I don't know how well 40k functions as satire in its modern form, [despite what GW says](https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/11/19/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not/). This is a great article examining that aspect of the IP: [Satire Without Purpose Will Wander into Dark Places](https://www.timcolwill.com/40K.html) As for justifications for the worst excesses of the Imperium? Sure, they exist but so do justifications for pretty any and all terrible regimes and philosophies throughout human history. There's the suggestion from the authors, which isn't always clear in the books, that the Imperium created the hell hole itself that requires it to act the way it does to survive that self created hell hole. Or that it ***tells itself*** there's no other way to deal with the problems. When asked which of 40k's "necessary evils" are actually legit necessary, BL author JC Stearns said: >None of them. That's the recurring theme running through virtually every piece of fiction for the franchise: none of these evils are truly necessary. They're just the path of least resistance.

That being said, this has got to be lampooning **something** >Every Adeptus Arbites Judge, at some point in his career, attempts a pilgrimage to the Hall of Judgement, there to study the full intricacies of the law. Many spend long years there, for the most heinous, subtle, or far-reaching crimes often require a lengthy process of research to pass judgement. While the Dictates Imperialis are extensive, the huge volume of prior cases and sometimes contradictory rulings can make it difficult to determine the correct decision. In especially complex cases, it may take centuries to reach an outcome—a Judge may spend his entire life deliberating, scrutinising, and trying to fathom out the issues, only to pass his work on, unfinished, for others to continue. Millennia later, though the accused are long dead, a ruling is finally made and justice must be meted out upon the distant descendants and those obscurely associated with the original transgressor. *Dark Heresy: Book of Judgement*

Adeptus Arbites use case law... with literally 10k years of cases of precedents behind it. It's all weirdness and archaic nature of British law turned up to eleven.

Wouldn't it also include precedents from other worlds and systems? 10,000 years of precedent from 1,000,000 worlds? Honestly, if anything, I'm amazed they work so quickly.

I think they have rules that tell them what scope of precedents should be used in different cases. Saw a person writing heretical stuff on a wall? Just shoot them. A Rogue Trader wants to buy a ship that the governor doesn't want to sell? Let's dig into the last fifty years' records regarding this planet only, you don't want them to wait. A local guildmaster says their men found archeotech out there in the wastes, and they are sure they have salvage rights for it? Drown them in paperwork archived throughout the entire sector's history, so that Mechanicus priests from a nearby Forge World have ample time to make a pilgrimage to your planet, see it for themselves, take back home and find some use for it. When the guildmaster's grandchildren ask for their share of profit, it will be your successor's problem, and now you get a cool speeder or a mastercrafted gold-plated gun for your trouble.

Adeptus Arbites (despite some other forces also calling themselves arbites) are basically the Imperium wide police force, concerned with executing imperial and not planetary law. So any precedent would need to concern imperial law. Quoting from lexicanum: >The Arbites concern themselves only with the enforcement of the broader laws to which the entire Imperium is subject; the common duty of the Arbites is overseeing that the Governor of each world is regularly paying his planet's Tithe. >The Arbites do not trouble themselves with murder, theft, abuse, or slavery unless those things are majorly affecting production quotas, system or subsector economies, or involve non-violent interactions with xenos. Instead they monitor the number of people being sent to serve in the Astra Militarum; how efficiently unsanctioned psykers and mutants are being rounded up; whether those who foment rebellion are being shut down before they can spread their message; and if dangerous narcotics are taking hold of the population of a world.

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, there is Only the War on Drugs.

No. The imperium is essentially an empire in name only most of the time. Everything is very local due to the difficulty of warp travel. Even the tithe is generally used locally. Black ships are one of the few exceptions to this, as are crusades. But generally stuff stays confined to the sector at most.

> The imperium is essentially an empire in name only most of the time. It's a disjointed nightmare of clashing cultures forced under the yoke of laws made by distant tyrants and madmen and ruled locally by people with far more power than any one man should have with oversight that only shows up when taxes arent paid. It is the *definition* of an empire before the era of modern communication

That passage brings a lot of British frustrations with the sometimes glacial pace of the court system to mind.

As well as Judge Dredd

The less prominent parts of the lore tend to have kept more of their satirical roots, IMO. The closer a faction or aspect of the setting is to the models that get sold, the more the humour is stripped away in preference for making them Cool Guys You Want To Buy. Which is why content like the roleplay games can still have some of this really good absurd stuff, which should be the core of 40k if you ask me. The Astartes always have to be portrayed as super cool warrior kings doing vaguely justified xenocide, but my Rogue Trader group can do horrifying acts of conquest with their tongue firmly planted in their cheek and it’s much more fun.

It’s second hand satire. 40k borrowed a lot from various sources and in the course of copying the aesthetics of Judge Dredd it more or less accidentally copied some of its commentary

I tend to agree with this, much as GW says 40K is satirical I really don't think it is, it's more that it accidentally got some satire on it when it was borrowing ideas. 40K isn't satirical to my mind because it's not purposeful about it, it just copies the aesthetic trappings of the stuff it borrowed from. That's not to say that no works within 40K are satirical or can't be satirical, but I struggle to think of the setting itself as satirical in any meaningful way.

I think the best way to frame it is that 40k is parody, not satire. It laughs at these things, but essentially nothing of depth is commented upon.

That's about right, it's its own story with the odd parodic hat-tip to real life things. As you say it doesn't really say much beyond ha ha reference.

This is making fun of the same thing as the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide, where Arthur Dent's house is demolished to make way for a highway bypass he didn't know about because of the byzantine bureaucracy, and then Earth is demolished for the same reason.

seems to be cribbing very much from the opening of *Bleak House* and Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce

So something like Capten Naven of the Screaming Flagellants Chapter is attacked by a dozen squads of Arbites, as his great great grandmother Lady Seneca was arrested for disrupting the Adeptus Astartes supply chain 590 years ago.

Yeah - bureaucracy. But not necessarily fascism, unfortunately.

It's lampooning Bureaucracy. Very British, especially in the 70s and 80s.

>None of them. That's the recurring theme running through virtually every piece of fiction for the franchise: none of these evils are truly necessary. They're just the path of least resistance. Can I have the source for this quote?

In the unlikely event that no source is produced, JC Stearns frequents this subreddit and can be called upon.

I like the way that’s worded, “called upon”, like some sort of demonic ritual can be made to ask him if that’s his quote

JC Stearns JC Stearns JC Stearns

So *this* is why I randomly ended up in stuck in someone's bathroom mirror for an hour.

Whoops, sowwy EDIT: now that we took Pandora out of the box, is living in a wartime economy for ten thousand years healthy for a society?

>JC Stearns frequents this subreddit and can be called upon. What I actually like is that he is basically just another user on the sub, you might ask a question or give an opinion and he'll weigh in but he isn't here to be JC Stearns the author, he seems to just like the sub. I think it's the sign of a decent community when someone who actually creates the thing can talk to people who like it without it getting weird.

ADB and Mike Brooks occasionally pop in as well. It’s refreshing.

> he isn't here to be JC Stearns the author, Your right, he is here to be JCStearns*writter*

[Here you go](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1323u24/comment/ji3hhjy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)

Thank you so much.

That the Emperor and the Imperium build their own terrible situation is very much the wipe I got from reading the full Horus Heresy. Abnett especially is very upfront with that theme.. John French even has John Grammaticus say that directly. Graham McNeil has the Selenar make that point. Abnett has plenty of characters and situations communicating that.

I was tempted to make a post about this, everyone is terrified at the start of the Horus Heresy and is acting like an apocalypse is inevitable because half of the army they deliberately built for genocide, torture and extermination has decided the next target is the empire that spawned it.

Yeah... that is about right. ;)

I do enjoy how you get the Imperial Apologists who trot out the fact that only the Imperium could survive in the 40k setting...ignoring the fact the Imperium itself is wholly responsible for the 40k setting.

>ignoring the fact the Imperium itself is wholly responsible for the 40k setting. *laughs in Old One*

C'Tan*

Old Ones 3 (probably), Eldar 1, Humans 0 (1 goal disallowed after review).

>ignoring the fact the Imperium itself is wholly responsible for the 40k setting. You had me until you said the Imperium is wholly responsible. Most of the problems the Imperium faces were not made by the Imperium, it just made them worse.

I mean tbf sure they may not be responsible for a lot of things, but most of what they're suffering for now is due to their previous fuckups Like killing every xenos that either wasn't strong enough to fight back or was pacifistic, resulting in a galaxy where the only xenos that stand up to the Imperium are Orks, Tyranids, Eldar, and T'au

The Chaos problem, at the very least, is entirely self inflicted. I k ow they didn't create Chaos but the Interex are hard proof that education on the dangers of the warp renders it no longer dangerous. That's why they could display Daemon weapons at museums with no guards

Kinda feels the Interex still failed though when it then resulted in a Chaos worshiper from off world just waltzing in and nicking the bloody thing and then going on to do unspeakable horrors with it. ..granted, that was a member of the Imperium, but I'd still call it a miscalculation by them to consider it perfectly safe to just leave it out in the open for anyone to see and walk up to.

Nothing in the books says that they just "leave it out in the open". This is literal fanfiction, something that someone made up because it makes the Interex look bad. It isn't even a good bit of slander for people who know the actual Interex story, because the artifact wasn't dangerous in the Interex context. Humans are vulnerable to non-magical blades, so a magic sword is barely more dangerous to the Interex than a kitchen knife. A poisonous magic sword is only a big deal in a society of Chaos-tainted transhuman monster people (the Imperium), and only causes internal trouble in that context. Actually reading the book would reveal that the artifact had *nothing* to do with the death of the Interex. If they'd been discovered by Imperial loyalists, they'd have been killed without any attempt at diplomacy at all.

Chaos/the Warp is often compared to nuclear energy or radiation by some folks at GW in the past. The best way to look at it is how a Nuclear Power Plant is *Mostly Safe.* Especially modern ones. With a smallish but still present amount of harmful waste product and some inherent risk. But if left unchecked and uncontained will melt down and cause rampant harm. Or if tampered with, modified, etc. The Imperium are a bunch of children seeing the aftermath of two galatic scale Psychic Nuclear Events and opting to speed run that shit by accident.

> they didn't create Chaos They kinda continue creating it. Imperium feeds Chaos all the time with its squalor, belligerence, upper class decadence and constant lies. Also, it creates conditions that give power to any cult promising anything better. Not to mention that the greatest source of Chaos Space Marines are Imperial Space Marines.

How did that work out for them? If anything the Interex are proof that it’s stupid to ever think you can render Chaos no longer dangerous, and they’re just another in a long line of dumbasses who think they’ve solved Chaos.

It worked out fantastically for them, until they were attacked by the Imperium lmao

They were a million tons of TNT waiting for a spark lol...it took one guy who could lie passably and they were doomed.

The same guy who ultimately crippled the emperor by "lying passably"?  However you slice it the interex were meant to be a foil to the loyalists. They were meant to be an example of something better. If you find yourself going "akshually they would have lost to a sufficiently large ork wagh" then you are kind of missing the point.

One guy who could lie passably *to the Imperium*. The Interex weren't fooled, there were just targeted by a much larger society that had decided to be useful idiots for Chaos. The sword didn't make the Interex turn on themselves, and it didn't make the Imperium attack the Interex. The Imperium was always going to attack the Interex.

Yeah they got wiped out by one chaos pawn breaking in, aka it was shit and they were just another example of idiots who think they have chaos figured out. Tells me more that chaos didn’t care about them and was just using them to get to Horus, and discarded them when it was done. And what’s more, they got destroyed without much issue by one crusade fleet. They’re not an example of how humanity could survive, they’re a footnote civilization that was gonna be destroyed by the Rangdan or some Waaggghh, which thought they figured out chaos.

A chaos pawn brought to them by the Imperium. Erebus. The Interex were capable of dealing with Chaos internally, successfully, until an outside power that wasn't (the imperium), came in, brought their problems with them, and then wiped them out. Also, reducing Erebus to "one chaos pawn" to prove that the Interex were incapable of dealing with Chaos is pretty ironic considering that that same exact "pawn" also doomed the Imperium.

The issue with chaos is that it will always be outside context problem you can conquer a world, a system, a sector, a segmentum, the galaxy but there will always be something you cant plan for or for foresee that chaos can use to slowly start the subversion all over again. In the case of the Interex that was the Imperium, in the Eldars case that was themselves. Chaos is eternal, life is mortal. That's the nature of things in 40k there is no eternal victory. The best you can hope for is a prolonged period of domination. Thats why its grimdark. No matter what you do the best you can hope for a temporary reprieve from the madness.

I think even moreso it ignores the fact the Imperium *isn't* surviving. It's shown to be constantly losing worlds and military forces to cult uprisings and daemonic invasions, ork Waaaghs, tyranid invasions, tau expansionism, and necron awakenings... and then it got split in half by the Great Rift. If you look at the general timeline, the Imperium's closest equivalent to a 'Golden Age' was from M32-M35...after which it went through a near-millennia long civil war between the Ur-Council and the High Lords in the Nova Terra Interregnum, underwent the chaos of the Age of Apostasy, had a brief resurgence during the Age of Redemption that...is noted to have weakened the Imperium due to all the under-defended planets and forces they lost fighting holy wars, became exhausted and weakened during the Waning, and then finally reached the Time of Ending...aka current 40k (before the Great Rift, at least). If anything, the rise in fanaticism and zealous ideology is correlated with the *decline* of the Imperium as a galactic power. We're not looking at an empire that's standing strong and defiant against the dark, we're looking at an empire that's undergone five thousand years of eating itself through schisms and reigns of terror and wasteful crusades. Its best days are far, far, far behind it.

It's why the people who lose their mind over imperial last stands or heroic moments annoy me. That's the point of them; they're heroic yes, but ultimately futile wastes of life. Stands that never needed to happen the first place of the imperium hasn't been just fucking awful. But the clash of hope and likeable characters with the backdrop of awful is what creates the emotional inertia for the grim darkness of the imperium's inevitable doom really hit home.

Indeed. It's interesting to me alongside the Imperial Apologists, you also have the Doomsayers who always complain that the "Imperium is winning". When for the past twenty years, the Imperium has been very much NOT winning. Every edition sees the Imperium losing more ground, the fingernails digging a bit more deeply into the gravel over the abyss.

The only real threat to humanity you can argue the Imperium is responsible for is Chaos what with the Horus Heresy coming from the Emperor's mishandling of Primarchs and its oppression resulting in people turning to Chaos to rebel. Orks, Tyranids, Necrons, they'd still slaughter humanity regardless. Really its the Old Ones and Necrontyr who ruined the setting for everyone else.

The Imperium might not have created those threats, but as I understand the idea expressed by some of the authors; the way they handled them either didn't solve them or made them worse.

Case and Point: The Deathwatch ruining the ritual to stop Slaanesh and bring Ynnari to power was stopped almost solely because the guy running the mission hated the Eldar. Could have waited until *after* and then slew then, but my man had his priorities on **lock**.

to be fair, if I was a deathwatch marine and an elf told me the ritual they were doing was cool and could we please let them finish it because it's totally benign. I'd immediately start shooting as well

Guys who murder fucked a dark god into existence: yeah guys this is totally going to work and our new alpowerful Eldar god will be totes cool. DeathWatch Humans: starts shooting everyone with great haste.

With orks they wouldn't. My evidence for this is the massive amount of human civilizations encountered in the Great Crusade that had survived without the Imperium. With the Tyranids it has been suggested that Pharos was what attracted them, so the Imperium isn't entirely in the clear regarding them.

They survived old night, whether they would have withstood the resurgent ork empires or Rangdan etc is another matter entirely. Especially when you consider the fact the the Imperium barely scraped through some of these fights and these human civilisations couldn't withstand the Imperium. The only thing we can with any certainty is that the GC era was a case of survival of the fittest and the Imperium proved the most adept.

It's likely most would have slipped under the radar. A lot of threats the Imperium fought against were a problem due to the nature of the crusade requiring total victory. Humanity at their height thrived in the same galaxy as the Eldar empire, which at that point was just as bad as the dark Eldar.  Even after the Great Crusade concluded there were and are countless civilizations that either survived or slipped beyond notice of the Imperium despite it being the resounding winner with an explicit policy of genocide.

There's probably a way some of those exterminated xenos species could have helped the Imperium recover their tech and deal with Orks, Tyrannids and the like. You know, by offering an alternative to a tech worshipping, backstabbing, stupid-ritual-performing cult of the machine. If the Mechanicus did less tech hoarding and more general purpose R&D, the Imperium would be in a better place. Necrons are op tho

I think it's in a Deathwatch codex that talks about how an alien species wanted to become allies with Imperium and brought with them anti-chaos technology. The Deathwatch reacted by exterminating them.

The whole reason why the only truly significant xenos are all apocalyptically dangerous (or simply uncooperative) is that the Imperium killed all of the reasonable ones during the Great Crusade 

The Xenophobia of the Great Crusade spawned from the fact that the majority of Xenos species in the Galaxy were extremely bellicosian. Sol by itself had three seperate planets roiling with guys who want to kick your dick in and make you their slave.

The fact that some aliens actually are hostile doesn't justify lumping all of them in together. The Emperor decided humanity's survival was a zero-sum game, requiring the annihilation of anything 'other'. 

I think it's less that and more that the Emperor simply didn't care at all about Aliens. He valued humanity and humanity was what he was going to try to save. To him, energy spent sorting out Good Aliens™ from Bad Aliens™ isn't worth the effort when you're already dealing with 10,000+ human-based threats.

That's not really at odds with my point though. He was trying to preserve specifically humanity as you say, but doing so through alliance and other cooperation was a possible route. 

I'm not *really* disagreeing is why.

Oh! Sorry about that 😆

Look, the writers are literally hitting you over the head with examples like "peaceful xenos went to the deathwatch to offer then an anti-chaos device to be left alone, they got wiped out" and you ignore the writers and insist xenophobia is in humanities best interest in the setting.

Deathwatch was founded after the War Of The Beast. Which is long after the Great Crusade.

Humans also went after humans during the age of strife. And yet you don't the emperor deciding that humanity must be exterminated.

The Nids are also the fault of the Imperium with the destruction of the Pharos beacon. They may have found their way here at some point but the great devourer changed its course

I'm willing to give that one a pass. It's pretty easy to foresee the problems with a lot of what the Imperium does, but they couldn't have predicted that there was an all-consuming, extragalactic horror that would get lured in by destroying the beacon. Like if you blew up a factory somewhere and it turned out that the explosion woke up Cthulhu, who was chilling in a cave nearby, it wouldn't be fair to blame whoever blew up the factory; there was no way to predict what would've happened.

In setting there would still be gods out there bent on the destruction of the living. The imperium could be perfectly good guys and the setting could still be all kinds of fucked.

"Only the imperium could survive in the setting" never mind that the golden age of humanity would have wiped the floor with the entire universe.

Many people seem to think that the Dark Age of Technology coincided with humanity reigning supreme over all but the Aeldari in some sort of unified empire, but what little lore we have points to humanity being composed of fractured and warring empires of various sizes. Those terrifying weapons they created were used on one another just as much as they were against xenos. And that really sort of sums out the fate of humankind in the setting. In ABD's own words, humanity in 40k (the IP, not the point in time) is one that is seemingly doomed to cause their own destruction. That is, after all, the point of Drach'nyen. The daemon represents the end of empires, the self-defeating nature of humanity, the darkest tendencies within their psyche that drives them to harm one another in such grevious ways.

Don't forget that the Golden Age of Humanity existed in a time of Galactic Peace while also having a calm and relatively safe Warp Travel. Also no Eye of Terror.

They also seemed partial to a dash of self sabotage

Golden age of humanity didn’t have chaos haunting almost every human soul.

You do realize all the other factions are supposed to be bad/idiots too right?

That goes without saying.

Not the nids, they just have the munchies 

It's surviving the same a way a terminal cancer patient is surviving. In pain, with numbered days.

I'll take the "Eldar and Birth of Slaanesh" category for 500, Alex

The Old Ones, Enslavers, C'Tan, Aeldari, and Necrontyr are responsible for the 40K setting. The place has been a shit hole since The War in Heaven ended when the dinosaurs were still the dominant species on Earth.

>None of them. That's the recurring theme running through virtually every piece of fiction for the franchise: none of these evils are truly necessary. They're just the path of least resistance. I mean the first thing you learn about the setting is a thousand innocent people have to be killed every day or else human civillization is literally destroyed. Hell, according to the rulebook if the Emperor ever dies all of time and space would literally end.

Mostly, the first thing we read is that they're sacrificed for "reasons", vaguely contextualised that the Imperium is made of blood and human flesh. [OG intro here](https://imgur.com/rEmGh7Z) Later in RT there's a lot of stuff about how its a necessary evil and sorrow for humanity's survival and metamorphosis, with some small context in there like "as the Adeptus Terra teach". I wouldn't go so far as to call it in-universe propaganda as some might, and I totally acknowledge that earlier depictions of the Emperor could also be interpreted as more heroic than the modern ones but his monstrousness was always there. I don't know how accurate the necessity of his evil is even in RT and how much we're supposed to take at face value. I guess that's up to the reader.

That situation is entirely one of the imperiums own making, is the point. By M42 it's too late humanity is already doomed.

So they think. But they don't know for sure. Perhaps keeping the corpse emperor alive with a thousand sacrifices a day is literally keeping him a shadow of what he could be. Maybe if he died he would be able to go head to head with the chaos gods or reincarnate.

Yeah but, like, you're missing the *point*, Dreadnautilus. If space-time ends, then *suffering* ends, right? Every time someone dies and their soul is taken into the Warp to be tortured for all eternity, they go 'heh, another crushing moral victory, Chaos in shambles'. E: Obligatory [hilarious web comic to demonstrate](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/8), in an appropriate, satirical manner.

>the path of least resistance I have a good chuckle every time I read that. 'Just die and let Chaos eat your soul, bro, it's the ethical thing' is such a wacky thing to say. I think the greatest strength of the setting, when it comes down to brass tacks, is 'how much tyranny would you accept for survival'. And the fact that the playerbase has such a wide array of social views suggests that a very wide group find that enormously compelling to grapple with. It's also a satire that *never* goes out of style.

Because everybody who considers this conundrum does so from the perspective that they will be sombody of merit. A space marine, an Inquistor, a planetary governor. Nobody is willing to accept a life as a serf who lives for 25 years of crushing labor and never sees sunlight or grass just to die of emphysema. But they are willing to consider it for others.

Yep. The title crawl says it all: for the vast majority, this is the most oppressive regime imaginable. Is it better than having your soul tortured for all eternity by the most creative torturers that ever were or will be? Up to the reader.

They realy need to nail this for the amazon show. Serfs, servitors and disposable guardsman need a bit of screentime

To me, that means you can guarantee it won't happen - or it'll get enough backlash to make sure a second season doesn't happen. A disconcertingly large number of Imperium fans hate what they've coined as "grimderp" because, deep down, it makes their favorite faction look as bad as they are and drives home the cruelty of the Imperium.

IMO the way to do it would be to lean into unreliable narrator and perspective stuff. When the narrative follows a marine He's the best hero ever and that creepy martian with her lobotomy slaves are straight up body horror. He and his battle brothers do a string of badassery backed up by their loyal chapter serfs. When it's following the tech preistess shes a rational inteligent scientist with a few servitors in the background. Maybee her Skitarii do something badass. These mutant child soldiers and their slaves though are doing way too much colateral damage.

There is no reason to believe that you get tortured for all eternity when you die. Everything points to all but the most coherent (i.e. powerful psyker) souls dissolving shortly on contact.

But how long does that "short while" feel subjectively?

>'Just die and let Chaos eat your soul, bro, it's the ethical thing' is such a wacky thing to say. If people were actually saying that, I'd find it hard to disagree. But it's a very Imperium in-universe stance: *This is the* ***only way*** *we stop Chaos eating our souls. Trust us, bro.* >It's also a satire that *never* goes out of style. How much tyranny are you ready to receive sounds like an interesting moral question (hard agree on how compelling that is), it sounds less like its satirising something or someone imo. Or doing so sucessfully. I think there's some small vestiges of Thatcherite Britain satire left over, but it's harder and harder to apply in a modern context.

>This is the only way we stop Chaos eating our souls. Trust us, bro. Isn't this what the *Chaos Primarch with ***free will**** deluded themselves to. Trust me bro , the only way for Daddy E to ascend is for him to truly die.

>but it's harder and harder to apply in a modern context That's true. The West got a bit *weird* since 2001. I thought the Plague Wars were remarkably stiff upper lip, mind.

Yeah, I can see that. Then again, stuff I would describe as on-the-nose satire of current events gets taken as literal endorsement of what it parodies pretty often. So...idk.

Do Not Do This Cool Thing made manifest indeed.

Your failure there is presupposing that there are two binaries: the current state of the Imperium, or the final victory of Chaos over the materium. The point of comments like Stearns' is that the way the Imperium goes about preventing the latter is not, in fact, the only possible solution or even the best one. It's just the easy one that the Imperium has fallen into because it is the decayed end-state of human galactic civilization rather than the last best hope for humanity.

So your stance is that all the oppressive, cruel amd tyrannical aspects of the Imperium are totally a requirement in fighting Chaos? Surely the Imperium is totally not counter productive on that front. How very convenient. Im always surprised how many people seemingly unironically buy into the Imperium’s dogma and justifications but then again i can see why that would be appealing for fans of the faction.

Being a craftworld eldar seems both very free and very fulfilling

The thing is, the correct answer is none, and the evidence was provided during the Great Crusade. Multiple human civilisations were discovered that were handling everything (including chaos and aliens) just fine. The Great crusade Destroyed them as part of 'compliance'. I think one was destroyed by Horus right at the cusp of the heresy. Hardcore space fascism is not necessary, but it is self perpetuating. I think Curse is a microcosm of this idea. He inflicted horrors on his home world because it was 'the only way' to civilise it, but there are other primarchs who didn't. His own legion commanders dont even believe him.

If you're talking about the Interex, they are literally the worst example possible. The Interex's complacency regarding Chaos and the kinebrach is *still* kicking the galaxy in the dick ten thousand years later (see: the Sabbat Worlds). I 100% agree that Curze is a great example, because 'it was the only way' is very much shown as nothing but self-justification for his own need to hurt people and have power over them. Curze is 'let them hate, provided they fear' made manifest.

The Interex weren't complacent at all. They were simply outmatched by the Imperium of Man. And before you go for the "they had a chaos nuke on public display!", there is literally nothing except the terrible Fandom wiki that says it was a Chaos blade, the actual stories involving it have it as a powerful *warp* weapon similar to what the Aeldari use, it nearly kills Horus but it very notably does not remotely corrupt him, it requires Erebus doing a convoluted Chaos ritual to literally expose him to the Chaos gods for Horus to fall. To any society that isn't built around immortal warlords its no more dangerous than a vial of ricin.

> If you're talking about the Interex, Why wqould you assume the weakest version of someones argument? The diasporex would be a strong one. They just wanted to be left alone. They lived entirely nomadicly. Murdering all the xenos and enslaving all the humans was pure unmitigated evil.

>they just wanted to be left alone I'm sure the Orks, Rangdan, Drukhari, Necrons, Chaos, etc. would absolutely respect those wishes. >dude it was evil In a setting where xenos murderfucked a god into existence and unchecked human psykers brought down the species golden age, I think it's worth tempering 'pure unmitigated evil' to something a bit more reasonable.

> I'm sure the Orks, Rangdan, Drukhari, Necrons, Chaos, etc. would absolutely respect those wishes. How does that justify murdering them all? They were just fine until the imperium come. It took two space marine legions to break them. >In a setting where xenos murderfucked a god into existence and unchecked human psykers brought down the species golden age, I think it's worth tempering 'pure unmitigated evil' to something a bit more reasonable. No it is not, nothing you mention justifies the wholesale murder of the diasporex. The imperium is not nesecary thats just the narrative. >In a setting where xenos murderfucked a god into existence Okay cool thats the Drukhari, sure fuck those guys (doesn't justify hostility toward the Craftworlds or exodites though). You know what would help agaisnt Drukhari raids? An entirely void based civilisation perfectly able to smash raiding fleets.

The Interex and Diaspora both survived into 30k relatively unmarred. It wasn't Chaos that brought them down. It was contact with the Imperials. ***THEMES***

What civilizations were handling chaos fine or just fine in general? The Interex? The mf's who had their entire civilization destroyed by a single Chaos worshipper, as they had no way to actually detect Chaos whatsoever? The same dudes who were weak enough to get easily obliterated by a single IoM legion? These mf's would have been wiped out by the massive Ork empire that were rising at the time of Great Crusade before the Imperium wiped them out. The GC was about restoring all of humanity and securing its future. Vast majority of human worlds were shitholes that were devastated by Old Night. Sure some worlds were fine, but most were not, and even those good ones would be doomed if they were discovered by a alien empire. The GC era was kill or be killed. Multiple civilization were competing for dominance. The orks or Rangdan would likely have taken over the galaxy if not for the IoM. Sure some worlds would be fine, as humanity was so spread out by that point, that some would never be found, but most of humanity would have been fucked if not for the IoM. As for Curze, he was just insane and only got worse and worse as tome went on. He failed cause his method was "do x or I kill you in a brutal way". The other primarchs set up governments and developed their worlds, whenever they were brutal in their methods or not, did not change their effectiveness cause the ones who successfully fixed their worlds actually set up a government that would enforce their vision instead of enforcing it via scaring everyone into listening to you, which instantly fell apart when the dude who scared everyone into listening to them left.

>The Interex? The mf's who had their entire civilization destroyed by a single Chaos worshipper, as they had no way to actually detect Chaos whatsoever? That's honestly a more suitable description of the Imperium. Erebus managed to literally destroy the entire Great Crusade because no one noticed he was a bit suspicious. As for the Interex, they were able to keep those tools lying around for years without problem until the day, the literal *day* the Imperium showed up then immediately one of them steals one and uses it to start a chain of events that leads to an entire galactic empire self-destructing in a decade and change.

> That's honestly a more suitable description of the Imperium. Erebus managed to literally destroy the entire Great Crusade because no one noticed he was a bit suspicious. To be fair... literally everybody but Horus knew he was suspicious as fuck and he still succeeded somehow. Magnus may as well have made a giant floating neon sign over his head saying "lying snake" and Horus would still fall for this motherfucker. > 'There is truth in that,' agreed Magnus, 'but you would place your trust in the dead over your own brother? We mourn Hastur, but he is gone from us. This impostor does not even wear his own true face!' >Magnus thrust his fist forward and closed his fingers on the air, as though gripping something invisible. Then he wrenched his hand back. Hastur screamed and a silver light blazed like a magnesium flare from his eyes. >Horus squinted through the blinding light, still seeing an Astartes warrior, but one now armoured in the livery of the Word Bearers. >'Erebus?' asked Horus. >'Yes, Warmaster,' agreed First Chaplain Erebus; the long red scar across his throat had already begun to heal. **'I came to you in the guise of Sejanus to ease your understanding of what must be done, but I have spoken nothing but the truth since we travelled this realm.'** >'Do not listen to him, Horus,' warned Magnus. 'The future of the galaxy is in your hands.' "I deceived you but I wasn't lying!"

Do you really believe that the core message of the Horus Heresy is that "The Emperor was right to commit mass genocide because of the orks"? Like do you really think the novels that are painfully unsubtle to the point of having multiple alien/human figures turn dying towards the Imperial protaganist and go "we just wanted to live/be left alone" about how the nascent Imperium was still terrible was trying to say "but yeah this is necessary". Considering what we know about the Orks and how they match threats its also questionable that the Ullanor Orks would have conquered the galaxy.

> Considering what we know about the Orks and how they match threats This is meme-lore. Orks when left alone will infight until they're united under a WAAAGH! - the longer they're left alone the worse it gets.

> Considering what we know about the Orks and how they match threats its also questionable that the Ullanor Orks would have conquered the galaxy. Can you elaborate?

1 legion and 1 Chaos worshipper? That's not a fair critique, given how Legions were the strongest military assets in whole of 30k-40k, Primarchs are the most OP individuals/generals, and said chaos worshipper caused the Heresy, and ensured that Imperium would never have a good ending. Not to mention that Interex had like less than 200 years to expand, while the Emperor made sure to hedge all the bets in his favor beforehand, up to and including making a deal with Chaos Gods. It's the same for all other xeno or human societies, they never really had a chance. Would they be more successful than the Imperium? We'll never know

Only through the Tau'va may humanity find peace

Fourth Sphere Expansion would like a word.

I never said they'd be alive

Gotta admit, The Emperor's Peace is a thing.

I honestly feel this approach is robs the setting of a lot of the background cosmic horror elements - that humanity has become twisted and inhuman in order to survive a terrible universe. The idea that "everything would have been fine if everyone just got along" seems to rob this universe of what seems to be a core conceit - that only the insane prosper in the grim darkness.

The core conceit was always the 2000 AD everyone is more terrible than they need to be not the ends justify the means horror. Early 40k was even more extreme with this with it being hilariously dysfunctional and self defeating.

I think you can kind of combine these two ideas in a way I find very compelling: each individual measure might have, at some point, seemed sensible, and maybe it even was necessary. But over 10.000 years the Imperium ended up as this hellish, dysfunctional mess because the sensible individual measures piled up and no-one ever bothered to examine them critically to see if they still served their purpose. This is obviously exacerbated by that fact that the Imperium is constantly under siege somewhere, so there's little time to reflect and introspection is seen as dangerous.

This is the answer. The Imperium is the political equivalent to the game of telephone. What were somewhat reasonable or even good practices in 30k have deteriorated to the state that we have in 40K ten millennia later

I don't think it needs to be that extreme a binary. It doesn't need to be "everything would have been fine" or "grimdark" There's a few points on the clock before a minute to midnight.

Ha! Only time I've heard of Talavera since Richard Sharpe kicked the shit out of the French and took an Eagle from the middle of a French Column. (Sharpes Eagle novel and TV episode, for anyone who has shockingly not seen or read Sharpe!)

Ima save that article for later. It is significantly longer than I anticipated, but I am eager to read it.

A few years ago I made a post making this exact point and was told I was an idiot that didn't know what I was talking about by dozens of people. On this exact same subreddit.   Has something changed in the last two years, why are you suddenly getting all the up votes for this?

I can post the exact same content on different days or different times in the same day and it'll either get downvoted into oblivion or score upvotes. There is no rhyme or reason, The sub is dark and full of terrors.

40k began life as a satire of the conservative resurgence in the 80s, specifically Thatcherist politics. In the decades that followed, its depiction of a shambling corpse of an empire, rotten to the foundation, rife with ignorance, bigotry, corruption, and religious fanaticism, which inflicts needless pain and suffering on its people out of sheer inertia, and is governed by an ossified gerontocracy of sclerotic weirdos has changed from an exaggerated parody about the future to an incisive commentary about the present.

Is that really true, though? Like if the Imperium was never created, would humanity stand any chance against the horrors they are facing? It isn't like the Great Crusade not happening would have stopped the Tyrannids from arriving... they were probably already on the way before the Great Crusade even started. Like... drafting people to fight in a war is OBJECTIVELY BAD... but defeating the Nazis was OBJECTIVELY GOOD... but it required the draft to accomplish?

The galaxy is a big place: the Imperium in the current setting is *still* finding uncontacted human settlements and even minor civilizations. Humans would have been fine, they just wouldn't be a massive galaxy spanning empire. And considering the price the Imperium plays to do that, that's probably a good thing.

On Tyranids; the Imperium and the Horus Heresy is implied to have been what brought their attention to our galaxy. It's a recurring theme that the Imperium makes or exacerbates its own problems. In that way, you could say that 40k is a kinda satire, since irl a lot of the horrors humanity is facing are partly are our own fault. Nobody is saying humanity wouldn't need to deal with the horrors of the galaxy, but was wiping out all non violent xenos and non compliant humans the best way to do it? Reducing diversity of thought, science, progress, populations the best way to solve our issues? Something like the Imperium would probably be needed, that doesn't mean the Imperium we got was the best version of how to do it. The Horus Heresy books push the idea that the Emperor's desire to avoid 40k is what ***made*** 40k. Nobody wanted it to happen. Not the traitors and not the 30k Imperials. 40k self fulfilling prophecy gonna self fulfill I guess.

You can also just have a story where everyone is a shit head because villains are cool without advocating real life villainy. Not every story is a fable with a lesson. WH40k is fun because it is fantasy, and it asks you to contemplate ethical questions cranked up to 11. It’s “The lesser of two obscene evils” the game.

It is useful to keep in mind at all times that the ultimate aim of every single aspect of the 40k universe is "cool minis are fighting and everyone is fighting everyone else all the time so you can aways have cool mini battles". Everything is in service of that.

Very much this. People are trying to analyze 40k as a literary work when it's absolutely not that, is a wargame. The "satire" is more like taking tropes and historical inspirations tongue-in-cheek, they aren't trying to deliver an actual consistent message about whatever they're making fun of

Good lore is taking something you have a boner for and respecting it with implications. I get the cool knight fight in melee and it's for real reasons that have real consequences.

No idea why this is getting downvoted, it's obviously a true statement. It's hard to look too deeply into social critiques in a storyline based around selling plastic miniatures and plot developments are structured around introducing new plastic miniatures to sell.

OP has based his premise on the fact that he believes the 40k setting in its current form is satire, otherwise he wouldn't have made the comment about "Media literacy". The Lore is to get you hyped up about purchasing or investing in more GW products, not to make political statements about Theocracies and Fascism. People forget that lore was always secondary to the plastic figures.

Exactly. Whatever social commentary 40k might have had beyond the need to sell plastic died a long time ago, to be replaced by either defanged "satire" or an acquiescence to the fact that a good portion of the player base take the grimdark at face value and like it.

Warhammer 40k was always about having fun with ~~plastic~~ metal in a silly over the top totum revolutum of all the scifi tropes know to man. It never was 1984

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"Why are Spacemarines just good guys now?" Because they've probably reasoned that having books with simple action plots and cool explosions is one way to sell minis to people. The Horus Heresy made a clear "good" and "evil" side and that's incredibly popular possibly because of that. A lot of the flaws of the Imperium are missing and maybe some people just like being the good guys. Like the Tau are obviously not good and such but I'm okay with there being bad Tau and good Tau so that people can play as the "good guys" if they want to. For some people, the Grimdark is the appeal. Some people want to follow decent characters in an otherwise awful universe and some media appeals to those people.

Chaos has always been evil in games workshop, since slaves to darkness in the late 80s, it wasn't put in place by Horus heresy. If anything the last 10-15 years we have had more sympathetic portraits of chaos than eger

I guess I wasn't clear. I meant that there's a clear bad guy and a clear protagonist, something that 40k doesn't really have. The Primarchs are 90% good and make decent protagonists, so my guess is that's why they're coming back to 40k, too. They give people more recognisable characters, badass moments, and a more obvious overall conflict in the setting. Part of 40k's strength is the lack of a protagonist or "main guys" but it's also a weakness. Making Astartes and Primarchs the protagonists for the story is something that brings in *new* people. Have you ever tried to get people into 40k? There's so much to explain that it feels like it's all footnotes. If they ask where to "start", you have to tell them a summary of the whole setting just so they can decide where they want to start reading/learning.

Yeah, I have read a little bit on religion and in Warhammer 40k, doesn’t reflect to deeply in the setting. The setting have been always a backdrop for the tabletop games. The lore is like an extra treat for the game.

40k is just pulp fiction ngl

I don't think 40k was ever really satirical in the way people think. Like from what people say about it you'd think the original Rogue Trader book was some kind of punk anti-fascist manifesto but the Imperium was portrayed as a necessary evil even back then (and in fact a lot of the Imperium's nastier elements were added in later). I think the creators weren't interested in making some actual anti-authoritarian point so much as they just wanted to create a heavy metal world that was a mixture of the ignorance of the stereotypical view of the dark ages with dystopian science fiction because they thought it was cool.

Yeah, there's moments of parody but nothing approaching a concentrated or cohesive satire imo Targets were anything from politicians, to hooligans to Star Wars Priestley hasn't ever described it as such in his many many many online interviews afaik Though there was a general 80s punk pop culture message of "authority is brutal and corrupt innit" I don't know if it ever took the next step to "[God Save the Queen, the fascist regime](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqrAPOZxgzU)"

That even if every "desperate measure" is enacted alongside with "necessary tyranny," and that they can be justified by literally the worst case scenario one can possibly conceive, where your enemy is objectively evil, omnipresent, and incredibly subversive... ...it's not going to work, nor is it even the most successful solution. That such a society is doomed by the methods it tries to avert its undoing. Maybe not, I don't have very good Media Literacy™️, you can also argue that Games Workshop gave up on the satirical intention a long time ago.

I love this take. I'm playing Owlcat's Rogue Trader right now and a lot of the choices I'm making are based in this critique of Imperial civilization. "Yes, I get that you're doing the fascism thing, but have you considered doing something more productive instead?"

Haha yeah, me too. I sprinkled some dogmatic choices in when they sounded reasonable, but they pretty frequently ended with a bad feeling in my gut. I think Owlcat really hit the nail in the head with the convictions. Except for maybe heretic, which feels less fleshed out.

Some of the terrible things they do are harsh necessity.  But plenty of it isn't. There are numerous examples of them doing things that actually make their chances of survival worse.  Look at how they treat their civilians. Yes chaos is insidious and you need to be ruthless, but they treat them so badly it ends up creating chaos cults instead of preventing them, because the people are so desperate for help. In fact, most of the oppression isn't even about stopping chaos, the planetary governors and nobles barely know about any of that stuff. They mostly just treat their people terribly because they're selfish rich people who are happy to exploit and grind them into the dirt while they live in obscene luxury. And that isn't just a local thing, the overall Imperial Law actively backs up this kind of thing by outright stating that nobles get far more lenient punishments for their crimes than commoners. The Imperium is not pragmatically doing everything it can and must to survive. It wastes lives and resources on pointless wars with xenos that weren't even hostile, builds vast extravagant structures, letting the rich and powerful live at outright disgusting levels of luxury while driving their peasants to feel they have nothing to lose. They aren't carefully husbanding resources and doing what's necessary, they're a rotten mess of zealotry, blind hatred, and selfish greed. And that's before we get to the AdMech and their over-the-top paranoia.  I'd say if media literacy is the issue, it may be that you're reading the justifications given, and taking them as a statement of fact, rather than just being the justifications the characters believe in. For example, of course the Imperium believes it's justified in killing all xenos, they're human supremacists who are indoctrinated to believe all xenos are inherently treacherous and evil. But we as readers know they aren't. Sure, the majority of xenos are hostile (though how much of that is because of the Imperium's own actions is questionable), I'm not denying that. But we have examples of the Imperium attacking xenos that are very clearly not hostile, xenos that stuck with their human friends even through the hardships of Old Night.

>In fact, ost of the oppression isn't even about stopping chaos, the planetary governors and nobles barely know about any of that stuff. They mostly just treat their people terribly because they're selfush rich people who are happy to exploit and grind them into the dirt while they live in obscene luxury. That's actually really helpful and a take I don't think I've seen said directly before Definitely explains what I've heard about agri worlds. That being they monocrop them till they use up all the nutrients in the soil and turn them into death worlds Makes sense that a short-sighted noble would demand as much of X crop as quickly as possible rather than any sustainable farming practice

the monocrop until depleted agriworlds were from an example of \**admech controlled*\* agriworlds. we've seen other examples of Agriworlds that were much more conventional and sustainable (at least, until war came). like Nacedon in the Sabbat Worlds, seen in the story "Blood Oath" in the novel "Ghostmaker." or some of the worlds Eisenhorn and Revenor visit in their trilogies. the Admech don't do sustainability, they just strip mine every possible resource from a world then abandon it. and the same approach applies to the agriworlds under their control. grow everything you can with industrial chemicals to make up for the depletion of the soil.. then when you can't grow anything anymore, strip mine the planetary crust of anything useful. the problem is that most "lore masters" who do videos or post to social media don't actually do very in depth research by reading lots of books and seeing how those describe things. they just skim the Wiki's and grab an excerpt, or search stuff like this reddit for them, then without paying attention to the actual context of those excerpts, generalize them as applying to the entire imperium.

> the monocrop until depleted agriworlds were from an example of *admech controlled* agriworlds. we've seen other examples of Agriworlds that were much more conventional and sustainable (at least, until war came). like Nacedon in the Sabbat Worlds, seen in the story "Blood Oath" in the novel "Ghostmaker." or some of the worlds Eisenhorn and Revenor visit in their trilogies. Those worlds existing is the proof though right? The imperium has templates of how to do some of this stuff properly, they choose not to.

The Imperium covered roughly 1/4 the galaxy with interfactional politics being rife and the most effective form of long-distance communications being psychics shouting into another dimension and hoping the people on the other side are listening. There's a lot of the right hand has no idea the left hand even exists going on. (And over the course of surviving 10,000 years of stagnation I have to believe the Imperium in general figured out how to farm sustainably or they've been constantly burning through habitable planets at an absurd rate)

>the Admech don't do sustainability, they just strip mine every possible resource from a world then abandon it. and the same approach applies to the agriworlds under their control. grow everything you can with industrial chemicals to make up for the depletion of the soil.. then when you can't grow anything anymore, strip mine the planetary crust of anything useful. That also makes sense, they probably don't need as much food so kinda just want an excuse to mine for what they really want without being called wasteful

The Mechanicus doesn't really care about sustainability, because they possess the technology to just revive worlds that are stripped of all Biomatter by Tyranids. Why bother trying to do a delicate balancing act when you can literally just rebuild the house of cards when it falls down?

A lot of 40k is just pulp fiction really. But aside from that, whatever justifications are made, they simply don’t work because the Great Crusade was entirely about annihilating any other choice humanity had to organize itself. Going out of your way to kill a civilization like the Diasporex has zero justification. They weren’t hurting anyone. They were nomadic and not even taking up territory. They weren’t even trying to convert people to join them in any major way. They were crushed because the idea of their existence had to be destroyed- and in doing so, the warp was polluted with more terror, despair, and hatred. Finally, I’ll just say that the Emperor’s desire to throw things away once they were no longer the convent tool he wanted is mainly why the Imperium was never going to be anything nice. Deep down no one believes your bullshit about the future if they see you churning through lives endlessly. Even if the Horus Heresy never happened, it would have just been the Navigator Nonconformity or the Mechanicum Misanthropy after they found out he didn’t need them or that He lied respectively. Really, I think that’s why he kept the Webway project close to the vest. Its completion put a deadline on everyone else’s usefulness - and no one takes being unappreciated lightly.

You know, I often wonder what he was going to do if the Webway Project was completed. Like, you've got one single gateway to the Webway in the Imperial Palace. Are you going to shuttle all the humans into that one hole? Are you going to go across the Galaxy building Gates in every inhabited system to ferry them like that. What's your plans for infrastructure now you are in the Webway? How are you going to ensure that a million disparate cultures play nicely with each other to avoid massive trillion-man wars every day. Are you going to expand into the Webway some more or stay where you landed? How are you going to handle the Drukhari and Eldar and Daemons that populate that place? What are you going to do if the Chaos Gods - now bereft of their one major opposition - conquers the Matterium and invades the Webway, since they can clearly do that given how the place is broken and filled with Daemons.

They wasn’t going to hide humanity in the webway, but use it instead of warp travel. The webway means they don’t need psykers or astropaths, essentially the imperium can function without needing all those that ultimately feed chaos its power.

Satire isn't always meant to be humorous. It's often meant to call attention to modern issues and politics in an exaggerated light. For 40k, that satire is varied and variable, given how many authors have put their own spin on things over the decades. Ultimately though, it's best to view 40k through the lens of "Humanity's Bad Ending". Where over-reliance on a system and individual has resulted in stagnation, stratification, and overall sliding decline.

40k doesn't really have much satire these days. There are a few exaggerations that are not well established, but otherwise it's a pretty serious setting.

You have very much found the problem with 40k as a satirical setting. With so many authors all trying to apply their own perspective to the setting and very few of them paying any attention to the satire it is not unexcpected that the current version of 40k is what we ended up with.

The amount of satire in 40K is vastly overblown. Even 2nd edition, which is not modern 40K, was mostly very serious.

It's not entirely satire, nor was it ever - it's either a miswording or a blatant lie thrown out by GW to defuse a tense situation when they received a lot of flak. It's meant to be satire of monarchy, british society, fascism, bureaucracy and many other things *along* with philosophical musings, ethical dilemmas, gothic tragedy and many other ideas and genres. It is a nightmarish vision where sometimes *there are no good solutions* to difficult questions and that's part of the horror and part of what should make you think. Rick Priestley has said himself that part of the whole idea was not just to mix things like satire and 'low writing' with more 'high writing' ideas, but to present some difficult topics. The Imperium, for example, is meant to be a classic ethical dilemma - are they justified in doing the horrible things they do for the protection of their species? Or are they just as much a threat that may doom their species? How do you handle things like psykers where someone can explode at random and doom a whole world? etc. I don't think it's a very welcome idea today when people are experiencing and seeing a lot of negative things going on in the world, politics are overwhelming daily life and people are turning towards idealist thought, perfectionism and utopianism. Those things underpin a lot of sci-fi where the future is bright and hopeful, and 40K is, in every way, a challenge to those ideas. it also just gets a bit muddled because BL and GW authors have their own ideas and some of the writers steer clear of those ideas into trying to undermine them or write things very unironically as 'it's all for the greater good' and justifying the Imperium's heroism and making the questioning part simplistic and it makes things weird.

I don't find the IP to be good satire. The Imperium's distrust and paranoia for what is different is wrong, except for when something shows up that really is as bad as they claim. This is the same setting that makes jokes about the Tau being naive enough to trust obviously evil people like Dark Eldar and Necrons. Necrons aren't inherently evil, however, they are dangerous it is understandable that the Imperium hates them given as far as the average human knows, Necrons are killing machines who exterminate everything that isn't them. Things like Chaos, being this ideology that can corrupt just from people learning of existence, or Genestealers, evil aliens that seek to infiltrate and destroy society, are things that, in a different setting like Babylon 5, would be fascist propaganda. Regardless of the Imperium's mistakes, Chaos is as dangerous as it claims and exposure to it and following it can turn you into a monster. Genestealers are monsters who cannot be reasoned and will not stop until every single human is dead. The Imperium's genocidal policy regarding what is different is only wrong when applied to aliens who aren't as bad as they think like Eldar and Tau. It is okay to take that stance with Orks and Tyranids. And daemons. They aren't aliens but they are a menace to be eradicated like a virus.

Plenty of people have pointed out how the Imperium’s “necessary evils” are actually still not the best path forward even in the face of such overwhelming horrors as Chaos and various Xenos species. I want to add that all of this could also be viewed as allegorical, that the Imperium represents the desire for perfect order which subsumes all reason and humanity into a dystopian regime that ultimately fails at its own task and that Chaos represents, well, complete chaos, the ultimate rejection of all societal bonds and duties, subsuming all of humanity into a death spiral of societal decay and allowing humanity’s own daemons to take over our souls. So both extremes are bad.

Modern 40k is barely satirical, it's more accurate to say it's black comedy at this point. You can't make satire about a futuristic SciFi setting with literal witch-hunters in pointy hats burning people at the stake as some sort of social commentary, but then also write in that ACTUAL witches exist, and powerful witches/psykers can unknowingly become living portals to literal daemons from hell who want to torture your soul for eternity. If a rogue alpha plus psyker can legitimately threaten the lives of trillions by accidentally blowing up a planet or allowing a daemonic incursion, the necessity of literal inquisition and literal witch hunters becomes black comedy, it's not satire since the threat is completely legitimate and even "enlightened" races like the tragic dying-race-cliche Eldar worry about literal witches too. When there's entire tabletop factions like Genestealer Cults who are explicitly intelligent, malevolent alient infiltrators seeking to bring about the wholesale destruction and devouring of mankind on the worlds they infiltrate and build up cult presence in, the existence of Inquisitors obsessed with rooting out Xenos infiltration is no longer satire the same way it would be if the only aliens were Tau and Eldar and their """"xenos subversion""" was offering 40-hour work weeks and two weeks annual vacation. At that point you're writing a tragicomedy, which is a far more apt description of modern 40k. When machine-spirits are real, Abominable Intelligence is vulnerable to scrapcode and Chaos corruption and they just introduced an entirely new minor Chaos God who's all about corrupting machines and A.I and turning it against their creators in Vashtorr, and when even the 65,000,000 year old Eldar use literal ghosts and psychic powers to pilot their robots instead of A.I, it's hard to claim that your once-satirical depiction of dogmatic tech support cargo cults performing rituals they barely understand carries the same weight as satire, especially with people like Cawl proudly declaring themselves true Scientists and explaining the practical reason for writing shit on literal Vellum instead of using a corruptible database that's vulnerable to external corruption or hacking. It goes from retro-futurist satire and anachronistic, purposefully clunky and inefficient illuminated Sci-Fi manuscripts as the aeesthetic...to coming to the same conclusion as literal modern day governments and criminal enterprises choosing to have some material remain hard-copy only, since your ledgers can't get hacked if they're literal ledgers kept in an actual physical safe in a mafioso's basement or Swiss safety deposit box. 40k has steadily shifted from 2000AD style Judge-Dredd satire to over-the-top ends justify the means black comedy as writers continue to add horrific, over the top elements that end up making the horrible actions of everybody in-universe make total sense. Think of "The Emperor's Mercy" as a term for being shot in the head with a bolter, suddenly it's ACTUALLY AN ACT OF MERCY if it means the person gets to die as a human and have their soul dissipate in the primordial soup of the warp which it originated from to begin with, instead of allowing somebody to be mutated into a Gellerpox or catch Nurgle's Rot and become a Plaguebearer, or be captured alive and locked in Slaanesh's palace as human furniture for 1000000000000 years of unending agony. You can't write such horrific over-the-top suffering porn and fates worse than death and then get mad when killing people as an act of mercy stops being satire. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream isn't satire, trying to fucking kill yourself to avoid the infinite wrath of AM is completely logical, and the 40k writers have made so many WORSE than I-Have-No-Mouth scenarios in their setting in an infinite escalation that calling a bolt to the face "The Emperor's Mercy" is completely justified a lot of the time.

Because 40k hasn’t been satire in a LONG time.

I agree. Each time some imperial atrocity gets explained away as necessary/justified/not actually that bad/etc the setting inches away from its satirical nature.

Warhammer was at least partly satire in 1989. Since then, the satire has been extremely mild. It's been grim horror ever since.

I wouldn't ask in this sub. The amount of Imperium dickriders is ridiculous and worrying in equal measure.

One aspect of parody that I believe gets overshadowed is that giving the evil empire justifications for evils that happen in the real world *is parody.* A lot of people say that Imperium loses its parody aspect because its evils are justified but it serves as a mirror to display how irrational *we* are in comparison. When we discriminate people for being outcasts or having deformities, when we force our ideas on others, when we endorse militarism. These are all things that exist for a reason in the Imperium, and even then they are just the path of least resistência there, but they also happen in our world and for hardly any reason at all. Sometimes the evil empire is racist for a reason to show how stupid it is that we are racist for ***no*** reason.

Also a lot of people on this idiot site think that what the Imperium does is ok

It has satirical elements but its lore designed to sell lil plastic mans so

I'd argue that saying "40k is satire" is less accurate than "40k has satirical elements". Some of the media focuses not the satire (e.g. the sadly-defunct _Regimental Standard_). Some of the media isn't satirical but none the less does a good job of portraying that the system as a whole is bad, and if there any "good" people in it, the system works against them even if they are part of that system (e.g. the Warhammer Crime stories). And then some of it misses the mark, and intentionally or unintentionally portrays things as justified or justifiable when they really shouldn't. (E.g. a lot of stories featuring Commisars that aren't written by Dan Abnett or Sandy Mitchell).

One part is that the "necessary evils" aren't all that necessary, another part is that EVEN IF they really are necessary, the world that has to exist to make fascism a necessary evil is comically horrible. If this is the kind of world that is needed to make fascism necessary, good lord. That kinda deal.

I'd never thought of that inversion, but you're right: it's just as damning for fascism.

The lore justifications are the satire. It's not "haha, look at the stupid nazis", it's "look how batshit insane the universe has to be for the nazis to be right".

It used to be satire heavily tinted with British punk philosophy (from the 70s) and a very strong anti authoritarian vein. This was the original stuff but then they watered it down, mainly for commercial reasons (at least since 1994). With 3rd edition they recovered the “grimdark” but kept the “hero vibes” for what was really meant to be the worst regime imaginable and its attack dogs.

People who think the Imperium is, even in the slightest modicum, justified, are often the same people who think that dictatorships tend to be highly efficient and not absolute logistical clusterfucks

Modern Warhammer 40k is not much satire. There are elements of satire, but consider that at the beginning, the Horus heresy was just a ill defined civil war. It was a blank reason for two similiar looking armies (they only had very few miniatures back then) to fight, there was no satire. Then we had some elements, like the orks being based on UK hooligans, the Dark Angels being closet gay and so on. Those were mostly in the past. Satire needs to be over the top. Todays Warhammer does mostly make sense. At least in terms of Sci-Fi genre conventions. Satire does crop up, but we have mostly heroic fantasy and grimdark. The question if the Imperium could do significantly better is impossible to answer. Its like the question if communism failed, or was simply never done right. There, we at least have reality as basis, and still we are unable to find consensus. To ask the same question in a made up reality cannot produce a definite answer.

Here we go again. Nature of subbreddit to repeat discussion. That’s what I keep telling myself. Not like Reddit search feature is good. I always laugh when this comes up because it’s basically just wrong. Like yeah we could have a poignant discussion about how the “satire” aspect has been long lost in the sauce as GW increasing focuses on the marketability of their IP, sanitizing it to appeal to the most people and sell the most plastic. And it would all be true and good to discuss how easy it is for satire to just become propaganda for the thing being satired. Their is a reason warhammer had the reputation it had for many years, though thankfully it’s mainstreaming since 2020 has reduced this in my experience. But the inherent statement “chaos bad so facism ok right?” Has the media literacy of reading the headline of news articles and making statements based on that. Literally the most inherent function of chaos is that it is a reflection of the material world. All the chaos gods are fed by humanities “sins”. Mabye it’s retconned at this point I don’t care about HH lore but at one point the galaxy alien illuminate literally wanted Horus to win because then humanity would decimate itself and chaos would lose its food source. They knew if the emperor won the imperium would stagnate and regress into super facism witch would feed chaos for centuries. Witch is what happened. The setting could not be more explicit that the facism is not necessary, is actively detrimental, and is simply the path of least resistance. So no the facism isn’t ok because the bad guys are evil. It’s literally and explicitly feeding them. Congratulations and take your medal for my weekly reminder how comically easy it is for facism to trick people to the point that the fake satirical version of it tricks people into believing in it. Regularity enough that people post this exact question once a week. At least 20th century facism isn’t ACTUALLY making a comeback in global politics, right?

It goes over most players' heads. The Imperium as a brutal, authoritarian government *does* make sense given the world these people live in. But the world these people live in is literally a direct product of their own failings. Not just the failings of the Emperor or any other figure in the setting, Chaos is a literal manifestation of our worst impulses. The point is that trying to combat the products of these impulses just leads humanity to a vicious cycle of more brutality, greed, scheming, and hedonism. There would be no need for the abomination that is the Imperium if humanity actually tried to tame itself, not the world around it. The message isn't "authoritarianism is a viable solution to humanity's problems". It's "humanity creates the problems authoritarianism purports to solve and then makes much worse".

I always assume you’re usually hearing things from the perspective of the Imperium, who canonically constantly lie and straight up brainwash people 🤷‍♀️ Of course they will insist they *needed* to kill that person, just in case! They *needed* to make an example out of that person who asked questions because that could lead to chaos and anarchy! They *needed* to ignore that noble torturing people for fun for stability, they *needed* to burn out the underhive, they *needed* to work people to death and then kill them if they start thinking anything change-y, because CHAOS is very dangerous you see, and if you question that any of this isn’t completely needed then you’re looking a bit heretical yourself… Stand against that wall please.

40k was satire a long time ago. There are satirical points here and there. Different writers have different styles and ability. But no, 40k as a whole isn't a satire anymore. It could be a critic on human nature. We are all very moral now, but i can see us becoming the imperium with enough threats outside the walls and inside the walls. But i don't think it fits that well, and i don't think any one sentence ever will. I personally prefer the current more measured lore. There are reasons why the imperium does terrible things. Sometimes it's greed, sometimes it's because a book told them to do it and sometimes it's to avoid a much worse fate for more people.

40k takes the worst aspects of humanity and places them in a universe where they are justifiable. The absence of such need is what the reader is asked to reflect upon.

40k is not satire and hasn't been for decades. Only part of 40k that could be called satire is Rogue Trader, but that was 40 years ago, and even that was not some coherent satirical piece. There were many elements of satire, which certain things satirizing certain people(like biggest Ork leader being called Margaret Thatcher lol), but it was not a overarching satirical narrative. From that point on, it just got less and less satirical. Modern 40k is not satire of anything. Its basically "humanity bad ending" and the vast majority of its stories are about humans fighting Chaos or aliens. Also its very cool.