Been hearing a lot of rumblings from normal people in the warhammer community they are tired of fascists worshipping the imperium of man in their community.
is it like a human supremacist group in the lore or something like the empire in Star Wars?
Its numberless legions of soldiers and zealots bludgeon their way across the galaxy, delivering death to anyone and anything that doesn’t adhere to their blinkered view of purity. Almost every man and woman toils in misery either on the battlefield – where survival is measured in hours – or in the countless manufactorums and hive slums that fuel the Imperial war machine. All of this in slavish servitude to the living corpse of a God-Emperor whose commandments are at best only half-remembered, twisted by time and the fallibility of Humanity.
Warhammer 40,000 isn’t just grimdark. It’s the grimmest, darkest.
The Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of Humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in. Like so many aspects of Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man is satirical.
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/11/19/the-imperium-is-driven-by-hate-warhammer-is-not/
Jesus Christ.
The difference between the empire in Star Wars and the Imperium is that the Imperium is essentially inescapable.
It has endured for 10,000 years, it has a million worlds. Non-human intelligence is mistrusted at absolute best. Separatism is not tolerated, Alderon was just Tuesday morning, and probably literally a quadrillion people thought they deserved it anyway. Communications and travel can take hundreds of years depending on the conditions, so a response fleet might not even arrive in your lifetime, or your children’s lifetime, but it will come, and even a low estimate of the Imperiums levy would mean they command around a trillion soldiers.
Basically the Imperium of Man is a suffocating, unstoppable, grinding hate machine.
It is human society twisted into eternal, nightmarish, inescapable horror.
Luckily almost all the major xeno and chaos empires also suck majorly and are evil machines. The only major redeemable ones are Tau, who are lawful good (also based, prob better than modern humanity irl) & Orcs who are chaotic neutral and just vibing. Everyone else is evil evil evil.
Torture elves. God enslaving undead machines. Universe consuming biomass swarms. Filth demons. Chaos Demons. War demons. Sex demons are less cool than they sound. Imperium men but possessed by demons and even more evil than before somehow.
Also something that’s implied but never really mentioned in the Warhammer 40k universe: the warp is evil, and there is no good warp to counteract it. It’s built into the fabric of the world to be evil. The truth of reality is evil. Very lovecraftian hellworld, fighting against the truth and being good requires you to be naive.
The Tau are the only good guys and they basically have no warp connection at all, they only believe in science and their collective good. They censor and ignore a portion of reality, their society and ideology requires it.
It’s what would happen if you took a DnD universe and magic system but then just removed all the good planes and all the good gods, even the neutral ones too. A cursed, doomed world that hopefully is not prophetic.
The warp wasn’t inherently evil, I thought, it’s just the swirling manifestation of conscious and sentient thought. It wasn’t so bad until the Eldar orgied themselves a deamon god into existence and then the other three came from humans, apparently, doing so much evil they spawned chaos gods too. It’s been bad for so long that it’s become self-reinforcing, but the God-Emperor had some kind of plan to reset it or something I dunno.
All the Chaos Gods have an inverse “good” aspect to their portfolios too, Tzeentch isn’t just betrayal and evil plans but also Hope, Nurgle isn’t just pestilence and death but also Love, Slaneesh isn’t just lust and hedonism but Beauty and I think Khorne was supposed to have Courage or something. The more “good” parts could be cultivated but the galaxy has been broken for so long that it’s hard to say if anything good could ever come of the warp and if they’re not better off just having the Tyranids eat everything and wipe the slate clean.
im losing my mind at lust and hedonism being considered an equivalent evil to rotting to death and eternal war
I had an idea. What if the Dark Eldar went Monsters Inc and made everyone laugh to save their owns souls from Slaanesh?
Did I just noblebright the Dark Eldar?
Necrons hate the warp and have the technology to close it.
Sincerely, a Necron player
Close it then already
When the stars are right
In one of the PC games that’s the Necron faction’s ending! They totally pull it off!
The Imperium of Man is simultaneously invincible and on the brink of collapse at the same time. It’s one of the disadvantages of a setting meant for wargames instead of a tabletop game where you create your own narrative: because the players don’t want their preferred faction to become obsolete, the setting is in stasis. Nobody can win or lose in any way which matters.
…Old figurines become obsolete anyways due to better stuff coming out. Gotta make the dosh.
The Imperium of Man is simultaneously invincible and on the brink of collapse at the same time.
Ironically (or probably not a coincidence) the fascist propaganda; “We’re powerful and unbeatable” but also “We’re falling apart and being destroyed”.
