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Discussion topic.

Has it? Since 1st ed each subsequent edition has seemed.to trend playing it straight. When you got into it back then, the satire was pretty front and centre.

If you asked a teenager getting into it now, do you think it would read satirical?

Can GW really play 40k straight and still try and defang it by claiming satire?

Plenty of people pull out the satirical nature as a defence of its intolerance and violence, but when is something played so straight that it just is straight?

The amount of self-awareness and satire varies from book to book.

There are usually enough examples of the imperium being horrible or hypocritical for it to be clear that they're not the "good guys," even if it isn't always "ha ha" comedic style satire.

Some stories steer away from the actual satire and just want to tell funny or action-packed stories in a setting that would be very unpleasant to visit. (A lot of the xenos PoV stuff falls into this category.) They're not excusing the horribleness; they're just not necessarily wallowing in it either.

The only stories that I can call to mind where it's really an issue are some of the marine stories. Not necessarily showing the marines as "good guys" (though those exist too), but frequently putting them firmly in the role of protagonist without going out of the way to remind the reader that the imperium they're fighitng so hard to protect is an evil dystopia.

But most novels seem to fall into the realm depicting the 41st millenium (including the imperium) as pretty awful and telling the stories of people who live there without necessarily "satirizing" the horribleness. It's like telling a story set in Sin City. The city is bad, and there are things to be satirized, but not every story is necessarily satire, nor are protagonists necessarily good people to be emulated. Or maybe the Black Company books are a better comparison: lots of morally gray or straight up horrible people in a frequently bleak setting. But a given story doesn't have to spend the whole time dwelling exclusively on how horrible everything is.

EDIT: Salamanders, the good guy marines, still commit the occasional mass murder or genocide. Whether or not a given story about Salamanders bothers to mention that is a decent barometer for whether a story is wandering into glorify-the-donkey-cave territory.

I was referring to 40k as a whole, not any specific novel. The setting was designed as a self aware satire of totalitarianism, thatcherism and many other isms.

for satire to actually function as satire though, it needs to be apparent. Satire has a purpose that is completely undone if no one knows it's happening.

When things become post satire and play straight, they can often end up acting as a positive message for the thing they were satirising.

Satire's strength is that it runs the line of the topic in order to highlight it, but if the line disappears then you're just unironically supporting terrible ideologies.

At some point in satire a shoe will drop and you get the message. Modern 40k seems to cruise by on assuring everyone there's a shoe and it will drop, but it never does.

It's like that guy who likes to make terrible comments to women and how they take it determines whether he says he was joking or not.


I just don't think I can consider giving 40k that cloak of satire unless I actually see some. It shouldn't be able skate by on 40 year old Obiwan Sherlock Clouseau.

GW has sniffed their own farts for too long and taken themselves far too seriously for it to actually be satire anymore.


EDIT:
One of the things that really pointed out the satire and was one of my favourite parts of older editions, were the in universe imperial quotes in boxes peppered throughout the books. They were almost all absurd, intolerant and hilarious as a result. Quotes like 'an open mind is like a fortress with its gates unguarded and unbarred', or 'I find foreign travel narrows the mind wonderfully'. Things that are clearly at odds with how most readers' would think. Modern 40k is just lots of intolerant violence and unironic justifications for why its good and necessary to do.

the power of those quotes was they had no arguments or defences around them, they were just statements of ridiculous intolerance that came across exactly as intended. The more they try to protagonise the setting, the less you get to see it as an observer and the more you see it in an empathetic way, undermining the point of the satire.

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

I don't think modern 40k is a satire - but I'm not sure it ever was. GW was less serious as a company back in the 80s and 90s. But I think people read into it what they want.

There was a bit of tongue in cheek that around 5th became played straight. But it's not like it was that way all the time or applied to every bit of lore put out.

Depends what you’re reading. The Cain and Ufthak Blackhawk books really lean into the satire, without themselves become a satire of the satire.

With Cain, we’ve someone who despite being a Commissar (or because of it) is very aware of the Imperium’s rampant hypocrisy. Who in turn believes himself to be a coward because his every action isn’t selfless or strictly for the greater good of The Imperium.

Ufthak is an Ork perspective series, and a blood good one. It gets across that Orks just don’t care in the way other species do, that they are indeed, mostly just there to have a good time which happens to involve fighting, and some typically Orky reflection on the ‘Umies approach to things.

I guess the important thing to keep in mind is that satire needn’t be comedic. Black Mirror for instance is fundamentally satirical horror, relatively light on all by the darkest of humour. And we do see some of this in at least the earlier Heresy novels, where the Legions will quite happily commit genocide on Xenos species, and only slightly regret doing it to human civilisations that won’t bend the knee. Too caught up in the insisted righteousness of their cause, that only The Emperor can help mankind survive and anyone who doesn’t agree has to die.

There are glimpses of satire still there, but it is mostly glorification and apologism of totalitarianism via boring shiny, perhaps nominally tragic "hard men making hard choices."

It is pretty off putting, and has gotten worse over the years. Return of Guilliman was the culmination of it, and now the instead of the Imperium being led by a mad shadowy cabal of faceless overlords, it is led by such tragic but noble hero.

I just need to ignore most of the modern fluff if I'm to enjoy the game.

I'd say, yeah it has been flanderised to hell. But it's inevitable for a work of fiction that is maintained and allowed to change over such a long time.

I also want to make clear that I don't really consider the novels to be "40K". They're a side thing to me, it's what's in the books for the game that count as far as I'm concerned.

All the original writers are gone now, as well as most of the original artists. The people who've replaced them are generally fans. So what we read nowadays is fanfiction. And it does show, in my opinion.

Original 40K was crammed full of (often quite hamfisted) cultural references. Some were pop culture, some quite arty, and it was all mixed together.

The people writing 40K now grew up on those references, and the references are their culture. They may not know much about the original thing that was being referenced. You see this all the time in fantasy especially - original fantasy, say Tolkien, was based heavily on history and myth. But as people grow up on fantasy as a genre, history and myth is no longer the main reference, but rather fantasy stories themselves, and through this self-referential process fantasy becomes more and more disconnected from it's original cultural references. That's why you see especially in video game but now also in miniatures such ridiculous looking armours and weapons and so on, because they are self referential rather than referencing any real material culture. A really excellent designer can make something whole cloth that looks cohesive and sensible, but most are not that good and create heavily stylised versions of something that was based on something that was based on something that was historical.

40K suffers badly from this in my view. But so do lots of things. Star Wars suffers from it, the Ghostbusters movies, the Transformers stuff, LOTR shows and movies - anything where "the property" is being handed off to new writers who grew up with the thing they're being handed. I think millennials (my generation) are especially bad for this, and generally write really poor fiction because of it.

I don't see much of a way out of it though. So I tend to ignore the newer stuff and cherry pick what I like. Like, I hate pretty much everything about how the Primaris marines were introduced and what they mean for the setting, but ADB's book featuring them was pretty good for a 40K novel.

It's important too to maintain perspective. I'm expressing a negative view here but I'm in no way heated emotionally over it, and I don't "hate" anything. I'm a bit disappointed, but it's not a huge deal for me and probably shouldn't be for anyone. If you don't like what "the property" has become because others own it, take ownership yourself and make your own version of it. If you're a long term fan your ideas have just as much legitimacy as the guys writing the current background, they're just like you.

So if we ignore the satire, there’s no satire?

K.

Yeah that's what I said and all that I said, good talk!

Way I see it, 40K was originally "edgy" and satirical because the og designers were so much into the whole 2000 AD thing. But little by little, ties needed to be severed to Rebellion style edgyness, and.. here we are.

For me personally all this matters little, as I have my own headcanon fork of the whole 40K lore in my head, which is still married heavily into 2000 AD. In that headcanon, the Emperor Of Mankind is basically Torquemada, and Khaos loves to fight against the tyranny. Cant help myself, thats what I fell in love with originally, so I'm sticking with it. Fans of the modern lore can enjoi their flanderisms, no skin off my hack

The overt satire has been gone a very long time. Even the jump from Rogue Trader to second edition pushed 40k from a loose sort of collection of influences into the basic blueprint we see today. And at the end of hte day, 40k exists to sell space marine models, and there's only so ironic you can make space marines and still sell them.

I don't think the game lore is substantially less satirical, but the bigger change has been the perspective and voice in lore snippets. IN 3rd and 4th edition, we tended to get a lot more "unreliable narrators" and outside views. In the first Tau codex, there was literallly a story of an imperial diplomat visiting a tau world, and we got to learn about hte tau through his eyes. In the current tau codex, we saw the opposite: a tau delegation visiting an imperial world. So, it was cool to see the imperium described through alien eyes, but if you wanted to learn more about the tau, not so helpful.

I just think that overall, the tone has shifted from slightly tongue in cheek and unreliable to propoganda/encyclopedic.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Da Boss wrote:
I
Original 40K was crammed full of (often quite hamfisted) cultural references. Some were pop culture, some quite arty, and it was all mixed together.

The people writing 40K now grew up on those references, and the references are their culture. They may not know much about the original thing that was being referenced. You see this all the time in fantasy especially - original fantasy, say Tolkien, was based heavily on history and myth. But as people grow up on fantasy as a genre, history and myth is no longer the main reference, but rather fantasy stories themselves, and through this self-referential process fantasy becomes more and more disconnected from it's original cultural references. That's why you see especially in video game but now also in miniatures such ridiculous looking armours and weapons and so on, because they are self referential rather than referencing any real material culture. A really excellent designer can make something whole cloth that looks cohesive and sensible, but most are not that good and create heavily stylised versions of something that was based on something that was based on something that was historical.

With long running IP, you want to mix keeping it fresh while playing the hits, while avoiding it becoming "just say the line." Personally, I think that separating 40k from it's influences is good, in the long run. There's clearly a demand for deeper and more specific lore, and the only way to get that is to differentiate 40k from it's influences. I'm not a big fan of the HH series, I liked the idea of it being legends, not history, but 100 novels and a whole new game later, I"m clearly in the minority.

If I have one concern about 40k going forward, it's that last truly new faction was added in 2003, with the Tau. While GSC, Admech, Custodes, and Votann are all newer, they reach back to very clear influences, if not full armies, in 40k's past. That is now mined out, aside from Exodites and Lost and the Damned.

 Da Boss wrote:

All the original writers are gone now, as well as most of the original artists. The people who've replaced them are generally fans. So what we read nowadays is fanfiction. And it does show, in my opinion.

Nailed it on the head. Whole post really, but this line summarizes it well. The issue with long running satire is simply that you start picking up fans unfamiliar with what is being satirized and are instead fans of the satire itself. Probably the biggest example of this is 90's comics and ultimately the DCEU, which were all a result of a fanbase built on DKR as a baseline for what those characters should be.

40K suffers from a lot of the same thing. Fans that zealously guard the canon and try to make it as real and rigid as possible. There's definitely value in that, but it definitely creates a lot of people that increasingly accept the justifications put forth by the characters in the setting. Not only do things have to be this way, but they should be this way. The more your audience feels this way, the harder it is to pull off any real satire.

With the thing about fans taking over - it grows stale as it's there's less or no stuff outside going back that influences it (which was how it was originally built).

LunarSol: Yeah, I almost referenced the DCEU in my post. Except that like you say, those guys seemed to only be fans of deconstructions of DC superheroes, not actually fans of the superheroes as they are normally.

Polonius: Yeah, I think it's very tricky to keep something like 40K "going" for as long as it has been. Probably impossible to do it without making someone like me grumpy.

I think we just live in an era where immortal brands seem to be the going thing, and it makes you really aware of how stretched these ideas can be when you see it everywhere. That said, I hold contradictory feelings about it as well. Like, I feel the same as you about HH, but then I also read a bunch of the books and overall enjoyed them.

I think this process is inevitable when these things are conceptualised as IP and part of a profit motivated system. And obviously, none of this would really exist without being part of that system, but it still has these effects on the things it creates.

Over the course of a few decades, 40k has gone from being an intentional parody of many aspects of politics, literature and culture to being an unintentional parody of itself.

Kind of a bummer, but probably inevitable when you go from a scrapy underdog to the billion dollar, big-dog-in-the-room juggernaut.

My take on it is that 40k has gone from overt satire like Starship Troopers to a much more subtle satire, though perhaps not everyone got the memo. It's hard to keep a consistent tone and feel with so many cooks in the kitchen.

I think the Horus Heresy really exemplifies the modern take on this. It told from the perspective of the Imperium (for the most part) and the impression that they're the "good guys" but that's only the most surface level read of what's going on. Much of the conflict within is about the Primarchs and their Legions reconciling with what exactly they are fighting for and what a victory would actually even mean.

The largest thing though is something that was always core to the lore and has only been better expanded upon, and that is the failure of the Great Crusade itself. Big E is portrayed as the strongest, smartest, most powerful person to ever exist; he is given every possible conceivable advantage and his plans still fail. Importantly they fail BECASUE of his ideals and policies. The entire Horus Heresy is an example of how even in the most ideal situation, a fascist totalitarian government is doomed to collapse.

Da Boss and LunarSol with great posts. I do have lots of thoughts that I often feel my English just isn’t good enough to convey.

For 40K specifically I think a big issue is a lack of other factions being able to really have different themes. So often they are just enemies of the imperium and are the most bad and evil. It’s hard to have satire when it’s rarely ever challenging or thoughtful.
Chaos I think gets it worst, rather than reflection of the universe it’s often just worse and why would anyone even consider it.

But outside of 40K I also think it’s a bit of the influence of lore channels and such. So often I hear it’s all shades of grey to essentially say that these absolutely horrible groups are somehow not the bad ones, since sometimes the good guys are forced to make sacrifice or choices.
It’s why I think satire is so common still outside of Nerd culture, But within it’s often stagnant.

This is also an issue with other themes that I think share parallels within Nerdy culture.
Writers are pretty commonly toning down the writing in so many games, even when they want to write these themes and stories.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Tawnis wrote:
My take on it is that 40k has gone from overt satire like Starship Troopers to a much more subtle satire, though perhaps not everyone got the memo. It's hard to keep a consistent tone and feel with so many cooks in the kitchen.

I think the Horus Heresy really exemplifies the modern take on this. It told from the perspective of the Imperium (for the most part) and the impression that they're the "good guys" but that's only the most surface level read of what's going on. Much of the conflict within is about the Primarchs and their Legions reconciling with what exactly they are fighting for and what a victory would actually even mean.

The largest thing though is something that was always core to the lore and has only been better expanded upon, and that is the failure of the Great Crusade itself. Big E is portrayed as the strongest, smartest, most powerful person to ever exist; he is given every possible conceivable advantage and his plans still fail. Importantly they fail BECASUE of his ideals and policies. The entire Horus Heresy is an example of how even in the most ideal situation, a fascist totalitarian government is doomed to collapse.

I think it’s called Juvenalian Satire, or maybe Menippean satire. I sure someone here knows better than me .

I don’t like the Horus Heresy and gave up on it as I don’t think it did well setting this up, maybe later books did better. But I never got that feel with discussions on the setting I listened too.
I often feel HH fans are the ones who least think of it this way.

On Chaos I agree, though I think the problem was pretty much there from the start.

I really liked the Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader RPG books, they had great, very 40K ideas in them and I think hit the themes pretty nicely. Standouts were the clan of tech-nomads living on an ancient terraforming machine that they could only barely keep running, for example. Very 40K.

When Black Crusade, the Chaos expansion was going to be released, I was very excited. I thought that a Chaos book would sort of show things from the Chaos point of view, show why a Chaos worshipper might not think of themselves as evil, why they might have good reasons to do what they do and show a more nuanced view on Chaos than the in universe Imperial propaganda. I wasn't expecting Chaos to be "the good guys" but I was expecting a similar treatment to what the Imperials got, just from a different philosophical viewpoint.

Instead, it was very much a game about playing the villains, having essentially a villains campaign. I was really disappointed and actually sold my collection of 40K rpg books soon after (though that was a lot to do with finding the mechanics for those games to be a bit lacklustre, the setting stuff in the first two books remains top notch).

Chaos was always way better in Fantasy Battle, and it seems this has at least somewhat carried to AOS as well. Chaos barbarians in those seem pretty understandable and relatable; they're just people living brutal lives worshipping brutal gods.

Given how horrible Imperium is it shouldn't be terribly hard to depict those who decide to oppose it and choose to pray for dark gods for aid as sympathetic, but GW practically never does it. Chaos in 40K is usually just silly cartoon evil for evil's sake.

Yes.

Modern 40k is still Not Good, but it is absolutely no longer satire. Anything remotely satirical which comes up is circumspect, ergo individual authors choosing to satirize individual elements in their individual works. On the whole, as in the broad strokes, it is now just a grim-derp setting rather than satire.

It still is somewhat there if you read core books and codexes, see the Tyranid deniers (a blatant parody of COVID deniers) in the recent Leviathan crusade book.

Some novels are still very satirical, but they are a minority.

 Eilif wrote:
Over the course of a few decades, 40k has gone from being an intentional parody of many aspects of politics, literature and culture to being an unintentional parody of itself.

Kind of a bummer, but probably inevitable when you go from a scrapy underdog to the billion dollar, big-dog-in-the-room juggernaut.

Yes. As one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live said: "At some point you go from being avant garde to just garde."

There are elements to the 40k lore that simply can't be discussed now. I mean, yes, the lore may still be out there but what it meant - the subversive element - would get you banned in a hot minute if you tried to explain it.

That's one reason I reverted back to the 1990s version of the game and have been collecting all the WDs of that era. It was a much more relaxed time and the game had some bite.

 Hellebore wrote:
The setting was designed as a self aware satire of totalitarianism, thatcherism and many other isms.

According to who?

I think the big issue with it is that GW uses the in universe narrative (aka imperial propaganda) for their marketing which makes it feel very non satirical. It isn't tongue in cheek anymore because it tries to justify itself too much by the in universe realities instead of looking at the setting from the perspective of the audience. It's taking itself too seriously and glorifying the factions/characters which stops being satirical when it feels like they want you to buy into the lore as being objective.

GW's flagship faction are the ubermensch saviors of the IoM who are the embodiment of intolerance and hatred for those against their God Emperor and the Imperium. It takes quite a bit of digging to find the aging satire when the lore does so much to justify what they do. I would even argue that Guilliman fits the trope of the Randian Hero who is this great person fighting against the problems of the bureaucratic government to try and keep the IoM afloat. Without doing a bunch of digging, the only parts of 40k still taken as satire are the Orks who are still the resident comic relief faction.

Tree_Beard wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
The setting was designed as a self aware satire of totalitarianism, thatcherism and many other isms.

According to who?

Well, the designers for one, but there are a ton of references to events and people that are entirely forgotten today and trying to bring people up to speed involves long, tedious explanations that invariably end with: "I guess you had to be there."

Tree_Beard wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
The setting was designed as a self aware satire of totalitarianism, thatcherism and many other isms.

According to who?

Your question is exactly the problem I see. 40k has not kept the satire relevant or front and centre, so you're working from a completely different paradigm thinking it the way 40k just is.


As I said above, would a teenager getting into 40k now apprehend it as a satire? I don't think so. It's now just played straight as dark and edgy ultraviolence fantasy.

40k back in the 80s and early 90s made direct references to pertinent political events of the day, illustrating marines acting as space police arresting punks for graffitiing walls, referencing socio economic groups within britian and of course the infamous Ghazghkull Thatcher.


there have been a lot of great comments here from others on the issues with the satire, but it's clear that the corporatisation of art ensured that the satirical commentary was frozen in stone in an identity to make money, rather than a means of dialogue.

you see this in all art owned by corporations. Their early days are scattershots of creativity, exploring anything they can to find something that will be popular. This early time is where their best ideas come from because they are unbound by expectation. but as soon as they come up with something that sticks, the business strategy congeals around it, redirecting everything to continuing to replicate that thing for eternity. You can see the difference here between US comic companies and Japanese ones - the US companies own all the IP and have spent the better part of 100 years regurgitating the same dozen IPs over and over, dressing them in new clothes to try and resell them. The japanese industry has the IP owned by the creator, and when the story is done, the product concludes. And so you see a churn of new stories, ideas and IP in Japan at a rate that leaves the US for dead, entirely for this reason.


So although 40k was originally created with aware satire in it, as soon as that turned a profit, the satire congealed into a static image because they knew that sold. They didn't consider the satire as the reason it sold, only the particular examples in the product and so those stuck with the IP and the reasoning behind it was lost.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

Tree_Beard wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
The setting was designed as a self aware satire of totalitarianism, thatcherism and many other isms.

According to who?

Well, the designers for one, but there are a ton of references to events and people that are entirely forgotten today and trying to bring people up to speed involves long, tedious explanations that invariably end with: "I guess you had to be there."

You could be helpful & list thise references so that those who're curious enough can do thier own research.

ccs wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

Tree_Beard wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
The setting was designed as a self aware satire of totalitarianism, thatcherism and many other isms.

According to who?

Well, the designers for one, but there are a ton of references to events and people that are entirely forgotten today and trying to bring people up to speed involves long, tedious explanations that invariably end with: "I guess you had to be there."

You could be helpful & list thise references so that those who're curious enough can do thier own research.

I dont think anyone wants to copy paste thousands of popculture references that can easily be googled by anyone interested.

The setting now has a blonde-haired blue-eyed super-super soldier regretfully pressing the big red button labelled "genocide" 20 times a day while thinking about how far from his father's dream this all is.

That the absurdity of it is lost on people (including, seemingly, some of the novel writers!) I don't think is a notch against its satirical nature.

ccs wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

Tree_Beard wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
The setting was designed as a self aware satire of totalitarianism, thatcherism and many other isms.

According to who?

Well, the designers for one, but there are a ton of references to events and people that are entirely forgotten today and trying to bring people up to speed involves long, tedious explanations that invariably end with: "I guess you had to be there."

You could be helpful & list thise references so that those who're curious enough can do thier own research.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/11/19/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not/

That's me being helpful for the day!

 Rihgu wrote:
The setting now has a blonde-haired blue-eyed super-super soldier regretfully pressing the big red button labelled "genocide" 20 times a day while thinking about how far from his father's dream this all is.

That the absurdity of it is lost on people (including, seemingly, some of the novel writers!) I don't think is a notch against its satirical nature.

But - at the danger of being ignorant - what is that a satire of?

"Its a send up of how fascism is bad". But that's kind of broad brush. I'm not really sure how its a satire. "Tyranid deniers" as stand in for various X-deniers in real life is kind of a satire. But there's also a sense that this isn't what this is. Instead its just what the Ecclesiarchy does in 40k - because its living via decade long-recycled memes at this point rather than a thing in itself, operating according to logical/consistent character development.