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I personally find the most interesting stories/eras come from between M30ish and M40. Actually, I'll add to that prior to the great crusade as well, the terra wars with the thunder warriors etc as well as the dark age of technology.

But anyway, inbetween the two:

The rise of the ecclesiarchy including the ago of apostasy etc. Age of redemption, rise of the imperium...

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
I mean, one could argue that the imperium is more popular because people unconsciously prefer reading about human characters and their development? I mean,I'd much rather read about the intricacies of kharn and argel tal' friendship for example. Granted, they could develop interesting characters for say, the eldar, dark eldar or maybe even the tau, but then that requires running them through the frame of human emotions and development.
.

It couldn't be because literally over half of the models/lore/information is Imperium based? Kinda difficult to like something you never hear about and when they are mentioned are usually dumb as all hell (Eldar for example). Though Xeno's races in general are not that well done, or easy to write about which is probably why.

I haven't read a lot of heresy (actually I only read Flight of the Eisenstein and the Forgeworld books up to book 5 I think). For me it's too focused on Marines, even more so than 40K. Also as a Chaos Fan it just seems like the guys that were dumb or dicks right from the beginning turn to Chaos and the nice guys generally don't, which is pretty bad character development.

In 40K on the other hand there's not really character development at all it seems, many protagonists are thousands of years old and have their grudges, and the ones that aren't are usually killed on the Imperium side or have some kind of plot armor or are passive on the Xenos side.

I actually do like the current development because finally the Imperium seems to break apart, but as another poster said it doesn't really feel that bad. And that's because GW still has no sense of scale. The galaxy breaks apart and the biggest achievement of the main antagonist in 8th Edition (Mortarion) was to conquer 3 planets (or starsystems) either way that's actually... not much.
Abaddon ripped the galaxy in two and goes on to a trench fight on Vigilus, that ends in a draw as usual.
All the psychic awakening stories were also very limited in scale, with war of the Spider literally telling the all important story of what Fabius Bile did when hell broke loose... Wow.

So, just throwing some thoughts in here and my conclusion is, that 40K and 30K lore overall is just not very good/ deep. There's little to think about, it's mainly Bolter porn for nerds. And that's okay, too, as it's just the background for some toy soldiers . But if you want some more philosophical Sci-Fi you'd have to search somewhere else.

I think gw got themselves into that bind simply by dent of making the chaos legions evil overall. However, there are some cases which of disagree with your point about them all being dumb or dicks.kharn for example. His character development shows him struggling with his honourable martial and tactical values against his nails, and his friendship with argel Tal, whose development is also interesting.

You've also got mortarions story, which is one of manipulation and deceit, so there is room for interesting development on the chaos side too.

One of the problems I see with the heresy is that it is protagonist driven. The reason I see this as a problem is because the scope of 40k as a galactic setting shrinks when ever you have to put characters as the plot drivers.

You either have to create 100s of protagonists to cover the scope, or you concentrate on a couple and suddenly a vast universe seems tiny as everything hinges on a few characters' actions.

Obviously the heresy has always had the primarchs and the Emperor, but they were never depicted as being the focus of every event in the heresy until the novels required protagonists.


I think this has a lot to do with 40k being built out of historical wargaming. History tends to treat important players less like protagonists and more like active participants. 40k had always benefitted from this as it created a grandeur and scope through the inertia of billions of actions rather than the protagonism of one person.

Post rift 40k increasingly turns plot on the hubs of different characters actions - guilliman, Abaddon, eldrad, gazghkull, sjadowsun etc.

This creates protagonists that allow people to live out power fantasy, but it doesn't so any favours to the setting scope.


As to people liking the imperium, or that aliens can't be written properly, imo these are apologies for lack of effort.

SciFi and fantasy is littered with stories written from alien perspectives and GW HAVE written some anyway, they've just not put the kind of effort in they have on imperial stuff.

And GW themselves likes to tell people that their general represents them on the battlefield, whether they're a Tyranid, Ork or daemon.

30 years ago people used to say space marines were inhuman and alien and no book would be interesting with them in it because they had no life or desire outside their training and war.

But hey GW decided that that didn't matter and went ahead and wrote very human marines anyway. Retconing extreme indoctrination death soldier 'gave up humanity to protect yours' tropes so they could write bolter porn to sell.

Which they can also do for every other faction, finding the right way to tell the story to connect to the reader regardless of protagonist. That's an author's job.



And this doubly easy for the 'good' species - Eldar, tau and all their allies and humanity. They are all very human no matter what throw away lines about alienness have been used. GW are only ever one decision away from expanding non imperial factons.

 Hellebore wrote:

As to people liking the imperium, or that aliens can't be written properly, imo these are apologies for lack of effort.
...

And this doubly easy for the 'good' species - Eldar, tau and all their allies and humanity. They are all very human no matter what throw away lines about alienness have been used. GW are only ever one decision away from expanding non imperial factons.

The old BL position of "alien POVs are impossible to write so we won't ever do so" was simply a cop out excuse. We are now at several Eldar trilogies, multiple individual short stories and books, audio plays, some Farsight and other Tau novels. So much for impossible.

My main issue with BL and GW is using the same larger than life characters over and over. Not every battle or conflict has to hinge around the actions or even participation of the same handful of characters. Their presence in everything shrinks the setting. Instead, they should do more new characters, that then have room to develop, because let's face it, any novel involving one of the prime characters of a faction is not going to end with their death, or even a lasting change to their status quo.

Smaller scale characters can achieve things on a smaller scale, such as a world or sector. One doesn't have to upend the whole galaxy in order to show some change.

I think xenos are hard to write as their personality/ethos for a whole race seems to be an extreme of human emotion.

Where as in humans, you get arrogant people/characters that can play off as a foil against a more measured person... In the case of the Eldar, all are that arrogant character, and writing characters who are not arrogant as Eldar are then not really Eldar (I know this has come mainly from Tolkiens Elves, but the same issue is there, you have empathy and like legolas, but he is not typically Elven).

The same is then the case for Tau (big world thinking, but naive - however, recent writing such as in shadow breaker where they are noticeably un-ethical is a breath of fresh air, adding complexity).

For the rest of the xenos, it is the same problem, they are collectively too hard in one emotional/personality type.

I am being very layman's here and broad brushing whole races, but in my opinion that is the crux of the problem.

endlesswaltz123 wrote:
I think xenos are hard to write as their personality/ethos for a whole race seems to be an extreme of human emotion.

Where as in humans, you get arrogant people/characters that can play off as a foil against a more measured person... In the case of the Eldar, all are that arrogant character, and writing characters who are not arrogant as Eldar are then not really Eldar (I know this has come mainly from Tolkiens Elves, but the same issue is there, you have empathy and like legolas, but he is not typically Elven).

The same is then the case for Tau (big world thinking, but naive - however, recent writing such as in shadow breaker where they are noticeably un-ethical is a breath of fresh air, adding complexity).

For the rest of the xenos, it is the same problem, they are collectively too hard in one emotional/personality type.

I am being very layman's here and broad brushing whole races, but in my opinion that is the crux of the problem.

Humans are to Eldar as Orks are to Humans. If Imperial humans can be portrayed as looking down on Orks as barbaric and crude, then it is easy to write the same for Eldar. Nothing hard about that at all. Nor is it even without justification, since as outside readers we know from the given GW sources that the Eldar are objectively superior to baseline humans with far longer life, more acute senses, superior memory, faster mental processing and reflexes.

Eldar society has nuances and different Eldar have different personalities as shown by the various Eldar novels that have shown more of life on Craftworlds. It is just the Imperium has difficulty perceiving those nuances because most Imperial characters, and perhaps most BL writers, don't move beyond racial caricatures.

You're broad brushing in the same way that 'all marines are brain washed zealots that only fight and train'. You can either choose a one dimensional perspective to look at them through, or you can not. Marines would be boring if they were all stereotyped, so would Orks and Eldar.

As to the whole Eldar arrogance, that's entirely from the human perspective. They are no more arrogant to each other than humans are amongst themselves, but because we always get the biased human perspective as the view point it skews everything.

Eldar society is not depicted as a bunch of high strung emos trying to out haught one another...


Reductive stereotypes are no basis to work from, regardless of what you're writing about. Claiming that the stereotype is the ultimate truth is lazy writing and disrespectful, telling people what they like is not worth the energy put into making other stereotyped factions interesting.

Agreed. Personally if they wrote some interesting dark eldar characters I would be interested in reading them. I'd also be up for reading about orks and their societies, but as I said the 'fungus' thing puts me off

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Agreed. Personally if they wrote some interesting dark eldar characters I would be interested in reading them. I'd also be up for reading about orks and their societies, but as I said the 'fungus' thing puts me off

Why? it's just their mode of reproduction. It's a science fiction universe - what prevents you from writing a fungus based life form with human emotions and motivations and character?

We have magic daemons made of feelings that have human emotions and motivations and character in 40k.

 Hellebore wrote:
You're broad brushing in the same way that 'all marines are brain washed zealots that only fight and train'. You can either choose a one dimensional perspective to look at them through, or you can not. Marines would be boring if they were all stereotyped, so would Orks and Eldar.

As to the whole Eldar arrogance, that's entirely from the human perspective. They are no more arrogant to each other than humans are amongst themselves, but because we always get the biased human perspective as the view point it skews everything.

Eldar society is not depicted as a bunch of high strung emos trying to out haught one another...


Reductive stereotypes are no basis to work from, regardless of what you're writing about. Claiming that the stereotype is the ultimate truth is lazy writing and disrespectful, telling people what they like is not worth the energy put into making other stereotyped factions interesting.

Lets be honest, Eldar are awfully written. You can see the sheer bias toward the Imperium even just in technology. Anyone ever play Stellaris? Fallen Empire might not be in its hay-day but still has more than enough firepower to deal with anyone who annoys it. Eldar ruled the galaxy for as far as i can tell for millions of years...yet the humans who are technological backward can match them tech for tech. In fact their greatest strengths come from their bodies which is not technology and the webway and wraithbone which were old ones technology. So lets cut it down to as short a time as reasonable 1 million years....of technology and its matched and surpassed by humans in the golden age of technology.

The Eldar do diplomacy on a level of stupidity even the ancient humans could manage better.
They are supposed to be enigmatic but they just come across stupid and arrogant.
They are supposed to have superior technology to the Imperium but they don't.
TBH eldar tech would seem like magic to us because in millions of years their techology would have improved beyond our imagination most likely
They supposedly ruled the galaxy yet only had a handful of worlds

the_scotsman wrote:

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Agreed. Personally if they wrote some interesting dark eldar characters I would be interested in reading them. I'd also be up for reading about orks and their societies, but as I said the 'fungus' thing puts me off

Why? it's just their mode of reproduction. It's a science fiction universe - what prevents you from writing a fungus based life form with human emotions and motivations and character?

We have magic daemons made of feelings that have human emotions and motivations and character in 40k.

I'm a big fan of the pre-Gav Thorpe, original Orks in the background. When you the Ork 'kulture' and loads of info about them in the Rogue Trader books ('Ere go go is still a tremendously readable book), it was so characterful.

Now they have been replaced by creatures that exist only for war, which I understand fits the setting (or at least how it has changed), but I think is far more two dimensional than they were in the past.

In my background/Epic campaign (World Eaters invading an Ork world during the Great Crusade) I have chosen to ignore Mr Thorpe's updates (they haven't happened yet.. ) and have got ork towns and villages, ork civilians working in factories, female and children orks, and clans other than the main ones