Think about it - You’ve got a bunch of swole people who live on planets that are universally described as being pre-industrial at best, ie unlikely to have any kind of universal education. You’ve got the Imperium, which decided racism wasn’t racist enough and invented new kinds of higher-racism mathematics to be more racist. The Ogryns are already abhumans - Stable evolutionary offshoots of baseline humans, and the Imperium hates abhumans. Not enough to genocide them, but enough to severely discriminate them in a culture that is already ruthlessly oppressive.
So you’ve got people who stand out no matter where they go, who are loathed by society, who are believed by everyone other than themselves to be dumb brutes. Are they getting education? Are they getting taught to read and write? Would anyone even listen to them if they did have something to say? No, no, no.
So my conjecture is that Ogryns are probably just as smart as any other human population, and at most thousands of years of selection pressure have re-wired them to be competent at specific tasks they encounter on their home worlds, the same way baseline humans are wired for throwing stuff, following prey at a steady pace, and talking a lot. Maybe Ogryns are just really, really good at general purpose survival skills. Or maybe their language centers evolved in a way that favors terse, laconic statements. idk. But my point is; They could all be smart as hell and the Imperium would still dismiss them as dumb brutes.
This is all related to Darktide, of course, where the Orgyns are at least as smart as any of the other rejects.
You mean to tell me that in the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, they have uncharitable attitudes towards neurodivergence?
sidelong glance at the thousands of brain-different people thrown into a furnace daily to keep the emperor’s pants free of shit uh, no?
Also, everyone is a psyker. Think about it - The vet can just… see enemies through walls? And project where enemies are to their allies? The Ogyrn cannot be stopped except by major warp manifestations? The zealot can heal themselves through sheer violence? Idk about you but that sounds pretty psykic to me.
Those are mostly just normal things anything with a soul/warp presence can do: living things with a warp presence literally warp reality around themselves slightly, and extraordinarily fanatic belief can manifest in superhuman feats of durability, strength, awareness, etc. Very large numbers of people who are emotionally aligned in some way also have effects that match that: textually the collective misery and strife experienced in hive cities on a massive scale constitutes a threatening warp effect of its own that requires sanctioned psykers to manage and smooth out to prevent daemonic incursions from spontaneously occurring from all the literal bad vibes of the place.
Psykers are just that, but more by orders of magnitude. Where unwavering belief or strong emotion can have a minor effect for a normal human, psykers cause much larger effects, with the strongest psykers being the ones that do the really wild and extremely big stuff.
This is why pariahs cause such a negative effect on other people, even non-psykers: every human has a warp presence and is a little tuned into it just as their “normal,” but a pariah has a negative warp presence, like the complete inverse of a psyker, and they still the warp and create an unsettling absence that’s unpleasant for normal people and agonizing for psykers.
I think there’s also a bit of quasi magical stuff around the edges too that breaks this paradigm a little, like rituals or symbols of gods, great daemons, the Emperor, etc having their own, separate power because of their connection to other powerful things, like chaos runes and rites not necessarily needing a psyker to empower because they amplify and poison normal human warp presences, prayers to the Emperor actually bringing power that’s more than just the supplicant’s own strength of belief because whatever he began as he’s now a powerful warp entity in his own right, etc.
Also the vet is supposed to be using a fancy sensor device that detects enemies, like a combo thermal scope, metal detector, triangulating microphone array, sonar, and camera running a crude heuristic program that flags signatures that match things it’s been programmed to detect. It’s a bit more “stuff actually works” than some of the fluff, but is entirely in line with how someone like Dan Abnett writes imperial tech (that is, actually very good and cyberpunk level of effects, but in a bulky retro casing).
Oh shit oh fuck I did a diegetic essentialism.
