My Two Cents: The Warhammer 40k Alternative

My personal insight of Warhammer 40k, my objections, likes, and an alternative perspective to the objections to the franchise and why, and hopefully an alternative solution.
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[@daringdarius5686]

As a fellow Catholic, I feel I can lend some more insight into 40k. 1) As somebody who has spoken to the authors before, but not so buddy buddy with them that I have their contact information, one of their main prerogatives was to ensure that the game had 0 religious or political message to sway the ideas of the Youth. Sure, we can learn from the story that being evil is bad, and that being good sometimes has it's rewards, but they intentionally made the Universe in such a way that Religion should not be taken seriously, and cannot be taken seriously. The core purpose was to: a) not alienate any potential audiences, and b) not cause the Red Scare 2.0 electric boogaloo. At the time of it's creation in it's infancy, they were just making a funny goofy game! If you look at early versions of Warhammer, it wasn't even a tabletop war game but just a miniatures collection. During this funny goofy game's creation, other tabletop games such as D&D, came into the light and caused massive problems across not just the USA, but other countries as well, being described as "a game made by Satan!" because it allowed the players the ability to be creative! To be more specific, the game was liberal enough to where you could choose to be holy paladins smiting demons... or you could be the demons themselves! You could act as the church, or conversely, as the church become corrupt and murder the masses. Warhammer intentionally made a game whose focus was "don't take our game seriously, it's just a fun, silly game, we've intentionally tried to take out as much political and religious stuff out of it so that it's as neutral as possible." 2) Another of the steps taken to make the game as neutral as possible, was that instead of making a specific race "the bad guys", it made EVERY race the "bad guys", this does include humanity itself. In fact, if you were to take a step back and look at things holistically, probably the "least bad" guys in the Universe are the Orks! While they do terrible things, humanity does worse in it's sleep. All the Orks want is warfare and pillaging, whereas Humanity commits hourly war crimes and crimes against not just other races, but to humanity itself. The Tau borderline do the same things, and use other races that join their cause as meatbags on the frontlines. There are no "good guys", because the only guys who stand for good, are usually left eating dirt through a hole in their skull 5 minutes later. When every race is desperate for survival, let alone victory, ideology is thrown out a window. 3) It's easier for people to go into war if they hate each other. A good way to view this is in multiple times in World War 1 and 2, people in Trench warfare would sometimes do small deeds for the other side, such as when both sides would agree to a momentary ceasefire to recall their dead and wounded. A historic one would be the french film "Joyeux Noel" where such small acts occurred, but then on Christmas, they eventually came to the conclusion of a momentary cease fire to celebrate Christmas. During this period, the different sides eventually came to even talks despite communication barriers, share food and drink, and even compete in sports. When the ceasefire ended, neither side wanted to shoot the people they had just met and celebrated with. Even when given direct orders to fight, the French refused to shoot the Germans and vice versa. Eventually they were relocated to fight in other areas, but many of the soldiers ended up refusing to fight, coming the realization that "we're killing other humans, what's wrong with us?!?" This was a real life event, and it has occurred multiple times throughout history, in smaller and equal sizes. So, when you vilify you're enemies, it's easier to shoot them. The same goes for all races. I could go on and on about why I believe the 40k Universe to be in a perfectly good state. I also agree that your Universe would be interesting (Let's go LUMINOTH!) but it also wouldn't be 40k. I believe the direction of the game and it's Universe so far is, slow and a bit stale, but in the right direction. The world you envision would not encompass as large of an audience, and many would not enjoy it. I would enjoy it, don't get me wrong! But 40k was meant to be funny, cool, and silly. In the books and lore, it gets serious, emotional and heart warming amidst the nuclear cold, but that's what it's attempting to do. The influence of Narnia would be akin to the Tau: an idealistic, naive, community that is either bound to be absorbed and defeated by an outside force, or collapse internally. We can even see that happening in the 40k Universe with Commander Farsight and the Farsight Enclaves rejecting the caste system and "the Greater Good".

[@divinecomedyproductions967]

1) Im well aware of the first one, but I've met people who take it *way* too seriously, which for some reasons are understandable given the current progressive cultural landscape, but these individuals treat the Imperium of Man as this perfect and infallible representation of Space Catholicism. But when you dive deeper into the ideology post and pre heresy, its far from it. 2) I understand that too, and it makes sense if you want to make a tabletop war game with all out war and its not inherently wrong to take that direction in space science-fantasy, but some treat thats the only direction you can take with some of the concepts of Warhammer 40k(space elves, space demons, space church) and anything else to be meaningless or worthless and often just tell dissenters "just go watch Star Wars and Lord of The Rings bro", which I will assume is a vocal toxic minority that doesn't speak for everyone. 3) Of course, and 40k does a good job of showing off war and its moral relativism in real life as a horrific and unfortunate reality, and the Humans, Eldar, and Tau to me are the prime example as three "good" races who despite being morally "better" than the others(emphasis on the quotation marks) they all got their heads up their asses with Pride and fail to see the three of them are all in this together as species of Order. And that’s not a bad thing if your intend to show that’s as a bad thing and part of the tragedy. I know what I have in mind wouldn't be 40k, hence why I'm making its own thing, but there clearly is an audience with 40k fan concepts like the Human/Eldar Hybrid Lofn, humans, elder, and tau mingling People want Tolkien in Space, they want to see three heroic factions like humans, space elves, and other alien races teaming up to fight Space Morgoth/Sauron and space demons with the aid of space angels, and I think its because a lot of people are tired of super-extreme-grimdark Hopepunk and want something a little more idealistic idk how big that audience is, but it seems to be big enough But thank you for the constructive criticism!

[@mpk4712]

@@daringdarius5686 You had one BIG mistake, there were no Nazis in WW1. Please correct it. It is like calling the medieval russians communist.

[@daringdarius5686]

@@mpk4712 fixed, thanks for pointing that out.

[@andraskovacs5431]

While I deffinetly can see the direction wich you are going at. It would go against everything warhammer is about besides the aestethics. I'm deffinetly curious about what you or people who like this idea would make and it has a great number of merits. But what you want is just simply so antithetical to warhammer wich roots itself knees deep in satire it's just not compatible anymore

[@divinecomedyproductions967]

@@andraskovacs5431 hence why I’m using what I wanted to make an original work, Im well aware it is the polar opposite of Warhammer, but there is clearly a potential audience The problem is there’s no other science fantasy franchise, at least to my knowledge, that has space elves, space demons, and space church among other things with clear lines of good and evil There’s DOOM for space demons, but that’s more sci-fi/action-horror And what I don’t get why someone hasn’t given that said audience what they want. Especially with indie content being more receptive today. But in my experience I can say that reason why is snobs might brand it as “thinly veiled warhammer FanFiction” which I had covered in a previous video. As well as aforementioned potential audience being insulted by said snobs and told to just shut up and go watch (approved thing) Then they act all shocked when big entertainment tampers with pre-existing franchises. The snobs aren’t the primary reason for that problem, but they are a contributing factor.

[@mpk4712]

Shep