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[epireancrusade]

Warhammer 40,000 as a universe is trying to do the impossible.

Warhammer 40,000 is, broadly, a grim satire of fascism. It takes the fascist's worldview, all the xenophobia, conspiracism, hypernationalism, and militarism, and amplifies it to a galactically ridiculous scale.

"The Imperium of Man has ruled for 10,000 years, warring endlessly against heretics, traitors, aberrant humans, and aliens galore, all of whom are so wildly different from humanity that peaceful coexistence will simply never be possible. The only emotion stronger than our hatred of them is their hatred of us. So, we war. We war and war and battle and slaughter until the end of days. We throw our sacred human form, untainted by mutation or the hideous sciences of our ancestors, against the barbarian hordes by the millions, most of us dying in the process. We revere and worship the warriors elevated by the hand of our divine god-emperor, the apotheosis of our glorious, eternal state. These warriors, reborn in the Emperor's image with His sacred eugenics, to become the ultimate fighting men. And yes, they are all men. We are never safe, while we must constantly be defending our borders from our enemies, we must also be ever-vigilant within. Anybody, from our comrades on the front lines to our commanders, tech-priests, preachers, or politicians, could be a traitor. Nobody can ever TRULY be trusted, and those who truly are heretics, must not only be destroyed, but erased. They, and all memory of them must be eradicated. One heretic can sign the death warrant of his entire world, and sometimes, for the preservation of the human race, billions must die."

Warhammer 40k presents a world where all of this(asterisk) is true (VERY BIG ASTERISK)

Through this lens, a lot of the more... questionable aspects make sense.

T'au Empire Mind Control: The T'au are how fascists view liberals. They CANNOT understand that an integrated, multicultural society could ever POSSIBLY work. They cannot FATHOM that different communities can just... agree to work together, it HAS TO BE the woke mind virus. "Can you believe these fucking idiots tried to NEGOTIATE with TYRANIDS???? These fucking losers tried to make PEACE WITH ANOTHER RACE??? PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT"

Why the chaos gods are what they are: The followers of chaos represent everyone of the 'ingroup' the fascist hates. Because nothing, not even their sacred ingroup, is sacred to the fascist. The followers of chaos are the germans who resisted, the jewish antizionist, the rebel (Khorne), the intellectual (Tzeentch), the sick and disabled (Nurgle), and the queer (Slaanesh). "There is no reason ANYBODY, ESPECIALLY not those of our sacred ingroup, could object to our glorious genocide. And the runts of the litter must be eliminated to not be a drain on the rest"

And EVEN WITHIN 40k, a lot of this is bullshit.

The T'au mind control thing is provably bullshit because the Farsight Enclaves exist. A whole T'au society that exists free from the apparent mid control of the ethereals

The imperium feeds as much into the chaos gods as the traitors do. A stagnant, decaying empire (Nurgle), with an incomprehensibly vast and byzantine bureaucratic structure (Tzeentch), where a select few live appallingly lush and lavish lives of hedonism and pleasure, completely detached from the people they're supposed to govern (Slaanesh), all for the purpose of making ever more destructive and bloody war with everybody else (Khorne)

There is evidence of peaceful human coexistence with xenos empires during the Dark Age of Technology, including one humanity CREATED, and many inquisitors and rogue traders will GLADLY incorporate xenos into their retinues. Trade and coexistence with aliens DOES still happen in the imperium.

Hell, the parody of fascism is in the very MECHANICS OF THE WHOLE LORE. Fascists don't believe in "facts" or "truth", if they did, they wouldn't be fascists. Therefore, in 40k, "Everything is canon, nothing is true". This allows players to EITHER

Think critically and try to connect the dots to form their best guess as to what "canon" is

Or buy wholly into one side or another's propaganda

And one of those groups is going to find a "truth" they can accept and treat as fact a LOT more quickly than the other.

40k lays out in perfectly plain low gothic, all of the bullshit and hypocrisies of the Imperium. They'll let entire sectors die in the interests of preserving human life. The way the imperial guard are lauded as heroes but treated worse than the lasguns in their hands. The way that in order to become a space marine, one of humanity's great guardian angels, you must have everything that makes you human either beaten out of you or surgically removed. The priests who worship science and technology viewing scientific progress as the most abhorrent of heresies. The divine worship of a man who scoured entire worlds for the crime of worshipping him as a god.

Actually hang on lemme derail the flow of this post and talk more about the emperor. The Emperor is the chief hypocrite in an empire of hypocrites. "I AM NOT A GOD" says the 10-foot-tall gleaming golden immortal psychic god-man, "NOW GO FORTH MY ANGELS ON YOUR GLORIOUS CRUSADE TO BRING SCIENCE AND REASON, and by science and reason I mean doing exactly what I say without question and turning a blind eye to fundamental truths of the universe, TO THIS BENIGHTED GALAXY"

The problem is that parodying fascism is impossible. Fascism is already so inherently, fundamentally ridiculous a worldview, for all the reasons explained above, that distinguishing sincerity from irony is nigh impossible.

If you, an antifascist, read The Turner Diaries, you will probably assume it's satire. The book ends with Earth as an irradiated hellsacpe where few can survive and nothing about its resulting culture is explained. But nope! This is fascist propaganda! It was written by actual neo-nazis who committed actual hate crimes! It is an enthusiastic YAAAAAAAAAY APOCALYPTIC WARFARE!!!!!! YAAAAAAAAY GENOCIDE!!!!!!!! At least all the black people are gone! Hell, when Rogue One came out, Lucasfilm got all sort of shit flung at them for portraying the evil space nazis... as the bad guys... which they always were.

This is why both we, the fandom, and Games Workshop as a company, are DIRECTLY pushing SO HARD against the fascists in the space, and must push harder. 40K IS NOT FOR THEM. And no amount of clever writing or obvious parody will ever convince them otherwise. It does not matter how unfathomably stupid you make fascism look to people with functioning brains, fascists will gobble that shit up. You cannot make fascism look worse than it is, and you cannot make it stupid enough to convince fascists its stupid.

The problem isn't that Games Workshop isn't doing a good enough job writing the imperium as bad (although they aren't), the problem is that it will never be an adequate mockery to make the fascists feel unwelcome. It's not a bad parody of fascism, fascism is just beyond parody.

[epireancrusade]

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

[epireancrusade]

Cutting edge fandom commentary

requested by Dilara

[epireancrusade]

YESSSSSS. UPFRONT CONFIRMATION

Ah, the Custodes superiority continues

[epireancrusade]

Playing with the guard against chaos kinda feels like this.

[epireancrusade]

She may be tired from the day's battle, still aching from exhaustion and the painful memories of lost comrades. But a Kasrkin would not go to sleep before first maintaining her gear, so she just goes through the motions, the sweet numbness of performing a repetitive task taking over her mind... Tomorrow they are going to rest, so whiskey will help in the task as well. Just another day in service of the god-emperor...

[epireancrusade]

Battle raged. Every voxline was blasting, the air itself blistering, the sky felt like it was closing in. Reports flooded the Praetorian's ears with every moment he stood listening. World Eaters had torn asunder one gate and, by the screams coming through the line, were using it to bludgeon the soldiers who had stood behind it; another defense had been flanked by the Night Lords; on yet another line, the dulcet tones that could only be of Fulgrim's sons announced that the defenders had proven imperfect. A lesser man, a mortal, would have been overwhelmed, but Rogal was a Primarch. He could endure it, and wished for half a heartbeat he could not.

His skull ached like it was being crushed under a tank-tread. He issued commands automatically, knowing it would not be enough. He ordered defensive sectors abandoned, knowing it would not be enough. He ordered his bodyguards to leave him and join the battle, knowing it would not be enough. The Warmaster was at hand: he could feel the talons closing around Terra, around the Palace.

Rogal felt the weight of the chainsword at his hip, wishing he was out there, bringing it to bear. How much simpler things felt with ripping flesh under his blade, with gore-spray tinting his breath. How easy would it be to die fighting instead of to live commanding, but such was his task. From his command throne, he turned, and activated a module built into the tactical array. The sleek metal surface opened a panel, steam of sublimation pouring from within, as with one ponderous gauntlet the Primarch reached within, extracting in his grasp a well-chilled bottle of Cerveza Cristal,

Oh goddamnit.

[epireancrusade]

The ork kommando was among the enforcers before any of them had the time to react. The one with the shotgun went first, not being able to bring his larger gun to bear in the tight confines of the train's maintenance corridors. Large piece of sharpened metal cleaved him in two, from the left shoulder to the right hip, and the green monstrosity was already swinging it's another choppa to the officer. He didn't have time to react either, as his head separated from the body with a messy geysir of blood. The last officer tried to avoid the ork, but he tripped over the body of one of his companions, and the ork stomped on his head without making a fuzz, it's gaze already locked with Jackie's.

This was certainly a surprising turn of the events. Just as the finest of the Moloch law enforcement were about to arrest her from indecent behavior (why wouldn't a girl be allowed to fuck a cute PDF officer when she was not on guarding duty, she could never fathom, but here we are), a greenskin saboteur had decimated them within the time it took to blink one's eyes. It wasn't too hard to guess what it was doing here, she and the whole Kissian 6th had been ordered to protect the massive, city-sized trains from those monsters. The agri-world's produce was feeding half the sector, but ever since the greenskin invasion five years ago, these irritating units of unusually sneaky orks had been making trouble.

Now the smiling, yeasty smelling thing was staring her right in the eyes, grinning. It didn't attack, instead it just made a beckoning gesture with it's blade. Jackie felt a similar, deathly grin creeping over her own face. She had been slaughtering the enemies of emperor on many worlds during her 37 years of life, always preferring the intensity of close-quarter fighting over shooting. She just had the knack for it, a nasty streak in her genetics, a hunger for violence. She didn't even remember that she had a lasgun on her back, her blood was up and the battle-frenzy was taking her over. "Okay, you ugly fuck," she said, pulling her blade free from it's scabbard. She was a man-made monster, forged in the endless wars of the imperium, a killer, and the ork had recognized a kindred spirit. She Cracked her neck, flexing her arms, both the right one made of flesh and the augmetic replacing the left. "Let's dance".

[epireancrusade]

I haven't been doing much Warhammer stuff lately,since I have been consumed by my other passion: history. Viking age and early medieval period are a big hyper-fixation for me, and it's not a surprise that I have been building and painting a lot of Vikings, anglo-saxons and celts. (I think I have painted nearly three hundred figures at this point). I have also been building my own terrain pieces, the bridge in the picture is made of cardboard and styrofoam. Next I'm thinking about building a church.

[epireancrusade]

Just a short step away from grimdark. Our webcomic just came out in Finnish, hard covers and all. Go and check the English version at the address. A good ghost story with some eldritch horror and a hint of gore to spice things up.

Fenlands, the webcomic I made with my lovely partner Sari is now printed in Finnish! Our dog Naava just wanted to be included.

For those who speak English, go and check out the whole comic in fenlandscomic.com! It's a good old Victorian horror story, telling a story of Aisling, an Irish immigrant worker and a medium who has to face eldritch horrors with her trusty cat. It's not too long a read and the whole story was finished in 2022!

[epireancrusade]

[epireancrusade]

I have been thinking a lot about what makes 40k sooo good and engaging after all these years.

Games Workshop have really managed to create a modern mythology, an amalgamation of fantasy and sci-fi tropes, of pop culture references, of modern day and past politics and sonehow made that into its own very distinct thing.

It somehow feels both very current and timeless at the same time.

People ofthe harp on about “40k is so grimdark, it’s so gritty and realistic”, but I don't think that is its true appeal.

I think it is the whimsy and not the darkness that is the true appeal.

Think about the first thing that makes you drawn to 40k.

Almost every person I ask this question will answer something silly, whimsical or over the top, before even touching the grimdarkness.

We live in a post-GoT age where EVERYTHING fantasy adjacent has to be as gritty and dark and realistic as possible. And people are already so sick of it. (either that or its superpolished marvel/disney:esque family-friendly with no substance behind it at all)

Let fantasy be cool and whimsical again. The world needs more weird and repulsive beauty.

[epireancrusade]

The Helldivers logo is a skull lmfao

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[epireancrusade]

JUST LETTING Y'ALL KNOW WHERE THIS BLOG STANDS.

[epireancrusade]

My favorite 40K galaxy map. Artist is Ikkan.

[epireancrusade]

Hey friends, go and change your blogs visibility settings ASAP!

Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you. 

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner. 

We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.

To opt out of sharing your public blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option. 

For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc. 

Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.

If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.