Rick Priestley was one writer of many, and he was about the only one who was cramming his rather childish politics into the lore, which eventually got him shown the door when GW decided to focus on the lore as an actual story to sell their plastic crack. Stop using him as an end-all be-all for what 40k is supposed to be.
My Shadowrun game is set in Alanta and the city has literally built a wall to keep the SINless out. They walked off the south side of the city and put the SINless there. You have to go through a checkpoint that checks you have a SIN to get to the nice part of town. Guess who mostly lives in the south side. Also it became a joke with my players that “green is the new black” after they found out the city put mandatory building reinforcement requirements in for buildings housing orca and trolls. Convienently most people in the nice part of town never bothered to do that retrofit. It was interesting to see them use that to their advantage when breaking into an office once. They just had the cybered out orc jump up and down on the floor above the office they needed to get into. It also gave them cover as it looked like an accident.
>idea
just like bad people can do good things and vice versa authors and creators can be dumb.
so what is it, they don't focus on audiences to sell plastic crack or they constantly change to sell more of it?
I'm not saying that every Wehrmacht soldier was a war criminal, but some certainly are, especially in the early days when it was the Wehrmacht that was given the task of killing undesirables, but obviously, some Wehrmacht soldiers didn't agree with the Nazi ideology (which led to some of them defecting to Allied hands) and there's also tons of war crimes on the Allied side, particularly with the Soviet Army (there's a reason German women didn't want to end up in the hands of Soviet soldiers, particularly after the brutality the Germans exhibited during Operation Barbarossa). It's just that the idea of the Clean Wehrmacht has been disproven a long time ago, especially by WW2 buffs who studied this stuff.
The franchise obviously has many authors, and you eventually get your Karen Travisses or Matt Wards who idolize an in-setting faction to the bone, as Rick Priestley complained.
A hero is someone who fights on the side of GOOD. Not just someone who protects. The Nazis protected their people from Communism, does that make them heroes? Someone who protects can be an evil person fighting another evil for personal power, (for example, Chaos forces protecting their worlds from Tyranids or Necrons) or someone neutral who was just paid to do a job, but a hero is willing to get out there and save your ass even if you didn't ask for it, even if the people he's fighting pose no threat to him whatsoever.
But that's not Warhammer 40K. In the end, ALL the factions are assholes. In fact, when they tried to introduce the Tau as a heroic faction that even takes in human deserters and treats them well, the fanbase ERUPTED IN A FURY and said that the Tau don't fit in 40K because they're too good. So while individual humans in the Imperium can be good or heroic, the faction they work for is not, and even some of those "heroes" enforce that brutal, corrupt regime unto their own people, casting doubts on whether or not they were heroic, or just following orders. A real hero does what's right, regardless of orders-being a good hero means doing what you know is right, regardless of what they're told to do.
That's exactly why the lore nuts are pissing their pants; they want to keep stories local and grimdark, so that status quo would remain as a backdrop for people to have a setting where everyone fights everyone and your personal fanfic story of the humans fighting both the Orks and the Eldar on the same day would fit in the greater narrative. When things start changing, the Imperium starts getting stronger, they start innovating tech-wise (ex: Primaris Marines) and they are potentially building up an alliance with the Eldar, the lore fans begin to disagree, since the whole grimdark story where everyone hates everyone is slowly being swept away.
No, the problem is, their only focus IS selling plastic crack, and they couldn't give less of a shit which audience they have, be it the goofball parody-lovers of the 80s, the edgelords of the 90s and early 2000s, or the superhero capeshit fans and tournament/model whales of the late 2010s/early 2020s. They will literally abandon one audience for another if the other audience is willing to buy more plastic crack, especially since the older fans from the 80s and 90s are still complaining about model prices.
He was one of the original authors of Warhammer, and 40K started off as a parody of the right-wing. He's the guy credited with laying the groundwork for 40K's lore. Also, GW ditched him not because they wanted to focus on the lore as an actual story, but because Space Marines sell well and they need to hawk more stories about the SMs, so they wrote the Space Marines as heroes and that pissed him off.
That's because GW only really cared about the money in the end. Unlike Lucas or Tolkien who had a clear message with their stories, GW only wanted to create something to make money, so they followed trends. They went with a parody back then when liberal Brits were angry at Margaret Thatcher and wanted to lampoon what they saw as right-wing religious extremism and militarism, they went with a grimdark storyline to lure in the edgelords of the 90s and early 2000s who didn't like the sterile culture of the time, and they went with capeshit-style heroics now because that will sell plastic crack to normies today, not to mention that the model whales and tournament players will like new and improved marines for them to paint and use in a wargame, while all the lore nuts who fell in love with 40K in the 90s and early 2000s shat their pants and got mad because they were no longer the target audience.
GW putting money above all else is their one constant. They can and will change 40K as the market shifts. The amount of butt hurt over the changes from a goofy setting to a more serious one was immense amongst older neckbeards, and is something they still whine about in any threads, groups, chats, etc., dedicated to Rogue Trader and 2nd edition. Their pivot from grim dark was inevitable. They can and will pivot again in the future.
They're currently pivoting from grimdark to superhero shit. Moving away from the Dark Ages-style of 3rd Edition and towards a Marvel/DC style superhero storyline with Guilliman and his bigger Primaris Marines saving the day and halting the Imperium's decline, while possibly setting up a future alliance with the Eldar. My guess is, they'll inevitably have Guilliman wage war on the more retrograde and traditionalist factions in the Imperium, especially since some in this thread have brought up the fact that Guilliman not being a raging dickhead is causing friction with the higher-ups among the Imperium hierarchy and will eventually lead to a breaking point.
Of course they would throw the older fans under the bus. The ones that keep complaining about price hikes and lore contradictions. The whales and the newer audience will support them, and GW has seen their coffers increase in input after 8th Edition came in. They will always chase the almighty dollar even if it screws over the central themes and narratives that 40K was originally meant to show.
at your words, there will be 20 or 30 who are too set in the rut of turning up to a GW store and just playing. The idea of organizing something themselves - even just "hey, come round to my place and we'll play last ed" - is too much like work. Even then, GW customers have been conditioned so much to keep up with the churn, you could still have your work cut out to even make them look back at an old edition, let alone anything else. I said somewhere on KF, a few weeks ago, that GW stans are the biggest brainless mob of captive consoomers ever. It comes from observation and bitter experience.
You're right that people don't need to rely on GW to enjoy Warhamer, but the reaction to End Times is understandable when you consider the loss of minis.. With basically every human faction squatted and replaced with the Sigmarines, you have to proxy like hell to even attempt at having an Empire Army, and that really hurts the game when designing minis has become half of the experience for the average Warhammer player.Shoot, forums dedicated to Rogue Trader and 2nd Ed already show a magnitude more autonomy than your average battered-housewife GW slave.
This is a thing I emphatically agree with, especially when GW torched WHFB and people ran around like the sky was falling. The trouble is in practise, for every one player who might simply
That said, I might walk it back just an inch, and say it might have something to do with the kind of nerd brain that dives deep into wargaming. The wargaming club I once joined had a healthy contempt for 40K, but anything that wasn't two or three favored historical periods was just a silly diversion to them.
I don't think they'll do that. That's a lot like nuking Star Wars, and GW won't nuke their own answer to Star Wars. More likely, they will take the same path Disney did, make it more politically sanitized and clean so the normies can partake in it.
Not everything is Star Wars or designed to counter it.
I suppose so. But from my perspective, the more likely outcome is that they'll have Rowboat Girlyman turn progressive, since he already hates the Imperium as it is:
They did. The return of Girlyman and the dramatic shift in the universe with the Eye of Terror exploding into a rift across the galaxy is 40k's End Times.
Well aware. It, End Times, and their actions when they created Warhammer+ is why the franchise is dead-dead to me.
For most fans, (fans of 3rd-7th edition) it died when the Primaris Marines showed up in 2017. And for fans of the 1st and 2nd editions Warhammer, it died with 3rd Edition appeared in 1998.
Andy Chambers was the real power. Hallowed be his name.
At this point, frankly, why the fuck not?I suppose so. But from my perspective, the more likely outcome is that they'll have Rowboat Girlyman turn progressive, since he already hates the Imperium as it is:
"Why do I still live? What more do you want from me? I gave everything I had to you, to them. Look what they've made of our dream. This bloated, rotting carcass of an empire is driven not by reason and hope but by fear, hate and ignorance. Better that we had all burned in the fires of Horus' ambition than live to see this.
We failed, father. You failed your sons, and we in turn failed you. And now, to compound our arrogance and vainglory we have failed all of them too. Did Horus not say you sought godhood? He built his rebellion on that claim. Oh how he would gloat and laugh at the state of the imperium now."
He's already GW's answer to Rey; a hero who has everything in his power to change things for the better. So once the traditionalists and the back-stabbing ass-kissers in the Imperium turn against him and launch a civil war with him, Guilliman will use it as an excuse to purge the Imperium of every backward, retrograde, traditionalist influence, and GW will use it to purge any "problematic" elements in the Imperium and have Guilliman be Mr. Rational, arranging an alliance with aliens like the Eldar, while having Belisarius Cawl innovate more new tech for the military. Guilliman will then go off eradicating the more fundamentalist parts of the Imperium, to create what amounts to an enlightened despot state that the normies can love without being called fascists. Instead of Space Nazis, they'll have Frederick the Great in space, now with more tolerance for those filthy xenos.
Mark my words. They'll turn 40K into an SJW agitprop eventually. Especially since it makes them lots of money, ever since 8th Edition dropped:
Games Workshop Group PLC, GAW:LSE financials - FT.com
Games Workshop Group PLC (GAW:LSE) financials, including income statements, growth rates, balance sheets and cash flow information.markets.ft.com
Exactly. Why the fuck not? The superhero capeshit fans get a superhero empire to root for that no longer has problematic elements, the "BASH THE FASH" people become happy that the Imperium is no longer a larping mechanism for those they deem fascist, and GW can market the Imperium as the good guys, with a straight face, without it being some kind of back-handed satire. Just have superhero marines being super and being heroes, wiping out both the alien and chaos threats, while also getting rid of the more "problematic" parts of the Imperium and having Belisarius Cawl advance the tech of the Imperium, possibly with Yvraine's help.
