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Aye, but the difference is 40K was a setting, with some story elements. Now it is a story, with some setting elements.

Tyel wrote:
On "Mystery" I wonder if there is something of a backlash because there was this massive overabundance of "mystery box" storytelling, and people rightly got bored of "you are just making this up as you go, there is no payoff, and how come it all ended in a church?"

The lore for years was written so that everything was set on the knife's edge of 999.M40 when the balance was about to tip and all of the dominos would fall. The balance did often feel off for how many portentous things were supposed to be happening right at that date. Then GW decided that they wanted to advance the plot so that they could sell primarchs which were gaining popularity in the Horus Heresy and a whole rigamarole of nonsense followed from this. The world feels smaller when the heroes have to teleport about and solve the past decade of cliffhangers.

The focus on named characters in novels has had an effect that I've seen in other franchises after they get big where they become very protective about what they allow their franchisable characters to do or in what they can be involved. GW is not letting a new author take an experimental stab at writing about Calgar's doomed romance or a look into how fear and guilt consume him and leaves him a husk of a man. He is going to be dutiful and grim and while he may falter he will complete his mission with all of his limbs and all of his shiny toys intact. GW needs authors to leave these characters almost as they found them sitcom style so that the next writer can pick them up and continue the narrative.

Some of the most enjoyable writing from GW that I have read has come from stories that feature characters on the edges or outside of the main canon because they are allowed to experience the world and grow without fear of breaking the story. One of my favorite novels of the HH The Flight of the Eisenstein has both the positive and negative examples of this. The first half of the book unbearably dull where characters have to speak around events so as to not step on other authors' toes in the collaborative writing event. The entire setting feels like it is in stasis, waiting for permission from management to greenlight any event. The latter half is a fascinating dissection of faith and how a devout atheist deals with his entire world shattering. He is confronted with real challenges and is forced to adapt as a person to overcome them. This story can exist because Garro was a nobody that had no narrative stakes. If the book flopped, they were not staking the continued narrative of the HH on this nobody former Death Guard.

Tyel wrote:
I also think "flanderisation" is overused.

Would you say that the concepts of this term were gradually exaggerated and overapplied?

 the Signless wrote:

Would you say that the concepts of this term were gradually exaggerated and overapplied?

Lol.

I would agree, but I think there's a combination of over exaggeration usage, and real narrative decay in content as they try to keep a regular schedule of new material, regardless of quality. I'd like to claim the latter but am happy to be proven the former.


I think that gws choice to shift to character driven content is a fundamentally bad strategy because of the nature of their product. It's fine for finite content like tv and books and it works in comics where they just redo the material over and over again endlessly.

But 40k isn't set up to be rebooted into 10 different continuities. In fact the opposite, it's a single narrative. But they cant end the story so each character becomes a nothing data point of pretty meaningless content. Th weight of stories don't mean anything if they never end.

Which is why a setting is a much better way to do a product like 40k. In character driven You get to a point where guilliman has done everything conceivable but still won't die and nothing has changed.

When I joke about HH being says of our lives I'm only half joking. That's a tv strategy that is built on never finishing the story, except gw is less likely to kill Ramone and replace him with an evil cousin when they have models of Ramone to sell.

 Hellebore wrote:

 the Signless wrote:

Would you say that the concepts of this term were gradually exaggerated and overapplied?

Lol.

I would agree, but I think there's a combination of over exaggeration usage, and real narrative decay in content as they try to keep a regular schedule of new material, regardless of quality. I'd like to claim the latter but am happy to be proven the former.


I think that gws choice to shift to character driven content is a fundamentally bad strategy because of the nature of their product. It's fine for finite content like tv and books and it works in comics where they just redo the material over and over again endlessly.

But 40k isn't set up to be rebooted into 10 different continuities. In fact the opposite, it's a single narrative. But they cant end the story so each character becomes a nothing data point of pretty meaningless content. Th weight of stories don't mean anything if they never end.

Which is why a setting is a much better way to do a product like 40k. In character driven You get to a point where guilliman has done everything conceivable but still won't die and nothing has changed.

When I joke about HH being says of our lives I'm only half joking. That's a tv strategy that is built on never finishing the story, except gw is less likely to kill Ramone and replace him with an evil cousin when they have models of Ramone to sell.

You say that, but they do have examples like killing Creed to replace him with... Creed's daughter, Creed. Who happens to use exactly the same equipment as her dad, and could be substituted in the game comfortably by the old Creed model should you wish.

 the Signless wrote:
Would you say that the concepts of this term were gradually exaggerated and overapplied?

I think the issue is that there are clear examples of flanderisation in 40k.
As Rogal Dorn put it, the Space Wolves are incredibly uninspired. (Cue gnashing of teeth and denouncing memes all the way down.)

But I'm not convinced that applies to the wider 40k universe.
The lore may be repetitive - because in many cases it has not fundamentally changed since 2nd/3rd/5th so reading the same thing for the past 15-30 years doesn't have as much impact. But that's a different issue to flanderisation.
Frankly the return of the Primarchs has had almost negligible impact on the wider universe/setting/story. Really this idea its a story is questionable. You can lament perhaps that the 8th rules & codexes run and ask after the Primaris like Scrappy Doo, but that has largely ended. The jump forward of 100 years was firmly retconned. 9th's "story" was presumably the rise of the Necrons? Narrative impact? Zero. 10th's the rise of the Tyranids? Again, the impact would seem to be zero. In 11th now its about Orks - but will they fundamentally "change" any faction in the game? I highly doubt it. The various warzones just tick away, much as they did in earlier editions of the game.

Characters undoubtedly are more prominent than they were in say 3rd edition - where various factions barely had special characters to begin with. But I'm not sure how far I go along with this being a major change in the writing. Vect for example may sit like a tedious albatross around Dark Eldar lore. But if "40k is a setting not a story" is true, that's just a cross the faction has to bear. We are stuck with him. Does this flanderise Dark Eldar? If so, how?

A narrative not changing the status quo doesn't mean it wasn't a narrative, it just explains why it is unsatisfying (and is why such narratives are problematic for a story that cannot end whilst it sells models).

Hence why the focus on such big, supposedly paradigm-shifting events is a mistake, because they cannot actually change the paradigm much or they risk impacting sales of models. Cadia was destroyed... but conveniently New Cadia and similar worlds keep pumping out Cadian regiments you can represent with our extensive range of plastic Cadians! and so on.

The storytelling was better when the stakes were smaller, because that meant they were less constrained by the outcome.

 Hellebore wrote:

Which is why a setting is a much better way to do a product like 40k. In character driven You get to a point where guilliman has done everything conceivable but still won't die and nothing has changed.

Some of it is just a matter of changing with trends. Its very possible in 5-10 years we'll swap back to a more setting based storytelling if that comes back into vogue. Have a big event, maybe split the Imperium again in a civil war. Kill off a bunch of characters and set a new status quo for a while.