance to the things you "consume" (urgh) along with the social media age requiring everyone to broadcast their virtue to others for brownie points.

Is it because we spend so much time and money and passion on this trivial crap that we need to convince ourselves it's somehow meaningful, a commentary on society, rather than a bunch of stuff slapped together because the people making it thought it would be funny or cool?

The real life several-hundred-percent rise in hate crimes and hate speech, as well as weaponized politics and culture war that disproportionately affect some people for stupid reasons, are why it’s less enjoyable now.

That and all the chuds using this stuff to get hyped and even more radicalized make it seem less fun.

If comedy is tragedy plus distance, we’ve been steadily losing distance for years.