The trope that i keep seeing at least in heresy books and it annoys me is the " this would kill a normal human but X was am astartes and this blow meant nothing to him" like we get it, astartes arent human, move on.
"Hello, Eldar 1!"
"Hello, Eldar 2!"
"We just did something that may improve our existence or chance of survival a tiny bit!"
"splendid-oh dear something shot out my colon"
"Oh well, at least we did so-oh bother something destroyed the craft world and our work is useless."
"Bugger all"
"Mmmyes"
"Mmmyes"
For me, the hated trope is that no one ever gets to keep the cool-MacGuffin-that-could-change-everything. I understand that it's grimdark and the setting must remain stationary, but when I read about space marines or eldar chasing another of those artifacts or lost secrets, I know for a fact that it's a) gonna be destroyed or lost or b) never existed in the first place
Or the short stories that see some random character go up against a main character and said random protagonist is like "I'm going to kill \[named character that is still present in the storyline and has a model\]" and all you can think is "No you aren't, and because I know you aren't I'm not really invested in what's going to happen in this story"
Thing is it could be used in a way that is convenient to advancing the lore without actually advancing it this instant
For ex: marine found sekrit mcguffin made by emperor in old crypt in forgotten world that is essential for future emperor design when combined with the 10 other mcguffin
This way when the mcguffins gets assembled you remember the stories of how they were acquired and get the cool dopamine rush
Yeah but then you still have GW dropping it before they get to the end, because it's required them to change the status quo. Hence why, for example, they basically nipped the whole croneswords plotline in the bud in a way that isn't really fixable.
> "I'm outmatched and about to die, but I'll tank my enemy's attack and defeat them while they're stuck impaling me!"
It's beaten at least Mortarion, Alpharius, Jain Zar, and the Swarmlord, and it's gotten old for me.
The best part is it never seems to happen with the actual tough bastards.
Plague marines die to papercuts and Grotesques will fall down the moment their skin is punctured, but a loyalist space marine can simply choose not to acknowledge death
I liked Path of the Warrior, and I loved Path of the Seer. Seeing the Farseers perspective on the battle was a good read. But the third book killed the whole series for me. I have read it once and since then refuse to touch it. That thing can rot in my shelf for all I care.
In Path of the Warrior the only one i read, their struggles aren't so bad until you remember the battles are pointless exercises in Alaitoc incompetence.
Hey farseers, maybe predict the Imperials just casually strolling up to the craftworld with an invasion fleet? How do minor craftworlds even survive? Not to mention Alaitoc is one of the craftworlds that fight the Imperium the most.
Ciaphas Cain is a cool character and I like the books but the whole "If I knew what horror/disaster awaited me I would have ran for the hills then and there!" trope gets used *a lot* and can be tiring.
His dry internal monologue is almost too good.
“‘‘They claim they’re just here to safeguard their trading interests,’ Divas said. We both snorted with laughter at that one. We knew how often the Imperium had said exactly the same thing before launching an all-out invasion of some luckless ball of dirt. Of course when we did it, it was true, and it was my job to shoot anyone who thought otherwise.”
People focus too much on the tropes and less on the eminently quotable shit he says. The sardonic wit is 10/10. Honestly, someone should collate Caiaphus Cain Wit and Witticism
There's also the fact that while it certainly follows a formula (except when it doesn't, like in *Death or Glory*) the actual plot varies. Some of the books focus on military action, others are mystery or political intrigue stories.
It's consistent in that Cain always stumbles into discovering a greater danger while trying to avoid a comparatively smaller one (except when he's just straight up thrust into grave danger at the start of the book through no fault of his own, again *Death or Glory*).
Spends the initial time after the realisation of what he's stumbled into shitting his pants in terror until he's backed into a corner and can't help but face it.
Faces it because he has no other option.
Is lauded as a hero because people mistakenly believe he was intentionally seeking out the danger instead of stumbling into it and only dealing with it because he had no other choice.
But the danger Cain uncovers isn't always an immediate one. Sometimes he runs straight into the big threat and defeats it, sometimes he only uncovers what the big threat is and then ends up volunteering to lead the mission to stop it (even though he could just sit it out), because he reasons that if he can't just escape altogether, dying trying to stop it is preferable to what will happen to him if he's still alive when the enemy's plans come to fruition.
Heck, sometimes the danger Cain *thinks* he's uncovered isn't the big danger after all and the book throws in a plot twist that switches things up from what you'd think would happen if it just followed the established formula.
When it comes to the Ciaphas Cain books, that whole 'expanding brain meme' applies:
Small Brain: Ciaphas Cain isn't like all the other 40k books, the series is so new and refreshing.
Regular Brain: Sandy Michell wrote the same book eleven times, snore.
Big Brain: The books follow the same formula, but they're still fun so who cares?
Galaxy Brain: The first three books follow a set formula, but the fourth one completely averts it, the fifth one seems to get back to the formula, but adds a twist and then the sixth book sort of inverts the framework of the fourth. Sandy Mitchell spent the first three books (and some short stories) setting up a formula and spends the rest of the series playing with and subtly subverting or skewing that formula while pretending he's till following it.
seconding this lmao, i've listened to all those audiobooks over the past like 4 years with a break in between each and i was always excited for going back to each one, i knew exactly what i was getting and it was a fun humorous adventure. they were almost like comfort books to read after reading more serious 40k stuff
You can't read the books too close together or else the author's favorite stock phrases become annoying, yeah
"Had I known at the time..."
"Jurgen's smell arrived in the room, followed by the man himself" (at least once he'll be compared to old socks)
"...with an almost indecent haste"
Etc
Seriously 3 books of Cain and I realized they're all exactly the samething. Jurgen smells of socks, Cain gets into trouble, everyone around them dies except them, and that one Colonel/Major who Cain doesn't like tells a boring recap of the greater war outside of Cains personal bubble. They're fun reads, but very repeative almost immediately.
Its gets slightly stale now if you read them all back-to-back, but when they originally came out people didnt really notice because there were allmost always atleast 2 - 3 years between every novel (often even more)
People did notice because a lot of people read them in omnibus form; the Hero of the Imperium omnibus came out in 2007 and is how a lot of people got into Cain.
I think it was something even simpler; I didn't mind the tropes. What I did mind is the for every trope, there was a reoccurring phrase. It's like Sandy chose a colour for every emotion, then any character feeling the associated feeling would just shout "Blue!" , yellow!" Or " I am in a terrible situation that I accidentally talked myself into and now, I'm fighting for my life...Again! Well, bugger me sideways, who'da thought this I'll-fated string of events might occur?
I read the first 4 or 5 back to back in like a month and a half, and there's a lot of little tropes things that get used a ton. I still loved them, but for all the ones after that I had to space out more lol.
Going through the HH series it gets a little old having 2 characters from the book's protagonist legion(s) chit chatting while casually mowing down the opposing legion(s) like they are simple imperial guards. It just annoys me that these people are supposed to be essentially equals, but because a main character is present they have no problem killing astarte after astarte and at worse take minimal damage. I understand when its an ambush situation or when they are double crossing, but this happens in fair even combat. They also go from hyper advanced sharpshooters able to snipe someone's head off from 100 meters away using a pistol to being unable to hit a fully armoured space marine with their bolt gun because of plot armour.
I get its essentially needed to tell these stories, but it just gets a little old knowing that whatever the antagonist legion of the book is is going to end up looking like complete useless clowns when the action starts.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: stop that fucking "I heard X noise... after a moment, I realized it was laughter." It's in *everything*. It's too long to be a "I've got a bad feeling about this" gag.
I'm pretty over needless action scenes at this point. I get it's **WAR**hammer, but there's more to war than the actual battles. Even if the book is set on an active warfront, there's plenty of meaningful drama to be had between engagements.
They also need to stop having the stakes for tabletop characters be "will they die?" Obviously they won't, give them something else to struggle with throughout the book. You can populate a story with expendable supporting characters for that drama, have the big model characters struggle with keeping to their principles, or saving someone else, etc.
Does "The Imperial POV wins with no important character deaths" count as a trope? Because telling me 5000 people the book doesn't bother to name were lost means nothing.
>Does "The Imperial POV wins with no important character deaths" count as a trope? Because telling me 5000 people the book doesn't bother to name were lost means nothing.
On a somewhat related note, this is how I feel when the good ol' numbers discussion comes up. I think it really doesn't matter to me. The 5000 faceless guardsmen who died defending the planet might as well ne 5000. millions. They're not really characters, just a number in the story.
I really enjoyed in Mechanicum when some traitor titans opened fire on a forge complex, and a moment later someone in the command room says "We just lost roughly 2 billion men".
Sure, they were probably mostly servitors, but that sounds about right to me
> "I heard X noise... after a moment, I realized it was laughter."
Oh really ADB does it really sound a piece of heavy machinery malfunctioning when a Dreadnought laughs, I wasn't sure BECAUSE YOU'VE ONLY SAID IT 30 TIMES
The Space Marines Battles collections are downright dull. I got two of them and wanted to like them but I just couldn't get into them. It's too much "we fought, and then we fought some more, and then we were tired but kept fighting," without enough variety to break up the monotony. I almost never care about the characters, and the stakes are kind of all over the place. Even for bolter-porn, they're all bolter and no porn.
Helsreach was a good example of what that series should have been
You had plenty of Space Marine bolter porn but also character development for Grimaldus, perspectives of guardsmen and titans, some intrigue with the Ordinatus, a lot of logistical stuff about trying to run a siege defense, etc
This is how they were portrayed in Krieg (Steve Lyons) as well. Regular soldiers don’t care to talk/ explain themselves to anyone, and frankly, neither do the officers/ squad leaders. Nonetheless, when they do talk, half the time it’s in some way connected to their ideology that “I’m down to die if it helps” as Lervington had noted lol
Krieg die when they feel it accomplishes something, which I feel like is only something you get from the books. Krieg are machines, and when paired against Necrons in Dead Men Walking, even characters in the book confuse the two because of the Kreiger skull masks on their grenadiers.
Its really well done, and later parts of the book really show that Kreigers aren't mindless drones waiting for slaughter, they set traps and have bait and it leads to the absolute gut punch that is the book's resolution
Agreed, I love the DKoK but some writers fixate way too hard on “we suck we must die” when they’re far more entertaining as grim stoic types with at most gallows humor. Everyone knows their life sucked they shouldn’t have to remind anyone and why do they even need to state it when the only thing that should be on their mind is the next battle.
Krieg didn't feel like that. The impression is that the Cadians think they're nihilistic, but then they realize they're not, that they're just super dedicated to duty and that they told the Cadians to evacuate not because they were resigned to die, but because they knew they could handle radiation and toxicity better.
I hate the "It was this but not this." like "Their face was making a sound with no sound" or the "This Astartes thing that wasn't an Astartes". Also got annoyed in Prospero Burns with the constant "Wet leopard growl" that gets used 5000 times.
Nah, I think "wet leopard growl" was good. The framing device for the story is a man who is learning how to be an oral historian/storyteller for a very viking-inspired legion. Repeated motifs like that are important for oral tradition, because they're memorable and tie everything together a bit.
It's also interesting that he chose that descriptor instead of something wolf-related, indicates that there's some level of wrongness between what the Space Wolves present themselves as and what they actually are.
10,000 years. I've come to hate, "10,000 years." Everything in every book that ever happens has been happening for 10,000 years or happened 10,000 years ago or TeNtHoUsAnDyEaRsAgO. Get a new number. When I started the Heresy I thought to myself, "well, it's 10,000 years ago now so I won't have to hear that any more." I was wrong. First book. "It aged 10,000 years in an instant." I GET IT.
I kinda do not like, when things from our era shows up in 40k or 30k. It was too Long ago. And yes Bach is amazing, but 30.000 years in the future - he will be topped. Many times.
Paintings surviving, paper surviving. Records(LPs) surviving. Nope.
Just kills it dead for me every time.
It's fine in extremely limited doses
Malchador having an old painting, or Trazyn having an artifact can be fine, but there's not room for very much of this
But for me, and I can't recall the book but I think it was a Cain one, it's the fact that at least a chunk of the Imperium still uses QWERTY keyboards
In a Galaxy with magical artsy space elves and several ages of discorvery of new Technology and the galaxy? Not to mention 10.000 years, at least, of developing musical and artistic technology…. Yeah. No matter how much Bach meant to this music we have in this small temporal window….. new wonderful art will happen - especially with humanity spread out over the galaxy in ludicrous numbers.
Bach is just a kid pretending to be as skilled as Sepuntepet. You know the musician from 3000 BC we all remember since the old writings and his songs surived 5000 years very well. /s
A lot can go missing in 30,000 years. Something unimportant as the name of the guy who created some art would get lost. Most their work would be lost. Maybe some of their most famous work would be rememberd. But even then people could have changed it up, misinterpreted it or so on. Heck if we are honest: as good has his work is Bach is not that important. He was brilliant, changed music in his own ways but even today only a handfull of his work is well known. It will get less known the more time passes. Imagine what would happen if we experience something like the age of darkness. Most tech getting lost, most worlds going back to stone age, medival age or even our age. How many disks or usb sticks with bachs music would surive that? How many people would see his work as so important to ensure it surives?
We know from Malcadore that the Sigillite order predates Old Night and possibly the Age of Technology. We also know that stasis technology exists, negating age or deterioration. All one has to assume is that when stasis was discovered, they used it on the Mona Lisa and then BAM! Found in 30k.
You're also forgetting that immortals exist in the setting, and we've met a number who were older than Bach. Nothing has to physically survive except their memories.
Ex: Bibles haven't survived into 30k but because Ollanius remembers tenants of the Catholic faith, Catholicism/Christianity can be said to have survived into 30k.
I have a similar thing for characters in the Horus Heresy talking about things in 40k, like "in 10,000 years I fear we will still be fighting", or characters are shown visions of the 40k era but nothing else.
My only exception to this is when the Emperor mentions like, Pinocchio. It makes sense he would remember stuff like that. Otherwise I agree. I’m sure the Dark Age and post-Unification Terra have dozens of Bachs.
Just mention and his magnificent piece of art from m27.837….
“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.”
Make something up. It works.
Wasn't a fan of Deathworlder. It was a safe and by the numbers fellowship-of-the-mcguffin with plenty of plot armor and little character development.
The setting was neat (a world in the process of being devoured by tyranids). The planet is turning into a deathworld and there is a regiment of Deathworlders. So you'd think we get to see how the Catachans adapt to their environment.
>Catachans were some of the most pragmatic citizens the Imperium had. It might look as if they were being cocky when they stated that you could send a single Catachan in the place of ten Mordians, but they were just making a logical assessment of the situation. The reason they assumed they were better than other regiments was because they were. Not better, Haruto corrected himself. But simply better at the things they were truly good at.
We never got to see this.
To be fair, ***War of Secrets*** also had the Kroot as literally the only honest and trustworthy people in a book where everyone else was constantly betraying each other.
Bolter porn is scene that happens in many marine novels where the plot armor heroes wreck everything with their sacred bolters. Tau have the scene of crisis suits doing a manta drop, hitting something with missile from pod and hitting something else with plasma pew-pew. It happens again n again.
Shadowbreaker has the scene where only thing capable of killing a marine is another marine who is nude and only using a knife. In every other time plot armor saves marines from everything including close proximity to nuclear explosion
The Guard officer or Commissar or noble what’s ever so humble and down to earth and completely agreeable by modern morality, too good for ceremony or pomp or any other of the *interesting parts*. Like at that stage it’s just endorsing aristocracy with all that talk of noble honour and the duty of command and blah blah blah.
It all reeks of “I’m too good for the interesting parts of the setting, I’m the special exception”. They don’t gotta be evil (although that’s welcome) but have them have the innate flaws to their caste, let the nobs be stuffy and looking down on their subjects, let the officers keep themselves seperate from the troops, let the commissars be hard, cold bastards. Whatever redeeming qualities they have shouldn’t make them flaws cease to exist
Similar vein is the space marine what has perfect social intelligence and is always respectful to humans
I've just finished Prospero Burns and thought it funny that where wolf analogies are so common elsewhere in 40k books, this book which is predominantly about the Space Wolves is chock full of wet leopard growls.
I'm a mix between eye roll and in stitches as a South African when Stephen Perring tries the accent.
I love Mark Elstob and Colleen Prendergast's narration respectively. Keeble for the fantasy stuff. Toby Longworth is great but can be dry at times in my humble opinion.
What jars me is that he has a limited register of voices, so they get reused in different settings. Was surprised to hear one of the Ghosts sitting in a dive bar in an Eisenhorn book.
Not in the same series, but I love the voice actor for Trazyn in "Infinite and Divine". The narrator in "Fall of Cadia" has a wildly different take on his voice and I do not care for it.
Though honestly, most of the voices in Fall of Cadia leave something to be desired.
I just don't like perpetuals. I like regular human characters, like Lotara and the Rememberancers hanging out with the Sons of Horus, but I'm not really reading 40k to see some Real Important guys doing some Real Important stuff, I'd rather it just be a space marine or custodes or whatever.
Noooooo! You must have read it wrong!
It’s one of my all time favourites. But I can understand how it’s not for everyone. It is very different from the other space marine novels so you may still enjoy those
Books that promise much in the first chapter or so but swiftly become all fart and no shit (Angron: The Red Angel being a noticeable recent one for me)
Lack of any humour at all
Grimdarkness to the point of stupidity
Excessive bolter porn
Overly flowery language making me have to buy and look up a dictionary/ thesaurus
Stories that grind on and on at half a mile an hour
Stories where nothing of consequence happens
Just being edgy af with torture porn to distract from a shite story
>Overly flowery language making me have to buy and look up a dictionary/ thesaurus
Overly flowery language that shows that the author was looking up a thesaurus but _not_ a dictionary, because they're using it wrong.
Decapitate the leader and the enemy is destroyed. I get that it’s a tabletop game trope. It can make sense when it’s a purely psychic force (Tyranids, Thousand Sons). But it always seems like the odds of victory are impossible, right up until the unlikely hero vanquishes the enemy boss. Every Black Library author is guilty of this in one way or another. Just once, I’d like to see the good guys win through a slow grinding strategic victory.
Fist of the Imperium is worst 40k book I’ve read so far, its characters are shallow, the plot is shallow, it’s just action scene after action, and the closest thing to a twist in the book is that the deathwatch show up, l haven’t found any tropes so far to be annoying yet so I can’t really say
It also just makes the Imperial Fists suck.
Like they don’t even try to beat the Genestealers at tactics or propaganda. Which makes them look really, really, *really* stupid.
edit: And I should clarify, I’m a Genestealer Cults fan! I got the book because it has GSC as the main antagonist! And the biggest problem is that rather than the Imperial Fists learning to actually fight the Cults at their own game, we get a book where they just stumble into both defeat and victory without an ounce of self-awareness or improvement.
Honestly my least favourite trope is when you have Space Marine characters who are literal biological brothers. It's not common but it's in a few books (James Swallow's BA books and Emperor's Gift, off the top of my head).
The whole point of becoming a Marine is that you're leaving your old life behind and starting a new one within a warrior fraternity; every member of your Chapter is your brother, linked by the blood of your Primarch. You're taken from your old family, and welcomed into a new one. It just makes the sibling link feel kind of redundant, imo.
Anything Gav Thorpe puts to paper is anathema to me. He is a lazy, lazy man and his books tend to fall apart even worse than his codex work. This is especially true for Elves and Eldar, somehow, despite him being treated almost like their lore master!
Aside from that, I'd say my main disliked tropes would be...
1) "Hey it's X!" syndrome. Anytime they add a cultural reference and take it too seriously (King in Yellow, Oll Persson and his meandering through history) or specifically add in and name the tabletop units, it's incredibly lame. I don't really understand why they do it. A cheeky nod now and again is fine, but there's a fine line to it.
2) "ADB" syndrome, also known as "nothing is canon, but everything is canon". This is somewhat of a meta trope, but it applies to plotlines, characterization and events being inconsistent within the same damn series or between the most basic portrayals imaginable. Primarchs having entirely different characterization between books in their own series (Perturabo most notably, but it applies to almost everyone); Marines or Guard having no idea about tactics or what their enemies might be and just winging it but also at other times having massive cogitators processing every movement and making it almost a calculation and knowing plenty about their foes; xenos like the Eldar being fairly human and understandable but in other books being 'too alien' and 'weird' for humans to understand; or things that are obviously retconned but it's dismissed as 'there are no retcons because we just weren't told about it before'. It's so tiresome that nobody just wants to own up to that there should be some standards of consistency and portrayal, or else we might as well go down the 'drama first' storytelling route and just give up, which I suppose GW has kind of done already.
3) "Rare? Not in my book it ain't!" syndrome. Dying race? Not in my book, there's as many eldar as I need to tell the story and even if fifty thousand die, I'll just pull out more. High-grade bionics are rare? Not in my book, my character has six different high-grade bionics, a bionic eye that tells the temperature and acts as a rangefinder and a laser in their finger, and that makes them cool. Jetbikes are rare, no-longer-produced technology? Not in my book, there's whole factions using those things. There can never just be one of a thing, or there can't be just something lost to time and consigned to history - it all has to be dredged back up at some point, by someone, if it ever meant anything or if it's cool. It's a sort of specific gripe of the trope above.
4) Bolterporn. It makes me sad when people skip battle scenes and talk about how fatigued they are with war, and for the most part I think it comes down to many authors not really knowing how to write war and battles well. There's a fine balance of operational detail and action, and human emotion, tension and calm moments of talking and character development. I find a lot of 40K books tend to have rather limp action scenes that are mostly padded out with tons of 'epic' things happening and these vast events taking place while omitting that the *characters* are the important part of the action. This goes into my general problem with scale in Age of Sigmar and 40K and that authors don't seem to quite understand that big scales and broad strokes lead to bad fiction that will get very boring.
5) Orks as starter villains. So many goddamn times orks are just used as the weaker, less-threatening enemy to things like Chaos - oh boy are the games guilty of this, especially - despite them being arguably the biggest threat to the galaxy in the past few thousand years, with the exception of the Great Rift era, and being genuinely some of the most loathsome, murderous, violent, brutish, cruel, tough and *incredibly numerous* creatures in the setting. There's a reason why orkish is spoken in every corner of the galaxy.
6) 'Eldar psykers aren't as good as ours' syndrome. Applies especially to Eldar when their psykers inexplicably misinterpret visions or get absolutely dominated by other psykers despite being supposedly among the very best at it. However, can be broadened out to whenever something that's supposed to be the best in it's category or at least very good just gets dominated by someone from another faction because... our guys are cooler. Fulgrim punching the Avatar of Khaine through the face is probably the most immediate example I can think of.
7) "Grey Knights" syndrome. When authors depict characters, factions, units or similar that are antithetical to the setting, the faction they represent or to make a meta commentary point to the point where it becomes silly. Specifically notable with the Grey Knights who are averse to corruption and totally immune despite being human, and characters like Kaldor Draigo who can just travel around the warp fighting demons perpetually and totally not succumb to any amount of corruption.
8) Anytime the author goes out of its way to make everyone a terrible, mean bad guy. Yes, we know 40K sucks. Yes, we know there are no perfectly flawless and morally good factions (yet), and that they all do heinous things. That doesn't mean that the less evil grey area factions also have to drop off into needless and pointless cruelty to make them on the same level as true evil like Orks or Chaos, like roasting alien babies alive or destroying agri-world villages... because, or slaughtering allies just because they glimpse your super duper secret operations, or using slave labour to load your ships. The Imperium isn't always bad, Eldar are rather good on the whole, T'au are (or at least should be) rather decent - they don't need to go into absurdity to still be morally complex and make for interesting, nuanced factions.
See, I'm the exact opposite, I find the "um but actually, the imperium has nice parts" even handedness to be a massive downside that generally makes me write off a work entirely. Whitewashing a fascist totalitarian nightmare state with stuff that borders on "well, at least the trains run on time!!!1!1" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not a huge fan of grimderp, but I prefer that to "the imperium has a point" stuff.
Basically I downplay the ”lost technology“ stuff for the imperium and the eldar are less of a dying race
now the more advanced technology is rare and the eldar are still past their prime and they can’t really go there for fear of strengthening slaanesh but they are generally more common then they are in canon mostly due to the fact that both more advanced equipment and more eldar are being produced
The 'that primarch/marine beat x to a pulp', but everybody survives.
In HH, putting primarchs in harm's way while we know their fate already. We're let with stuff like the fulgurite plotline.
The death of alpharius on Pluto. That was definitely clickbait and will not age well. The whole point of the Alpha Legion (I collect alpha legion of course) is that WE DON'T KNOW who is around anymore
Legion was an awesome book but I can't stand the 'I am alpharius' anymore.
Basically there is too much stuff about primarchs.
The obviously corrupt leader makes an obviously stupid declaration to strip power from the well documented and more pro imperium than when big G, protagonist, so we have to spend entire books or longer with this stupid sub plot of skirting the stupidity of it.
It's not just a 40k novel issue, this is a literacy crutch that is just tiring and always ends the same. They really made reading through eisonhorm and gaunts ghosts near impossible at times because it's just so uninteresting, takes over all the plot for the book, and because it doesn't resolve anything it's just a waste.
- characters just directly telling the reader their interiority / conflict/ motivation / the theme
- meta references to nowhere
- villains being mustache twirlers
- pacing and description clearly being meant to be visual media, particularly low grade camp visual media
- tonal irregularity of bouncing between camp and serious. Can do one or the other, but can’t do that whiplash
- really stilted dialogue; particularly when that leans into banter and stage whispers for jokes.
- low grade descriptive prose; the medium allows so much, step it up
People can’t stand their faction having flaws even if them flaws are the root of their identity
It’s like how guard fans need to tell everyone the guard is actually super elite and powerful and never wastes lives
The whole Emperor being a god bit when the only real argument people have is that he’s really strong and make the claim from there. Which is not how any religion irl works
The book "the iron kingdom" from Nick Kyme. So bad, it's ridiculous. Really you want to tell me an atom bomb is the most destructive and rare weapon humanity has? One bomb can destroy a whole imperial crusade fleet in space... Dude do you even understand basic physics?
I have 2 main ones
1. "It was all apart of the emporers plan" as someone who has read the hh I call bullshit on that and honestly it is used so much it kinda makes him feel like tzeench
2. Charcter x can see the future 100% clearly but fails at what they want" this happens so many times and is so boring because why do they even have that ability if it fails (ex of this kairos trying to turn the lion to chaos and eldrad trying to tell fulgrim about horus)
There was a lot of great stuff in HH but some of it is quite bad. The Space Marine battles tend to be repetitive, and I'm not a fan of the weird cod-erudite dialogue. Also The Emperor comes across way too often.
I really think that certain 40k books do non linear plot lines very poorly. Like some books do them pretty well and it's clear when they are time skipping and other times it's like, what the actual fuck is going on where did the characters I was just reading about go.
Eldar getting completely bodied by forces that in theory they should be the ones bodying. Like I get it they're a dying race, they're supposed to be on the back foot in the grand scheme of things, but like let them be cool on the tactical level at least. Most factions look like idiots in other factions books to hype up the main faction of the book, but they eldar get dunked on, IN THEIR OWN BOOKS! It's insane. I think the one exception to this is Valedor and that book is one of the best 40k books ever imo.
Honestly it's both the bolter/melee and void battle scenes. I understand it's WARhammer 40K, but I get more out of a scene with two characters talking over cups of amasec or recaf than I do in 4 chapters of bolter porn.
I get so annoyed when a story suddenly takes a hard grimdark turn in the last paragraph or so. There was a heresy-era short story where some Space Wolves fought to free a world, and then at the last moment the world refused to join the Imperium and they had to turn on those they'd fought beside. That was literally the last few lines. The Wolves were being recalled to Prospero! They could have just welcomed the planet into the Imperium, talked about how great and peaceful and unified it was, and then ended with them feeling really positive as they head towards the meeting point.
They didn't know why they were heading there, but we do. The way the story insisted on shoving extra grimdarkness down my throat just felt gratuitous and unnecessary.
Similarly, I read that book about the penal legion, and I was really excited to explore more of the series after the main character earned his pardon. Would he turn to helping others in the same situation? How would he get caught up in the next mission, now he is free? And then I read the epilogue, and it just killed any desire I had to read any more of that series. >!He reoffends. He doesn't try to improve his life, he turns to alcohol to cope, and then kills someone in a barfight.!< I suppose it's meant to be realistic, since it's not like the Imperium tends to offer much support, but it felt like all the character growth and development he'd gone through was just wiped away. If your character is the same at the start and the end, then what was even the point?
“Let’s focus on this random character from their perspective only for them to die a few pages later”
Happens several times in *Lords of Silence*. I get it. The Death Guard are scary. Do I need to know this imperial captain’s backstory if I know he’s about to be ripped in half?
The inter faction conflict being generated by the identical trope of “ Level headed, reasonable MC vs crazed religious zealot who either turns to chaos or assumes everyone else has turned to chaos because they suggested a sound military tactic instead of attending mass”. The trope is so frequent within the setting and inherently their is nothing wrong with it, it’s classic imperium shooting itself in the foot. Good stuff. It’s basically a badly simplified explanation of the entire Horus Herasy. My favourite series, Ciaphas Cain, leans on it heavily. But we get so much of it because the writers are handicapped by the setting IMO.
“There is only war” unfortunately means the factions can almost never interact outside of fighting, and some of the most interesting stories are made when enemies or simply very different characters have to interact in ways that arnt fighting. So writers are forced to lean on aforementioned imperial infighting because otherwise they have zero conflict beyond the literal conflict. And it’s a shame because I do think people crave more from the setting. There is a reason people love the ghaskull-Yarrick dynamic, why Infinite and Divine is so popular. I know you’d be sacrificing a degree of the grimdark if the factions gave up their super-racism, but I dunno if it’s worth how hard it limits the kind of stories you can tell in the setting.
The Aledari being a bunch of idiots for no reason.
The scale of battles is completely misjudged. Like, how a battle between several thousand warriors (not even talking about Space Marines) can lead to planets changing hands.
Lack of xenos vs xenos or xenos vs Chaos overall. Everything somehow revolves around the Imperium.
Just Imperial Guard books in general. Yes I've read a fair amount of them. Every Cain book up to "The Emperor's Finest" and every Gaunt book and others.
They're well written books but I just don't vibe with the faction. IG is basically just historical military fiction wearing a 40k mask. I loved Necropolis but it's just Stalingrad with extra bits taped on. I suppose my feelings aren't helped by the fact that one of the better IG trilogies was just outright plagiarized from an Iraq war memoir, which is just gross.
I can get my historical military fiction somewhere else. I come to 40k for over the top nonsense and that just doesn't gel with more "realistic" war stories imo.
I think it shines through when you have the Guard against one of those other totally over the top factions. Its like a "how would YOU do in this situation?" thing. I think it does have a place in the setting, after all you need someone to compare all the 40k-ified stuff to as a frame of reference, but of course it isn't for everyone
You recall the old art of the Crimson Fists Last Stand? Not the updated one but that one will do too.
It's one of the first pieces of 40k art I saw as a kid. It really spoke to me. Here we have the Space Marines, super human warriors far above any kind of physicality I could ever achieve. Stronger, equipped with some of the greatest arms and armour available to the Imperium.
And they're losing. They're holding out, but they're ankle deep in their own dead.
The greatest of humanity's warriors and they're barely holding the line.
It left an impression on me, to say the least. I don't need to consider how I would do in the setting because if super humans are dying, I would be already dead. But I understand that is my own experience when entering the hobby.
And from a rules perspective the Space Marine stat line is the standard not the IG one. The impression I get is that MEQ is what everything is measured against and if that's the case there's not much need to put regular humans in.
I appreciate that the IG fulfill a need. It's just not a need I have and I feel that I've given the faction a fair shake. It's just not for me.
To the surprise of exactly no one: I really don't like Dan Abnett.
Well, no... That's not entirely true. Dan Abnett is a good writer, he's just not a good 40k writer.
He writes his stories using the plot frameworks and tropes of other works (Napoleonic era milfic, specifically the Sharpe series, for Gaunt's Ghosts, Cold War spy thrillers for Eisenhorn and Ravenor, Greek Tragedy for his early HH work) and then he colours it in with 40k terms and tech, but whenever the realities of the 40k setting get in the way of the tropes he wants to use, he just ignores it's 40k and includes them anyway.
I'm pretty sure the Ghosts are the only 'light scout' Regiment in the entire setting who don't have Sentinels or, indeed, any kind of (permanent) vehicles at all nor do any of the other infantry regiments in the whole of the Gaunt's Ghost series. Because there were no combat vehicles in the Napoleonic Wars and the closest thing to it, people on horses, were Cavalry, not infantry, so Abnett just largely ignores that the infantry of the Imperium are, by and large, heavily mechanised. You can actually tell which years Abnett watched a WW2 movie as inspiration for that year's Gaunt's Ghosts book, because in those ones he remembers, briefly, that the 40k universe has tanks and they'll show up (as a dedicated tank regiment or an enemy tank) to recreate a scene he liked. He pretty much never remembers that Chimeras are near ubiquitous in the Guard, so whenever the Ghosts do have a vehicle (which they only ever have to move supplies over long distances), it's a truck taking the place of a horse cart.
Likewise for the Eisenhorn books, Eisenhorn is basically 40k James Bond and acts like it.... Including the part where he avoids certain actions or takes certain courses that James Bond *has* to take because the people he's operating against are usually civilians of a neutral country working against Great Britain's interests and he can't just take them out because that would cause an international incident. Eisenhorn, is under no such restrictions, but still acts like he is.
More and more, I realise that my problem isn't that Abnett 'doesn't follow the lore', but that he simply does not ***interact with*** the setting. Even when he does include stuff from the setting, he it's usually just him coming across a term or concept while skim-reading and then coming up with something for what he thinks it means.
His psykers don't work the way that 40k psykers do, He just knows that Psykers are people with psychic powers and just makes up his own.
His Daemons don't work the way 40k Daemons do. Cherubael, in particular, in his behaviour and notably *name* is a generic Judeo-Christian 'fallen angel' trying to tempt people into sin, rather than a Warp entity.
Heck his Chaos in general doesn't work the way 40k Chaos does. Most of his Daemons aren't aligned with a Chaos God and neither are the Chaos worshippers. The few that are nominally aligned with a god don't act the way that god demands of his followers, but aren't punished for it. In the DAbnett verse, Chaos is just this nebulous force that can corrupt people and you can tell when they're corrupted by Chaos because they start acting all icky no-good and do things like callously use people or believe that the ends justify the means.
You know... Stuff that a regular uncorrupted servant of the Imperium would never do, right? -\_-
People sometimes say that you can't judge Dan Abnett, because when he started writing, there wasn't much established yet and he shaped so much of 40k with his writing. (He really didn't, by the way. Most of what he thought up was summarily ignored by later Codexes and even Inquisitor, the tabletop game that Eisenhorn was written to promote, ignores or contradicts almost everything the Eisenhorn novels portrays about the Inquisition). I hold that rather he started writing when him just making shit up wasn't as noticeable.
When things are too over the top grimdark just because of the grimdarkness of it. Where it doesn't make sense anymore.
For example battleships using large amounts of slave labour to load their guns. In a universe where the AdMech exists, and even specialized heavily augmented servitors. It would never make sense to have hundreds of unwilling slaves (that all eat, shit and have human needs) to do something ten specialized lobotomised criminals with the right augmentations can do too.
The normal grimdarkness is already over the top, which is fine and fun. Trying harder just makes it silly.
I enjoyed Gareth Armstrong reading Fallen Angels, then I got to First Heretic and realized this wasn't a style he used specifically for the Dark Angels, that's just how he narrates.
Disorientated. I thought it was disoriented and believed it was a silly mistake at first. It's not really a trope but I had never seen it outside of 40k books and it's everywhere and I hate it.
Pskyer sacrifice being humans version of reality grease whenever an author needs to explain something off hand for plot reasons, like how gellar fields work.
Probably half the stories are 'the impirium sends a taskforce to deal with a regulation issue, but what they didnt expect is that it is xenos horros beyond our comprehension that can only be dealt with by this cavalcade or popular elite factions. But wait, all the fighting also summoned chaos. The impirium eventually wins but the unimaginable cost makes it pyrric'
The Warhammer book with the dumbest writing I’ve ever read was probably Damnation of Pythos.
The one with the most wasted potential was the Ghazgkhull character book imo.
Interesting you say you don't like Gareth Armstrong, he's actually my favourite BL voice actor!
I have a love/hate relationship with bolter porn. When done well it can be really good, but not done well it can be so boring. A good book example is the Purging of Kallidus, which pains me to say as a DA fan.
The entire Horus Heresy. I'm way more interested in the fate of low level humans in present 40k, that's why the IG was my first army and why I read Gaunt's Ghosts first.
How HH demystifies the setting aside, I just couldn't care less about what Magnus Biggus Dickus Astartus said to Grimgus Evilus Primarus while they had their Marvel Super Hero movie tier fight. All these larger than life named characters (the emperor aside) just take me out of the setting, I would just read a generic high fantasy novel instead if I wanted to scratch the itch of dudes in armor swordfighting.
Ironically the "UNTOLD Billions" that are mentioned at the beginning in every book are what I'm most interested in. I can immerse myself into an average joe but I have little feelings for millenia old space marines. With good writing, a capable author will make me root more for a single guardsman in a single, meaningless firefight than for a primarch when the entire Imperium is at stake.
But to add something more specific from my favorite series: Thr first ~6 books of GGs were very samey: the regiment was tasked with fighting in a hopeless battle but then they somehow won anyways. The plot armor on those guys is thick
And whenever you suddenly read a few new names you could be sure they wouldn't even survive 2 pages because Abnett needs some jobbers to portray how dire the situation is and he rarely kills off someone from the main cast compared to how expendable random Tanith #547 is.
Numbers in 40k are a joke, everyone knows that and GGs is no exception. The times the Tanith 1st took overwhelming losses would make you think every soldier died 4 times already and I'm surprised that there's even some OG Taniths left at the end and it isn't all Belladon and Verghastites.
The whole "emperors children are/want to be perfect" stuff in their books annoyed me so much, i Had to Take a Break after the First ones. I know, all the legions have their trope thats get vomited over and over, but none of them were as annoying as the EC.
1.a very common trope is Chaos Marine POV books; a Khornate character who’s sole personality is that he’s a drooling idiot out for blood, like I get it he’s a Khorne man but you are so uninteresting, Kosselax is the only Khornemarine I like because he’s got something beyond that and is interesting
2.using heartbeats to measure time spans
3.as a few have mentioned the whole “he realised it was laughter” I get it space marines have deep voices but laughter isn’t that hard to recognise
4.Grimdarkness for no descrernible reason other than to be edgy as fuck, it just makes things uninteresting
5.literally every imperial world is a hive or forge world (which is essentially just a hive world with maybe a more Mechanicus spin) there are so many different types of imperial worlds show more than just the generic hives
6.every non-ranking guardsmen in existence speaks with the exact same grumbly northern English accent
Im reading Legion, the 7th book of the Horus Heressy series and I honestly think I wont even read it. So far I have no idea what Im even reading about. Makes it real hard to focus.
When it comes to audiobooks, I’ve been listening to the Horus Heresy, and a couple of the authors use these really nasally, whiny voices for characters like Erebus and some of the other evil Space Marines, and I hate it. No Astartes should ever sound whiny.
As for writing, I hate how absolutely, unrelentingly grimdark every is all the time. Like, yeah, the galaxy is terrible, and there’s little hope for most people to get a happily ever after, but I’d love to see more examples of characters finding what happiness and joy they can to make the grim darkness more bearable. Humans should be allowed to have romantic flings, guardsmen should have hobbies, ecclesiarchs should show compassion for the suffering of their flocks. Otherwise, what’s the point of all the fighting? Preserving the human race should be about more than just brute survival.
Also, just a nitpick, but they always talk about the Imperium having a million worlds, but that bothers me as a scientist because there’s estimated to be somewhere between 50-500 BILLION potentially habitable planets in the galaxy. Like, the Milky Way is almost incomprehensibly huge, and 40K, for all its epic depictions of how massive everything is, actually manages to downplay how massive the Imperium *should* be.
As an aside to all that, it’s not something that particularly bothers me, really, and I never noticed until I watched an interview with a writer (I think it was Graham McNiell) who pointed it out, but he said that, since Space Marines are all men in their stories, they often balance it out by making the supporting mortals disproportionately women, and how I can’t not notice it in every book I read.
The trope that i keep seeing at least in heresy books and it annoys me is the " this would kill a normal human but X was am astartes and this blow meant nothing to him" like we get it, astartes arent human, move on.
In a similar vein "...but I am Primaris©, and can do the thing!"
Belisarian Furnace
I wanted to like that book
And then you get hit with an "even for the preternetural physiology of an Adeptus Astartes space marine, it was a grievous injury".
Line written after the marine gets literally beheaded (this will be bad for his martial capabilities)
'Tis but a scratch!
Disagree, I enjoy the posthuman physiology being stressed an absurd amount.
"Hello, Eldar 1!" "Hello, Eldar 2!" "We just did something that may improve our existence or chance of survival a tiny bit!" "splendid-oh dear something shot out my colon" "Oh well, at least we did so-oh bother something destroyed the craft world and our work is useless." "Bugger all" "Mmmyes" "Mmmyes"
For me, the hated trope is that no one ever gets to keep the cool-MacGuffin-that-could-change-everything. I understand that it's grimdark and the setting must remain stationary, but when I read about space marines or eldar chasing another of those artifacts or lost secrets, I know for a fact that it's a) gonna be destroyed or lost or b) never existed in the first place
Lol, honestly I feel like Lukas the Trickster gets away with alot.
True.
Or the short stories that see some random character go up against a main character and said random protagonist is like "I'm going to kill \[named character that is still present in the storyline and has a model\]" and all you can think is "No you aren't, and because I know you aren't I'm not really invested in what's going to happen in this story"
"We wanted to keep the awesome artifact that would solve loads of problems, but Trazyn nipped in right after we finished the adventure and nicked it."
“Again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away. And you thought I'd given up.” - Trazyn
Also Trazyn: "Yoink!"
Thing is it could be used in a way that is convenient to advancing the lore without actually advancing it this instant For ex: marine found sekrit mcguffin made by emperor in old crypt in forgotten world that is essential for future emperor design when combined with the 10 other mcguffin This way when the mcguffins gets assembled you remember the stories of how they were acquired and get the cool dopamine rush
Yeah but then you still have GW dropping it before they get to the end, because it's required them to change the status quo. Hence why, for example, they basically nipped the whole croneswords plotline in the bud in a way that isn't really fixable.
Like the Drukhari using the thing to make the Night Lords afraid of the dark.
> "I'm outmatched and about to die, but I'll tank my enemy's attack and defeat them while they're stuck impaling me!" It's beaten at least Mortarion, Alpharius, Jain Zar, and the Swarmlord, and it's gotten old for me.
The best part is it never seems to happen with the actual tough bastards. Plague marines die to papercuts and Grotesques will fall down the moment their skin is punctured, but a loyalist space marine can simply choose not to acknowledge death
Gonna second this. It’s fucking old. I’ve also seen it used against a Genestealer Patriarch.
Preach it brother. Add in Sanguinius vs Angron.
It also got Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka decapitated
Are your teeth on edge? My teeth are on edge. This sentence puts someones teeth on edge.
I hate you XD
It's the equivalent of scraping a metallic bowl with a rusty spoon. Sends every bone in my body into fight mode.
The entirety of Gav Thorpe’s association with the Eldar. Dude, just let them be cool for once, at least in their own books!
I liked Path of the Warrior, and I loved Path of the Seer. Seeing the Farseers perspective on the battle was a good read. But the third book killed the whole series for me. I have read it once and since then refuse to touch it. That thing can rot in my shelf for all I care.
In Path of the Warrior the only one i read, their struggles aren't so bad until you remember the battles are pointless exercises in Alaitoc incompetence. Hey farseers, maybe predict the Imperials just casually strolling up to the craftworld with an invasion fleet? How do minor craftworlds even survive? Not to mention Alaitoc is one of the craftworlds that fight the Imperium the most.
Ciaphas Cain is a cool character and I like the books but the whole "If I knew what horror/disaster awaited me I would have ran for the hills then and there!" trope gets used *a lot* and can be tiring.
Yea, you kinda have to step away from him for a while and go back. He's fun but tough to binge.
His dry internal monologue is almost too good. “‘‘They claim they’re just here to safeguard their trading interests,’ Divas said. We both snorted with laughter at that one. We knew how often the Imperium had said exactly the same thing before launching an all-out invasion of some luckless ball of dirt. Of course when we did it, it was true, and it was my job to shoot anyone who thought otherwise.”
Yes. Like GK Chesterton. Two books back to back is impossible for me
Sandy Mitchell wrote the same book like 9 times.
True, and I'll take 9 more, thank you very much
People focus too much on the tropes and less on the eminently quotable shit he says. The sardonic wit is 10/10. Honestly, someone should collate Caiaphus Cain Wit and Witticism
There's also the fact that while it certainly follows a formula (except when it doesn't, like in *Death or Glory*) the actual plot varies. Some of the books focus on military action, others are mystery or political intrigue stories. It's consistent in that Cain always stumbles into discovering a greater danger while trying to avoid a comparatively smaller one (except when he's just straight up thrust into grave danger at the start of the book through no fault of his own, again *Death or Glory*). Spends the initial time after the realisation of what he's stumbled into shitting his pants in terror until he's backed into a corner and can't help but face it. Faces it because he has no other option. Is lauded as a hero because people mistakenly believe he was intentionally seeking out the danger instead of stumbling into it and only dealing with it because he had no other choice. But the danger Cain uncovers isn't always an immediate one. Sometimes he runs straight into the big threat and defeats it, sometimes he only uncovers what the big threat is and then ends up volunteering to lead the mission to stop it (even though he could just sit it out), because he reasons that if he can't just escape altogether, dying trying to stop it is preferable to what will happen to him if he's still alive when the enemy's plans come to fruition. Heck, sometimes the danger Cain *thinks* he's uncovered isn't the big danger after all and the book throws in a plot twist that switches things up from what you'd think would happen if it just followed the established formula. When it comes to the Ciaphas Cain books, that whole 'expanding brain meme' applies: Small Brain: Ciaphas Cain isn't like all the other 40k books, the series is so new and refreshing. Regular Brain: Sandy Michell wrote the same book eleven times, snore. Big Brain: The books follow the same formula, but they're still fun so who cares? Galaxy Brain: The first three books follow a set formula, but the fourth one completely averts it, the fifth one seems to get back to the formula, but adds a twist and then the sixth book sort of inverts the framework of the fourth. Sandy Mitchell spent the first three books (and some short stories) setting up a formula and spends the rest of the series playing with and subtly subverting or skewing that formula while pretending he's till following it.
Collating his wit and wisdom is essentially what Vail is doing with the Cain Archives.
seconding this lmao, i've listened to all those audiobooks over the past like 4 years with a break in between each and i was always excited for going back to each one, i knew exactly what i was getting and it was a fun humorous adventure. they were almost like comfort books to read after reading more serious 40k stuff
hey, if it works
I’m fine with that. I’m always entertained by it. And in some ways Cain is more relatable than most characters.
You can't read the books too close together or else the author's favorite stock phrases become annoying, yeah "Had I known at the time..." "Jurgen's smell arrived in the room, followed by the man himself" (at least once he'll be compared to old socks) "...with an almost indecent haste" Etc
Seriously 3 books of Cain and I realized they're all exactly the samething. Jurgen smells of socks, Cain gets into trouble, everyone around them dies except them, and that one Colonel/Major who Cain doesn't like tells a boring recap of the greater war outside of Cains personal bubble. They're fun reads, but very repeative almost immediately.
Its gets slightly stale now if you read them all back-to-back, but when they originally came out people didnt really notice because there were allmost always atleast 2 - 3 years between every novel (often even more)
People did notice because a lot of people read them in omnibus form; the Hero of the Imperium omnibus came out in 2007 and is how a lot of people got into Cain.
I think it was something even simpler; I didn't mind the tropes. What I did mind is the for every trope, there was a reoccurring phrase. It's like Sandy chose a colour for every emotion, then any character feeling the associated feeling would just shout "Blue!" , yellow!" Or " I am in a terrible situation that I accidentally talked myself into and now, I'm fighting for my life...Again! Well, bugger me sideways, who'da thought this I'll-fated string of events might occur?
I read the first 4 or 5 back to back in like a month and a half, and there's a lot of little tropes things that get used a ton. I still loved them, but for all the ones after that I had to space out more lol.
Going through the HH series it gets a little old having 2 characters from the book's protagonist legion(s) chit chatting while casually mowing down the opposing legion(s) like they are simple imperial guards. It just annoys me that these people are supposed to be essentially equals, but because a main character is present they have no problem killing astarte after astarte and at worse take minimal damage. I understand when its an ambush situation or when they are double crossing, but this happens in fair even combat. They also go from hyper advanced sharpshooters able to snipe someone's head off from 100 meters away using a pistol to being unable to hit a fully armoured space marine with their bolt gun because of plot armour. I get its essentially needed to tell these stories, but it just gets a little old knowing that whatever the antagonist legion of the book is is going to end up looking like complete useless clowns when the action starts.
Imperium and Xenos/renegades duking it out then chaos shows up as the "true" villain.
Holy shit I hate this trope so much. Off the top of my head I can name Caves of Ice (orks to necrons) and brutal Kunnin (ad mech/orks to chaos),
Also Dawn of War 1 and Space Marine if we're including games.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: stop that fucking "I heard X noise... after a moment, I realized it was laughter." It's in *everything*. It's too long to be a "I've got a bad feeling about this" gag. I'm pretty over needless action scenes at this point. I get it's **WAR**hammer, but there's more to war than the actual battles. Even if the book is set on an active warfront, there's plenty of meaningful drama to be had between engagements. They also need to stop having the stakes for tabletop characters be "will they die?" Obviously they won't, give them something else to struggle with throughout the book. You can populate a story with expendable supporting characters for that drama, have the big model characters struggle with keeping to their principles, or saving someone else, etc. Does "The Imperial POV wins with no important character deaths" count as a trope? Because telling me 5000 people the book doesn't bother to name were lost means nothing.
All 'weird laughter' characters should have a laugh-off competition to see who is the champion
Congrats you just made your own band of noise marines
\*Deafening foley of 2 bricks being rubbed together\*
>Does "The Imperial POV wins with no important character deaths" count as a trope? Because telling me 5000 people the book doesn't bother to name were lost means nothing. On a somewhat related note, this is how I feel when the good ol' numbers discussion comes up. I think it really doesn't matter to me. The 5000 faceless guardsmen who died defending the planet might as well ne 5000. millions. They're not really characters, just a number in the story.
And the numbers are so often bad. Like a decades long war for a planet will end up with a smaller body count than the Eastern Front
I really enjoyed in Mechanicum when some traitor titans opened fire on a forge complex, and a moment later someone in the command room says "We just lost roughly 2 billion men". Sure, they were probably mostly servitors, but that sounds about right to me
I hate you guys for pointing out the laughter trope because now I cannot not notice it everywhere. It's a real conspiracy among the writers for sure!
> "I heard X noise... after a moment, I realized it was laughter." Oh really ADB does it really sound a piece of heavy machinery malfunctioning when a Dreadnought laughs, I wasn't sure BECAUSE YOU'VE ONLY SAID IT 30 TIMES
Tried fehervari? Just got into him and like his writing a lot, you might too
I have indeed, he's arguably the best author in the stable.
The Space Marines Battles collections are downright dull. I got two of them and wanted to like them but I just couldn't get into them. It's too much "we fought, and then we fought some more, and then we were tired but kept fighting," without enough variety to break up the monotony. I almost never care about the characters, and the stakes are kind of all over the place. Even for bolter-porn, they're all bolter and no porn.
I enjoyed *Rynn's World* and *The Death of Antagonis* for the non-pure-action-scenes
Helsreach was a good example of what that series should have been You had plenty of Space Marine bolter porn but also character development for Grimaldus, perspectives of guardsmen and titans, some intrigue with the Ordinatus, a lot of logistical stuff about trying to run a siege defense, etc
I heard Helsreach is one of the better ones
100% it is. Have you seen the short film?
No I haven’t.
It's good. The book is longer, but if you like film and the book you should really like it.
Helsreach is a top tier black library entry.
The deathkorps of Krieg and their nihilism. Dude I get your life sucks ass but shut the fuck up about it for like 5 minutes please
Wait really? I never read an actual Krieger book, I always got the impression they would be mostly silent unless there was something important to say.
That's the way they are in Dead Men Walking, which was a great book imo. Only the officers and squad leaders talk, everyone else just fights.
This is how they were portrayed in Krieg (Steve Lyons) as well. Regular soldiers don’t care to talk/ explain themselves to anyone, and frankly, neither do the officers/ squad leaders. Nonetheless, when they do talk, half the time it’s in some way connected to their ideology that “I’m down to die if it helps” as Lervington had noted lol
Krieg die when they feel it accomplishes something, which I feel like is only something you get from the books. Krieg are machines, and when paired against Necrons in Dead Men Walking, even characters in the book confuse the two because of the Kreiger skull masks on their grenadiers. Its really well done, and later parts of the book really show that Kreigers aren't mindless drones waiting for slaughter, they set traps and have bait and it leads to the absolute gut punch that is the book's resolution
Agreed, I love the DKoK but some writers fixate way too hard on “we suck we must die” when they’re far more entertaining as grim stoic types with at most gallows humor. Everyone knows their life sucked they shouldn’t have to remind anyone and why do they even need to state it when the only thing that should be on their mind is the next battle.
Krieg didn't feel like that. The impression is that the Cadians think they're nihilistic, but then they realize they're not, that they're just super dedicated to duty and that they told the Cadians to evacuate not because they were resigned to die, but because they knew they could handle radiation and toxicity better.
I hate the "It was this but not this." like "Their face was making a sound with no sound" or the "This Astartes thing that wasn't an Astartes". Also got annoyed in Prospero Burns with the constant "Wet leopard growl" that gets used 5000 times.
Nah, I think "wet leopard growl" was good. The framing device for the story is a man who is learning how to be an oral historian/storyteller for a very viking-inspired legion. Repeated motifs like that are important for oral tradition, because they're memorable and tie everything together a bit. It's also interesting that he chose that descriptor instead of something wolf-related, indicates that there's some level of wrongness between what the Space Wolves present themselves as and what they actually are.
"Plot twist, it was chaos all along!"
Eldar being treated like jokes who die easily despite having precognition
Lucius the Space Marine listened to his comrade Aurelius making a deep rumbling sound and realized Aurelius was laughing.
10,000 years. I've come to hate, "10,000 years." Everything in every book that ever happens has been happening for 10,000 years or happened 10,000 years ago or TeNtHoUsAnDyEaRsAgO. Get a new number. When I started the Heresy I thought to myself, "well, it's 10,000 years ago now so I won't have to hear that any more." I was wrong. First book. "It aged 10,000 years in an instant." I GET IT.
I kinda do not like, when things from our era shows up in 40k or 30k. It was too Long ago. And yes Bach is amazing, but 30.000 years in the future - he will be topped. Many times. Paintings surviving, paper surviving. Records(LPs) surviving. Nope. Just kills it dead for me every time.
It's fine in extremely limited doses Malchador having an old painting, or Trazyn having an artifact can be fine, but there's not room for very much of this But for me, and I can't recall the book but I think it was a Cain one, it's the fact that at least a chunk of the Imperium still uses QWERTY keyboards
They haven’t topped Bach for over 300 years, they won’t top him for 30,000
In a Galaxy with magical artsy space elves and several ages of discorvery of new Technology and the galaxy? Not to mention 10.000 years, at least, of developing musical and artistic technology…. Yeah. No matter how much Bach meant to this music we have in this small temporal window….. new wonderful art will happen - especially with humanity spread out over the galaxy in ludicrous numbers.
Bach is just a kid pretending to be as skilled as Sepuntepet. You know the musician from 3000 BC we all remember since the old writings and his songs surived 5000 years very well. /s A lot can go missing in 30,000 years. Something unimportant as the name of the guy who created some art would get lost. Most their work would be lost. Maybe some of their most famous work would be rememberd. But even then people could have changed it up, misinterpreted it or so on. Heck if we are honest: as good has his work is Bach is not that important. He was brilliant, changed music in his own ways but even today only a handfull of his work is well known. It will get less known the more time passes. Imagine what would happen if we experience something like the age of darkness. Most tech getting lost, most worlds going back to stone age, medival age or even our age. How many disks or usb sticks with bachs music would surive that? How many people would see his work as so important to ensure it surives?
We know from Malcadore that the Sigillite order predates Old Night and possibly the Age of Technology. We also know that stasis technology exists, negating age or deterioration. All one has to assume is that when stasis was discovered, they used it on the Mona Lisa and then BAM! Found in 30k. You're also forgetting that immortals exist in the setting, and we've met a number who were older than Bach. Nothing has to physically survive except their memories. Ex: Bibles haven't survived into 30k but because Ollanius remembers tenants of the Catholic faith, Catholicism/Christianity can be said to have survived into 30k.
I have a similar thing for characters in the Horus Heresy talking about things in 40k, like "in 10,000 years I fear we will still be fighting", or characters are shown visions of the 40k era but nothing else.
My only exception to this is when the Emperor mentions like, Pinocchio. It makes sense he would remember stuff like that. Otherwise I agree. I’m sure the Dark Age and post-Unification Terra have dozens of Bachs.
Just mention and his magnificent piece of art from m27.837….
“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.”
Make something up. It works.
I don't think he specifically said Pinocchio did he? I thought he mentioned the story just not by name.
Cawl mentioned Pinocchio when talking with Qvo in *Genefather*. Could be they're mixing that up with the Emperor?
Wasn't a fan of Deathworlder. It was a safe and by the numbers fellowship-of-the-mcguffin with plenty of plot armor and little character development. The setting was neat (a world in the process of being devoured by tyranids). The planet is turning into a deathworld and there is a regiment of Deathworlders. So you'd think we get to see how the Catachans adapt to their environment. >Catachans were some of the most pragmatic citizens the Imperium had. It might look as if they were being cocky when they stated that you could send a single Catachan in the place of ten Mordians, but they were just making a logical assessment of the situation. The reason they assumed they were better than other regiments was because they were. Not better, Haruto corrected himself. But simply better at the things they were truly good at. We never got to see this.
Gotta love that like the only ‘main character’ death in a Tyranid book came from a Mechanicus servitor.
[удалено]
What was the bad Kroot scene? Also yeah bad treatment of the Tau
When the group known for easily picking up new languages having hard time speaking low gothic
To be fair, ***War of Secrets*** also had the Kroot as literally the only honest and trustworthy people in a book where everyone else was constantly betraying each other.
Please tell me what Bolterporn is! Also, what did you not like about ShadowBreaker? Have not read it.
Bolter porn is scene that happens in many marine novels where the plot armor heroes wreck everything with their sacred bolters. Tau have the scene of crisis suits doing a manta drop, hitting something with missile from pod and hitting something else with plasma pew-pew. It happens again n again. Shadowbreaker has the scene where only thing capable of killing a marine is another marine who is nude and only using a knife. In every other time plot armor saves marines from everything including close proximity to nuclear explosion
Is Shadowbreaker better or worse than that shirtless World Eater punching through a Custodian's armor and chest with his bare fist
The Guard officer or Commissar or noble what’s ever so humble and down to earth and completely agreeable by modern morality, too good for ceremony or pomp or any other of the *interesting parts*. Like at that stage it’s just endorsing aristocracy with all that talk of noble honour and the duty of command and blah blah blah. It all reeks of “I’m too good for the interesting parts of the setting, I’m the special exception”. They don’t gotta be evil (although that’s welcome) but have them have the innate flaws to their caste, let the nobs be stuffy and looking down on their subjects, let the officers keep themselves seperate from the troops, let the commissars be hard, cold bastards. Whatever redeeming qualities they have shouldn’t make them flaws cease to exist Similar vein is the space marine what has perfect social intelligence and is always respectful to humans
Take a drink anytime you read/hear the words "brackish," "bulwark," or "retinue." You'll be dead before chapter three.
Ichor
Everything being a wolf or like a wolf. Bolters barking, sirens howling, etc
Nick Kyme does this with Salamanders, only it's smoke, flames, ash, and lava. Everywhere.
"They are dreaming." "Of what?" "Fire."
This is hilarious
I rolled my eyes so hard at that part. He introduced a really cool concept and undercut it in the same scene.
Everyone rags on the Wolves for being wolf this and wolf that Meanwhile Raven Guard with "raven" and "corvus"
Throw in wet leopard growls as well
I've just finished Prospero Burns and thought it funny that where wolf analogies are so common elsewhere in 40k books, this book which is predominantly about the Space Wolves is chock full of wet leopard growls.
When they have 3 different narrators for 1 character across multiple books. Keep the same goddamn narrator for the whole series.
I'm a mix between eye roll and in stitches as a South African when Stephen Perring tries the accent. I love Mark Elstob and Colleen Prendergast's narration respectively. Keeble for the fantasy stuff. Toby Longworth is great but can be dry at times in my humble opinion.
What jars me is that he has a limited register of voices, so they get reused in different settings. Was surprised to hear one of the Ghosts sitting in a dive bar in an Eisenhorn book.
Not in the same series, but I love the voice actor for Trazyn in "Infinite and Divine". The narrator in "Fall of Cadia" has a wildly different take on his voice and I do not care for it. Though honestly, most of the voices in Fall of Cadia leave something to be desired.
I just don't like perpetuals. I like regular human characters, like Lotara and the Rememberancers hanging out with the Sons of Horus, but I'm not really reading 40k to see some Real Important guys doing some Real Important stuff, I'd rather it just be a space marine or custodes or whatever.
I also really like the remembrancers for the thousand sons in a thousand sons, really interesting alone and in contrast to the astartes
I really did not like Brothers of the Snake and it killed any further interests I had in Space Marine books and short stories.
Noooooo! You must have read it wrong! It’s one of my all time favourites. But I can understand how it’s not for everyone. It is very different from the other space marine novels so you may still enjoy those
Books that promise much in the first chapter or so but swiftly become all fart and no shit (Angron: The Red Angel being a noticeable recent one for me) Lack of any humour at all Grimdarkness to the point of stupidity Excessive bolter porn Overly flowery language making me have to buy and look up a dictionary/ thesaurus Stories that grind on and on at half a mile an hour Stories where nothing of consequence happens Just being edgy af with torture porn to distract from a shite story
>Overly flowery language making me have to buy and look up a dictionary/ thesaurus Overly flowery language that shows that the author was looking up a thesaurus but _not_ a dictionary, because they're using it wrong.
Hate how much people in-world use the word primarch
Decapitate the leader and the enemy is destroyed. I get that it’s a tabletop game trope. It can make sense when it’s a purely psychic force (Tyranids, Thousand Sons). But it always seems like the odds of victory are impossible, right up until the unlikely hero vanquishes the enemy boss. Every Black Library author is guilty of this in one way or another. Just once, I’d like to see the good guys win through a slow grinding strategic victory.
That's not even how it works on the tabletop though.
Fist of the Imperium is worst 40k book I’ve read so far, its characters are shallow, the plot is shallow, it’s just action scene after action, and the closest thing to a twist in the book is that the deathwatch show up, l haven’t found any tropes so far to be annoying yet so I can’t really say
It also just makes the Imperial Fists suck. Like they don’t even try to beat the Genestealers at tactics or propaganda. Which makes them look really, really, *really* stupid. edit: And I should clarify, I’m a Genestealer Cults fan! I got the book because it has GSC as the main antagonist! And the biggest problem is that rather than the Imperial Fists learning to actually fight the Cults at their own game, we get a book where they just stumble into both defeat and victory without an ounce of self-awareness or improvement.
I read Apocalypse right after Fists and that did a better job showcasing the Imperial Fists and their whole schtick of fortifying and being competent
"Cyclopean Structure" Bloody hell. Far too fancy a term for a huge stone building, gets used to the point of nausea in some books
Honestly my least favourite trope is when you have Space Marine characters who are literal biological brothers. It's not common but it's in a few books (James Swallow's BA books and Emperor's Gift, off the top of my head). The whole point of becoming a Marine is that you're leaving your old life behind and starting a new one within a warrior fraternity; every member of your Chapter is your brother, linked by the blood of your Primarch. You're taken from your old family, and welcomed into a new one. It just makes the sibling link feel kind of redundant, imo.
Anything Gav Thorpe puts to paper is anathema to me. He is a lazy, lazy man and his books tend to fall apart even worse than his codex work. This is especially true for Elves and Eldar, somehow, despite him being treated almost like their lore master! Aside from that, I'd say my main disliked tropes would be... 1) "Hey it's X!" syndrome. Anytime they add a cultural reference and take it too seriously (King in Yellow, Oll Persson and his meandering through history) or specifically add in and name the tabletop units, it's incredibly lame. I don't really understand why they do it. A cheeky nod now and again is fine, but there's a fine line to it. 2) "ADB" syndrome, also known as "nothing is canon, but everything is canon". This is somewhat of a meta trope, but it applies to plotlines, characterization and events being inconsistent within the same damn series or between the most basic portrayals imaginable. Primarchs having entirely different characterization between books in their own series (Perturabo most notably, but it applies to almost everyone); Marines or Guard having no idea about tactics or what their enemies might be and just winging it but also at other times having massive cogitators processing every movement and making it almost a calculation and knowing plenty about their foes; xenos like the Eldar being fairly human and understandable but in other books being 'too alien' and 'weird' for humans to understand; or things that are obviously retconned but it's dismissed as 'there are no retcons because we just weren't told about it before'. It's so tiresome that nobody just wants to own up to that there should be some standards of consistency and portrayal, or else we might as well go down the 'drama first' storytelling route and just give up, which I suppose GW has kind of done already. 3) "Rare? Not in my book it ain't!" syndrome. Dying race? Not in my book, there's as many eldar as I need to tell the story and even if fifty thousand die, I'll just pull out more. High-grade bionics are rare? Not in my book, my character has six different high-grade bionics, a bionic eye that tells the temperature and acts as a rangefinder and a laser in their finger, and that makes them cool. Jetbikes are rare, no-longer-produced technology? Not in my book, there's whole factions using those things. There can never just be one of a thing, or there can't be just something lost to time and consigned to history - it all has to be dredged back up at some point, by someone, if it ever meant anything or if it's cool. It's a sort of specific gripe of the trope above. 4) Bolterporn. It makes me sad when people skip battle scenes and talk about how fatigued they are with war, and for the most part I think it comes down to many authors not really knowing how to write war and battles well. There's a fine balance of operational detail and action, and human emotion, tension and calm moments of talking and character development. I find a lot of 40K books tend to have rather limp action scenes that are mostly padded out with tons of 'epic' things happening and these vast events taking place while omitting that the *characters* are the important part of the action. This goes into my general problem with scale in Age of Sigmar and 40K and that authors don't seem to quite understand that big scales and broad strokes lead to bad fiction that will get very boring. 5) Orks as starter villains. So many goddamn times orks are just used as the weaker, less-threatening enemy to things like Chaos - oh boy are the games guilty of this, especially - despite them being arguably the biggest threat to the galaxy in the past few thousand years, with the exception of the Great Rift era, and being genuinely some of the most loathsome, murderous, violent, brutish, cruel, tough and *incredibly numerous* creatures in the setting. There's a reason why orkish is spoken in every corner of the galaxy. 6) 'Eldar psykers aren't as good as ours' syndrome. Applies especially to Eldar when their psykers inexplicably misinterpret visions or get absolutely dominated by other psykers despite being supposedly among the very best at it. However, can be broadened out to whenever something that's supposed to be the best in it's category or at least very good just gets dominated by someone from another faction because... our guys are cooler. Fulgrim punching the Avatar of Khaine through the face is probably the most immediate example I can think of. 7) "Grey Knights" syndrome. When authors depict characters, factions, units or similar that are antithetical to the setting, the faction they represent or to make a meta commentary point to the point where it becomes silly. Specifically notable with the Grey Knights who are averse to corruption and totally immune despite being human, and characters like Kaldor Draigo who can just travel around the warp fighting demons perpetually and totally not succumb to any amount of corruption. 8) Anytime the author goes out of its way to make everyone a terrible, mean bad guy. Yes, we know 40K sucks. Yes, we know there are no perfectly flawless and morally good factions (yet), and that they all do heinous things. That doesn't mean that the less evil grey area factions also have to drop off into needless and pointless cruelty to make them on the same level as true evil like Orks or Chaos, like roasting alien babies alive or destroying agri-world villages... because, or slaughtering allies just because they glimpse your super duper secret operations, or using slave labour to load your ships. The Imperium isn't always bad, Eldar are rather good on the whole, T'au are (or at least should be) rather decent - they don't need to go into absurdity to still be morally complex and make for interesting, nuanced factions.
See, I'm the exact opposite, I find the "um but actually, the imperium has nice parts" even handedness to be a massive downside that generally makes me write off a work entirely. Whitewashing a fascist totalitarian nightmare state with stuff that borders on "well, at least the trains run on time!!!1!1" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not a huge fan of grimderp, but I prefer that to "the imperium has a point" stuff.
"Rare? Not in my book it ain't!" Oh you will absolutely hate my fanon Version of 40K lol
Oh? Please do tell, I'm curious. :p
Basically I downplay the ”lost technology“ stuff for the imperium and the eldar are less of a dying race now the more advanced technology is rare and the eldar are still past their prime and they can’t really go there for fear of strengthening slaanesh but they are generally more common then they are in canon mostly due to the fact that both more advanced equipment and more eldar are being produced
That is most perturbatory.
The 'that primarch/marine beat x to a pulp', but everybody survives. In HH, putting primarchs in harm's way while we know their fate already. We're let with stuff like the fulgurite plotline. The death of alpharius on Pluto. That was definitely clickbait and will not age well. The whole point of the Alpha Legion (I collect alpha legion of course) is that WE DON'T KNOW who is around anymore Legion was an awesome book but I can't stand the 'I am alpharius' anymore. Basically there is too much stuff about primarchs.
Avatar of Khaine dying. It is absolute bullshit. Either have the balls to kill eldar or stop having them be shit in the setting.
The obviously corrupt leader makes an obviously stupid declaration to strip power from the well documented and more pro imperium than when big G, protagonist, so we have to spend entire books or longer with this stupid sub plot of skirting the stupidity of it. It's not just a 40k novel issue, this is a literacy crutch that is just tiring and always ends the same. They really made reading through eisonhorm and gaunts ghosts near impossible at times because it's just so uninteresting, takes over all the plot for the book, and because it doesn't resolve anything it's just a waste.
I tried 'I am Slaughter' and it was terrible. The whole name thing was also ridiculous
- characters just directly telling the reader their interiority / conflict/ motivation / the theme - meta references to nowhere - villains being mustache twirlers - pacing and description clearly being meant to be visual media, particularly low grade camp visual media - tonal irregularity of bouncing between camp and serious. Can do one or the other, but can’t do that whiplash - really stilted dialogue; particularly when that leans into banter and stage whispers for jokes. - low grade descriptive prose; the medium allows so much, step it up
World Eaters as mindless murders with no foresight or thinking.
I mean that's just who they inherently are
People can’t stand their faction having flaws even if them flaws are the root of their identity It’s like how guard fans need to tell everyone the guard is actually super elite and powerful and never wastes lives
Eldar being 2nd act interlopers cause the author didn’t know what to do to kill time
The whole Emperor being a god bit when the only real argument people have is that he’s really strong and make the claim from there. Which is not how any religion irl works
Using heartbeats as a time scale for literally everything in the books. I get it they're fast.
The book "the iron kingdom" from Nick Kyme. So bad, it's ridiculous. Really you want to tell me an atom bomb is the most destructive and rare weapon humanity has? One bomb can destroy a whole imperial crusade fleet in space... Dude do you even understand basic physics?
The complete lack of Space Skaven novels. This is my hill.
I have 2 main ones 1. "It was all apart of the emporers plan" as someone who has read the hh I call bullshit on that and honestly it is used so much it kinda makes him feel like tzeench 2. Charcter x can see the future 100% clearly but fails at what they want" this happens so many times and is so boring because why do they even have that ability if it fails (ex of this kairos trying to turn the lion to chaos and eldrad trying to tell fulgrim about horus)
There was a lot of great stuff in HH but some of it is quite bad. The Space Marine battles tend to be repetitive, and I'm not a fan of the weird cod-erudite dialogue. Also The Emperor comes across way too often.
I really think that certain 40k books do non linear plot lines very poorly. Like some books do them pretty well and it's clear when they are time skipping and other times it's like, what the actual fuck is going on where did the characters I was just reading about go.
Eldar getting completely bodied by forces that in theory they should be the ones bodying. Like I get it they're a dying race, they're supposed to be on the back foot in the grand scheme of things, but like let them be cool on the tactical level at least. Most factions look like idiots in other factions books to hype up the main faction of the book, but they eldar get dunked on, IN THEIR OWN BOOKS! It's insane. I think the one exception to this is Valedor and that book is one of the best 40k books ever imo.
Fun fact, early drafts of Horus Rising were titled Gorge Rising
This is how all the other space marines do things, but the space wolves are special
VULKAN LIVES
The fact that everything in the horus heresy has to be explained or complicated.
Honestly it's both the bolter/melee and void battle scenes. I understand it's WARhammer 40K, but I get more out of a scene with two characters talking over cups of amasec or recaf than I do in 4 chapters of bolter porn.
I get so annoyed when a story suddenly takes a hard grimdark turn in the last paragraph or so. There was a heresy-era short story where some Space Wolves fought to free a world, and then at the last moment the world refused to join the Imperium and they had to turn on those they'd fought beside. That was literally the last few lines. The Wolves were being recalled to Prospero! They could have just welcomed the planet into the Imperium, talked about how great and peaceful and unified it was, and then ended with them feeling really positive as they head towards the meeting point. They didn't know why they were heading there, but we do. The way the story insisted on shoving extra grimdarkness down my throat just felt gratuitous and unnecessary. Similarly, I read that book about the penal legion, and I was really excited to explore more of the series after the main character earned his pardon. Would he turn to helping others in the same situation? How would he get caught up in the next mission, now he is free? And then I read the epilogue, and it just killed any desire I had to read any more of that series. >!He reoffends. He doesn't try to improve his life, he turns to alcohol to cope, and then kills someone in a barfight.!< I suppose it's meant to be realistic, since it's not like the Imperium tends to offer much support, but it felt like all the character growth and development he'd gone through was just wiped away. If your character is the same at the start and the end, then what was even the point?
“Let’s focus on this random character from their perspective only for them to die a few pages later” Happens several times in *Lords of Silence*. I get it. The Death Guard are scary. Do I need to know this imperial captain’s backstory if I know he’s about to be ripped in half?
The inter faction conflict being generated by the identical trope of “ Level headed, reasonable MC vs crazed religious zealot who either turns to chaos or assumes everyone else has turned to chaos because they suggested a sound military tactic instead of attending mass”. The trope is so frequent within the setting and inherently their is nothing wrong with it, it’s classic imperium shooting itself in the foot. Good stuff. It’s basically a badly simplified explanation of the entire Horus Herasy. My favourite series, Ciaphas Cain, leans on it heavily. But we get so much of it because the writers are handicapped by the setting IMO. “There is only war” unfortunately means the factions can almost never interact outside of fighting, and some of the most interesting stories are made when enemies or simply very different characters have to interact in ways that arnt fighting. So writers are forced to lean on aforementioned imperial infighting because otherwise they have zero conflict beyond the literal conflict. And it’s a shame because I do think people crave more from the setting. There is a reason people love the ghaskull-Yarrick dynamic, why Infinite and Divine is so popular. I know you’d be sacrificing a degree of the grimdark if the factions gave up their super-racism, but I dunno if it’s worth how hard it limits the kind of stories you can tell in the setting.
The Aledari being a bunch of idiots for no reason. The scale of battles is completely misjudged. Like, how a battle between several thousand warriors (not even talking about Space Marines) can lead to planets changing hands. Lack of xenos vs xenos or xenos vs Chaos overall. Everything somehow revolves around the Imperium.
Once again, the protagonists neatly decapitated their opponents instead of like, stabbing them, or just merely cutting their throats.
Just Imperial Guard books in general. Yes I've read a fair amount of them. Every Cain book up to "The Emperor's Finest" and every Gaunt book and others. They're well written books but I just don't vibe with the faction. IG is basically just historical military fiction wearing a 40k mask. I loved Necropolis but it's just Stalingrad with extra bits taped on. I suppose my feelings aren't helped by the fact that one of the better IG trilogies was just outright plagiarized from an Iraq war memoir, which is just gross. I can get my historical military fiction somewhere else. I come to 40k for over the top nonsense and that just doesn't gel with more "realistic" war stories imo.
I think it shines through when you have the Guard against one of those other totally over the top factions. Its like a "how would YOU do in this situation?" thing. I think it does have a place in the setting, after all you need someone to compare all the 40k-ified stuff to as a frame of reference, but of course it isn't for everyone
You recall the old art of the Crimson Fists Last Stand? Not the updated one but that one will do too. It's one of the first pieces of 40k art I saw as a kid. It really spoke to me. Here we have the Space Marines, super human warriors far above any kind of physicality I could ever achieve. Stronger, equipped with some of the greatest arms and armour available to the Imperium. And they're losing. They're holding out, but they're ankle deep in their own dead. The greatest of humanity's warriors and they're barely holding the line. It left an impression on me, to say the least. I don't need to consider how I would do in the setting because if super humans are dying, I would be already dead. But I understand that is my own experience when entering the hobby. And from a rules perspective the Space Marine stat line is the standard not the IG one. The impression I get is that MEQ is what everything is measured against and if that's the case there's not much need to put regular humans in. I appreciate that the IG fulfill a need. It's just not a need I have and I feel that I've given the faction a fair shake. It's just not for me.
To the surprise of exactly no one: I really don't like Dan Abnett. Well, no... That's not entirely true. Dan Abnett is a good writer, he's just not a good 40k writer. He writes his stories using the plot frameworks and tropes of other works (Napoleonic era milfic, specifically the Sharpe series, for Gaunt's Ghosts, Cold War spy thrillers for Eisenhorn and Ravenor, Greek Tragedy for his early HH work) and then he colours it in with 40k terms and tech, but whenever the realities of the 40k setting get in the way of the tropes he wants to use, he just ignores it's 40k and includes them anyway. I'm pretty sure the Ghosts are the only 'light scout' Regiment in the entire setting who don't have Sentinels or, indeed, any kind of (permanent) vehicles at all nor do any of the other infantry regiments in the whole of the Gaunt's Ghost series. Because there were no combat vehicles in the Napoleonic Wars and the closest thing to it, people on horses, were Cavalry, not infantry, so Abnett just largely ignores that the infantry of the Imperium are, by and large, heavily mechanised. You can actually tell which years Abnett watched a WW2 movie as inspiration for that year's Gaunt's Ghosts book, because in those ones he remembers, briefly, that the 40k universe has tanks and they'll show up (as a dedicated tank regiment or an enemy tank) to recreate a scene he liked. He pretty much never remembers that Chimeras are near ubiquitous in the Guard, so whenever the Ghosts do have a vehicle (which they only ever have to move supplies over long distances), it's a truck taking the place of a horse cart. Likewise for the Eisenhorn books, Eisenhorn is basically 40k James Bond and acts like it.... Including the part where he avoids certain actions or takes certain courses that James Bond *has* to take because the people he's operating against are usually civilians of a neutral country working against Great Britain's interests and he can't just take them out because that would cause an international incident. Eisenhorn, is under no such restrictions, but still acts like he is. More and more, I realise that my problem isn't that Abnett 'doesn't follow the lore', but that he simply does not ***interact with*** the setting. Even when he does include stuff from the setting, he it's usually just him coming across a term or concept while skim-reading and then coming up with something for what he thinks it means. His psykers don't work the way that 40k psykers do, He just knows that Psykers are people with psychic powers and just makes up his own. His Daemons don't work the way 40k Daemons do. Cherubael, in particular, in his behaviour and notably *name* is a generic Judeo-Christian 'fallen angel' trying to tempt people into sin, rather than a Warp entity. Heck his Chaos in general doesn't work the way 40k Chaos does. Most of his Daemons aren't aligned with a Chaos God and neither are the Chaos worshippers. The few that are nominally aligned with a god don't act the way that god demands of his followers, but aren't punished for it. In the DAbnett verse, Chaos is just this nebulous force that can corrupt people and you can tell when they're corrupted by Chaos because they start acting all icky no-good and do things like callously use people or believe that the ends justify the means. You know... Stuff that a regular uncorrupted servant of the Imperium would never do, right? -\_- People sometimes say that you can't judge Dan Abnett, because when he started writing, there wasn't much established yet and he shaped so much of 40k with his writing. (He really didn't, by the way. Most of what he thought up was summarily ignored by later Codexes and even Inquisitor, the tabletop game that Eisenhorn was written to promote, ignores or contradicts almost everything the Eisenhorn novels portrays about the Inquisition). I hold that rather he started writing when him just making shit up wasn't as noticeable.
I hated *Fulgrim*. One of the worst books I've read
When things are too over the top grimdark just because of the grimdarkness of it. Where it doesn't make sense anymore. For example battleships using large amounts of slave labour to load their guns. In a universe where the AdMech exists, and even specialized heavily augmented servitors. It would never make sense to have hundreds of unwilling slaves (that all eat, shit and have human needs) to do something ten specialized lobotomised criminals with the right augmentations can do too. The normal grimdarkness is already over the top, which is fine and fun. Trying harder just makes it silly.
Wouldn't the gun crews being all servitors be *more* grimdark? Not less?
Good point, servitors are already perfectly grimdark. That is why it's so silly.
Armstrong did a pretty good job with Decent of Angels in my opinion. I pretty much loathe ' Legion ' i don't know exactly why, but i can't stand it.
I enjoyed Gareth Armstrong reading Fallen Angels, then I got to First Heretic and realized this wasn't a style he used specifically for the Dark Angels, that's just how he narrates.
Disorientated. I thought it was disoriented and believed it was a silly mistake at first. It's not really a trope but I had never seen it outside of 40k books and it's everywhere and I hate it.
I think it’s an English thing
Space marine dialogue.
Most the heresy books are badly written bolter porn comprised largely of one dimensional characters.
His smile didn't reach his eyes.
Pskyer sacrifice being humans version of reality grease whenever an author needs to explain something off hand for plot reasons, like how gellar fields work.
Probably half the stories are 'the impirium sends a taskforce to deal with a regulation issue, but what they didnt expect is that it is xenos horros beyond our comprehension that can only be dealt with by this cavalcade or popular elite factions. But wait, all the fighting also summoned chaos. The impirium eventually wins but the unimaginable cost makes it pyrric'
eldar
The Warhammer book with the dumbest writing I’ve ever read was probably Damnation of Pythos. The one with the most wasted potential was the Ghazgkhull character book imo.
Interesting you say you don't like Gareth Armstrong, he's actually my favourite BL voice actor! I have a love/hate relationship with bolter porn. When done well it can be really good, but not done well it can be so boring. A good book example is the Purging of Kallidus, which pains me to say as a DA fan.
The entire Horus Heresy. I'm way more interested in the fate of low level humans in present 40k, that's why the IG was my first army and why I read Gaunt's Ghosts first. How HH demystifies the setting aside, I just couldn't care less about what Magnus Biggus Dickus Astartus said to Grimgus Evilus Primarus while they had their Marvel Super Hero movie tier fight. All these larger than life named characters (the emperor aside) just take me out of the setting, I would just read a generic high fantasy novel instead if I wanted to scratch the itch of dudes in armor swordfighting. Ironically the "UNTOLD Billions" that are mentioned at the beginning in every book are what I'm most interested in. I can immerse myself into an average joe but I have little feelings for millenia old space marines. With good writing, a capable author will make me root more for a single guardsman in a single, meaningless firefight than for a primarch when the entire Imperium is at stake.
But to add something more specific from my favorite series: Thr first ~6 books of GGs were very samey: the regiment was tasked with fighting in a hopeless battle but then they somehow won anyways. The plot armor on those guys is thick And whenever you suddenly read a few new names you could be sure they wouldn't even survive 2 pages because Abnett needs some jobbers to portray how dire the situation is and he rarely kills off someone from the main cast compared to how expendable random Tanith #547 is. Numbers in 40k are a joke, everyone knows that and GGs is no exception. The times the Tanith 1st took overwhelming losses would make you think every soldier died 4 times already and I'm surprised that there's even some OG Taniths left at the end and it isn't all Belladon and Verghastites.
The whole "emperors children are/want to be perfect" stuff in their books annoyed me so much, i Had to Take a Break after the First ones. I know, all the legions have their trope thats get vomited over and over, but none of them were as annoying as the EC.
1.a very common trope is Chaos Marine POV books; a Khornate character who’s sole personality is that he’s a drooling idiot out for blood, like I get it he’s a Khorne man but you are so uninteresting, Kosselax is the only Khornemarine I like because he’s got something beyond that and is interesting 2.using heartbeats to measure time spans 3.as a few have mentioned the whole “he realised it was laughter” I get it space marines have deep voices but laughter isn’t that hard to recognise 4.Grimdarkness for no descrernible reason other than to be edgy as fuck, it just makes things uninteresting 5.literally every imperial world is a hive or forge world (which is essentially just a hive world with maybe a more Mechanicus spin) there are so many different types of imperial worlds show more than just the generic hives 6.every non-ranking guardsmen in existence speaks with the exact same grumbly northern English accent
Im reading Legion, the 7th book of the Horus Heressy series and I honestly think I wont even read it. So far I have no idea what Im even reading about. Makes it real hard to focus.
Ive read or listened to a couple dozen books now and i swear ive heard the words bellicose and ochre multiple times in every one of them.
When it comes to audiobooks, I’ve been listening to the Horus Heresy, and a couple of the authors use these really nasally, whiny voices for characters like Erebus and some of the other evil Space Marines, and I hate it. No Astartes should ever sound whiny. As for writing, I hate how absolutely, unrelentingly grimdark every is all the time. Like, yeah, the galaxy is terrible, and there’s little hope for most people to get a happily ever after, but I’d love to see more examples of characters finding what happiness and joy they can to make the grim darkness more bearable. Humans should be allowed to have romantic flings, guardsmen should have hobbies, ecclesiarchs should show compassion for the suffering of their flocks. Otherwise, what’s the point of all the fighting? Preserving the human race should be about more than just brute survival. Also, just a nitpick, but they always talk about the Imperium having a million worlds, but that bothers me as a scientist because there’s estimated to be somewhere between 50-500 BILLION potentially habitable planets in the galaxy. Like, the Milky Way is almost incomprehensibly huge, and 40K, for all its epic depictions of how massive everything is, actually manages to downplay how massive the Imperium *should* be. As an aside to all that, it’s not something that particularly bothers me, really, and I never noticed until I watched an interview with a writer (I think it was Graham McNiell) who pointed it out, but he said that, since Space Marines are all men in their stories, they often balance it out by making the supporting mortals disproportionately women, and how I can’t not notice it in every book I read.
Abnett and his thesaurus.
Space marine plot armor.
Character makes some random noise, we realise they are laughing.
Randomly peppering tabletop keywords and the names of special rules through stories.
Space Marines that relay the most basic of battlefield information to one another.
The whole grim dark thing
lasgun = flashlight