RandyLahey [he/him]

ive read way too many 40k novels lol (yeah i read theory) and theres a huuuuuge disconnect between the different writers. youre absolutely right that the eisenhorn/ravenor books in particular are all about how incredibly dogshit the imperium is, and other books do make this clear as well

but with a lot of the space marine focused ones you can just feel the authors jerking themselves off as they write (someone should compile all the bits from the horus heresy novels where they first describe each of the primarchs in particular lol) and they are often really uncritical or apologetic about not just the space marines but the imperium itself

and of course the video games mostly go no deeper than “yay space marines”

another thing that nobody mentioned yet is that the imperium has the space marines who are the heavily-armoured genetically-modified superhuman special forces guys, and then the vaaaast majority of the army are the imperial guard who are mostly just conscripts with shitty guns who get sent in human wave style to die en masse

there are various themed imperial guard regiments that have distinctive uniforms and fighting styles of their planet. the most popular amongst warhammer nerds are the death korps of krieg, who resemble gas-masked wwi soldiers with a german-style helmet. purely coincidentally, they seem to be most commonly painted in feldgrau colour schemes

It really doesn’t help that GW constantly oscillates between “the theocratic fascism is really self-destructive and stupid and is why the imperium is a decaying wreck, and having an autocrat and his large adult sons in charge of everything totally fucked it all up in the first place”, “the fascism isn’t great but it’s necessary and justified because it’s the only thing saving humanity from unimaginable horrors that vaguely resemble whatever ethnic group you’re most afraid of”, or “the space marines are unambiguously good heroes with honour and piety who keep everyone safe, yay for the good guys”

starving 👏 to👏 death 👏 is 👏 a 👏 human 👏 right👏

fuck me, my subconscious definitely picked up on some kind of extra racial weirdness when i was going through all this shit arguing with people on r*ddit, but yeah it didnt quite click until you mentioned it that this is exactly what it was

and yeah im just realising as well that there was lots of talk about religious persecution etc, but very little talk about islam - rarely called “islamophobia”, and i have a strong feeling that if you looked at all the articles with this in mind youd find that as much as they focused on religious buildings that they really downplayed “mosques” in favour of other terms or generic “houses of worship” etc (this last bit might actually be legit though, it does seem from my very limited knowledge that their version of islam is a bit different in its religious buildings from “mainstream” islam)

this shit probably should have been immediately obvious but there was so much other bullshit to wade through that i guess i didnt really notice