Hopefully I’m preaching to the choir and the main response from everybody is that this is obvious and didn’t need to be said.
I read a few comments from some gross cishets about how angry they are about the female Custode. They prop up the Imperium of Man as though they are some paragon of morality and not the picture of everything wrong with imperialism. Naturally this perfectly moral force would have only men in its ranks, clearly! They don’t seem to realize that if women are left out we have a sexist/mysogynist system which is not worth praising, and if they include women then it’s the imperialist machine trying to keep up appearances. Frankly, I’ve always figured the Imperium didn’t care about gender or race because everyone is suitable to die in combat and be ground into food for the starving populace.
tl;dr Men are upset that women exist and missed the whole satire
Thought this was going to be about the balance dataslate lol. Yeah, anyone defending the imperium is, at best, a fascist who doesn’t know it yet. Sadly GW want money and so aren’t going to make the poster boy faction look bad.
My headcannon has always been that the Imperium is too concerned with high tech, enlightened forms of bigotry we could barely comprehend to worry about paltry shit like gender and race. They don’t give a shit what your skin color is, unless it’s more than 3 standards of deviation from normal, in which case they shoot you for being a mutant.
My headcanon was always that there have always been female Astartes, but they’re just so roided up from a young age, it’s impossible to tell a male Space Marine from a female one without seeing their genitals, so they all just present male and refer to each other as brothers. They’ve also been so indoctrinated in their cultiness from a young age that they don’t even have a concept of gender identity. They consider their genitals to be a personal matter you just don’t talk about.
It really doesn’t help that even out of the chunk of 40k fans that aren’t raging misogynists a decent number of them only like “female representation” because
Imperium as a whole don’t care but 95% of it is backwater theocratic shitworlds (with the theocratic part immensely resembling the christian realism) based verbatim on various stages of development of real world Earth and i’m absolutely sure they managed to cramp mysogyny in addition to the “everyone is suitable to die in combat and be ground into food for the starving populace.” And indeed in the books there is plenty of that, just usually not in the very front of PoV, but in background.
The closest to a good faction 40k has are the Tau, even after the decision to give them a caste system and some vague notion that the ethereals are using pheromones or some shit to rule over their society.
There were traces of that from the beginning, but it was also implied that it was actually nothing and the Imperium was seeing things that weren’t there because they’re ideologically incapable of conceiving of a functioning society, but we know how media literate people who treat lore like encyclopedia facts tend to be.
I’ve only recently gotten a bit into WH through lore videos while I’m going to sleep so my knowledge is pretty superficial.
The Tau are hopebright and good and everything bad about this is Imperial propaganda and the Smurf players can just cope and seethe about it. For the greater good!
The grimdark part of the Tau empire is that despite being very morally good, they’d still be completely wiped out if any of the other factions considered them a threat.
Also, while this is less confirmed, it’s also implied that the Tau’s belief in The Greater Good could eventually wind up creating a new warp god leading to the destruction of their civilization. The tau are the equivalent of a squadron of fresh recruits surrounded by entire armies of people who hate them. That’s why they still fit in the grimdark universe. They’re the plucky, good civilization with no real shot of surviving.
What kind of chaos god would they make? I wouldn’t be terribly opposed to a lord of altruism or comradery, though I don’t know too much about the Tau.
I wouldn’t be terribly opposed to a lord of altruism or comradery,
You fundamentally misunderstand the Tau. They’re not altruistic, they’re just the least-worst civilization. They’re closer to a space Roman Empire than they are to communism. They’ll conquer you, put you in a pseudo-slave caste, and collect taxes. They can only claim to be a lesser evil because every other civilization’s default response is genocide.
What kind of chaos god would they make?
Probably something to do with absolute control. The Greater Good is an authoritarian philosophy in which individual citizens don’t really have any rights. They have certain cultural freedoms of course, but no right to self-determination. For warp-sensitive races that believe in this philosophy, it would show up as a desire to dissolve the ego into the whole. This could create a god which seeks to create a galaxy wide hive-mind of sorts. A sort of warp based Tyranid empire composed of multiple races which would subject entire planets to experimentation for the greater good.
Ah yeah, that makes more sense. Fits the setting much better.
They’re practically nulls, how the heck would that work?
Yeah, but the humans and other races they seek to integrate into their society aren’t. They’d either have to do some necron-tier shit and destroy the souls of their citizens or they’d be at risk of humans creating a new chaos god.
Another option is they may decide that warp-sensitive races are too much of a risk to the galaxy and adopt a genocidal attitude for the greater good. That would be thematically appropriate for Warhammer 40k. A bad encounter with the effects of the warp leading to them abandoning their previous principles. Kinda like how the Horus Heresy affected the Imperium of Man.
Even then they colonize planets and give the choice of “join or die”. And if you join, you start at the bottom of their caste system at just a barely teeny tiny step above slavery.
The only good faction in 40k is Chaos, because they are hell bent on destroying the entire universe, and the entire universe clearly fucking needs to be destroyed because there’s no good anywhere in it.
Actually the Necrons are kinda good too, kinda sorta ish.
Yeah the original concept was supposed to be a utopian communist society and then they remembered its a grim dark setting and made them neolibs.
Utopian communists with a caste system…
I think that was something that was added later in their conceptualization before they decided to do away with the idealist and equitable society part, I assume because most Warhammer fans would have shit themselves in rage at the thought.
Smh, of course you liberals wouldn’t support the based Genestealer Cults and their AES (Actively Embodying Snackrifice)
Genestealers always be tryin’ to steal my toothbrush though so I don’t see how they’re the good guys
Pff ofc you’d take issue with that. One of the foundational tenets of Communism is sharing of the toothbrush. Plus, have you seem how many teeth our gene-comrades have? To each according to their needs!
Now face the biomass dissolving pool please.
Still wanna do a story where a Genestealer cult wins, but in the last battle with the Imperial forces their Patriarchy gets slagged and they somehow figure out what the Tyrannids really are, and now have to figure out what the fuck to do about the onrushing hive fleet that’s going to eat the revolution they worked so hard to win.
Have a small collection of GSC and that’s basically my army’s lore
It’s become easier to excuse since my dog ate my patriarch model
My only problem with femstodes is that they did not appeared earlier. Not a single mention in the HH. The addition is good, but that way it feels cheaply slapped on.
