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Dave Brookshaw
Jun 27, 2012

No Regrets

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.

The Orks are the only thing that ever come across as being satirical but it’s notable they also feel out of place tonally.

Noted Inquisitor Obi-Wan Sherlock Clousseau, scourge of psychic misdeeds and genetic deviance.

The black planet of Birmingham, where the sun never shines.

Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka / Magaret Thatcher.

The entirety of the Uplifting Primer

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TheDiceMustRoll
Jul 23, 2018
The main crux of the satire argument is that sometimes Warhammer has a laugh at itself, such as the Caiphas Cain books, which I'm told by british people is just Blackadder, but Warhammer(a moderately competent military officer elevated to godlike renown due to his ability to dive behind cover and secure the objective once everyone else stops moving, I haven't seen blackadder but I've described CC to three seperate people from the Isles and they instantly go "Oh! Like blackadder?" so I dunno)

On top of that, there's a screenshot floating around of some Orcs from WHFB that used Thatcher's face as a flag with a waterslide decal in one of the painting guides and also that one of the orcs is named after Thatcher, but apparently that's not true:

I just think Warhammer isn't really satire at all, in any way shape or form. At best, it's a deeply sarcastic setting at times, dripping with dry british humor. Other times it's unironic heroism and played so straight that I think people feel like it has to be a big joke. Like Dawn of War 1, I recently played through, and it feels at times, very Starship Troopers-y, but nothing that happens is really played for laughs, but the lines sound like they should be, when you have characters saying things like "An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unguarded and its walls unmanned" and such. But for every "lol this setting is dumb :clown:" there's like ten "and then they had to murder an entire continent because people said the Imperium wasn't fair and treated its population of the planet poorly but in no way shape or form was this criticism in good faith because every single person that criticizes the imperium is chaos cultist" and then it always turns out to be the case without fail.

People saying it's a criticism of the Thatcher administration, but it's so vague I just can't see it.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
I remember reading a 40K artbook once where the theme, presented as an in-setting document, was "a treatise on great battles in Imperial history" where the end result of every single one was that everybody ended up dying horribly. Like it started with a bunch of dark eldar raiding a colony and eventually the space marines are called in and they win, but all the colonists are dead by the end, and the battles it recounts keep escalating in scope until the last one is this massive planet-scale war that lasts for hundreds of years and the end result is a "victory" for the Imperium with the entire planetary population killed and the world itself reduced to a lifeless radioactive wasteland. To me, that's always been the closest to that 2000AD-era satire that people want to ascribe to 40K.

TheDiceMustRoll
Jul 23, 2018

Kai Tave posted:

I remember reading a 40K artbook once where the theme, presented as an in-setting document, was "a treatise on great battles in Imperial history" where the end result of every single one was that everybody ended up dying horribly. Like it started with a bunch of dark eldar raiding a colony and eventually the space marines are called in and they win, but all the colonists are dead by the end, and the battles it recounts keep escalating in scope until the last one is this massive planet-scale war that lasts for hundreds of years and the end result is a "victory" for the Imperium with the entire planetary population killed and the world itself reduced to a lifeless radioactive wasteland. To me, that's always been the closest to that 2000AD-era satire that people want to ascribe to 40K.

Yeah, the Fandom likes the stupid bullshit escalating anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R66Rqe_hrI

Whybird
Aug 2, 2009

Phaiston have long avoided the tightly competetive defence sector, but the IRDA Act 2052 has given us the freedom we need to bring out something really special.

https://team-robostar.itch.io/robostar


Nap Ghost
I feel like the reason the "is 40k a satire" argument is so perennial is that satire by its nature is dependent on the satirist having first having built faith with the audience that they don't tacitly endorse the viewpoint they're satirising. Ben Shapiro and George Takei could make the exact same tweet, and one would seem like a parody of right-wing homophobic attitudes and the other would seem like unionic homophobia with a fig-leaf of parody to justify it.

The problem is that for some people GW have built that faith and for others they haven't. And that's an intractable problem because everybody has a different experience of GW. Pointing to existing text of sourcebooks doesn't help arguments because any text can be read either as satire or unironic endorsement of its values depending on how much faith you have in the author. It's far healthier and more useful to point at actual concrete actions that GW have taken in the real world.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸
The problem is one person's over the top obvious satire is someone else's you know this guy makes a lot of sense, depending where you're starting from.

TheDiceMustRoll
Jul 23, 2018
To be honest I just think GW never really thought about it or cared at all. They started selling Warhammer Fantasy Battles, it got huge, and continued to climb in popularity, so much so they started putting out books, comics, video games and suddenly I think in the mid 00's they just become the dominant miniatures force and nobody really touches them again in sales until 2015, where a less than successful Fantasy reboot hurt sales briefly and the most popular sci-fi franchise ever made made a miniatures game that people actually liked. They would basically retain that stranglehold and probably wouldn't have said a goddamn thing one way or another about the franchise's political leanings because why rock the boat? Then in 2017 people started to comment more and more on how kind of hosed up 40k can be, the biggest 40k youtuber was a guy who liked to do videos with other shitheads on the site and use racial slurs and suddenly GW realizes they aren't just a niche hobby that somehow prints money. Remember the original CEO that got shitcanned in 2016 admitted to shareholders that they had no idea why it was so successful, other than there's weirdos who like miniatures and they fill that need the hardest.

They probably had no problem ignoring people that complained about the grimdark nature because there wasn't tons of evidence the criticism was coming from inside the house. Now there's a huge youtuber community and on twitter and such and there's a lot of people saying "Can you tone it down just a big? I've dropped like 10k into into your coffers over the last X years and would like to drop many 10s of Ks more but I'm not sure if that's a good use of my time. Maybe I should look into 3D printers...."

They're basically going through growing pains right now, where they're absolutely titanic in terms of reach, brand recognition and market share, and that means there's more eyes on them, so there's been obvious efforts to clean up the image of the company, from selling children's toys of various warhammer things to making public "nazis please go" statements. The fact that they've had more than a few products not meet the usual GW standard of "Instantly sold out, sorry you weren't awake at 3am on a sunday ;)" this year is probably fueling efforts to make the game more accessible.

That and if that one guy on youtube who worked as a manager is telling the truth, GW management's sales data indicates that loud racist dipshits don't actually buy models, and soccer mom samantha isnt going to buy her son a warhammer thing if all her favorite feeds told her it was a nazi hobby.

Angrymog
Jan 30, 2012

Really Madcats

I don't thing is canon anymore, but Ian Watson's Space Marine is very funny.

TheDiceMustRoll
Jul 23, 2018

Angrymog posted:

I don't thing is canon anymore, but Ian Watson's Space Marine is very funny.

Well, I just bought it, so I'll be back in a few months to screech at you if you made me waste my six canadian dollars on it.

90s Cringe Rock
Nov 29, 2006
:gay:

Angrymog posted:

I don't thing is canon anymore, but Ian Watson's Space Marine is very funny.

It is canon in my heart. The ladder scene, the gleeful "let's do terrorism," the zoat.

Comstar
Apr 20, 2007

Are you happy now?

TheDiceMustRoll posted:

hat and if that one guy on youtube who worked as a manager is telling the truth, GW management's sales data indicates that loud racist dipshits don't actually buy models

Where can I see this?

TheDiceMustRoll
Jul 23, 2018

Comstar posted:

Where can I see this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db7ML5EBYJ0&t

Strom Cuzewon
Jul 1, 2010

I feel like 40k is more tongue in cheek than it is satire. I thibk satire needs to have more political bite to it, instead of just a vague sense of absurdity.

I'm also really sad that they made the Tau have some weird pheremonal mind control, because they needed to be less "good". They're already a massively expansionist space empire, they just politely request that you join their rigid caste system or they'll sterilise your entire planet from orbit. The fa t that in 40K that makes them the least-evil faction is hilarious to me. There's so many more interesting directions they could have taken them.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



They debuted with allusions to having some dark side, which seemed to be that they were a racist colonialist power with a rigid class system.

They went to war with ultra-future tech and robot suits, their colonial powers used space-muskets.

But maybe it was too subtle and we got the forced sterilization and mind control. I feel like if the Tau were humans, fash would have locked onto them as the Good Guys.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

moths posted:

They debuted with allusions to having some dark side, which seemed to be that they were a racist colonialist power with a rigid class system.

They went to war with ultra-future tech and robot suits, their colonial powers used space-muskets.

But maybe it was too subtle and we got the forced sterilization and mind control. I feel like if the Tau were humans, fash would have locked onto them as the Good Guys.

The Tau got a lot of backlash at the time of their introduction for being "too anime." Not that you can't have anime-loving fash (boy can you ever) but 40K's particular brand of fash are really invested in the grimdark faux-catholic xenophobic "purity" of the Imperium and I think it's doubtful that even if the Tau were some offshoot human empire that they'd have been received any better.

GreenMetalSun
Oct 12, 2012
To add onto the 40k satire thing, it's explicitly canon that the crushing facisim of the Imperium is not the only way.

There have been in canon examples of utopian societies with multiple species living in harmony together and having fully integrated societies - the Federation from Star Trek, essentially. The biggest threat to these worlds isn't Chaos, it's the Imperium. It's a super important plot point in, among other things, the first Horus Heresy book.

One of the societies presented this way even feels compassion for a type of 'always Chaotic Evil' murder spider, and thinks genocide is wrong, even in this extreme fantasy case where peace is literally impossible. They build, essentially, a big national park so the spiders can live there undisturbed.

I'll admit they don't hammer that point home every other sentence, but it's definitely present in 40k fiction.

That Old Tree
Jun 24, 2012

nah


Strom Cuzewon posted:

I feel like 40k is more tongue in cheek than it is satire. I thibk satire needs to have more political bite to it, instead of just a vague sense of absurdity.

I feel like whoever said upthread that it's less satire and more just occasionally sarcastic hit the nail on the head. And that presentation has definitely waxed and waned at times. It can even be nuanced and self-critical at times, but that's just not the front-and-center, which I think is kind of a major weakness if you're going to disavow bad fans by claiming they're not understanding it right.

Kai Tave posted:

The Tau got a lot of backlash at the time of their introduction for being "too anime." Not that you can't have anime-loving fash (boy can you ever) but 40K's particular brand of fash are really invested in the grimdark faux-catholic xenophobic "purity" of the Imperium and I think it's doubtful that even if the Tau were some offshoot human empire that they'd have been received any better.

I was very amused by this at the time, as someone who got into 40k with 2nd edition where the Tyranids were Saturday morning cartoon pastel colors, and plenty of the other factions were also bright and lively. And also the various Eldar troop types have always been anime as gently caress. And the squats were even still in the stripped down core rules pamphlet army list, though they never appeared thereafter.

40k had always been at least a little ridiculous, and had some sort of sense of humor about itself. But I don't think it's so easy to just say "well the fash fans just don't get what we're going for" and wash your hands of it. As evidenced by that Facebook quote about Mag Uruk Thraka, I imagine most of 40k came about the way most of these properties do: someone thought it'd be fun or cool or amusing and just did the stuff. They may have aped the style of 2000AD some, but taking on the aesthetics of something does not confer all its qualities. (And then there's the fact that even 2kAD's satire poster boy Dredd is beloved by plenty of people just because he's a cool grim dude, because even if you're not fash that's a part of our culture that we have celebrated and continue to celebrate.)

That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Dec 16, 2021

Mormon Star Wars
Aug 13, 2005
It's a minotaur race...

TheDiceMustRoll posted:

The main crux of the satire argument is that sometimes Warhammer has a laugh at itself, such as the Caiphas Cain books, which I'm told by british people is just Blackadder, but Warhammer(a moderately competent military officer elevated to godlike renown due to his ability to dive behind cover and secure the objective once everyone else stops moving, I haven't seen blackadder but I've described CC to three seperate people from the Isles and they instantly go "Oh! Like blackadder?" so I dunno)

I've never see anyone talk about the Ciaphas Cain books to defend 40k as satire, because they aren't satirizing the real world - Ciaphas Cain is satirizing other 40k written media. I.e., the joke is that the other 40k books are so over the top that they would have to be baseless propaganda, so Ciaphas is a look at what the actual events could have looked like.

I'd imagine that the parts that people would actually point out as satire would be, like, when the protagonist of one novel tries to convince himself that his murder of Martin Luther King Jr. was good actually because everything is justifiable to fight nebulous chaos, or when Fehavari's personal space marine chapter goes from chaos corruption to purity and all that actually changes are the aesthetics they adopt.

KingKalamari
Aug 24, 2007

Fuzzy dice, bongos in the back
My ship of love is ready to attack

Kai Tave posted:

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.

I think this kind of hits on the crux of the problem: Fascists and fasc-sympathizers are pretty much all about the power fantasy so, unless the creators take specific care to actively deconstruct the power fantasy aspect, these types of people are going to look past any satire and just focus on "big strong man dominates the bad peoples". Couple that with a franchise as long-running and collaborative as 40K and you're inevitably going to get into a situation where people who look past the original satire are going to end up creating official content for it.

It reminds me a bit of a discussion that happened elsewhere on the site about the people who lionize RIck from Rick and Morty and how, for a lot of them, the major appeal, regardless of what the show does to make Rick seem like a miserable rear end in a top hat, is the power fantasy that comes from him always being the controlling force within the narrative. I think one person put it best when they said (Paraphrasing) "A good chunk of the people who idolize Rick aren't going to internalize the idea that Rick is pathetic unless Morty knocks him down on the ground, farts in his face and calls him a little bitch because a good chunk of the appeal for them is that Rick is always the dominant character in his series".

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

People citing the 3rd edition core book for 40k is telling, since that's like 23 years old. Even the Uplifting Primer came out in 2008. Mostly just telling us that GW is shifting away from the Strangelove stuff and further into "It turns out you can literally charge 11 extra dollars if you change the name of a tank to a Latin work ending in -um."

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

If you want modern stuff, GW regularly puts out the very clearly satirical Regimental Standard…but also, like, satire is hard in the first place and GW absolutely does like to present Space Marines as cool and badass.

Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos
Kickstarter has heard your feedback and decided to assuage it with more buzzwords:

https://twitter.com/Kickstarter/status/1471178556034199555

quote:

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Crowdfunding has made it easier to fund creative work without the involvement of intermediaries and gatekeepers. At the same time, there should be better ways for creators to connect directly with their communities, and more tools available to help creative projects of all kinds and sizes come to life. Backers should be able to easily discover and participate more deeply in projects, better control their data, and have more robust tools to assess the trustworthiness and viability of a project.

That’s why we’re supporting the development of a decentralized crowdfunding protocol that will make it possible for people to launch and fund creative projects anywhere, whether it’s on Kickstarter.com or someplace else on the web.

You may have heard of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) which helps you browse the web, or SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) which helps you send email. Protocols like these make up the unseen infrastructure of the internet. Imagine that, but for crowdfunding creative projects.

The protocol will live on Celo, a carbon-negative, public blockchain, be open source, and be available for collaborators, competitors, and independent contributors from all over the world to build upon, connect to, or use.

This openness enables everyone who is interested in the promise of crowdfunding to help build its future and have a say and stake in how it works. Blockchain will also open the potential to be rewarded for contributing to the systems that you use everyday.

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Nice ratio there:

Capfalcon
Apr 6, 2012

No Boots on the Ground,
Puny Mortals!

If there's this much argument about whether or not your satire is satire, I think the most generous statement you can make is that it's satire, but not very good at it.

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.


I know the whole thing is investor bait, but wouldn't a decentralized funding platform make it trivial to cut out kickerstarter from getting their take?

Puppy Time
Mar 1, 2005


From every time I've seen this argument, my impression is that GW meant 40K as satire (or at least humor) for a while, then it pivoted to absolutely taking it seriously, then it pivoted back to "No this is humor/satire." Plus the line probably shifts according to whoever happens to be creating for them at the time. So ultimately even leaving aside the subjectivity of whether satire works, there's no conclusive answer to "Is 40K satire or just fash?" because it changes depending on the director and the creator. (And probably the political climate of the observer.)

Sometimes it's more fash, sometimes it's less fash, and I don't think there's a way to consistently tell, unless we round up every person involved and interrogate them with a truth serum.

homullus
Mar 27, 2009

Capfalcon posted:

If there's this much argument about whether or not your satire is satire, I think the most generous statement you can make is that it's satire, but not very good at it.

Bigots did not perceive All in the Family as satire. Right-wing militarists did not perceive Starship Troopers as satire.

dwarf74
Sep 2, 2012



Buglord
One would hope the executive leadership is making GBS threads their pants about these awful ratios. I have a hunch they're just trucking along anyway, though.

gently caress 'em.

neongrey
Feb 28, 2007

Plaguing your posts with incidental music.
maybe they can hire a wizard to refund anyone who's complaining's active pledges whether they asked for that or not

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



There's also a sizable amount of reasonable people who just like cool fash badguys. Darth Vader was cool as hell. His stormtroopers have a neat aesthetic. People liked the evil dragon mom from GoT. Or how like 80% of GoT was evil monarchs. They were all frequently depicted as badasses in various media.

I'm not trying to say we shouldn't be wary of glorifying villains - but in a fantasy setting it isn't always an on-ramp to the fascist pipeline.

Like, maybe make it more clear that the ethics espoused by the characters are bad. GW's been better about that, but there's not much more they could really do at this point without diluting the setting beyond recognition.

Cessna
Feb 20, 2013

KHABAHBLOOOM

TheDiceMustRoll posted:

To be honest I just think GW never really thought about it or cared at all. They started selling Warhammer Fantasy Battles, it got huge, and continued to climb in popularity, so much so they started putting out books, comics, video games and suddenly I think in the mid 00's they just become the dominant miniatures force and nobody really touches them again in sales until 2015, where a less than successful Fantasy reboot hurt sales briefly and the most popular sci-fi franchise ever made made a miniatures game that people actually liked. They would basically retain that stranglehold and probably wouldn't have said a goddamn thing one way or another about the franchise's political leanings because why rock the boat? Then in 2017 people started to comment more and more on how kind of hosed up 40k can be, the biggest 40k youtuber was a guy who liked to do videos with other shitheads on the site and use racial slurs and suddenly GW realizes they aren't just a niche hobby that somehow prints money. Remember the original CEO that got shitcanned in 2016 admitted to shareholders that they had no idea why it was so successful, other than there's weirdos who like miniatures and they fill that need the hardest.

Another problem for GW is the fact that the world they live in has changed.

In the the 90s when GW was writing out their background for 40K Nazis were a disenfranchised joke. Sure, there were a few skinhead assholes, but it's not like the President of the USA is ever going to be okay with people marching with swastika flags or turn out to be a fascist who tries to subvert an election in an authoritarian coup.

Things that seemed irrelevant and unimportant back them have become a real problem today, and GW isn't reacting decisively.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

dwarf74 posted:

One would hope the executive leadership is making GBS threads their pants about these awful ratios. I have a hunch they're just trucking along anyway, though.

gently caress 'em.

The whole crypto thing has nothing to do with creators or backers, it's purely about courting venture capitalists. They don't give a poo poo about any of the bad publicity around this until it threatens their ability to fundraise (not the KS kind).

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

I think 40k is a satire, in the same degree as Star Trek is a bright vision of humanity's post-scarcity future. Which is to say, it's that, occasionally, when it services the current author/writer/director/storyteller's story in some way: and the rest of the time, it's a background thing the creator is aware of, but doesn't feel like leveraging right now. The trappings of the setting are more influential: every Federation ship has warp nacelles, always, but Federation characters do not always remember that in their setting there's not supposed to be resource scarcity, everyone's allowed to pursue personal development wherever that might lead, there's no racism or sexism any more, and so on. Similarly, every Imperial ship is lavishly, absurdly encrusted with cathedrals, there's skulls glued to every surface, and everyone has huge pauldrons, always; and sometimes, the Imperial fleet is exterminating an entire planet with billions of humans on it because they heard a rumor someone sprouted a tentacle somewhere on the surface, but quite often they're heroically defending innocent human hive-cities from hordes of alien monsters that would definitely eat the whole world if they're not defeated.

When you have a shared setting, with literally hundreds of creative contributors to it, extending for decades of constant creative output, including regular turnover at the highest levels of content control and direction, it's probably impossible to continuously maintain a clear and unambiguous thematic direction, even if you wanted to. The primacy of other motivations - profitability, novelty to avoid becoming stale, appealing to the widest audience you can, maintaining enthusiasm, giving creative participants room to exercise their creativity - probably dominate over something like "the Federation is always supposed to be an example of our Good Future that we can hope and strive for" or "the Imperium of Man is always supposed to be a cautionary satire about what life is like if you let fascism win."

That might not be the best comparison but it's the one that comes to mind.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

Leperflesh posted:

it's probably impossible to continuously maintain a clear and unambiguous thematic direction, even if you wanted to.

Except 40k has done exactly that, just in a way that's counterproductive to their claims of satire and cautionary storytelling. "Everyone is a bad guy and this is all satire" doesn't square well with literally every bit of art direction being grand epic heroic badassery and glory. The only way it could come full circle at this point would to have 40k end and have the bugs just devour them all in the most comical over the top way that makes everything that came before it completely pointless and moot.

The Bee
Nov 25, 2012

Making his way to the ring . . .
from Deep in the Jungle . . .

The Big Monkey!
I'm starting to feel like nobody in the industry knows what an NFT is, and just throws it out as a buzzword at this point.

We're getting it bad over in video games now. Just look at STALKER.

Xiahou Dun
Jul 16, 2009

We shall dive down through black abysses... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.



The Bee posted:

I'm starting to feel like nobody in the industry knows what an NFT is, and just throws it out as a buzzword at this point.

We're getting it bad over in video games now. Just look at STALKER.

I haven’t been following for a long time, but please tell me I’m reading this right and the franchise about people hoarding weird technology they don’t understand that’s really trash has now also started hoarding weird technology they don’t understand that’s really trash.

I yearn for this irony.

Cat Face Joe
Feb 20, 2005

goth vegan crossfit mom who vapes



I can tell you, as someone who does not pay attention to 40k, that if there is any satire they're doing a terrible job communicating it.

The Bee
Nov 25, 2012

Making his way to the ring . . .
from Deep in the Jungle . . .

The Big Monkey!

Xiahou Dun posted:

I haven’t been following for a long time, but please tell me I’m reading this right and the franchise about people hoarding weird technology they don’t understand that’s really trash has now also started hoarding weird technology they don’t understand that’s really trash.

I yearn for this irony.

They're selling NFTs now, yes. Including three that give you an in game NPC in your likeness. Which, even in a theoretical world where NFTs weren't energy wasting shitshows, seems like it would gain no value from being an NFT.

Like, seriously. I don't need a digital ledger to confirm that an NPC with my face is owned by me. It has my goddamn face.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

Xiahou Dun posted:

I haven’t been following for a long time, but please tell me I’m reading this right and the franchise about people hoarding weird technology they don’t understand that’s really trash has now also started hoarding weird technology they don’t understand that’s really trash.

I yearn for this irony.

Bingo. It's a level of creator:content cognitive dissonance not seen since loving Orson Scott Card.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Bottom Liner posted:

Except 40k has done exactly that, just in a way that's counterproductive to their claims of satire and cautionary storytelling. "Everyone is a bad guy and this is all satire" doesn't square well with literally every bit of art direction being grand epic heroic badassery and glory. The only way it could come full circle at this point would to have 40k end and have the bugs just devour them all in the most comical over the top way that makes everything that came before it completely pointless and moot.
(emphasis added)

I don't think this is really the case. Often, yes, and maybe more so in recent years? But 40k has from its outset been a mix of "epic heroic badassery" and "horrific decay", with ebb and flow between them; perhaps its most important and heaviest influence coming from John Blanche:





Some creators have focused on different themes, though. There's humorous gruff cockney orks of the late 80s and early 90s:



The religious/catholic iconography sometimes sits at the forefront:


And so on. Arguably, even these depictions have some kind of "badassery" as a thematic element, so I'll grant you that part. Above all else, Warhammer is always supposed to be cool, even when it's gross or weird or awful. Maybe that's sufficiently broad a theme that every creator can aspire to it. But I think maybe "satire" is a more difficult theme to maintain than "cool" or "power fantasy"?

None of this is an excuse: I think I've been consistent in describing 40k as a problematic setting, for which a corporate profit-oriented company has always prioritized sell-ability over some kind of moral lesson or cautionary allegory.

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Coolness Averted
Feb 20, 2007

oh don't worry, I can't smell asparagus piss, it's in my DNA

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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.

The Orks are the only thing that ever come across as being satirical but it’s notable they also feel out of place tonally.

The FF RPG series has a ton of stuff about how absurd the Imperium is.
Dark Heresy off the top of my head in the section about the the default sector there's a whole fluff section called "the tyrant star" which is pretty clearly about eclipses. The people of the Imperium have no idea what they are/how they work despite being a space faring society, and so instead use the spooky black sun that has even engulfed and hidden the sky at times and has been observed on many planets as a sign of sinister evil lurking and waiting.

Though like you said all of this is pretty dry. There isn't a side bar that says 'look, we're clearly describing eclipses. You're free to make this entirely harmless, or have the powers of Chaos empowered by the fact people believe this harmless phenomenon is actually ruinous forces"
The Black Crusade book meanwhile is all about making humans who side with chaos sympathetic, and specifically states that the shittiness of the empire is what drives people to work for the ruinous powers. There's no hope for a better life in the empire, but if you tear it down before Chaos destroys you, there's a chance you can build something better.

Splicer posted:

The problem is one person's over the top obvious satire is someone else's you know this guy makes a lot of sense, depending where you're starting from.

This and the previously mentioned "GW has had a lot of writers who have different views of how slapstick or sincere to make the setting" and "they are at the end of the day a business catering to teen boys, who are often lured in by the unironic badass interpretations of the fluff"
I think are the key bits.

They're sensible enough not to want nazis in their community, but also their product attracts nazis and folks who will proudly make and display kitbashed sexual assault models/scenes.

Edit: I think Leperflesh's Star Trek comparison is also spot on, since even if envisioned as a post scarcity utopia, there are a ton of fans who never interface with that aspect of the IP and instead focus on the cool wars or scary monsters to fight. Which you can't blame someone for, because not every episode or even series had stuff like "Oh yeah capitalism destroyed America in the 2020's."

Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Dec 16, 2021

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