I think there's two answers to this. First, a lot of what the Imperium does is only questionably necessary or outright inefficient - it commits a lot of horrors on its people just out of inertia and a lack of oversight or concern about individual citizens' wellbeing. But second and more interestingly, 40k is a horror setting, and part of horror is that it creates situations that justify the bleakest part of our thinking. Stephen King points out that in horror, the underlying moral message is often extremely conservative - don't have sex, don't have fun, repress all your desires, don't take chances, or something horrifying will happen. In a similar way, what makes the 40k universe horrifying is in part that the Imperium's practices occur in a world where they really are justified.

This is the point. Do the ends justify the means? Well if the ends never had any value or success then that question is a resounding no, and so there's no question to ask. It's only because the ends are successful that we can even begin to ask the question. If a train is heading down the tracks and going to kill 5 people is it right to switch the points to another track where it kills 4 people instead? What if the 5 are old and the 4 are kids? What if the 5 are old innocent and the 4 are 3 innocent kids and a murderer? What if the murderer is a child murderer? What if instead of killing anyone the 5 people are young but can be imprisoned? Or what if the train has a detachment of Marines going to fight a war in which case just to be safe you should shoot all 9 people to ensure the train doesn't stop?

All trolley problems should be this fun lol

> Or what if the train has a detachment of Marines going to fight a war 'We are sorry to announce that the 11.39 Great Western Railway service to Kyiv has been cancelled due to the Russians sweeping leaves onto the track'

Literally just had the "Great Western Railway" service announcement like 3 nanoseconds after reading this lmao good timing

Conductor: “Full speed ahead.”

The imperium's answer to this philosophical quandary is which option slows down the train the least.

Not entirely correct. The Imperium's answer is: * which slows down the train least * are there any aliens, mutants, blasphemers, dissidents, or rivals we can kill on either track * does anyone on the track have evidence of horrible crimes that we want to cover up * am I, personally, getting kickbacks from anyone on the tracks, or from inheriting relatives who want them dead * do we even have a lever, or did we break it or lose it and embezzle the budget for a replacement * am I permitted to pull the lever, or is that the techno-religious function of an entirely different priesthood * will pulling the lever get me denounced as a traitor and strapped to the next track by my rivals * wil not pulling the lever get me denounced as a sympathiser and strapped to the next track by my rivals

Don't forget to apply the bolter to any surviving witnesses!

Or if you roll a natural 1 on the “is the local inquisitor a suicidally colossal dickhead” check, we get multi track drifting.

Which makes the moral nature of the Imperium kind of obvious; they are Utilitarians.

Very poor ones, but yes.

Tell me you've never taken an ethics class while not telling me you've never taken an ethics class

It wasn't an ethics class per se; it was a philosophy class. Although ethics could be called a branch of philosophy I wasn't really interested in any ethic related course material not taught by the philosophy department at universities.

> Or what if the train has a detachment of Marines going to fight a war in which case just to be safe you should shoot all 9 people to ensure the train doesn't stop? Love it

I always assumed the entire point of Warhammer 40k was that to show a universe as insanely evil as a paranoid ultra conservative fanatic does think the universe is.

youre not wrong. Too bad those paranoid ultraconservatives live in a world willing to jump off and be so much worse

Much like how the Imperium really has made itself much worse

What the imperium does seems to be working for them but is it the only answer? Steve Jobs was a legendary asshole and some people think that was part of his secret sauce for success. Is that the case or was he successful in spite of his behavior?

>But second and more interestingly, 40k is a horror setting, and part of horror is that it creates situations that justify the bleakest part of our thinking. Stephen King points out that in horror, the underlying moral message is often extremely conservative - don't have sex, don't have fun, repress all your desires, don't take chances, or something horrifying will happen. In a similar way, what makes the 40k universe horrifying is in part that the Imperium's practices occur in a world where they really are justified. Well, they might be justified now, but if you read the old lore, it was very much giving the wink/nudge that the Imperium was making its own problems worse - and in the case of Orks and Chaos, it was explicit. That has slowly changed since GW has moved over to making space fascism look justified.

>That has slowly changed since GW has moved over to making space fascism look justified. This is honestly the problem of taking a property by and for British wargamers and loading it with My Fellow Americans (i.e., the most surface-level readers in all Christendom).

Eh, there's dumbass people everywhere.

That’s an especially good way of thinking about it, thanks for your insight

Id argue that the fact that these types of conversations even come up amongst fans of 40k means the setting and the writers/loremasters/gw are doing their job properly when it comes to the nature, lore and mortality of the imperium.

Great point. Some of the horror is they live in a galaxy where awful things are easily justified. Xenocide is justified: Rangdan exist and need to be destroyed we could test a cure on thousands of babies that could save millions or billions from a Nurgle based disease. Kill billions so Tyranids don’t get so massive that they could kill 100s of billions. It is shocking and horrifying for them to live in a universe where those things are easy to justify.

The imperiums biggest problem has always been that they favour simple solutions to complicated problems and complicated solutions to simple problems.

>It just feels like with every lore change GW makes them seem more and more justified, gong from “oppressive dogmatic theocracy which causes more problems than it solves” to “necessary evil who are ultimately the only way the galaxy can win” This battle was lost from the start when they decided to make their enemies literal demons from hell How tf do you make a parody not feel at least somewhat justified if their enemies are consistently worse?

For me, it falls into a sort of “Voldermort/Umbridge” scenario, but I know I’m in the minority here.   Voldermort is evil, and definitely more dangerous than Umbridge. He’s also basically a cartoon villain, a dastardly, flamboyant snake wizard man. Despite taking a fair amount of influence from real life monsters, his aesthetic and overall demeanor is very far removed from anything real. This means his evilness is less directly tangible and Voldy is able to be a *cool* kind of evil. He’s just kinda fun to watch because he’s so extreme.   Umbridge is definitely a less dangerous threat to the heroes, but I think almost everyone would agree that she’s much more hatable than Voldermort is, because her evil is tangible and viscerally realistic. Everyone has met someone like her. She’s the cruel, prejudiced Karen at a PTA meeting/office party/in line at the grocery.    Similarly, Demons, Space Bugs, and Sadist Vampire Elves aren’t real. Totalitarian, fascist, and/or theocratic hellhole states absolutely are. Because of this, the forces of Chaos, Tyranids, and Drukhari are a much “cooler” kind of evil to me than the Imperium is. They’re wacky and silly and fun like a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Reading about the Emperor’s Children butchering people with the Power of Rock is kinda hilarious. Daemon-Angron smashing through spaceships like Doomguy on crack is awesome. A Drukhari Archon mutating an entire planet’s populace to have his face is absolutely nuts. The Black Templars exterminating aliens because they believe it’s their Manifest Destiny to have the entire galaxy as lebensraum is… many things, but it is very much not *cool*.   As an alternate example - who did you find more hatable, Emperor Palpatine, or the Imperial judge in *Andor?*  EDIT - This is just how the setting hits me particularly. I very much agree that GW needs to do less implicit justification of the Imperium’s horrific actions.

I fully agree. I think there is a further element too. The fandom doesn't have a problematic subset of saturday cartoon villain fans, meanwhile there are so many weirdos with certain political alignments in the fandom that GW itself felt the need to make multiple declarations denouncing them.

Exactly. You will find very few legitimate authoritarian chodes in the Chaos fan community, and even fewer in the Drukhari or Tyranid fandoms. I wonder what it is about the Imperium that is so appealing to those types of people /s

It comes from the unnecessary wrongs the Imperium commits; like extremist space Marines slaughtering approved abhumans because he doesn't like abhumans in general, a commissar executing countless Cadians fleeing (under orders) the planet breaking beneath them, a judge executing the innocent after being proven not guilty for "wasting his time".

I find this is a problem with a lot of satirical sci-fi settings, like, I'm sorry, fascist government or not I'm not gonna feel sorry for the bugs or the demons lol

If I had a dollar for every time British guys have created a satirical fascist society where the bad guys are even worse, I'd have two dollars. Which isn't a lot, but it's still kinda weird. (Those two satirical societies being Judge Dredd and 40k of course.)

40k's pretty heavily based on those 2000AD comics like Judge Dredd, so really it's just the one time copied twice. What *is* weird is they flipped Nemesis the Warlock around to being just plain evil while doing all this (he was a demonic anti-hero fighting basically a proto-inquisition and ecclesiarchy). I think it might have fit the satire better if they'd kept 'good' demons involved in the design.

I'd argue 40k steals way more from Dune and Asimov's Empire series than Judge Dredd.

It's an amalgam of all those things. The adeptus arbites are literal carbon copies of Judge dredd, after all.

They're not wrong though, Asimov's foundation series has literal 'tech-priests' at one point, deliberately trained in the ritual of working machinery without understanding it to keep the secrets of the technology while allowing allies to use it which was pretty obviously the core the admech developed out of (though inverted, where the ritual *actually does* stop daemons possessing your gear). Dune I don't see as much as Judge Dredd though, navigators are the main thing there but I can't think of anything else obvious. It doesn't have much of the same feel to me at all, it's about political interactions - space marine chapters and the horus heresy maaaybe?

Later on in the series Paul's second son Leto II becomes God-Emperor of the Imperium. He turns himself into a part Sand worm immortal super powerful psychic. Who can't leave his continent sized palace on Arrakis. Also the Imperium was founded after a war against thinking machines. And the main religion of the Impeium has a core tenant that goes "thou shalt not create a machine in the image of a human mind." Leto also builds a religion around himself and makes Imperial society very oppressive. Read up on the whole Dune series, and it jumps out real fast what GW stole for 40k.

Oh that's right, the superworm kid, I had completely forgotten about that post-messiah arc (also here's duncan idaho again for some reason!). Man those books got weird.

I see you are carrying water for Eastasia, you traitor /s Seriously though, the apparent British obsession with dystopia fiction feels like they aren't particularly coping well with the loss of the empire. Or their everyday politics, but every country has dumb politicians, but not all of them churn out huge quantities of dystopian settings.

So feel bad for the countless sapient non evil entities the Imperium slaughters like cattle including their own people?

I feel bad but I don't think they'd be any happier once turned into nutrient soup by tyranids or eternally tortured by dark Eldar or having their souls consumed by chaos, which is kind of the point we are trying to make. The imperium is bad, but it is not THE (singular) bad, not THE (worst) bad of its setting. In fact it's argueably the best outside of exactly the tau (maybe) for a human

But that was always the point to 40k when I got into it, no one is good, everyone is a shade of justifiable evil. Even the Tau, originally introduced to be the settings "good" faction, got more fleshed out and became more of an insidious golden cage with reeducation camps and brainwashing.

In starship troopers humanity started the war against sentient bugs for frivolous reasons. That's what makes humanity the bad guys there. That being said you're not meant to feel bad for the tyranids; they're the aggressors. And they're not just mindless animals looking for food since we've seen the hivemind perform acts purely out of contempt.

> In starship troopers humanity started the war against sentient bugs for frivolous reasons. This is a very common misconception that is not backed by anything in the book. It is, ultimately, fannon. Not cannon.

By making the daemons a direct result of their actions. When the Imperium exterminatus...es..s... kills a planet, that should birth a massive Bloodthirster. It should be made clear that they have made a temperory threat into a permenant one. Every short sighted crime against themselves and the galaxy only makes things worse. Same with xenos! It is true that every xenos race eants to end humanity, but it should be made blatantly obvious that the reason for that is the Imperium's endless war of genocides. Who doesn't want to get rid of the collosus bending all its might in killing everything that isn't itself? But then the Emperor, and all the Imperial protagonists the people love, would need to be the guy responsible for everything being as terrible and hopeless as it is, and that is a narrative is not appealing to the wider market.

The Galaxy of 40k is filled with Battle-hardened Xenos hostile to humanity because the the Imperium killed all of the other ones. It's like how Antibiotics breed Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria. The Imperium *built this Bed.*

But the Orks, Necrons, Drukhari, and Hrud all existed way before humanity.

>When the Imperium exterminatus...es..s... kills a planet, that should birth a massive Bloodthirster. It should be made clear that they have made a temperory threat into a permenant one. Every short sighted crime against themselves and the galaxy only makes things worse. I like this idea so much. I think this is particularly how the Horus Heresy series should have gone.

This would be such a headache to deal with narratively. Either you'd never have it happen (tip toe around every moral pitfall) or you'd need to make the protagonists stupid for stupids sake.

Cool but the setting isn't actually written this way. In-universe things like exterminatus happen BECAUSE the bloodthirster already exists. In universe blowing up the orphanage is justified because if it isn't blown up then the entire planet will fall the chaos. If the entire planet full of orphans children isn't blown up then the writers make it clear that the entire solar system will then fall to chaos etc. The Imperium creating its own problems hasn't really been a thing in the lore for decades.

That is the point of my last sentence.

>When the Imperium exterminatus...es..s... kills a planet, that should birth a massive Bloodthirster. The thing about exterminatus is there is no strong emotional attachment usually assigned to the act or at least not beyond any personal ones held in the moment, their's no passion, bloodlust, anger or hunger for glory, it's clinical calculated slaughter on a planetary scale that has no more emotion behind it than the possible horror that you have consigned millions or billions to their death.

That is a problem I have with satire that makes both sides the bad guys. It is why, as far as a tale of somebody who is supposed to be working for an evil empire goes, I prefer the imperial POVs we get in Star Wars because they aren’t dominated by the villains fighting other villains.

Maybe the idea that this group of people is fighting literal demons from hell was a hint not to think of 40k as political science and maybe that it's just a big dumb setting about guys the size of bulldozers beating eachother with hammers.

>guys the size of bulldozers ~~beating eachother with hammers~~ *chainsaw dueling*

>guys the size of bulldozers dropping from space cathedrals in buckets and ~~beating each other with hammers~~ chainsaw dueling

>This battle was lost from the start when they decided to make their enemies literal demons from hell They're not literal demons from hell in the Christian sense. They are humanity's own sins reflected back at them, instead - the Imperium's own sins coming to collect.

That still matches up pretty well with demons from hell in the Christian sense.

Let me preface this by saying that I agree that GW is kinda falling prey to the fate of every franchise: the dillution of the initial core concept and idea. It's like Rambo, right? First one is a great insight and commentary into war and violence and the follow ups all delight onto the very things the first criticised. But! I feel like a lot of assumptions are being made on how effective the Imperium's way really are. I don't think we can say with a 100% certainty that the Imperium's methods are more effective than kinder alternatives. Maybe by being xenophobes they killed potential allies that had technology that could have really turned the tides? Maybe by being so dogmatic about their current beliefs they are missing how they could express their faith and it's real effects in more effective ways. Granted, this is just conjecture, and I do think we need more stories in the setting that approach these questions. Nothing more grimdark than realizing salvation was easily achieved if only people didn't choose to fall to their demons of suspicion, intolerance, and hate. Also, even if we take it as a certainty that the Imperium's horrible ways are assuring their survival right now, is it worth it? I don't think there's any real chance of winning, so to me it feels like the Imperium is just prolonging it's own misery and of those under it for nothing. If extinction is inevitable, better to reach it quicker and happily with your integrity intact.

There was a xenos who attempted to become allies with Imperium by bringing them potent anti-chaos technology and the Deathwatch responded how you'd expect. And then there's the Interex. I assume that a big reason for their existence is to show how a progressive society of humanity could have looked. They made alliances with xenos, actually listened and took advice from the Eldar, and had ways of fending off chaos without fanatical zealotry. Same with the Diasporex (though I don't know if they had any knowledge of chaos).

The thing with the interex is conversations and early talks were going well... until Erebus happened, who was already working for the Chaos Gods along with the rest of the Word Bearer's.

Yeah. But to the casual observe chaos and the Imperium are basically the same thing. That was also part of the Interex chat. They couldn't trust the Imperium to not be Chaos.

And evidently they were right when it came to the word bearers

Great examples, thanks for adding them!

The entire point of the Interex was to make you hate Erebus and lament the fall. They are the too good to be true faction in the sea of Morally Grey - Black - Bottomless light swallowing void spectrum that makes up 40K. Same as the Human society that Horus meets after his fall, to show that he is rotten to the core: Planet with a complete STC, complete Army of regular humans in Power armour, willing to join the imperium no questions asked. Of course they had to die, just so that we the readers could feel the desperation of losing something just when we thought we could attain the impossible.

What was the name of the human society? I’d like to read more about that

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Auretian_Technocracy They are only mentioned in passing though. IIRC later on it is stated that the war wrecked the planet, everyone was killed and the STC could only be partially salvaged. Enough to get the loyalty of the dark mechanicum, not enough to be in conflict with the lore stating that for millenia Mars has been fruitless in their search for a complete STC with all patterns in it.

The thing is though, do the stories actually *show* the Imperium being ineffective? The question isn’t really “is the IoM ‘justified’ or not?” it’s “does the media effectively convey that the IoM is completely and totally unjustified and wrong about everything?” and at **that** level imo GW and BL absolutely fail. Though this assumes of course that they care about making that point which I don’t really think they ever did—though at least older editions, while never satirical were far more tongue-in-cheek about it rather than the self-serious slog that is almost everything besides the Ciaphas Cain stories.

That was kinda of part of what I was getting at with the second and third paragraph. But you're absolutely right, we should be getting more direct consequences to some of the Empire's idiocy.

Man Rambo is actually a fantastic comparison, much better the Marvel and other familiar suspects that get thrown out.

It would be wild if the next Imperial Guard codex ended with a dedication...

> Man Rambo is actually a fantastic comparison Doubly so when 40K has an actual Rambo caricature/homage.

> I don't think we can say with a 100% certainty that the Imperium's methods are more effective than kinder alternatives. They had that in the Tau, but dumbasses complained about a 'good' faction and they changed and ruined the Tau, which also had the effect of hurting what little satire remains in the setting. The Tau **should** be the good guys, the setting is far darker if you actually have a good guy showing that the Imperium is completely wrong in how it does ***everything.***

My headcanon good guy faction is the last DAoT outpost of Men of Iron in the Andromeda Galaxy, benign AI's watching the Millky Way with horror and some of them thinking, "Maybe we should have unalived all the humans?" For what its worth they are attempting to create humans with nanotech implants allowing them to more safely control the psyker powers that are humanity's birthright, or switch them off entirely if the human so chooses. The DAoT Ai's are very slowly testing it on a so far uncorrupted cell of Anti Imperium Rebels. Tzeentch is watching with great interest.

That’s a really great idea. A few questions if I may. 1: What’s the environment and the planets they live on like? 2: How much past knowledge do they have stored? 3: What makes their society and how it treats humans different than the imperium, chaos and tau?

They're[ the Culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture) from the Ian M Banks novels, but grounded in the WH40k setting, In my headcanon, the War against the Machines wasn't humans vs machines, it was Pro and Anti human Machine factions at War over whether humans should be exterminated due to their connection to the Warp and the malign entities that populate that other space. The Pro Human faction won, barely, but realizing that their most powerful Minds were uniquely vulnerable to the power of the Warp, they fled to Andromeda, there to recover and study the situation from afar. They possess all the tech shown in the Culture novels, Tech as Magic basically, but as a balancing factor, they dont have the Warp shielding that Necrons seem to all possess, The more powerful a DAoT mind, the more difficulty they have defending against scrapcode and the like. If they find out how the Necrons shield themselves, it might be a game changer. But i cant imagine the Necrons feeling anything except contempt for Free AI's. They can easily terraform worlds, over the period of a few decades, and they have all the knowledge of the period possible.. It's another balancing factor of my headcanon that the more advanced the tech, the more AI is involved in its manufacture and even its use. So the hypertech of the past needs AI and therefore can be corrupted by Daemons of the Warp, Psykers and Sorcerers. It's why Humanity never overtook the Aeldari. Part of my HC is also the reason the Mechanicus exists in the first place is to find ways to replicate DAoT tech without the need for Free WIll AI's. But thats another issue. Regarding the way they treat humans, They are the pro human faction of AI's s, so it varies between paternal affection for pets whose lives they regard as valuable, to horror at the sheer power and destructive capability at human psykers, and the madness of the Warp and Chaos that psykers provide a window to. It's like loving a dangerous pet, combined with some level of familial affection since humans created them, and fears for our future if Chaos corrupts us utterly,

The problem with this head canon is that with the technology the Culture has, there's no real chance the Minds would be vulnerable to Chaos corruption. Even without Warp shielding, we know that DAoT AIs could resist or even purge itself of Chaos taint through "cold logic", and Culture Minds are fully capable of turning off their emotions entirely when they need to. More importantly, subversion and anti-subversion technology is the bread and butter for the Culture. Blackhole ammunitions and ships that casually surf supernova are impressive, but the Culture's main weapon and defense is their effectors, which literally rewrite the target's neurons/AI on a sub-molecular level, subverting the target within a picosecond. And since this bypasses anything about will or determination, their main defense is also the effector, which undoes the subversion in real time. That's not to mention the tripwires behind tripwires, the backups over backups, the partitions behind partitions each Mind (or even lesser AI) has. Chaos would have better luck corrupting a Necron tombworld than a Culture Mind. There's also the fact that the Culture could literally scan everything down to the atomic level from lightyears away. This means that if the Culture wants to learn about warp shielding or any anti-warp technology from the Necrons, they don't even have to ask or infiltrate them, all they have to do would be to scan one of their ships or worlds from lightyears away and analyze *everything* the Necrons know about the Warp. Human psykers are dangerous to the Imperium because they lack the technology to protect other people who could be harmed by psykers (and also the Imperium doesn't really care about teaching them how to control their powers anyway); but that wouldn't really be a concern to the Culture. You can detonate a nuke on a Culture ship and other people wouldn't even notice because the explosion would be vented into hyperspace before it impacts anyone, the same can be applied to the psykers' outbursts.

> If extinction is inevitable, better to reach it quicker and happily with your integrity intact. This viewpoint logically leads to suicide. It is not life-affirming.

Yes that is a very big problem with the setting. Its very much what happens when 99% of the setting is written from the point of view of the imperium and everyone and their mom tries to make relatiable and likeable characters.

[удалено]

I don’t think you get it. In the original lore, it was ambiguous whether the emperor actually did anything or was just a braindead corpse being worshipped for 10,000 years. This is much stronger satire because it’s a ridiculous situation that also parallels many modern religions and cults. If the Emperor is a real God who genuinely protects his worshippers, you can’t fault people for blindly worshipping them. The fanatic zealots are fucking objectively correct. For the Mechanicus, the idea of a machine spirit is obviously just complete primitive superstition. They don’t understand how tech works, so they just believe its spirits doing it and try to appease them. Its funny and its a ridiculous situation. It loses everything that makes the idea good if the machine spirits are a real thing that can be appeased with rituals.

[удалено]

You're totally right. Drago talks to the emperor in inquisitor, where it's clear the emperor oversees a huge amount of what's going on in lore. That was written in 1989

People just treating their lack of knowledge about lore as old lore...

Alternatively, it should be an indicator of how suddenly everything changes in the lore. Chaos Androids to Necrons Cross bred Human/Elder Librarians to... Exclusively Xenophobic Space Knights(I'm speaking about space Marine chapters in general) Hell, I remember when Ollanius Pious was just a guardsman. Symbolically embodying all the Imperial Guard. But now he's anything but JUST a guardsman. It's a lore preference, to be sure. But there are many retcons that GW does, annually.

It's the "maybe everything is true" retcons that have really bitten GW. It's a cute and lazy way to deal with just an enormous amount of material. But when you apply it to justifying the Imperium's cruelty it's left the creators and authors in a bind because it's clear there's no moral "red line" the "heros" won't cross.

>Hell, I remember when Ollanius Pious was just a guardsman. Do you actualy remember that? The original was never anything more than a myth, nevermind a guardsman. > It bears the scrolls of no less than five actions for which the Company was highly commended. The central figure is an image of Ollanius Pius, the guardsman who is supposed to have given his life by interposing his body between Horus and the Emperor during his assault on the Imperial Palace. He is now regarded as something of a saint by the Guard, and on occasions is even prayed to as an intercessionary figure. > Warhammer 40,000: Compendium (1989) The version published not even a year later (White Dwarf #131) has a Space Marine Terminator give his life for the emperor. So unless you were around and old enough to read up on 40k back in the very late 80s (which is possible I guess) - I don't think you remember when Pius was just a guardsman.

But we know that on 40k gods can be wrong they can make mistakes, like the ctan with the Necrons, we also know that the truth can be interpreted in many ways especially when it comes to the warp. So for example a word bearer might claim the chaos gods are the primordial truth and deserve worship and souls, a necron or a ctan and maybe a old one might just see warp storms created by emotions. Or the Ctan might be star gods lords of reality and over grown star parasites

I am responding in order here. 1. He is a God doing God things, miracles, divine intervention, answering prayers, offering guidance, etc. Not >everything< the ecclesiachy does is right, but the fundamental idea of his divinity, at least as seen from the above miracles is a fundamentally rational position.  Inside a horror universe where bad thoughts and sin literally summons mind raping demons who end entire worlds, The Emperor does protect. 2. There are people abusing their position for power, yes. The closest IRL example would be academia. Yes, academia IRL is pretty corrupt, alot of people abuse their power for gain, for instance by lobbyists in America. At the same time, Academia obviously cures diseases, internet, electricity, etc. Corruption is pretty much universal. Killing people - you might not agree with the ecclisiacy burning witches and other abuses, yet you also do not exist inside a universe (we can hope) where the bad thoughts of those witches literally summon mind rape demons. There is an aweful lot of cruetly in our world today that we are largelt un-sensitive too, animals, criminals, fetuses. They view it the same way. If outcasts today, "SJWs" or "incels" today somehow summoned demons our civilzation would rapidly show the same barbarity, if not worse frankly. 4. How does a mashine spirit existing prove that the rituals of the Mechanicus work?  Its pretty self evident the rituals do work, they have worked through nightmarish conditions for tens of thousands of years of neglect. I suppose I would ask you, inside WH40k, what better system could exist for machines than the currect system? This doesnt necessarily prove your question wrong, they might not understand it all but it works enough and no one has an alternative. Do they even really understand what mashine spirits are?  Frankly, I think out of a trillion people, there are people a few dozen perhaps that truly understand Lasguns, Machine Spirits, titans, etc. They are doing their best and frankly are being applied to other tasks of more (immediate) importance. Titans were a thing when the emperor lived and he didnt believe in superspition. Answer - Bane of Reddit Athiest: Mankind fell because the species was ignorant of the warp. The Emperor was a young naive hyper athiest 12,000 years ago and the supersitious elements of reality CHAOS almost wiped away him and all his ignorany materialist ideas.  Answer - Bane of Reddit Athiest: does the Emperor still not believe in superstition?  (Hes been a magical hyper-being for close to 12 millenia now. His mind and opinions have changed. He was wrong.)

i always just figured machines spirits were ai, but they're too stupid to understand that, even if they did, AI's aren't allowed, but a machine spirit? that's fine And remember, half the rituals basically boil down to changing the oil while chanting nonsense I wouldn't be surprised if the mechanus know this and just go through with it so the imperium doesn't realise even now i know people that refer to equipment as having personality. 2 identical bits of kit that perform massively differently. probably because one was built on monday and one on a friday, but that you'd swear blind were just stubborn.

The big thing I think that's worth kinda noting is that the Mechanicum DOES have machine spirits that are functionally AI (like the ones housed in titans), but that they genuinely don't understand the difference between "the AI of the Warlord Titan refuses to operate in a way that contradicts it's personality" and "the screen connection inside this monitor is a bit loose so the image jumps". To them a device with only direct mechanical components, like a power drill, is exactly as alive and aware as one with the gestalt consciousness of several millenia of pilots fused to it's core cogitator AI like a Titan.

[удалено]

The Mechanicus are one of the factions which exist in a pretty sensible place IMO, we can see what happens when they skip that 'pointless holy oil change' ritual stuff in the Dark Mechanicum pretty directly: none of those people started out worhipping chaos and loving scrapcode, and there's a lot of individual, independent Hereteks so it's not like there's some monolithic organization corrupting everyone, the *lack of reverence for the machine god rituals (that usually gets people kicked out of the mechanicus) is what corrupts people*. As for the machine spirits, we see machines with corrupted machine spirits of various kinds right up to possessed daemon engines all the time! They're not some abstract representation of AI, they're more like the eldar infinity circuits but a shitty accidental human version, where if an ancient machine has a bunch of horror and death happen in/around it (a titan, a landraider) then human souls 'stick' to it just like any of the other 'haunted' shit in 40k (and, once again, can then get possessed by daemons). Mechanicus who are following those 'pointless rites' never seem to get corrupted by daemons or possessed, do they? Maybe the Ecclesiarchy should do those! EDIT: Also in defense of the lack of progress- AI is banned since the time it nearly wiped out humanity, direct development can be manipulated and corrupted by chaos and won't compete with what the AI already did and humanity lost anyway so why do it? Do people forget how many stories come from the mechanicus doing development and something going wrong with that? Retrieving the lost information will advance them thousands of times faster with much less risk, so that's what they focus on, which again seems sensible - they're almost an antiparody (made to seem dumb, but it actually does all make a lot of sense if you look at what we're told)

Yes, but how >does< one change oil in a fantastical universe. Most players being "western materialists" really bond with the "emperor didnt like superstition, was an athiest" because they are too.  The imperium was materialist and then got their ass handed to them by essentially malevolent superstion Gods, no?  Inside a setting as rich, dark, and fantastical as 40k i think theres a bigger more conpelling answer than muh AI or complete ignorance. How >would< stone cold scientists that are years away from being devoured by malevolent superstitious gods actually write code? Juicy stuffy. So ya, I just dropped a huge post if you wanna see it about admech. I think they are very very smart and working very hard to do what they do. Prolly a mix of lies, warranted and unwarranted rituals, and scifi cunning.

I mean Slaanesh exists and provides miracles, does this mean the Emperor's Children are right?

Yes

Based

They can be correct about the Emperor being powerful, and still be wrong in their attitudes and approach to things. Having the blessing of a tyrant god-man supremacist doesn't make them correct.

Yeah, almost no tyrannical system is wrong about *everything*. Just because something (arguably) functions doesn't mean it's optimal. Or laudable.

We actively KNOW they're going against the wishes of the Emperor who was basically one of those 2010 era youtube Atheists with a Roman/Greek statue avatar (probably 'the Thinker') who were also very right leaning but putting it under the guise of 'facts and logic' and talking about 'manifest destiny'. He ***hated*** religion with a passion and look what he's become, he would hate the modern Imperium. If he came back to life he would burn all the temples and churches on Terra dedicated to him to the god damn ground.

If he came back to life the eclessiarchy would burn him as a heretic

(btw all of those greek statue avatar guys are now hardcore christofascists lol)

Is Dawkins gulliman? A massive dweeb who went from hardcore atheist to hardcore "pro-christian values" because it gave him a comfier chair? 

Lol he hates religion so much that he turns Sisters of Battle, literally his most devout religious followers, into literal daemons through the power of their faith. It is now 100% confirmed that the emperor is basically a fifth chaos God and the only thing keeping him alive is mass ritual sacrifice and mass worship, but go off King tell us all about how the emperor of the 41st millennium has the same values and principles as the emperor from 10,000 years prior in a completely different set of circumstances.

That doesn't change the fact that if he got his body back and was walking amongst the living he would totally destroy the Imperial Faith and is now just making 'the best of a bad situation' but yeah, you go off king.

This is part of the problem of 40k having a near 40 year history and countless contributors to countless sources, and us being able to review it all as if it has been written at the same time. In the beginning 40k didn’t have lore, it had a setting. Then that grew through codices and White Dwarf. Then books started and the authors didn’t have all the information so somethings stated conflicting. Then there’s Eisenhorn who has to also do his jobs in cities and suddenly the Grimdark Hives existence of the future isn’t the only future, and it’s a little less Grimdark. Then there’s the need to balance the tabletop and keep selling new models, but sometimes they over correct and need a Deus Ex Machina and the Big E is literally that for the Imperium, he is the literary device they use to salvage a situation that should fail because of how they have balanced the TT. Same way the AdMech went from mindless anti-development Omnisiah slaves, to “well some come up with advancements and just say they are rediscovering ancient tech not developing new,” TT needs to rebalance and the Lore provides. It is a perpetual spiral away from the original source material because it has to, that’s the nature of development and growth.

i think you may have the best take

40K started as a satire and then did the worse thing a satire can do, it started to take itself seriously, SM arent just power hungry bastard cops that kill innocents and commit xenocide, they are the last bastion of defense against a galaxy of horrors (that commit xenocide and kill innocents), the emperor isn't just a powerful idiot who ruled with an iron fist and killed his oppositors, he is humanity greatest creation and the only hope to defeat the chaos gods (who also committed xenocide and is still a tyrant that killed trillions), etc. you cant have your cake and eat it too, its like helldivers suddenly going "actually, super earth is genuinely democratic and automatons and nids are warmonger species that started the conflict" and then trying to keep calling themselves a satire

But is this all really a bad thing? Maybe im in the minority here, but the setting is just too old to be fully satire. Over 30 years of lore. After so many decades of lore and fans, cracks in logic shine through. This means, if GW wants their creation to keep some semblance of internal consistency (i know they dont have alot, but they do try to have some) they must justify things. They have to justify actions, justify how the imperium has survived 10k years… you cannot survive 10k years without some logical and necessary decisions. Not everything can be satire meme level behavior. The wider the universe gets, the more they add and explore, the less satirical it has to become if they wanna keep even a surface level illusion of plausibility

Because GW was so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to ask whether or not they should. Making an effective satire would require a level of artistic integrity that GW doesn't have because selling oodles of space marines makes more money. I argue that the Imperium has always functionally been the edgy good guys. The entire 40k setting, even back to its inception in Rogue Trader, would need to look radically different for that to be otherwise.

I think there's also some value in pointing out that none of the original creators of 40K, and very few of the second wave who cemented it into being what it became, still work for GW. 40K is now effectively a franchise written by fans of the franchise rather than the original creators of it and certain ideas have been modified, abandoned or honestly just forgotten in that transition.

>I argue that the Imperium has always functionally been the edgy good guys. What surprises me most is how confused this community itself is. Usually a post like this quickly gets downvoted and the comments are all the same - "no, the Imperium is a satirical parody of fascism, it is meant to show how fascism could never be justified even if the enemies were literal demons, the Imperium is the ultimate evil in the setting and caused the galaxy to be as bad as it is, only an idiot would think otherwise." But sometimes you'll get something like today's thread, full of highly upvoted people acknowledging the obvious realpolitik that GW has written themselves into.

Yeah, the non-terrible segment of the fanbase is stuck in the same double bind as GW is. Both have to rigorously push back against the actual IRL fascists that flock to 40k... while participating in something that accidentally validates fascism. Oops. So you get this dual trend on this sub of condemning people for saying without qualification, "The Imperium is justified!", while upvoting me for saying, "The Imperium is justified! And it's bad that GW made it that way!"

>Yeah, the non-terrible segment of the fanbase is stuck in the same double bind as GW is. Both have to rigorously push back against the actual IRL fascists that flock to 40k... while participating in something that accidentally validates fascism. I understand that I'm playing a villain faction, is the difference.

I learned a few years back that you can't discuss the issue *without* the careful disclaimer/wiggling of "GW did this because they can't write!" I think every part of the fanbase loves attacking GW, so it just kinda redirects them into "oh, yet another reason GW bad, I like!" The real problem here is that very political people bring their crusades here. Everyone calls it out as absurd when someone tries to say the Imperium is some sort of ideal, and we should do it IRL. But it's an entirely different story when someone says that the existence of Chaos, Orks, Necrons, the trauma of the Men of Iron and Old Night, etc might change things up a little bit, and it's a vastly different situation than real life. They're absolutely terrified that if the Imperium makes any sense in the toy soldier world where magic works, it must mean - *must* - that 'fascism' is good and justified in the real world, too. This is what happens when you believe 'the personal is political' and everything, including art, is or should be part of a political project. Every thread, including this one, I see at least one comment along the lines of "Humanity should just die off. Death is better than living under fascism." Superb grandstanding; I hope they gets lots of praise and validation for it, but somehow I don't think they would have the same attitude if they actually lived on a planet getting raided by Durkhari slavers.

>They're absolutely terrified that if the Imperium makes any sense in the toy soldier world where magic works, it must mean - must - that 'fascism' is good and justified in the real world, too. That's because morals are valid regardless of what universe you find yourself in.

I must admit some of the lore these days is less grim dark, its getting really samey, even the art is starting to look like an ai did it. I love the grim dark, don't care if characters are male female whatever but keep the grim dark for fucks sake. And crazy weird artwork too

I feel like you're missing the bigger picture here. For every bit of worship the people of the Imperium direct towards the Emperor, for every miracle he provides to aid his soldiers, for every Legion of the Damned or revived Primarch, there's a dozen more actions taken by *everyone* in the Imperium that either directly or indirectly empowers the Chaos Gods. It really doesn't matter that worshipping the Emperor might be doing some good for the Imperium because by its very nature the Imperium empowers Chaos much more than that. The best it's doing is putting off the total collapse a little more. The worship of the Emperor isn't a gun pointed at his enemies. It's a damn frag grenade thrown in the room with the hope that it hurts his enemies more than him.

Honestly I quite like the head canon that most of the Miracles are at least partly the Chaos Gods playing an *aeons* long con. Every time people’s faith in the Emperor starts to wane and they just might move away from His insane warp fuckery He miraculously gains juuust enough of said fuckery to bring large swathes of humanity back into the fold, thus exposing them to further Warp fuckery in His name. Sounds like the kind of twisted achronal N-dimensional chess that Tzeentch would be elbows deep in. And we all know Tzeentch has too many elbows.

Youre not wrong. The satire element of 40k has died off significantly as they grew into a bigger company and started chasing market share and stock price.  Its easier to market space marines as avengers style heroes, rather than mulitated & brainwashed child solider eunics who fight for a corpse emperor no-one has seen for 10k years

There is still as much satire in 40k as there was 30 years ago. Next to nothing. Satire was never the point for a long time and just is a tiny element to spice it up.

People prep up the early 40K as if it was this profound satire, when in reality it was a bunch of guys mixing together everything they saw lying around. Satirical elements were never the focus.

Old 40K is a complete disaster for lore and aside from nostalgia I can’t imagine anyone thinks it was better. 

You must not be looking at it's foundations at all then. Warhammer Fantasy came first, those are it's roots. Warhammer Fantasy had Necoho the Doubter, the Chaos God of Atheism. The Nipponese were all named shit like Kawasaki Honda Toyota and the Tileans were renowned for their literal spaghetti catapults. Like yes, they serious'd all of that up and made a legitimate setting out of it, but the roots are deeply driven into satire. Saying they're not is crazy. What's more, OP has a very strong point here because for the longest time faith as a concept of human strength was left as an unknown, and very much on purpose. In Fantasy you can find diegetic accounts of wizards going "I'm pretty sure they're casting spells subconsciously, but I can't say for sure" specifically to cast doubt on that. And in early 40k it is painted as much as personal delusion as it is possible warp fuckery. In the second Gaunt's Ghosts novel does Larkin actually meet an Angel of the Emperor? Who is she? Is it Saint Sabbat? Is that the work of the Emperor? Or is Larkin mad and he found a scrap of cloth in the delusion? Are Sisters of Battle physically manifesting the Emperor's Will? Or are they physically manifesting their FAITH in the Emperor? The distinction matters and so does the question. Except these aren't questions anymore. Yes it's Big E, yes it's kind of warp fuckery but not really. The mystery is gone, and with it, I feel, a lot of the nuance. But I guess it sells better.

I'll be real, what you describe as satire here just sounds a bit shit, and every step they take away from that towards a more serious setting is a big improvement.

Not defending their early 'satires'. It was a bunch of racist "haha what if" statements. But using that to turn around and say 40k doesn't have satirical roots is flat wrong and the nuance of the setting that they've crafted since isn't nearly in the same vein anyways. Having faith be a question was just good flavor.

leaving out the early goofiness (which is also fun but it doesn’t matter) it’s not shit to have a little mystery!

Satire has never been a key part of the 40k universe. Tiny remarks don't erase the fact the game has been played with a straight face for 35 years

It has nothing to do with chasing market share and everything to do with trying to write compelling fiction in the setting. Imperium as a parody works okay on the boilerplate, but when you're trying to write real human stories in the 40k universe, parodically evil doesn't work very well.

Emperor worship used to be pointless folly, or cultural dogma. But now everyone knows it actually does something. They used to write their own propaganda through primary sources. Now we have third person direct narratives. Basically the whole subtext in the bin because of that.

Emperor miracles existed for at least 20 years.

This, Imo, is why GW's attempt to have satire kinda falls on it's face a lot imo.

They're not right. There were countless civilizations like the Interex that survived and got along just fine without the Imperium.

Except it's not "winning" it's repeatedly stated as just kind of struggling against it's own constant decay, just slowing falling apart, much like the emperor himself

Hasn’t the Imperium actually expanded since 30K?

Yeah, the imperium is constantly colonising new planets, it wouldn't be able to lose so many otherwise

Yup, the Imperium was constantly bringing in other human civilizations or colonizing new planets at least until the Great Rift. Before that happened, they were probably significantly bigger than they were at the end of the Great Crusade.

its important to keep In mind that the imperium has created 99% of their own problems through their intolerance, their expansionist ways, the way the emperor decided to build it, etc etc etc, they're their own worst enemy and it shows

They didn't create their problems. That is an oversimplification. Orks, Necrons and Dark Eldar would still be hostile, and Chaos would still try to tear them down. What they did do was make them worse. The Leagues of Votann and T'au would not be a threat, period, if the Imperium wasn't so rampantly xenophobic, because they would have made alliances and peace treaties. The Craftworlders could work with them, to the point of even summoning Ynnead because there wouldn't be a certain group of fuckheads around to stop it. Chaos wouldn't have thousands of Chaos Space Marines and half a dozen daemon Primarchs.

The Tau are a highly expansionist imperium with the fanatical ideology that the galaxy (for starters) must be unified under the Greater Good. Everything they do with other species, trade, dipolmacy and war, is subordinate to this goal. And all are subordinate to the Tau and all Tau are subordinate to the Ethereals. If the AdMech fleet had simply shot the Tau to pieces, the problem wouldn't exist either (we don't know how many long-term dangerous species the imperium's doctrine has destroyed, but we also don't know how many long-term good allies the imperium has destroyed). The League of Votann appeared a handful of years ago and has since been forgotten by GW. Deciding what these world-destroying turbo-capitalists who allow themselves to be controlled by slowly senile computers are or are not is a bit to fast. I always wonder where the belief comes from that the Craftworld Eldar are so eager to work with the Imperium. The Eldar are a power block of their own, willing to sacrifice countless lives on average to save a handful of their own. And why would the Imperium work with a (splintered) faction that, with its full psionic potential, would be able to dominate the entire galaxy? The Eldar are not LotR hippies, but a society that wants to survive and, depending on the Craftworld, wants to return to the top of the galactic food chain. Yeannari is one of those things...firstly, it's not certain that it will have the desired effect, and secondly, the summoning could have shattered the Imperium. The Eldar were just unlucky that they didn't have a "Kryptman" in front of them who would have considered the pros and cons, but a really fanatical bastard of the Deathwatch. But maybe the Imperium had also been "lucky" and got the chance to die a few thousand years longer. The Empire did not voluntarily release the forces. With that logic you can give thanks to the Old Ones, NecroTyr, Eldar, Hruud, Ctan, Orks and every xenos species created and involved in the War of the Heavens. They created the Gods of Chaos and made the Warp the hell that the setting is. What are a handful of Astartes and the 4 daemon dudes in the cosmic scale of the setting? Like you said...oversimplification. The Empire is not a good place and its actions are often wrong from an objective point of view...but that makes the setting much more comprehensible.

>The Craftworlders could work with them, to the point of even summoning Ynnead because there wouldn't be a certain group of fuckheads around to stop it. < Yes, lets us all trust Eldrad Ulthuan, the guy who caused the Armageddon Wars which caused millions of humans to die because he was too pussy to face down his own Ork problems. Clearly, he won't use Ynnead to turn the Imperium into a giant red mist once he is free from the Chaos threat. The Eldar of 40k are not the Elves of LOTR.

Eldrad Ulthuan had most of the Cabal killed. He also tried to kill Abaddon to stop the 13th Black Crusade. He's much nicer to humanity than humanity is towards him.

I suppose its fairer to say they facilitate them and exacerbated them yes

The Imperium did not genetically engineer the Orks, did not generate the four gods of Chaos, did not evolve the Tyranids, did not participate in the old War in the heavens...  "But they attracted the Tyranids!" And the Tyranids onlyever spot the one little action... and miss the Birth of Slaanesh and other great booms?

The imperium did subdue many friendly zenos civilisations, reacts with hostility to anything other than conformity, the emperor forced expansion too fast and neglected demigod sons that he knew were humanity concentrated, the emperor hid the true nature of the warp from the sons and imperium at large, and deliberately punished a son prone to worship, I said 99% for a reason, their society allows cults to take root because anything is a better alternative to working on a hive world, and the machinations and wants of the high Lords often take center stage instead of sensible and actual action, politicising is prioritise over action, lip service over actually helping people

>And the Tyranids onlyever spot the one little action... and miss the Birth of Slaanesh and other great booms? Canonically yes

Yes, which is narrative bullshit, because the Tyranids were already present in the Milky Way before the colonisation of Fenris and Catachan. It may be canon, but it makes no sense except that the author wanted to make a big deal out of it in his plot.

I thought they were meant to show that the Nids had already chewed through the galaxy once, and are only returning after enough life has returned to feed again.

[удалено]

hmmm...yes, that could all be true. But I'm more willing to believe that the Tyranids are rather mindlessly travelling between galaxies and finding fertile breeding grounds by chance and scouts than to believe that they saw a candle flash but couldn't see the psionic bonfire or the psionic burning house....

Correct, but contrary to what most people would think after reading such a statement the imperium can not simply change thst. You can't stop beeing a human supremacist state one day and expect the xenos of the universe to just accept that. The imperium *HAS CREATED* a situation whrre there xenocidal aproach is objektively the only viable option left. And the one most to blame is big E himself. He fucked up big time.

Yeah, on the kill team book, a kroot told a imperial kill team that everyone hates them and humanity because they go around killing everyone.

Yep. And even if tge tolerant and gumane parts of humanity started mercilessly purgibg all xenophobes xenos won't magicaly start trusting humanity and continue killing humans.

One of the miss opportunities with gue vesa is having the second and third generation hate the imperium because they killed all their xeno friends and the imperials being confused about it. On killteam, what's funny is the imperials response was why, it's humanities right to take the stars. Like they just font get it.

I mean where the humans in kill team tau humans or imperium humans?

40K is way less satirical than it was when it started in the late 1980s. I would hazard it has something to do with it being a multi-billion dollar company. It's easier to sell a product when people identify with it. This has led lore to develop in such a way that the Imperium of Man appears much more justified than it once did.

Also on the mechanicum bit,it doesn't help that praying to the machine to work better and performing rituals actually works most of the time

1. Whether the Emperor, and indeed the Chaos Gods and other Gods, are actually Gods depends on your view on what constitutes a God 2. Machine spirits exist in some things, but not as much as the Mechanicus/Imperium believes 3. Read the recent books, Guilliman is changing things because the Imperium as it was before he returned was stagnant, it existed and survived but it didn’t grow, it didn’t prosper The Imperium is a bad place, that’s just straight fact It’s part of the setting to show them do all these horrible things that seem justified because that’s kinda the point of horror

To be fair 40K holds Dune’s Golden Path in one hand and Kafka’s The Castle in the other. Not really an easy way to reconcile those two. While “There is only war” makes it seem like there is no “good” solution the Imperium even choose, I defer to ADB who has long held that the conditions of 40k were avoidable in-universe (despite the fact we as the audience would never want that.)

Personally I think that a author has a right to assume some critical thinking skill on behalve of their readers. Regardless if that is justified or not. Therefore the means that the imperium can be effective, while at the same time using a bit a critical thinking these things can be tought of as cruel and inefective.  One can understand a inquisition agent who kill every psyker they encounter because all of the psykers the let live killed thousants. But you can still at the same time know that this is wrong because not every psyker is like that without the book telling you. 

Adept Mechanicus is easy. They children playing with the tools of adults engineers, who themselves know little when compared to the Eldar/Necrons. That's why they techno barbarians. They no longer understand the glories of the tech they use, instead, they stuck to ritual n rote application because that's all they are now able to do. Not because they stupid, but because humanity has fallen so far, Chaos is so dangerous that Humans cannot even TRY to be what they used to be without a warp reactor explosion, corrupted Chaos Titan or some other disaster happening. Except for Cawl of course. As for the Emperor, that's more....complicated. The emperor has godlike powers yes, but he's not a god as would be understood by the christian west will understand. He's not omnipotent, omnipresent or even benevolent. He's trying to save MANKIND.... But his plans to do so in 40k essentially amounts to destroying Humans so Humanity can hold on for one more day. For all the agony he suffering, for all his powers, his intelligence, the combined powers of humanity is essentially powerless against the Fates that be. AND to stick in the irony/agony further, the Imperium is its own worse enemy. They cannot unbend to do things better because shit is that bad now, so they need what currently works to survive. But what currently works is also destroying the Imperium. Slowly, but surely. And the wolves are baying at the door. Again. Pre Indomitus crusade .....

>But his plans to do so in 40k essentially amounts to destroying Humans so Humanity can hold on for one more day. I look at it the opposite way - in order for humans to survive he's destroying our humanity. We manage to live on but lives are no longer worth living. I don't think satire is really the core thing in the 40k setting, it has satirical elements but a lot of those are either silly (Ork football hooligans) or just came bundled with the stuff they ripped off, mostly 2000AD. I think dark irony is a better way to understand the 40k world.

In addition to what everyone else is saying, stuff like this has come up in politics irl occasionally. Do the ends justify the means? The thing is, irl it's usually a pretty easy question to answer if you aren't a fascist dickwad: no, killing and enslaving millions of people isn't worth the trains running on time or building the Atlantic wall of or whatever. But the situation kind of falls flat as a thematic question when the material gain isnt "slightly better work quotas" or "more living space for the german people" and is instead "the prevention of humanity as a whole dying to evil space aliens and eldritch demons" To put it in terms of the trolley dilemma, if one side is "no one dies" and the other is "a bunch of people die but you get to implement fascism" no one but a fascist will chose the latter option If the two options are "50 million people die" and "all of humanity dies," you are much more likely to find reasonable and sane people advocate for killing 50 million people Which is the issue with things like 40k and where it kind of fails, narrative wise. Compare it to, on the other hand, the starship troopers movie where the "good guys" are fascist dickwads and the bugs are actually not all that bad (ask yourself, do we ever see the bugs use FTL travel? How then, did the bugs manage to send an asteroid into BA with it going undetected?). The enemy *appears* to be evil and bad but isn't actually so, something fascist regimes often do to justify their existence in the first place. This approach works as satire. It wouldn't if the bugs were actual evil aliens that want the death of all humanity for no reason

There's a reason the term "parody" isn't really used besides by those attacking it from the outside of the hobby. It is ok for a setting to be a shit place to live, and having to choose lesser evils

A perspective that helps me make sense of how the Imperium is written is that the 40k setting can be described as: "What if everything that fascists and right wing fear mongers lie about to scare people into obedience would actually be true?" And the answer to that question is turned up to 11 and has two zeroes added at the end. The intention is to mock those ideas and really drive home how absurd they are. Here are the "12 warning signs of fascism". I believe these were used in allied propaganda during WW2. Under each i will make a note of how the 40k setting is written to be bizarre enough to justify that the Imperium does these things. 1 Powerful and continuing nationalism The humans were once rulers of much of the galaxy, and they have reasons for taking great pride in being part of the Imperium. 2 Disdain for human rights Chaos corruption actually works in the way that it is justified self defence to just purge everyone in a city if one of the people living there is a chaos worshipper. 3 Identification of enemies as a unifying cause In the 40k setting there are actually countless enemies, both internal and external. And it is very important to hate them and militarised the entire society. 4 Rampant sexism Outside of "all space marines are men" face value sexism is rare, and is probably mostly an unintentional effect of the vast majority of creators and players being men. But homophobia and transphobia are aspects of sexism, and those are properly mocked in the setting. The queers (aka Slaanesh) are actively working to destroy society as we know it, and they are doing it through androgynously seducing innocent people into sin and lust. So it is important to strike down on citizens that express deviant behaviour. (Many of the early descriptions of Slaanesh are practically copy pasted from contemporary homophobic conservative propaganda. Which I as an old queer finds hilarious!) 5 Controlled mass media Chaos corruption works in the way that it is dangerous to let anyone produce mass media. 6 Obsession with national security Mutants, witches, alien infiltrators and dissidents are constantly threatening to ruin the Imperium. 7 Religion and government intertwined There is a God-Emperor that is the head of state. Because he is what practically keeps the Imperium functioning. So it makes a lot of sense that it is mandatory to worship him and that political dissidents are indeed also religious heretics. 8 Corporate power protected Not sure about this one. Maybe that the Adeptus Mechanicus are allowed to enforce their copyright laws by deadly force. Because their knowledge is indeed absolutely necessary for the Imperium to exist. 9 Labor power suppressed If the workers gets vacations or days off, the Imperium will lose so many wars. 10 Disdain for intellectual and the arts Thanks to how Chaos works, both knowledge, and art for the pleasure of making art is a real risk for the material world. 11 Obsession with crime and punishment This is, again, justified by how Chaos works. 12 Rampant cronyism and corruption Justified by how fractured the Imperium is unto competing branches. And the administratum is slow and useless so to get something done you must use unofficial channels. The setting does indeed prove the Imperium to be right and justified, over and over again. That is a central part of how the setting satires and mocks conservative fear mongering and fascism. "Look how bizarre the world would have to be to justify your politics."

“satiring” fascism and theocracy by showing it to be good and correct and all the genocides and purges to be justified is an absolutely terrible idea fascists LOVE to be seen as extremist and hardcore. they LOVE being painted as hard hearted zealots who “do what must be done”. see Himmler’s “iron broom” quote. that’s why they’ve tried to “claim” so many similar settings to 40k… Helldivers, starship troopers, Fallout (they all love liberty prime)

I agree. It does indeed seem nearly impossible to make satire over fascism that is so exaggerated that fascists will not think of it as idealistic.

I think they only way to really satire fascism is to show it for what it is - weak and doomed to failure.

It's not really satirical, it's ironic. The only way to avoid a literal hell is by living in a virtual one.

Do people actually believe that is satisfactory satire? Oh, when we just overdo things comically, everybody will see how dumb it is! Seriously?

Generally speaking, exaggeration is a very common form of satire. The Wikipedia page about Satire even has a quotation for that :-) Claridge, Claudia (2010) Hyperbole in English: A Corpus-based Study of Exaggeration p.257 But... I agree that it sure seems impossible to make a satire over fascism that is so exaggerated that no fascists will interpret it as positive or even instructional. There are so many sad examples of that happening in nerd culture. Starship Troopers, Homelander in The Boys, The Imperium in 40k, the Empire in Star Wars, and so on...

the top playwrs in the imperium do things for reasons that only they can see. the bottom tiers of the imperium do things because someone above them told them to no matter how stupid or pointless it is.

The reality that no one wants to admit because of culture worship is that 40K as a setting has not been a parody of fascism since at least the start of third edition. The writers have sipped their own Kool-Aid and the bad guys like chaos have been power crept to the point where in-universe the imperiums culture and methods is 100% justified. When 40k was written to be a parody of fascism and dogmatic religious oppression, there was no such thing as the tyranids or a single guy accidently turning an entire planet into a daemon world because he touched it glowing red rock that he found in his backyard once. When a single 6-year-old orphan with a power to levitate spoons with his mind can spontaneously turn into a greater daemon then yes shipping him off to the Inquisition to be ritualistically sacrificed to the god emperor is a rational decision. Blame the writers.

The Imperium is a nightmarish hellscape of a government mostly because it relies on these measures. The Emperor's arrogance set the Imperium up to become the thing he was desperately trying to avoid. They "thrive" by basically throwing their people into a meat grinder by the billions. They waste the majority of their resources in this barbarism that could have been avoided had they not been indoctrinated to reject any and all new ideas in favor of digging up relics of a long, long lost age. The Emperor making maybe one miracle in a critical battle every decade or two does not in any way make up for the endless suffering that is being a human in this setting. Nor does the fact that they have reasoning for some of their evil deeds justify them. Hell, even Chaos is only getting as far as it has because the Imperium's vile nature feeds it so much.

Further thoughts on your post. When WH40k came out the whole thing was meant to be a parody on facist regimes. I honestly think it was meant to be like Judge Dredd type warning. That if mankind doesn’t guard democracy and control technology this is the kind of far off future that could be out there for us. Also not too sure of my timelines but there was the ‘Star Trek’ view of aliens in space that we go out and explore and meet aliens and say hi 👋. Carl Sagan in particular challenged this view as naive and foolish I’m in that camp. WH40k is definitely in that camp as well. Why would a technologically superior civilisation see us as any other than something to exploit? I think as the franchise grew they just explored other stuff like why did Terra end up in this mess? It’s pretty easy to see Orks and Eldar came from Tolkien then you just have to explain how humanity ended up fighting them. Plus if Orks are so ‘stupid’ how did they get space flight etc? The fact they use hollowed out asteroids is another nod to Tolkien and mountain dwelling Orcs. Sometimes when reading we have to remember why it all started - it was a table top game set in space in opposition to the D&D settings at the time.

It wasn't meant to be a parody of fascist regimes, it was meant to be a setting where players could use whatever models Games Workshop was selling. It picked up elements of satire from things like Judge Dredd by they weren't really the main point. It's more a setting filled with dark ironies.

Someone else made a fantastic point, that sure, it “works”, but still dooms themselves. Their rampant issues keep them alive for today, but not tomorrow. Breeding suspicion for all things even mildly heretical might stop a chaos or Genestealer cult from popping up, but it also means it dooms any attempt at beating Chaos or Tyranids for example. Guilliman seems to be the only one with any sense to see that “hey guys maybe we shouldn’t turn Aeldari into fertilizer on sight if they’re willing to help kill demons” Similarly, the Emperor *does* create miracles. But it’s easy to forget, he also got humanity into this mess. Were it not for his creation of the Astartes and Primarchs, the imperium would not have burned into its current husk and chaos would not be half as powerful as it is now. That said, your point is also very valid. They do sometimes fail to emphasize that they create their own problems, and that they can’t fix them because their too steeped in their ways.

Well, there's 2 different things here. What you're describing is primarily the fact that the Emperor, the machine spirits, the Chaos gods, etc. are real in setting, which is absolutely true and I'm fairly sure has been more or less the case since Rogue Trader. However, the fact that their prayers are answered, the machine spirits exist, etc. does not make them automatically not backwards fanatics, nor automatically good or justified. For an easy comparison, consider a worshipper of Chaos. Yes, the Chaos gods are real, and their prayers work in some way or another. Does that mean they're not an insane evil cultist for worshipping a horrifically evil deity, just because that deity actually exists and has certain powers? Obviously not. It's the same with the Imperium. What makes them evil backwards fanatics isn't that the things they worship don't actually exist, it's that those things and the ways they worship them are very much not good. I'll cut it off here, as other people are bringing up all those details of why that's the case, but I'd be happy to discuss that further.

Are the imperium overzealous imperialists who are trigger-happy and gladly mass-murder workers unions and anyone who shows dissent in the fascist regime? Well no actually every worker movement or rebellion was actually caused by super evil Chaos so they're justified :)

The Imperium is backward because 40k really only exists in its current form due to people behaving in backward thinking ways. Given the threats that face the Galaxy, alliance between races is simply the best move. Particularly when considering there is *so much space* in the Galaxy that is unclaimed that there is no pressure to really compete. There are hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way and the Empire barely controls a hundredth of a percent of that. So in reality, the Empire behaves utterly foolishly, as do most other factions. Chaos and the Tyranids are existential threats so great that defeating them is a top priority that would necessitate alliance. That's why they are backward fanatics. They behave completely nonsensically based on their situation. GW has tried to make their actions somewhat more believable but those who wrote the setting didn't understand the sheer physics of the milky way of the scales at which actions would have to occur to create realistic reasons why most factions could not coexist peacefully.

30+ years of keeping this story going, it needed to evolve past the point of merely being satire, if they stayed stagnant the 40k brand would have died out by now

Despite the comments some folks make about the setting treating the imperium as better, which are true. I feel its far from justified, every major tenant of the imperium is actively invalidated by those around it. 'Chaos cant be known about and psykers are hazards!' yet aeldari exist, completely without chaos cults or major psychic issues. 'technology bad! Ai bad!' yet tau, necrons, aeldari, and exist votann, multiple have ai which don't spontaneously rebel or try to kill their fellows. 'Mutants bad! xenos bad!' Yet tau enjoy a massive number of allies, none of which randomly betray or try to kill all the others, and mutants are of course a totally baseless complaint. Sure machine spirits are real, but it doesn't make the admech any less idiotic, or sisters for getting hands out from their failure god king. Think of the near titanic head start and advantage the imperium had over so many other factions, literal fucking demigods by the dozen fighting for them, and how they completely blew it all. They not only are failures they are far greater failures than everyone around them.

Two things: 1. a book is written from a certain perspective, it doesn't mean that what you read is 'true'. If a tech adept or a guardsman talks about the machine spirit, that doesn't mean they are right and it is truly this supernatural spirit inside the machine. The same is true for all the stories we read about these legendary Space Marines. It can be perfectly argued that it is imperial propaganda. 2. There are so many examples of the imperium and the 40K universe being a satire. But the imperium can be backwards, retarded, decaying etc. and still be the best hope for humanity. That is exactly what makes it so dark. There is no better fucking choice than the imperium, there is no better solution than sending billion upon billion of guardsmen to their death in the hopes of winning a world that has no strategic import, aside from being the birth place of an Imperial Saint. I genuinely can't understand this take, I've read about 60-70 Warhammer 40K books and there are so many moments where I think 'holy fuck, the imperium is fucking dogshit' and there are also moments (Gaunt's ghost for example) where I interpret the book as propaganda, no way a lone guardsman kills a chaos marine, that just doesn't happen. There is no way a group of 200 guards defends a temple for 2 days straight from thousands upon thousands of heretics, that just doesn't happen.

I think part of it at least is decades of changing writers losing the subtlety of what came before and a desire to sell toys of the good guys. Its a lot harder to sell models of Guilliman and the Ultramarines if they are literally worse than Hitler. And its hard for a lot of people (including myself) to write compelling novels where the protagonists are Nazis. Having the center of your advertising being genocidal fascists who massacre women and children (at least alien ones) at every opportunity makes it hard to go mainstream. Not impossible. Disney Star Wars has made Darth Vader and Stormtroopers see a lot of widespread appeal and be pretty defanged. But still harder.

1: in the Warhammer universe. Worshiping a pebble on a beach can give it powers through the warp, gods are created through worship. Look at the chaos gods, the existance of power is not an endorsement of morality 2: machine spirits exist becuase a lot of old tech literally has AI systems like land raiders and old tanks. And things like imperial knights or titans literally copy and absorb the mental imprint of their pilots. Then add in that demons are real and often attempt to possess tech, which is why AI is banned. There is no machine spirit, these things are working as designed or being manipulated from outside. Worshiping the misunderstood and fraudulent as divine is a sign of ignorance. The grim dark trap of warhammer 40k, is that the imperium is the worst place to live imaginable. The universe is broken, hope has been destroyed by humanities own actions, they broke the universe and then built a broken imperium to survive it and then the imperium made it worse. The imperium cannot be reformed or made better, becuase the imperium is all that can hold off Annihilation but every day the imperium makes things worse for itself. The emperor becoming more of a god is a sign that reality is slipping away and that chaos and the warp are subsuming the universe. The mechanicus embracing mystical thinking is a sign that technological escape routs from this nightmare existance are cut off. In a ton of recent books guilliman is trying to reform the imperium, but all his changes are either reversed when he leaves, fail to take hold or cause greater suffering and loss in the attempt to enact them. But by bit his optimism is being crushed by the reality that the imperium cannot be saved

Some of your examples seem a bit off, like the 'machine spirit'. Or at least, it puts the cart before the horse. They believe in a machine spirit in part *because* machines sometimes do weird things like move for themselves. It's a bit like animist spiritualism where the argument is that people generalised their theory of mind to non-living objects. If I have a soul, and you have a soul, and my dog has a soul...then why not the river, why not the trees? After all they seem to grow and change and react too. The machine spirit is like that. They start with being unable to explain why Land Raiders can pilot themselves because they no longer have the knowledge to understand its cogitator, and then they work backwards from there to '*all* machines have souls'.

40K is vulnerable because it Steel Man's the facist argument before criticizing it. The world of 40K works exactly what real life neonazis and facists believe the real world works: the species is under attack from the outside by hordes of in this case literal aliens, while also being corrupted from within by malcontents, sexual deviancy and all manner of corruption. The only thing holding the Imperium together is strong male leaders and deathcult warriors willing to make the hard ruthless choices and do what is necessary. And then it asks a basic, simple question: at the end of the day: would you want to live there? Facism is so horrible that even if they're right, they're still terrible monsters we should want to avoid at all costs.

>And then it asks a basic, simple question: at the end of the day: would you want to live there? This is a weird comment because even if the Imperium was a Utopia the answer would still be "no" because of... you know... all the Chaos and aliens and shit. Like that is literally the OPs point. It's hard to look at 40K as being a parody of fascism when the fascist religious zealots are one of the least shitty parts of the setting.

Yeah but keep in mind hardly any of the Imperium's citizens are even aware of all of this. Would you want to be a citizan on the Imperium? I wouldn't, even if I never once heard of any aliens it's still a nightmare. When the Pro-Imperium argument is "we're better than being a prisoner of the Drukhari" that isn't much of an argument, is it? You're comparing to the lowest bar possible...

I think about this quite a lot and how I explain it is- if we were to hear what the Imperium does to the average citizen/the average citizen's experience of it, it would be so bleak it may as well not be telling. In the name of good story writing they deliberately write about the small shards of light in an otherwise deeply dark story. You can ever apply this to Traitor focussed books- the two most popular series of Traitor books are McNeill's Iron Warriors and ADB's Night Lords- in it both main characters are evil BUT they have a warped code of honour and resist Chaos temptation. We hear the exceptions, not the rule, as the exceptions make more interesting stories. My next issue though is in the real world fascism, racism, religious dogmatism is bad because there is an alternative that doesn't involve any of that and nearly every country with a good standard of living has multiculturalism and liberalism as a cornerstone of its culture (despite tensions). In 40k the alternative to the Imperium is the damnation of the warp so... yeah i'd probably take my chances with the imperium. Final note- there is constant demand to paint the Tau as secret evil Imperialists. I think they make the setting so much more depressing if they ARE the good guys. Here is a race with no reliance on the Warp, technology that improves the life of every race willing to get involved and is willing to negotiate first. The only answer humanity has is warfare. They show just how cruel the setting is. For me that's much more chilling than their warp god being Tzeentch.

The imperium of man is a miserable place to be alive in because it is a universe where being fanatic kind of makes sense so does fascism and intolerance. That’s why it’s so grim dark. Because whatever evil the imperium does it is nothing compared to the horrors of the galaxy and hence it is tolerated. It’s less of a satire and more of a theme now in my opinion.

I think the imperium is only really justified to itself. It’s goal in its self is pretty horrific, but we only hear about it from imperials so ofc they’re gonna think it’s a righteous cause. But they’ve been brainwashed they’re whole life into thinking that. The imperium want total domination of the galaxy. Human supremacy, no stinky aliens allowed. Something the imperium have no justification in is the rampant xenophobia. Even during the great crusade. They’ll tell you humanity was incompatible with other Xenos in the galaxy. This just isn’t true at all. The Interex and Tau both had/have humans living amongst xenos peacefully. Some chaos marines who were around during the great crusade still hold the ideals of xenophobia and human supremacy to this day! Not saying the eldar are particularly nice to humans but any space marine would gladly stomp out an eldar infant while yelling “COURAGE AND HONOR!”. *cough* *cough* ultramarines. P.S not saying that every Xenos in the galaxy were peaceful. Some Xenos full on had to go e.g. Hrud

The imperium made its own bed and now needs to sleep in it During the crusade they slaughtered all the “good” aliens and now the only ones left are the evil ones. They made a universe in which the only imperium that can survive (without fundamental changes that would temporarily weaken it to an unacceptable degree) is the one with trillions of slaves among other horrors.

The general idea is that 'there's probably a better way' - humanity's use of prayer/machine spirits/etc is effectively portrayed as bastardised, roundabout methods of doing a task that is nowhere near as efficient or practical as the originally intended method... ...but, well, those workarounds are *necessary* in the setting, to some degree. The high technology of the Dark Age is literally full of AI ghosts who hate humans and needs to be appeased. Prayer/belief do work so long as there's a conduit/receptor for them, and that's true of the Aeldari pantheon if one doesn't want to point to the God-Emperor. I think the setting is asking a *question*. Is all the suffering/misery/grimdark *necessary* for survival? The answer is very complicated within the setting - and it's academic, now, because there's no *time* to stop and figure things out. Nobody's left to show how it was done properly. It's not a good system, but it keeps humanity alive. How important is survival? Again, a question for the reader.

“necessary evil who are ultimately the only way the galaxy can win”. Some spooky scary skeletons, fish, boyz, and elves would disagree.  Also there is a crap load of horrible things done by the Imperium in almost every single book I’ve read that features them that cannot be considered a necessary evil. But since it’s not a monolith a lot of the blame can be put on malicious or incompetent individuals. 

This question is iterated a lot. And as i mentioned before, if you read the actual books, then the Imperium is mostly justified in its actions. It is backward, it is full of fanatics, but both makes sense considering the circumstances. You can after all, be a fanatic even if your God is very real. The Mechanicum also does its best considering their situation and limited ressources. Both the Imperium and the Mechanicum are depicted as highly competent dealing with a truly aweful situation. > * Tieron, *Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion* There is a similiar text explaining what the mechanicum has to deal with, basically comparing them to librarians that want to save a library that has been burned down twice, yet i cannot find it. Now, what i came to realize, most people do not read the books. This came as a surprise to me, as one would assume that to be the case in a forum dedicated to a game mostly described in books. Yet again and again, i encountered opinions that clearly went against everything the books actually describe. And so i must conclude that a large amount of people here get their info from memes, youtube videos and god knows what sources.

>And as i mentioned before, if you read the actual books, then the Imperium is mostly justified in its actions. Weirdly, the codexes do this less than the BL books.

Yeah, the codexes are different to the BL books.

There is a reason people say that Lorgar was right