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I don't think it was from white dwarf, I believe it was mentioned during a Q&A at games day (same context though, flippant off-hand response to "what happened to the Squats" "Tyranids ate them")

Much later Jervis wrote an article for the Citadel Journal in issue 33 about how to use your Squat armies (essentially either as Imperial Guard to represent those who reintegrated into the Imperium or Orks for those who didn't and became nomadic). Interestingly that article mentions that the Squat Homeworlds are "lost" but neglects to mention why.

Later than that in the reprints of the Inquisition War novels they added a foreword referencing the Squats:

As to the abhuman, the thread is cut. The accursed hive fleet of the tyranid put paid to that line too long ago

I'm fairly sure that was the first textual reference to the Tyranids having anything to do with the Squats dying out, but the idea had permeated throughout the nascent hobby Internet long before then

According to some internet sleuthing:

In White Dwarf January 2000 GW said this in response to a write-in:

Would you believe they were all eaten by the Tyranid invasion? Or, due to the Squats biker life style, everyone of the was arrested for disturbing the peace and sacrificed to the Emperor. Where do you think they get all of those souls anyway? All kidding aside, it doesn't seem likely the Squats will ever again see the light of day. When they were out they never seemed very popular, showed up at our stores, or tournaments, and didn't sell on top of all that. Their look was really outdated compared to the hundreds of other great Warhammer 40,000 models. Don't send us hate mail, it's just the cold hard facts of the 41st Millennium.

Then, in July 2004, Jervis Johnson on the old Specialist Games Forum posted this (amongst a much longer post on the whole affair):

In the end (and it took years to really get to the roots of the problem) this led to a realisation that we were going to have to drop the Squats in their 'Squat' form from the 40K background. There was little point having a major race that we weren't willing to make an army book for, and their inclusion in the background meant that people kept asking us when we'd do a Squat Codex. Instead we decided that we'd write the Squats out of the background by saying that their Homworlds had been devoured by a Tyranid Hivefleet. This would give us the option in the future to return to making a race based ont he Squat archetype for 40K. This race was given the name of Demiurg, and a certain amount of preliminary work was done to get a 'feel' for what the race would be like. At present the only hint of the Demiurg in 40K is the Demiurg spaceship for BFG. However, we do have this race 'in our back pocket' as a possible new race for 40K, or an interesting character model in Inquisitor, or whatever. So far the Demiurg have lost out to other projects, and it may be that their time never actually comes, as they will have to win through on their merits, not simply because we once made some Squat models in the past. At present, I have to say that it is more lilely that they don't make the cut than do, as there is a certain predudice these days to simply taking races from Warhammer and cross them over to 40K like we did in the early days, so it may be that the Squats/Demiurg end up remaining a footnote in the history of the 40K galaxy. Only time will tell...

It's notable that he recalls they'd write the squats out by having them be devoured, although we never really saw much actual canon statement on this beyond the above

Which largely matches the Votann background. A large group did get scoffed by Tyranids. And that was pretty much the only League commonly abroad in the wider galaxy.

So the others were always there, just content in the Deep Core where pretty much no other major player goes due to the extreme hazards.

Votaan were written about 20 years later to revive the squats. The extent to which they "match" the lore is just GW canonising the tyranids thing.
I'm not aware of any Leagues having been arrested and sacrificed to The Emperor though!

I have nothing to contribute to this thread, since I do not use the sort of internet that exposes me to "memes"

indie web FTW! Flock corpo big sosh media forever

 Ashiraya wrote:

Andykp wrote:
Apparently the purple thing was first mentioned by GW in catachen devil, 2023 where the kommando character thinks about purple being the sneakiest colour.

The meme far, far predates this novel. I think it's yet another case of the writers mistaking community memes for their own actual lore.

It happens from time to time. Like how the community associated the "Saturnine" name with a Terminator suit that never had it (and that was equal in performance to the other marks), until last year when HH3.0 dropped and the suit was Saturnine after all.

Yeah, the meme has been transfered to actual lore. Let's see if it gets put into a Codex at some point. I'll admit I hope this doesn't happen to "Orks think things into reality", so far GW has restrained themselves a bit to take that path. The Beast series has a scene that materializes orky belief a bit more and some Codex throwaway lines are ambigous, but other than that there's nothing concrete. I hope it stays that way. I'd like it even more if we get some fluff blurb that shows us a Mek analyzing imperial tech and coming to the very same conclusion as that tech priest: "No no, this stoopid 'umie tech can't work, this is all nothing but scrap, surely this only works because dem 'oomies fink it does. I've seen blue beakies shoot mind bullets, surely that's how deyz 'iz running scrap guns like this."

The Beast series should be stricken from the record of 40K.

 Da Boss wrote:
The Beast series should be stricken from the record of 40K.

Frankly, so should the HH novel series.

I think these "historical" novelisations are bad for the setting IMO.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
On topic, my memelore nominations:
-Guard troopers have an average life expectancy of 15 hours
-DKoK guard never break and are basically fearless automatons

Honourable mention to faith being a tangible force for ordinary, non-psychic humans to tap into if they are sufficiently fanatical. This would be in the list above except sadly GW seems to overwhelmingly support this being the case in lore now.

Guard life expectancy is on the shortlist.

DKoK might do as a general catch all. So the clone thing, the shovels thing etc.

 Haighus wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
The Beast series should be stricken from the record of 40K.

Frankly, so should the HH novel series.

I think these "historical" novelisations are bad for the setting IMO.

I like 30k more than 40k at this point, so I'll fight you on that.

I agree about the Beast though. Ridiculous novel series. It's criminal how pathetic it indirectly makes Ghaz look because the Beast authors were obsessed with shock value.

Yup, when they first announced The Beast Arises series it I was excited but it quickly devolved into hodgepodge writing for a terrible attempt at Imperial intrigue over a looming Ork threat. The worst part is their portrayal of the Orks. There's not one proper named Ork character in the entire series, just a nameless caricature of Primarchs of not one, but several "Prime-Orks" that basically just exist to get worfed by either Vulkan (who also bizarrely existed in this series to die shortly after debuting to commit sudoku against the Orks) and the other Imperials through the exact same process of just invading Ullanor multiple times. Considering how much flavour Nazdreg, Wazdakka and several existing Ork characters have in modern 40k, it just smacks of the laziness they had in The Beast Arises that The Beast never even has any dialogue or any sort of rivalry with any of the Imperial main characters. Functionally, the Orks seemed more like Tyranids than Orks. They also "Star Wars streeted" it into modern 40k by making Ullanor and Armageddon the same planet, which seemed frankly unnecessary.

The writers clearly didn't know how to write the Orks as a compelling foe other than "what if Orks, but bigger, and better tech?". They basically had to rely on two macguffins to beat them and it was a piss poor retcon on how they created the Deathwatch for marines.

Oh and let's not forget some of the weirdest side-tangents in the story, like a group of Harlequins infiltrating through the Imperial palace, killing dozens of Custodes, just to send the message to the Emperor that "Don't forget that Chaos still scary, kthxbye". Oh wow, thanks guys, really needed you to kill my bodyguards and get danger close within the Imperial Palace for me to take this very self-evident statement seriously. You know what would help? You jumping in to deal with the Ork attack moon in orbit instead of talking about a different threat.

Overall, 100% a series that either needs a do-over or be banished into the shadow realm of non-canon.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
The Beast series should be stricken from the record of 40K.

Frankly, so should the HH novel series.

I think these "historical" novelisations are bad for the setting IMO.

I like 30k more than 40k at this point, so I'll fight you on that.

I agree about the Beast though. Ridiculous novel series. It's criminal how pathetic it indirectly makes Ghaz look because the Beast authors were obsessed with shock value.

The 30k novels have a lot to answer for, although I'll grant that on a standalone level many of them are better written than the Beasts series is (note I say many, certainly not all). However, as much as the HH series might work as its own narrative, once it gets plugged back into 40k it makes the whole setting worse.

Primarchs were these legendary figures from half-remembered myths. Mighty beings with vast intellects and great physical abilities, with the Emperor an even greater being. But that was most of the actual detail we got. Then the HH series is written, and we learn those apparent geniuses are mostly idiots with the Emperor in particular having the emotional intelligence of a spoon despite being around other humans for 30000 years and having the ability to read minds. The trouble with writing a grand drama about geniuses is that geniuses are really difficult to write convincingly. Especially super duper inhuman geniuses like the Primarchs.

Add to this all the lore that was spawned by the series that is basically memes, some of which has gone on to become widespread in 40k lore and irrevocably changed the setting for the worse. Some of these memes are fairly minor if a bit grating, like "I am Alpharius". The one that really damages the setting is the shift from the faith of the Imperium being one of the ways in which they are demonstrated to be small-minded fools clinging to superstition instead of actually bettering society to being a tangible force the Imperium can harness and it is therefore totally logical to be complete fanatics. There were earlier hints that this may be the case, but in very ambiguous terms that could just as easily be explained by fanatics simply pushing through tough situations (such as the descriptions for SoB Acts of Faith). As far as I am aware, the first time this effect was explicitly, unambiguously stated in the wider 40k lore was in book 4 of the Horus Heresy, Flight of the Eisenstein. Since then, it has appeared unambiguously in more and more places and is now mainstream lore in 40k proper. This undermines the very satire of the Imperium as a bad thing, because, uh, they were right actually to have blind faith and force others to conform to it.

To be clear, I don't think this means the 30k setting as a whole couldn't be fleshed out more, but the celebrity melodrama of the novels was a bad idea. In comparison, the FW Horus Heresy series was far better and much more coherent with the atmosphere of 40k at the time too. It is written in the manner of some kind of scribe with high security clearance compiling a report after the Heresy concluded, and this makes the lore far more cautious and allows it the leeway of being a secondhand account at best. Sadly the Black Books decreased in quality after Bligh passed away and FW winded down into the remaining rump that it is, but I still prefer that method of fleshing out the era over the novels.

Spot on Haighus, fully agreed.

At this point dememefying 40K is a lost cause, as the original themes of the lore have been irrecoverably damaged and lost anyway. The writers run on memelore and fully buying what was originally just Imperial propaganda and myths.

We're at the point now where a lot of GW's writers aren't the people that were around at the founding of 40k, they're people that grew up reading all the memes and stuff and are now carrying the ye olde meme lore into the actual lore

 kirotheavenger wrote:
We're at the point now where a lot of GW's writers aren't the people that were around at the founding of 40k, they're people that grew up reading all the memes and stuff and are now carrying the ye olde meme lore into the actual lore

Yep, exactly this.

Re: War of the Beasts - what I hate the most about it is how it turned most discussions about Orks into "Oh, do you think a Prime-Ork could beat Y" and "Oh, are they the Krork, orks will evolve into Krork, Ghaz is nearly a Krork" blah blah.

The idea that Orks would become "advanced" and it would mean that they would stop speaking Gothic with an Orky Accent, man, I really can't get across how much I fething despise that.

I was also really excited because I love Orks and I thought a whole series with them as the antagonists would be awesome, but I was so bitterly disappointed because it turned out none of the authors gave a crap about Orks at all. Dunno why they decided to write it given their obvious contempt for their own antagonists.

Fully agree with others about the Heresy stuff - I even enjoyed a good few of the novels, but it absolutely loses the run of itself and the ending is very poor (which is a shame because I did enjoy some of the siege stuff too).

I remember when Acts of Faith came into Sisters of Battle and it was a point of discussion if it was actual Warp magic, latent psykers in the ranks or coincidence, and if the Living Saint was actually just a series of bionically augmented figureheads rather than an actual super powered "daemon prince of the Emperor".

But all of that ambiguity seems to be completely gone now, and Faith seems to be some other class of power completely, perhaps even separate to the Warp and I really hate that too.

It makes discussion the background really depressing for me now, because someone is always ready to quote chapter and verse to prove that this stuff is canon, and I know they are right, but I just find it totally offputting. The more I discuss 40K background or read discussions nowadays the less I want to be engaged with 40K.

Edit: And I love the guys books but a lot of it has to be laid at Dan Abnett's feet I feel. I think of it as the Dr Whoification of 40K.

 Haighus wrote:
I agree about the Beast though. Ridiculous novel series. It's criminal how pathetic it indirectly makes Ghaz look because the Beast authors were obsessed with shock value.

The 30k novels have a lot to answer for, although I'll grant that on a standalone level many of them are better written than the Beasts series is (note I say many, certainly not all). However, as much as the HH series might work as its own narrative, once it gets plugged back into 40k it makes the whole setting worse.