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Leperflesh posted:You can see this in a lot of other game lines from other manufacturers, too. If you want to play WW2 tabletop wargames, there probably has to be someone willing to play as an axis power, and yet, as a company if you're not pieces of poo poo you really don't want to pander to the nazi set, so you have to kind of focus on how cool the tanks and halftracks are and stick to the iron cross for the iconography and just try and be cool about it. You really haven't played much in the way of old school WWII wargames have you? It used to be SOP across multiple wargames to make the Waffen SS into German elite troops by the rules. (In reality some of the SS divisions were because they were full of (a) volunteers and (b) politically connected people who could get them the best equipment while others were of no military use at all). And let's not get started on the rulesets making all the Germans better troops than all the Soviets. quote:*Have there ever been any women authors of 40k fiction, ever? Yes. Rachel Harrison and Danie Ware are two.
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Dec 16, 2021 02:02
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I think it's good that GW has released an unambiguous statement about the "Austrian Painter" guy at the tournament and people who want to be fascist pricks in general, but I don't think it's at all a bad faith argument to point out that going "well 40K is a satire, how come people don't get that" doesn't hold a lot of water when decades of 40K media presents the Imperium, largely but not always solely via Space Marines, as the coolest badasses in the world living out a life of constant Hard Choices because the presence of literal hell demons justifies it. It's a setting chock full of multiple chapters of 300 The Movie Spartans in power armor fighting aliens in grimdarkly awesome ways, and even their doomed last stands where everyone dies are presented as being sick as hell. Both of these things can be true, that GW probably really does mean for the Imperium to not be seen as "the good guys" at the end of they day, but also that how they are actually portrayed is very frequently at odds with this. No part of this is being presented as a satire, the message is very much "space marines fuckin whip rear end."
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Dec 16, 2021 02:36
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GW seems to be at an impasse of treating the Imperium as a bloated, failing mess governed by cruel, self-serving tyrants and fuelled by blind zealotry, but portraying the factions within it as noble heroes doing their best with a godawful position. And that's before you consider all the recent Guilliman stuff. Whether that makes the fascist overtones better (the society is an utter failure even if individuals do their best) or worse (politicians, administrators, and religious figures are useless, only trust the army) is up to you.
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Dec 16, 2021 03:04
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Kai Tave posted:I think it's good that GW has released an unambiguous statement about the "Austrian Painter" guy at the tournament and people who want to be fascist pricks in general, but I don't think it's at all a bad faith argument to point out that going "well 40K is a satire, how come people don't get that" doesn't hold a lot of water when decades of 40K media presents the Imperium, largely but not always solely via Space Marines, as the coolest badasses in the world living out a life of constant Hard Choices because the presence of literal hell demons justifies it. It's a setting chock full of multiple chapters of 300 The Movie Spartans in power armor fighting aliens in grimdarkly awesome ways, and even their doomed last stands where everyone dies are presented as being sick as hell. Both of these things can be true, that GW probably really does mean for the Imperium to not be seen as "the good guys" at the end of they day, but also that how they are actually portrayed is very frequently at odds with this. No part of this is being presented as a satire, the message is very much "space marines fuckin whip rear end." The thing here is that that's a two and a half minute sizzle reel for a video game. I mean if you look at the intro to Dawn of War it's all about the uncritical badassery - but you'd have to not engage with the game itself to think that the Marines are unproblematic if not outright bad guys. I mean "An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded"? "Only the awkward question; only the foolish ask twice."? "Zeal is its own excuse"? The criticism therefore appears to me to be "Less than 100% of the time is spent hammering home with all the subtlety of a falling anvil that the Imperium are bad guys". And even then there's differing understandings. The following made me literally cringe because of how over the top and self-aggrandizing it was. But somehow it was presented as evidence that GW were presenting them as good guys.
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Dec 16, 2021 03:25
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neonchameleon posted:You really haven't played much in the way of old school WWII wargames have you? It used to be SOP across multiple wargames to make the Waffen SS into German elite troops by the rules. (In reality some of the SS divisions were because they were full of (a) volunteers and (b) politically connected people who could get them the best equipment while others were of no military use at all). And let's not get started on the rulesets making all the Germans better troops than all the Soviets. Was talkin' current games now, as opposed to the old school stuff. But you're right that this is mostly inference from reading a lot of posts about them here, rather than buying & playing them.
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Dec 16, 2021 03:37
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That image is cringey and fashy and self-aggrandizing, but there's nothing in it that is obvious satire, so if it is supposed to be read ironically i bet a whole lot of people do not. I don't know if there's more context in its' original printing, like how images in the Sabatt Worlds Crusade book are given in-universe backstories that make them explicitly Imperial propaganda and untrustworthy, but taken at face-value there's nothing there that screams irony. 40k has always wrestled at least a little between satire and guileless metal-album-cover badassery, and I think the badassery has been emphasized more in the last 10-15 years. My first exposure to 40k was the 3rd edition core rulebook which was chock-full of in-character asides revealing just how monstrous and insane the Imperium is, and the most prominent image in the book to my preteen eyes was Jon Blanche's magnificent and disgusting picture of the Golden Throne, laying bare the absurdity of keeping a literal moldering corpse alive in a gilded cage. I don't see as much of that stuff in the more modern books: the in-universe sidebars revealing the Imperium's ignorance and incompetence have been largely replaced with more omniscient narration and the art is a lot less disgusting and a lot more heroic. This isn't universal, I think Necromunda does a good job highlighting the insanity of the Imperium, and that's in large part due to what it highlights in the setting. Goliath gangers and Space Marines are both roided-out post-human genetic combat monsters, but the Goliath are not aspirational in the same way Space Marines are: I doubt many people dream of being a cloned worker drone good only for a few short years of backbreaking labor and meaningless violence but a whole lot of people can fantasize about being so cool and tough and badass that they are selected to become immortal Angels in a caste above humanity. In Necromunda, the Space Marines are distant and monstrous with their monasteries literally built on the suffering of billions, the distance and difference in focus gives a whole lot more context and makes the satire and criticism clear.
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Dec 16, 2021 03:55
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neonchameleon posted:The thing here is that that's a two and a half minute sizzle reel for a video game. Well Space Marine 1 was basically played completely straight with the only real satire being occasional background voice lines of automated factory systems telling dead workers to report to their shifts, so I'm not sure that "oh this is just the sizzle reel that shows the manly badass space marines being so venerated people are kneeling in awestruck reverence" means much when the whole game is also probably going to be like that as well, which is my point. neonchameleon posted:The criticism therefore appears to me to be "Less than 100% of the time is spent hammering home with all the subtlety of a falling anvil that the Imperium are bad guys" act It's actually that a lot of 40K stuff spends exactly 0% of the time caring about 40K's supposed "satirical" elements, and that this is still defended by people just going "but it's supposed to be a satire!" as though catching the uncritical Imperium fans in some sort of hypocrisy trap is going to cause them to suddenly go "oh no, I had no idea!" Like I'm not going to say that this is some moral failing of GW by not producing the Correct Sort of Media, but I think it's a stretch to say that the unironic pro-fascism Imperium fans just showed up out of nowhere for no reason. You can't "fascist-proof" media but there's a difference between "My Little Pony supports the ethnostate and in this essay I will" and "Space Marines, the literal ubermensch, are presented as the most incredibly awesome thing in the world, full of noble badassery and tragic heroism as they fight to save humanity from the savage hordes and degenerate others."
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Dec 16, 2021 04:11
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neonchameleon posted:The thing here is that that's a two and a half minute sizzle reel for a video game. I mean if you look at the intro to Dawn of War it's all about the uncritical badassery - but you'd have to not engage with the game itself to think that the Marines are unproblematic if not outright bad guys. I mean "An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded"? "Only the awkward question; only the foolish ask twice."? "Zeal is its own excuse"? In the universe of 40k an open mind is how literal demons from hell get in. The most dire threat to humanity are people who at first appear as friendly and well meaning but soon reveal themselves and their true sexually perverse, disease-ridden, scheming and violent agenda. You don't need to be fascist to enjoy 40k but it's easy to see why fascists enjoy it. Apart from the general glorification of the space marines it presents a setting where fascist thinking is correct - humanity is beset by an enemy other that can only be dealt with via a zero-sum war of annihilation. Once that's been conceded, fascists have an in to convince people that this is what's happening in our world now.
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Dec 16, 2021 04:23
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Saguaro PI posted:In the universe of 40k an open mind is how literal demons from hell get in. The most dire threat to humanity are people who at first appear as friendly and well meaning but soon reveal themselves and their true sexually perverse, disease-ridden, scheming and violent agenda. Yeah the thing, 40K's Imperium is ostensibly supposed to be a satire of fascism, and over the decades the setting has been massaged into one where "being a horrible fascist theocratic death cult" is actually the correct choice because the alternative is invariably presented as "Chaos demons eat everyone, the end." 90% of the time rebellions against the Imperium turn out to be an insidious chaos/genestealer/tau/whatever plot, or there's some sidebar about how this other civilization was trying to be egalitarian and not fascist but then whoops, a horrible alien menace/chaos again/etc corrupts and destroys them because that's just what happens when people aren't insane paranoid violent xenophobes in the 40K universe. Even the Tau who originally started out as "these guys are actually pretty good and decent and into cooperation and diplomacy, but the punchline is they somehow wound up in the worst possible setting to try and be that and they have no idea how much danger they're in" have since mutated into a faction ruled by mind controlling elites, with humans who join them implied to be sterilized and brainwashed and poo poo.
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Dec 16, 2021 05:02
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Kai Tave posted:Yeah the thing, 40K's Imperium is ostensibly supposed to be a satire of fascism, and over the decades the setting has been massaged into one where "being a horrible fascist theocratic death cult" is actually the correct choice because the alternative is invariably presented as "Chaos demons eat everyone, the end." 90% of the time rebellions against the Imperium turn out to be an insidious chaos/genestealer/tau/whatever plot, or there's some sidebar about how this other civilization was trying to be egalitarian and not fascist but then whoops, a horrible alien menace/chaos again/etc corrupts and destroys them because that's just what happens when people aren't insane paranoid violent xenophobes in the 40K universe. This is why I wish more of 40k's written material was presented as in universe documents instead of omniscient narration. When the reports of Tau sterilization programs and the inevitability of Chaos corruption outside the Imperial system are all coming from the Inquisition, that's a lot more interesting. Those old reports by Inquisitors or Rogue Traders were also just a lot more fun than the boring badassery of some of the more recent stuff.
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Dec 16, 2021 05:13
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Ehh that's a bit of a stretch. Like, fash love the idea of absolutes because it's a context where their black and white morality works. That's why they're so goddamn hung up on pedophiles and terrorists - there's little "grey area" there. BUT it requires an absolute good. The evil cabal of pedophiles is worthless except as a Goofus to Qanon's (and secret brain genius Trump's) Gallant. There's a lot of in-game propaganda, and I think the problem is that it works on dumbasses. There's nothing suggesting that the Emperor was a force for anything but himself and his own self-aggrandizing vanity. His colossal string of bad judgment and fuckups lead to the entire universe being literally on fire. Like, it's absolutely and unambiguously the case that he's a lovely leader and probably braindead. But fash being fash, that's loving appealing. It's why all the God Emperor Trump stuff was a thing. They have a pathological need to slot things into a binary good/bad dichotomy, reality (or published canonical setting material) be damned.
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Dec 16, 2021 05:15
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moths posted:Ehh that's a bit of a stretch. I think there has been a lot of stuff that's presented as propaganda and such, like the whole Imperial Infantryman's Uplifted Primer is in the same camp as a VaultTec guidebook, but even outside explicit goofiness there's been stuff before like in-universe recountings of "great battles of the Imperium" all of which end in devastating losses and destroyed worlds, but at the same time there's also been a lot of stuff that's just presented authorially and not as a product of unreliable narration. Part of the issue I think is that this kind of "drift" is probably inevitable when you have decades of expanded universe stuff happening from the hands of dozens and dozens of creators all kind of off working in their own little corners. It's like with Space Marines, you have a dozen people making stories about the Manly Band of Brothers because it's hard to tell a story about space marines if they're all just brainwashed ultra murder-zealots with zero personality, and so now you have a bunch of stories like that, and then other authors use those stories as a starting point for their own stuff, etc etc. And you sort of have the issue, as was pointed out, of a lot of authors adopting the approach of "the Imperium as an institution is bad but there are noble people working within it" which brings its own open can of worms to the party.
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Dec 16, 2021 05:46
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This guy made a video where he implied that the current Minecraft devs endorse colonialism and slavery due the presence of a bug that allows players to trap villagers in a specific behavior loop and farm them for infinite resources. In the same video he argued that people in the Global South can't enjoy Minecraft to the same extent he does because they lack the inherent cultural values necessary to enjoy terraforming and building "big things." He's a living satire of bad leftwing media criticism. Typical Pubbie fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 05:54
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I think there's also just a kind of thinking that is immune to nuance or irony, even on a closer reading. Like, the brain just doesn't bother to retain anything that conflicts with whatever it's decided. Like, from what I've seen there's certainly room to argue that elements of 40K have been super uncritical of the fash stuff in the setting. But from other fandoms I've been around (not fashy ones, even!), there's going to be a chunk of the audience that just won't pick up when the work is contrasting appearance and reality, even if it's done at a really blatant "Hi, we're here to tell you the themes directly!" level. After a certain point, as a creator you just kind of have to accept that some of your audience are just not going to get it, and hope that they're a small fraction and the majority can figure out that the war criminals are bad even if they look really cool. (It's also just scream-in-your-pillow frustrating to feel like you have to write everything at a preteen level because some dumbasses haven't grasped basic morality like "genocide? not a good thing!") Typical Pubbie posted:This is the guy who made a video where he implied that the current Minecraft devs endorse colonialism and slavery due the presence of a bug that allows players to trap villagers in a specific behavior loop and farm them for infinite resources. In the same video he argued that people in the Global South can't enjoy Minecraft to the same extent he does because they lack the inherent cultural values necessary to enjoy terraforming and building things. He's a living satire of bad leftwing media criticism. That is really stretching what he actually says in the video you're talking about dude. E: Dude literally says in the video that he doesn't think that the colonialism/slavery was intentional, and it's just a funnily awkward outcome of game systems interacting in unexpected ways. Puppy Time fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 05:55
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Kai Tave posted:I think there has been a lot of stuff that's presented as propaganda and such, like the whole Imperial Infantryman's Uplifted Primer is in the same camp as a VaultTec guidebook, but even outside explicit goofiness there's been stuff before like in-universe recountings of "great battles of the Imperium" all of which end in devastating losses and destroyed worlds, but at the same time there's also been a lot of stuff that's just presented authorially and not as a product of unreliable narration. It probably doesn't help that the Imperium as an institution is now headed by one of those noble people, especially one that's literally the first living son of the Emperor to come home. And while he's arguably being one of the most reasonable people in space, he's still keeping up all the crusading and the warfare. Though at the same time, his intro also wouldn't have even been possible if it wasn't for the Eldar, so it isn't like "purge all the aliens" is a black-and-white viewpoint of the franchise. It makes me wonder in which ways the Imperium moving forward like this is good for the franchise, and in which ways it's bad for it. It's doing a lot to help the franchise not stagnate, but I'm hoping it doesn't lead to the Imperium sliding right into the protagonist role in a relatively uncritical fashion. I believe the Guilliman books delve into the sheer mess he's stepped into, and how much he hates what humanity's become, but I really hope that doesn't all get papered over with an "it's okay, humanity's all better now!" The Bee fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 05:58
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Leperflesh posted:*Have there ever been any women authors of 40k fiction, ever? Single digits. Low single digits. I can for sure name Rachel Harrison with a novel and several short stories to her credit. She writes Imperial Guard stories based around a commissar protagonist, good ones. I'd like to see that change, even stories with female leads would be a step in the right direction. Rites of Passage for example, a novel about an older woman leading a Navigator house through multiple crises. So female representation is a rounding error so far for 40K. It's slowly changing and I intend to vote with my dollars as they put out more.
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Dec 16, 2021 06:06
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Puppy Time posted:
I don't know what it is about Dan Olsen's work in particular that does this to people, but almost every time I've encountered someone who takes umbrage with one of his videos, the way they describe his ideas and content makes it sound like they watched something completely different.
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Dec 16, 2021 06:08
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Puppy Time posted:That is really stretching what he actually says in the video you're talking about dude. Fast forward to 6:00 where he says that of course he doesn't believe the game behavior is intentional (*wink*), only to spend the next few minutes belaboring the point that this emergent gameplay (based on a bug) is totally chattel slavery in Minecraft you guys, and even if the devs didn't intend for it to happen they still designed the system that enabled it. The part about people in the global south not appreciating Minecraft because they lack the cultural values to enjoy building stuff is almost a direct quote.
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Dec 16, 2021 06:12
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Kai Tave posted:or there's some sidebar about how this other civilization was trying to be egalitarian and not fascist but then whoops, a horrible alien menace/chaos again/etc corrupts and destroys them because that's just what happens when people aren't insane paranoid violent xenophobes in the 40K universe. You could play a fun game of grabbing a bunch of quotes regarding the fall of the Eldar civilisation as a result of post-scarcity decadence and people condemning the moral depravity of modernity and ask people to guess which is which.
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Dec 16, 2021 06:13
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Puppy Time posted:Like, from what I've seen there's certainly room to argue that elements of 40K have been super uncritical of the fash stuff in the setting. But from other fandoms I've been around (not fashy ones, even!), there's going to be a chunk of the audience that just won't pick up when the work is contrasting appearance and reality, even if it's done at a really blatant "Hi, we're here to tell you the themes directly!" level. I mentioned My Little Pony as an example of how you can't, no matter how hard you try, "fascist-proof" media to the point that it flawlessly deflects people from planting their lovely flags onto it. MLP is a kids cartoon about pastel horses learning about cooperation and friendship and battling evil, and you can find unironic nazi MLP fans out there using it to extol the virtues of the ethnostate and drawing ponies with swastika marks and poo poo. Apparently there's even a bunch of drama over some big MLP fan art site being unwilling to ban nazis or remove nazi-related art due to the usual "free speech" stuff proving that time really is just a flat circle. So I completely agree that it is impossible to somehow make a thing that fascists will not somehow latch onto if they want, the same way it's hard to make an anti-war movie that doesn't in some way ennoble or glorify war, and I will also say that it's really fuckin hard to make effective satire these days. I do not think that GW is somehow morally culpable for making Bad Art or something, nor do I think that they're pushing some secret pro-fascist agenda, my main point (and the one I've seen other making) is simply that it isn't that people are somehow unaware that 40K is supposed to be a satire, it's that 40K has not really been very consistently or effectively satirical lately (by which I mean over the last several decades), and meeting the uncritical pro-Imperium wannabe fascists with "you know this is supposed to be a satire right?" doesn't challenge or dissuade that the way some folks seem to think it should.
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Dec 16, 2021 06:16
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Typical Pubbie posted:Fast forward to 6:00 where he says that of course he doesn't believe the game behavior is intentional (*wink*), only to spend the next few minutes belaboring the point that this emergent gameplay (based on a bug) is totally chattel slavery in Minecraft you guys, and even if the devs didn't intend for it to happen they still designed the system that enabled it. olson derangement syndrome strikes again
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Dec 16, 2021 06:16
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Typical Pubbie posted:Fast forward to 6:00 where he says that of course he doesn't believe the game behavior is intentional (*wink*), only to spend the next few minutes belaboring the point that this emergent gameplay (based on a bug) is totally chattel slavery in Minecraft you guys, and even if the devs didn't intend for it to happen they still designed the system that enabled it.
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Dec 16, 2021 06:20
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I believe it has already been mentioned, but I think all of this also has to be kept in mind that the primary target for so much of this stuff is teenage boys. So 'they're just too stupid to get it' doesn't apply as much, because the whole thing is created with the specific goal of appealing to children.
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Dec 16, 2021 06:22
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counterspin posted:I believe it has already been mentioned, but I think all of this also has to be kept in mind that the primary target for so much of this stuff is teenage boys. So 'they're just too stupid to get it' doesn't apply as much, because the whole thing is created with the specific goal of appealing to children. People can absolutely be too stupid to get media that appeals to children. Fascist Bronies exist. At some point you're either willfully ignorant or dumber than a sack of bricks, and I'll gleefully accept "both" as an answer when it comes to fash.
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Dec 16, 2021 06:28
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Typical Pubbie posted:Fast forward to 6:00 where he says that of course he doesn't believe the game behavior is intentional (*wink*), only to spend the next few minutes belaboring the point that this emergent gameplay (based on a bug) is totally chattel slavery in Minecraft you guys, and even if the devs didn't intend for it to happen they still designed the system that enabled it. He specifically says he doesn’t think it’s intentional or deliberate, but explores how it mirrors real-life issues of colonialism and chattel slavery. This is an important part of cultural studies today, which is what Dan Olson does - he’s exploring how Minecraft unconsciously includes and repeats those ideas, even though the coders weren’t trying to be hurtful, bigoted, or colonizing. I’m genuinely not sure what you mean by “people in the global south don’t appreciate Minecraft” because he doesn’t say anything like that. What he DOES say is that his own enjoyment of building, terraforming and gaining control over the world is founded in his own Western culture’s valorizing of those acts. He asks what non-Western games might look like, and expressly admits he does not know or if they are even possible. It sounds like you don’t have much background in academic cultural studies so you’re not understanding the specificity of where he locates problems and how he’s placing responsibility on the cultural forces and powers of Western civilizations, not the colonized.
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Dec 16, 2021 06:29
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Lmao you don't need any background besides a 7th grade reading level to understand a Dan Olson video. They're very good videos and I like them a lot, but they're not exactly dense and thorny subject matter. I suspect the poster either wasn't paying attention or had already decided what the video was supposed to be saying and went from there, because those are the only ways you could really miss the point of the video : it was really quite explicit in making its point and stated its thesis multiple times.
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Dec 16, 2021 07:32
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Typical Pubbie posted:Fast forward to 6:00 where he says that of course he doesn't believe the game behavior is intentional (*wink*), only to spend the next few minutes belaboring the point that this emergent gameplay (based on a bug) is totally chattel slavery in Minecraft you guys, and even if the devs didn't intend for it to happen they still designed the system that enabled it. Username/Post combo here is exquisite. That Dan Olson video is great, actually, and asks some interesting questions about what narratives our culture uses in its games unintentionally, possibly in ways similar to how 40k authors may unintentionally reinforce some harmful stuff.
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Dec 16, 2021 07:51
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When people talk about being a satire that some people don't get, I think about fellow 1980s gaming institution Paranoia and how no one has ever mistaken the Alpha Complex setting for anything other than a clattering dystopian shitshow without a single redeeming characteristic. No one is out there exalting the world of Friend Computer and drawing fan art of beloved politicians as High Programmers in the same way that some corners of 40K fandom do for their game. If 40K is a satire, it's a really badly executed one. It's possible to make a dystopian SF satire world that clearly communicates that it's a satire (we know this, because Paranoia did just that). 40K's designers and writers could have leaned into more strongly messaging that "yo, this is satire" but they chose not to, and it is entirely fair to criticize them for that choice.
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Dec 16, 2021 08:48
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GW could solve a lot if these problems by breaking up the human empire into squabbling smaller ones. Keep the old imperilam and make smaller areas lead by different leaders and groups. Bring back Primarchs who all disagree with how things need to be run and add some non space marine leaders who are just as plot powerful. With no long supply lines possible in half the galaxy already, a central structure should have already collapsed. I don’t understand why they haven’t done that yet. Maybe waiting for the last HH books to finish.
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Dec 16, 2021 08:52
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One easy example of WH40K actively pivoting away from obvious satire: in 1e, the Space Marines were criminal draftees who were mindwiped and brainwashed, and basically set up as Vietnam War-era drafted soldiers exaggerated to the nth degree. In 2nd edition they got rid of most of that and just had them (usually) willingly recruited, and in every edition after they've been made increasingly heroic ubermensch.
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Dec 16, 2021 09:00
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I remember 3rd ed when it came out (I was in elementary school back then) and having a huge disconnect between super serious stuff in the books and codexes and whenever some old goofy stuff from epic and whatnot poped up in white dwarf. I was wondering is it my bad English and is this same universe or what did I miss.
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Dec 16, 2021 09:07
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FMguru posted:When people talk about being a satire that some people don't get, I think about fellow 1980s gaming institution Paranoia and how no one has ever mistaken the Alpha Complex setting for anything other than a clattering dystopian shitshow without a single redeeming characteristic. No one is out there exalting the world of Friend Computer and drawing fan art of beloved politicians as High Programmers in the same way that some corners of 40K fandom do for their game. Paranoia I think works because the setting is deliberately made to be more personal and recognisable; it's just just a horrible dystopian setting to live in, it's horrible in extremely familiar and player-facing ways; every authority figure is specifically arbitrary and wildly incompetent even without necessarily being malicious, you're at the mercy of a malfunctioning all-powerful machine that demands you bring back evidence of enemies that demonstrably don't exist and gives you otherwise actively contradictory orders with no regard for your ability to carry them out, and nothing works the way it should. It's basically all the worst aspects of everyday modern life cranked up to absurd levels. Funny thing iirc is that the books have acknowledged that Alpha Complex is still a better place to live than some real-world places; everyone is employed and housed, and has access to food and entertainment, or at least is supposed to. Which I think is probably a sign that the writers knew what they were doing; gotta have some point of comparison to the real world when emphasising what it's like to live in such a setting. Roadie posted:One easy example of WH40K actively pivoting away from obvious satire: in 1e, the Space Marines were criminal draftees who were mindwiped and brainwashed, and basically set up as Vietnam War-era drafted soldiers exaggerated to the nth degree. In 2nd edition they got rid of most of that and just had them (usually) willingly recruited, and in every edition after they've been made increasingly heroic ubermensch. Weirdly enough, Starcraft being obviously based on Warhammer 40k has the Marines who obviously took visual cues from the Space Marines but otherwise are more like Imperial Guard, still have exactly that backstory. And pretty sure while practices vary across Chapters and locations, Space Marine recruitment is still usually shown as various flavours of ridiculous war crimes outside of very few cases, the Space Marine process does involve brainwashing and mind control even for volunteers, and some Chapters do outright raid places like Necromunda and round up gang members as potential recruits. Also, failed aspirants, if they survive, may be made Chapter serfs and effectively treated as slaves, if not lobotimised as Servitors. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 09:10
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I don’t know how much of a leg this has to stand on, but it might be worth keeping in mind that Paranoia’s setting is also riffing off of generations of ingrained Cold War propaganda about chaotic and ineffective Communist states*. Meanwhile 40k is satirizing a conservative viewpoint that is still disgustingly common in parts of North America and Europe that happens to have a lot of core tenets in common with Fascism. I’d be hard pressed to give a causal argument, but there might be something in the political and cultural terroir that sort of primes the pump on certain readings. Something like it being easier to see problems in a system that’s already being presented as a nebulous other versus home-grown issues. *Was it this thread or another one where someone got the bizarre idea that somehow Paranoia had a grain of truth in it about being a commentary on pre-Deng China? It was very silly but that someone could get that impression is in line with what I’m getting at.
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Dec 16, 2021 09:25
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Can you show an in-lore (book, game, whatever) example of 40k actually being satire? Everything I actually see is written completely straight and they try to skate by on it being over the top grim dark as good enough to qualify as said satire, which doesn’t really cut it IMO. The Orks are the only thing that ever come across as being satirical but it’s notable they also feel out of place tonally. Bottom Liner fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 09:29
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The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer was mentioned earlier and is a hoot iirc.
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Dec 16, 2021 09:31
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Xiahou Dun posted:Lmao you don't need any background besides a 7th grade reading level to understand a Dan Olson video. They're very good videos and I like them a lot, but they're not exactly dense and thorny subject matter. I don’t think 7th grade is giving you a decolonialist lens to terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery. Like Dan Olson isn’t Judith Butler but I specifically enjoy his videos because he engages with critical readings and theory. He is citing and responding to an academic paper about games in that very video.
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Dec 16, 2021 09:32
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Bottom Liner posted:Can you show an in-lore (book, game, whatever) example of 40k actually being satire? Everything I actually see is written completely straight and they try to skate by on it being over the top grim dark as good enough to qualify as said satire, which doesn’t really cut it IMO. So one of the Space Marine Codexes had a page with a breakdown of the average day of a Space Marine, broken down by time. it goes Food, training, exersize, study, food, training, drills, drills, yadda yadda yadda, but it ends in five minutes of "Free Time." Under the schedule there is an explanation that the original instructions to the first Space Marines included the directive to remember their duty even in their free time, so some marine chapters give the marines five minutes every day to meditate on the enormity of their duties. However, most chapters have eliminated this time in favor of more drills. The marines, in setting, have become a ludicrous caricature of themselves, destroying every remaining shred of their own humanity in the pursuit of being SUPER SPESS MENS.
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Dec 16, 2021 09:34
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Maybe it’s just written too straight and dry and comes off more as “EXXXTREME HARDCORE BADASS” and less as making fun of that attitude. That would also explain why so many 40k fans completely miss the supposed satire angle. But also the random written pasdages and supplements don’t really stick in peoples minds the same as all of the cover art and minis that are just mega heroic poses and acts.
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Dec 16, 2021 09:40
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Roadie posted:One easy example of WH40K actively pivoting away from obvious satire: in 1e, the Space Marines were criminal draftees who were mindwiped and brainwashed, and basically set up as Vietnam War-era drafted soldiers exaggerated to the nth degree. In 2nd edition they got rid of most of that and just had them (usually) willingly recruited, and in every edition after they've been made increasingly heroic ubermensch. OG Space Marine Lore: Space Marines spend all day training to kill and being brainwashed, with 15 minutes of personal time if they're lucky Modern Space Marine Lore: Hark ye, come and hear the grand saga of the Skullfuckers Chapter, their great triumphs and tragic fall, Ghost Leviathan posted:Paranoia I think works because the setting is deliberately made to be more personal and recognisable; it's just just a horrible dystopian setting to live in, it's horrible in extremely familiar and player-facing ways; every authority figure is specifically arbitrary and wildly incompetent even without necessarily being malicious, you're at the mercy of a malfunctioning all-powerful machine that demands you bring back evidence of enemies that demonstrably don't exist and gives you otherwise actively contradictory orders with no regard for your ability to carry them out, and nothing works the way it should. It's basically all the worst aspects of everyday modern life cranked up to absurd levels. Something else that sort of helps, I think, is that Paranoia is never at any point a power fantasy outside of, I guess, the vanishingly rare High Programmers game (which even then is a very precarious sort of power). Arguably Paranoia is explicitly a game about disempowerment even as an agent of the system, especially as an agent of the system. The default Paranoia experience is that you're granted just enough authority to have a heaping helping of impossible responsibilities dumped on your lap but not enough authority to actually resolve anything in a way that allows you to preserve your dignity or well-being, and the best case outcomes likely involve you having to do something that will inevitably result in you being executed for one reason or another. Now this also probably describes life for like 99% of everyone within the Imperium of Man, but they don't make tons of novels and video games and roleplaying games about nameless bureaucratic underlings being summarily executed for forgetting to initialize one of 10,000 forms properly, instead the focus is invariably on the powerful larger-than-life figures, and even in cases where the focus is placed on more "mundane" characters such as members of the Imperial Guard, they're usually still portrayed in a much more valiant, much more heroic light than any Alpha Complex Troubleshooter has ever been.
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Dec 16, 2021 09:43
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Bottom Liner posted:Can you show an in-lore (book, game, whatever) example of 40k actually being satire? Everything I actually see is written completely straight and they try to skate by on it being over the top grim dark as good enough to qualify as said satire, which doesn’t really cut it IMO. On page 112 of the 3rd edition core rulebook, one of the sidebars is Ecclesiarchal Proscriptions MCXVILIV, which is a list of dystopian commandments about obeying one's Master. One of them, however, is "Thou shalt not make improper use of thy Master's comm-links, nor his las-lines, nor his opticon either." Another sidebar on page 101, my personal favorite, is an account of the Macharian Crusade by General Sejanus, chronicling the genocides they perpetrated on human societies outside the Imperium. The last paragraph is this: "Not only subhuman civilisations await the explorer. In our years of travel we encountered a single planet that harboured life that owed nothing to the expansion of mankind. Our first envoy to the planet came back reporting a noble civilisation worthy of contact. While this heretic was chastised for his blasphemies, we dispatched Confessor Golav who was horrified by the tentacled beasts who greeted him in a most savage fashion. I ordered the planet fusion bombed, but as our weapons were brought to bear, the despicable heathen scum unleashed their planetary defences, totally vapourising the Sword of Retribution and the capital ships Emperor's Mercy and Emperor's Judgement. We were forced to retreat from this baseless attack and sowed quarantine markers before dropping into the Immaterium."
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Dec 16, 2021 09:45
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