Behind the Brush

There's a very charming 40k content creator on YouTube called "Paul is Bad At Stuff". He largely makes reports on his attempts to get better at playing competitive 40k, with the twist being that he has built his list entirely based on what models he finds cool and a sort of broad thematic lore. You can hear him discuss his own worldbuilding for that here. But the broad idea is tha His Little Guys are "stealthy" in the sense that they overwhelm and confuse and are impossible to understand, until suddenly it all coalesces into a devastating pinpoint strike right where you didn't want them. (In general one of the reasons I like this chap is that in both the game and the lore he doesn't take himself too seriously, so it tends towards the silly side of things. That's good, that's obviously the kinda 40k I like!) Something caught my attention as he reflects on his latest tournament performance here: he realised that the way his list plays is just like that. He'd done it, he'd built a list wherein playing the game matches the fantasy of how he wanted the army to work when imagining it. Now, it turns out not to be very good at winning tournament games and so it goes - but no one ever promised your fantasy would be tournament optimal! What interests me is just that he could make that work at all. So that got me thinking about the element of role playing in 40k and how that relates to the Sherden Pact.

Warhammer is a tabletop battlegame. You have your little toy armies and you push them around and roll dice to determine who wins according to rules. When describing it to friends I sometimes say "imagine Risk but there's rules variation between the factions and the movement is more freeform". And I really do think that captures a lot of the experience of playing it. But in both its origins as a game and contemporary culture it actually shares a bit more with Dungeons and Dragons; people tend to want to tell a story with their dice, tend to want to imagine that Their Little Guys are playing out some scenario. This can manifest in lots of ways - at its most simple, people will have names and little stories for their models they tell themselves in their head as the game progresses. At its most elaborate, people will try to actually recreate specific battles or campaigns from the published books. Indeed, one of the variant systems, Horus Heresy, is basically specifically designed to facilitate this style of play. In any case, outside of specifically competitive tournament players during match play, a notable feature of the culture of the game is that people don't just tend to play it for the mechanical game design elements (in fact for what it's worth my impression is that people who are into tabletop wargaming per se as a hobby tend to find 40k's dominance of the market frustrating precisely because they don't think it is an especially well designed game, mechincailly speaking) but tend to be heavily invested in this element of role play.

Now since as a hobby 40k is a house with many mansions, the story telling aspect has many outlets. Most obviously there's published fiction and fanfiction - this very site is a testament to that! And it also comes out in modelling and painting choices, which can then feed back into the fiction, and so on and so forth. For instance I have a character Gal-Uru who began as just a model I enjoyed the process of creating, then featured in a story, then I commissioned art for him, then I played with that model in a game you can read about here.

And that's not just me! Most famously there is the Retributors space marines. They began as a made up chapter for the excellent sci-fi horror/action short fan film Astartes but that became so popular GW gave the animator a job and made them part of the canon setting, and now people make models for them. So I think a lot of the story teling instincts are given this outlet - people use the setting as a place to write stories and tell them in various media, and people use the models to concretise or inspire those stories.

But what about during the game itself? Well here we can borrow some ideas from philosophy, especially from C. Thi Nguyen's work Games as Agency. The core idea that is that what playing a game amounts to is taking on a perspective, and various artificial limits to what sort of actions you are allowed to take in order to advance that perspective, that combine to constitute play-acting a new form of agency. You inhabit a new role (e.g. someone who only cares about crossing that line really really quickly, but for some reason can only travel within these lines and cannot make use of any mobility aids) and see what it would be like to give one's all as such a person.

This story telling interacts with the gameplay of 40k in two main fashions. The first comes from considering how the setting provides an obvious hint for what persona you are adopting; that of a general or commander who can interact with their units in the fashion proscribed by the rules. You even have to pick a character model to be your "warlord" - a fact which very often plays no mechanical role in the game at all, but I think is just meant to encourage you to think of one of the models as a sort of avatar for the player, an in universe leader who is giving the orders corresponding to the player's omniscient perspective play decisions. You can then make decisions in the game which correspond to what you think that leader would do, which may or may not amount to what is optimal for winning the game. For instance, there are factions where it is clearly implied in the lore that they highly prioritise rushing into close combat. Typically the rules are written to enable that to some extent - they will be extra good at close combat or receive various rewards if they kill a unit in combat or cetera. But even given that, often it will be advantageous to have such a unit hang back and do something less aggressive. Players will thus have a choice about whether to do the game optimal thing or what they think that unit or commander would do in context. It's the mark of casual players that they will typically opt for what-they-think-the-character-would-do, while competitive players will typically opt for what-they-think-the-rules-reward. Both are, to be clear, valid ways of playing the game - but they clearly express different attitudes to the importance of role play in the game.

The second comes in list-building, so before one actually gets to the tabletop at all. In various ways different lists can embody different approaches to the game. So there are ways of building lists which correspond to wanting a very intricate battleplan wherein each unit plays a very specific role that has to be handled with consumate skill (sometimes referred to as an MSU - multiple small unit - glass canon list). Whereas other plans can involve just being able to flood the board with lots of cheap little guys that don't do much individually but by sheer bulk can overwhelm (a horde army). And other plans still can involve creating one incredibly tough and killy unit and having everything else just run interference for that thing (typically called a Death Star unit). And so on and so forth. The point is that when choosing your faction and building a list within that faction, you can clearly set things up to embody a certain attitude to what one wants the battle to look like. This, again, is a chance for role play and agency, and more narrative or casual players often think it is important for there to be a coherence between the list style and the faction played. So, for instance, given the lore it feels unnatural for the Aeldari (a dying race of Space Elves for whom every remaining life is precious) to run as a horde army, whereas it can feel entirely in keeping for the orks to play that way. So a natural thing to do if one is role playing as an Aeldari commander is to build a list that emphasises conserving one's resources and avoiding throwing away lives wherever possible; an MSU glass canon list can do that well. And, again, it is a mark of good game design if the rules faciliate this.

So that is how I think role playing interacts with the hobby in general and the tabeltop game in particular. The hobby is based around a setting in which one can create fanart in various media, including using the little plastic models for which it is distinctively known. Then the game allows one to make choices in designing one's army, and then using it on the tabletop, that embody a peculiar character or type of commander one is role playing as. The game is well designed when the rules support one in doing so, when one does not too often feel that in role playing the character of one's commander or reenacting the details of one's stories one is actively "playing against" what the mechnical aspects of game design are trying to encourage. (For a nice discussion of how this can be incorporated into the rules, see this discussion this discussion of faction specific rules and how well they capture the feel of the faction.) Or, indeed, sometimes players will object to the rules facilitating a style that they feel runs contrary to the role play element. So for instance it is a frequent source of complaint among players that in recent years the Space Marines have often run well as a horde army; players actively don't like that this style of list works for most space marine chapters (outside of Black Templars, for whom this would be fine), as they feel the whole point of them is they should operate like a small elite strike force.

How about the Sherden Pact? Well, I have been lucky in that there is a (sub-)faction rule set specifically designed to facilitate playing as a largely mortal force of chaos worshipers. There's even one specifically designed for Khorne worshiping mortals, though I have not had a chance to properly try that out yet. So in principle the rules are set up to facilitate the exact sort of role play that I seem to be trying to engage in. But I have had a slight dilemma none the less.

The general idea I want for my chaps is: they're actually not that good at fighting, but they are good at bureaucracy, so they are able to "punch above their weight" just by being unusually-logistically-competent for the setting. The irony being, of course, that as Good Khornites they very highly valorise martial valour, raw strength, and individualised combat ability. So they can't ever admit to themselves that the thing keeping them in the game is the backend stuff that, while of course they do think its important, is meant to just be secondary to their glorious Mighty striding forth and setting the galaxy aflame. Hence their frankly erotic depictions of mighty Khornite warriors, even though it is the logisticians who are actually holding this whole thing together and the warriors are just barely competent enough to count.

(I am sort of inspired by the Twitter joke - "You read the order of battle in the Pacific Theatre and its like this. USA: 16,000 generic destroyers (made last week), 8,000 supply ships and a ship that makes ice cream and cookies for the other ships. Japan: The Ever Invincible Sword of the Emperor (irreplaceable battleship made in 1925) and The Katana of the Supreme Shogun of the Eternal Dawn (irreplaceable aircraft carrier made in 1930). Result: USA victory, costing several gallons of ice cream." The idea is that the Sherden Pact is logistically something like the US industrial powerhouse so described, but culturally more like Imperial Japan of the meme and so having to constantly lie to itself about the source of its own success. Probably in real life this could not actually happen, but that's the beauty of fiction!)

I can indeed play this out in list building! Lists for them combine lots of basic troops and "standard issue" tanks - no big fancy Ultimate Weapons and, at least, very few Demon Infused Monstrocities, just lots of cheaply made moderately reliable stuff. But when it comes to role playing I do face a bit of a problem, since the game is no fun if I do not actively try to win but at the same time being a bit incompetent at fighting is part of the fantasy? I even had a narrow mechanical version of this crop up in my one game where I was all in on role playing the Sherden Pact wherein there is a sort of gambling mechanic that the faction I was playing as has available, and I couldn't decide whether it was more appropriate for the Pact to always trust that Khorne would see them through and so always take the gamble, or be utterly run by Logisticians who would carefully crunch the numbers and so only take the gamble when optimal!

So therein lies my issue. I like the role playing element of 40k. Obviously I like fiction and worldbuilding, and I want that to be reflected on the tabletop. This would, I think, tryign to inhabit the perspective of a commander of the Sherden Pact and make decisions as if I was such a person facing the odd situation the game is meant to simulate. The rules and models are actually very nicely designed to exactly allow me to do this when it comes to building a list and having mechanical options available in game to represent the choices I think such a person would make, nice! But for my specific fantasy of these guys I worry that really living it out would be anti-fun, since it would actually too often lead to me making silly choices that ultimately render the experience less fun for my opponent. Still, that is clearly a problem I have run into because of the odd situation of the exact set up I have tried to create here. As we go into 11th edition it seems Games Workshop have indicated that they are specifically going to try and give people more options for recreating the lore on the tabletop, so people like me could well be in for a good time as our opportunities for role play with our toy soldiers are only expanded.

On Reddit someone posted a big quiz designed to focus your mind for worldbuilding. Of course I am a huge nerd so I enjoyed it, and answered all the questions here. I also thought that the kind of person reading this might be engaged in a similar nerdy worldbuilding project of their own, so here's a clean copy of the questions for you to copy and paste for your own sake.

Taylor Swift’s You’re On Your Own, Kid is my favourite pop-culture exploration of Satanic psychology. Since I basically now use this as a general fandom blog, and since Miltonian Satanic stuff is at least something of an influence on 40k’s general writing and vibe, I will write about why here! I think we all know that Taylor Swift x 40k is the crossover the world has been waiting for.

So what’s the song about? You can find the lyrics here, though I personally do not think the annotations do a good job of capturing the spirit of the song. The basic events recounted are: the narrator (who we can assume is Swift herself, though of course a fictionalised version thereof) gives us three snippets of moments in her life when she had an important realisation. The first verse, when she is young in a small town dreaming that some boy will notice her and reciprocate her feelings. But one day while “search[ing] the party of better bodies” she realises that he doesn’t care for her at all - perhaps she confesses her feelings and is rebuffed, perhaps he makes it clear that he is with someone else, perhaps he is cruel in some way; doesn’t matter, in any case she now knows he has no feelings for her. The next snippet concerns Swift’s emerging musical talent; she resolves to make it out of her town by pursuing her artistic career, and initially she’s a big deal in this small pond. But the moment of realisation occurs when she is trying to hit the big time and in some new environment she once again finds herself searching a party full of better bodies and this time it strikes her: “your dreams aren’t rare”. She’s just one of a million pretty young women who wants to be a pop-star, why should she be chosen over them? In both cases she immediately follows the revelation with the summary “you’re on your own, kid”, and the chorus refrain is “[f]rom sprinkler splashes to fireplace ashes” - the feeling we get is that each revelation is her coming to appreciate in some new way that from start to end (here visualised as hopeful sprouts being nurtured all to end in flames) she is, in fact, the only person who actually cares about her, the only person invested in her ambitions for herself.

So we go into the last snippet. It reads:

From sprinkler splashes to fireplace ashes
I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this
I hosted parties and starved my body
Like I'd be saved by a perfect kiss
The jokes weren't funny, I took the money
My friends from home don't know what to say
I looked around in a blood-soaked gown
And I saw something they can't take away
'Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned
Everything you lose is a step you take
So, make the friendship bracelets,
take the moment and taste it
You've got no reason to be afraid.

What’s going on here? Well, I think a couple of things, basically corresponding to the first and second half of the verse. In the first half we get a contrast between the relationship of the first two verses. The transition from the first into the second verse was basically her finding that she was being rejected by the man whom her ambitions had centred upon, probably due to all those “better bodies” making her insecure, so giving up on those ambitions. Whereas here she has once again found that between her and her ambitions stand lots of better bodies threatening to outcompete her - but she has stood her ground and fought, become the host of those parties, starved herself until she had a body that might be good enough, that would get her the kiss. But more than just that; she’s abandoned everything that made her who she was, all in the service of achieving this goal. Her integrity was sacrificed for this ambition, she was willing to do whatever it took. The realisation comes re what this says about her and her life as she looks around in a (hopefully!) metaphorical “blood-soaked gown” at what has become of herself for all this.

But, and here is where it gets Satanic, the lesson she draws from this is a kind of dark-mirror Stoicism. She realises that having sacrificed everything that mattered to her in service to this ambition she’s therefore escaped the cycle of hope-then-disappointing-realisation that characterised the previous two verses. Because she has nothing left to hope for; she has nothing of herself left at all, nothing that could ground that kind of aspiration. But with nothing to hope for, she has nothing to fear. She can live in the moment! Sure, she’ll “make friendship bracelets” - things meant to signify long-term commitment - but she does so secure in the knowledge that, of course, she has no long term commitments, everything is ultimately subordinate to a dream that no longer means anything to her, which means she no longer has to worry about the end of the friendship. You can’t betray commitments if you never really have any, you can’t lose friendships you never really posses. If freedom’s just another another word for nothing left to lose then, well, she’s free; with everything that entails.

The song ends on this droning discordant note. It’s uncomfortable. We have achieved resolution, of a sort, but not catharsis. It’s asking us to consider whether the kind of happiness and acceptance Swift finally finds is actually an appropriate place to end up at all.

I find the the psychology behind this song fascinating. It reminds me of Milton’s Satan. (Paradise Lost is one of my my favourite texts ever and very influential on my life trajectory; my nerdy rebellion as a kid was telling people I was going to study for exams but actually going to the library and reading various works of sci-fi and classic literature. Paradise Lost is a text I read during that odd teenage pseudo-rebellion, and it imprinted itself upon me.) There’s a famous moment in Book IV of Paradise Lost wherein Satan, having escaped the physical confines of hell, makes it to Eden - a garden of delights, a literal paradise - and finds of himself that he is still miserable. He introspects, and come to the realisation that the problem is internal, it’s his psychology that is the true hell, not the superficial physical torments and miserable surroundings of hell-the-place. As he puts it:

Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrauth and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;
And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.

Which prompts him to consider whether maybe, just maybe, he might have made some mistakes along the way to becoming someone who could be miserable in Eden. After considering and rejecting the possibility of repenting, he concludes thusly:

So farewell hope, and, with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my Good: by thee at least
Divided empire with Heaven’s King I hold

And I think I see in Swift’s song the same psychological movement that Milton depicts Satan as going through. This is a moment where Satan steel’s himself, he resolves to action (successfully, sort of — in that he rather famously will in fact succeed in corrupting mankind) and finds the strength to carry on. But that inner “strength” actually comes from an utter hoplessness, a nihilism so profound, that it strengthens just by removing anything that might count as a cause for fear. Someone who is in hell no matter what happens anyway cannot be threatened, cannot be offered anything good either — whatever purpose they happen to find themselves with, they may as well see it through for simple lack of anything able to sway them against it.

(The link to 40k, by the way, is that I take it this is meant to be some of the Traitor Legion’s motivations for continuing the long-war against the Imperium. Horus is obviously meant to be a Satan figure; not just in the religion of the Imperium but also in the narrative of the Horus-Heresy book series. And I think at least some of his legions are meant to be continuing a fight whose purpose and meaning has been long lost for something like this reason. Plenty of them, after all, do not actually worship chaos, they have no investment in the religious ideology or serving the hell-gods. Yet all the same they literally live in hell, they have nothing to lose and nothing you can really threaten them with nor bribe them with, no inner humanity left to appeal to; all they have is the nihilistic will to ruin that which they associate with their downfall, fulfilling some ambition whose meaning has long ago been lost to them.)

And this is where I think Swift is suggesting she finds herself at the end of You’re On Your Own, Kid. At one point the ambition meant something to her; it was a way of escaping her town, proving herself worthy of being noticed and loved in a way she had not been there, and expressing something meaningful through her art. But to actually get there she had to become someone for whom the art didn’t mean something, was not worthy of love; and while, sure, she wasn’t in her home town anymore — in general she just wasn’t forming meaningful connections, so it doesn’t ultimately matter where she is. But rather than seeing this as a reason to change up, to abandon course, she draws a kind of strength from it — now, unlike before, she cannot be disappointed, she’s escaped the cycle of saṃsāra by becoming someone to whom nothing matters at all. So now, sure, she can continue pursuing that goal, she can “enjoy” the varied experiences life sends her way, free from all fear. Free from all joy too.

In philosophy we debate whether anyone ever knowingly does evil. Socrates, famously, maintained they do not - and was memorably confronted on this by Callicles (another character who has imprinted himself on me). Socrates is, in the end, unable to persuade Callicles. This is not just a quirk of the characters in this moment: the deeper point is that Socrates' methods of persuasion actually require that he is right on this very issue - they require that you care, that if you realise you’re wrong that’s reason to correct. Callicles genuinely and consistently does not, and simply checks out of the conversation when it is dull to him. We’re left with a similar tension, a similar discordant note - can this really be it, can you know that you’re in the wrong and act anyway? A student has got me thinking about this lately, because she takes very seriously the possibility that people can. Somewhat unreflectively I have gone through life assuming Socrates was right, that when we persuade people they are wrong that will cause them to think or behave differently. But the Calliclean/Satanic/Swiftian response is at least conceivable too, and as I look around the world I worry that my student may be right after all.

Brief post of appreciation for a Trope I like today, because the world is sad and I could do with focussing on something that just makes me happy. On Bluesky Dot Com the other day I posted that I like the Black Knight villain archetype. I thought I would just explain why it is I like the archetype here, since it is not after all unrelated to the 40k setting.





So what is the Black Knight? Quite simply: it’s a villainous knight who wears dark, typically black, armour. A knight in black. A black knight, if you will. But ok while the aesthetic is a lot of why I like it, it’s more than just that. It’s a trope that actually has its roots in Arthurian legend, relating to knights who had either forsworn their liege, or were, in any case, willing to hide their allegiance and thus be in a position to do discreditable things without it tracing back to their lord. Not necessarily full on villains but certainly dishonourable by the standards of the day, and thus bad news. So a Black Knight is, crucially, someone who has the skillset and equipment of a knight, but not their (full) moral code. Therein lies their interest as an adversary. So what besides looking badass do they need to achieve this?

I think there are a few things that go into fully achieving this. Most crucial of all is, I think, the kind of threat a good black knight should represent. And to understand that we need to think about what makes a knight a knight. To me I think the pertinent details for what I like here are: the knight makes use of superior technology, they are very martially skilled, they obey some sort of chivalric code, and they are loyal to some lord. Their armour, weaponry, and transportation should be the best their society has to offer someone like them. Their degree of training should be far in advance of a random mook or press-ganged peasant - and in particular their form of combat should emphasise skilled application of brute force. They are not barbarous, but they are also brute force opponents not sneaky finesse types. Their principles should be clear and their honour dear to them. And their lord whom they serve should be a significant factor in how they make their decisions. So they have the ability to fulfil difficult and dangerous tasks, constraints on how they do so, and they do not set their own agenda.

A black knight should certainly keep the first two of these, and must drop or heavily modify at least one of the latter two. They can be either allegiant to no lord and thus dangerous because they now use their skills and advantages to self-serving (or otherwise nefarious but self-set) ends, or they can be unbound and terrifying or dishonourable in how they carry out the orders of their liege, willing to “just follow orders” all the way into hell.

In fact 40ks two (count’em!) iconic black knight aesthetic factions, the Black Legion and the Black Templars, basically embody just these two modes of deviation from the knightly ideal.

Both are still heavily armoured space marines with all the prodigious durability and lethality that entails. But the Black Legion have forsworn their allegiance to the Imperium, to humanity, and any other ties they had beyond the loose amalgamation which is the Black Legion itself. Whereas the Black Templars are still a knightly order loyal to the Imperium… it’s just that the Imperium is a cruel and evil organisation wherein being willing to advance its ends, embody its ideals, and follow its orders… amounts to being a terrifying galactic war criminal.

(EDIT: a commentator on Bluesky dot com pointed out to me that there is a third Black Knight archetype faction, the Deathwatch! They are knights just in virtue of being Space Marines, and they are wearing Black to indicate that they have - temporarily, usually - forsworn their normal chapter allegiance. Definitely a case and obviously drawing on their real life historic inspirations for the mythos to get their iconic look. But, well, to my mind they actually don't hit any of the other mythic inspirations - they really do just seem like knights who happen to wear black, in the main. It matters, in fact, for how they are treated and interpreted that in the main their change of allegiance is only temporary, all organised and sanctioned by official procedure. So while I still think they look cool, they are not really an instance of the thing I like. The original commentator actually well explained the slight difference in vibe and how that relates to the Black Knight mythos.)

Ok, if that’s what Black Knights are and how they come up in 40k, why do I like them? Well, again, I cannot emphasise enough, that in the main because I’m in my heart a kinda emo chap and I just think they look neat.

I’m a simple man with simple tastes.

But ok there’s two other direct story-telling things I want to highlight about the Black Knight archetype and one meta-point about them. First, they basically force the writer to make at least someone involved in their antagonist faction an actual threat, someone among their villains competent. The Black Knight, to really be an instance of the thing in question, basically has to be an actual threat. (The most famous comedic-take on the trope plays off subverting precisely this expectation.) In the world of amateur fannish writing that I am taking part in the most common sin, the extreme temptation for writers like me, is to make your heroes Mary/Marty Sues and punish the antagonists for having the temerity to stand up to your faves by having them be incompetent buffoons. But the Black Knight has a hero’s skillset and the technology to back that up. If you’re putting any effort at all into story telling it’s actively difficult to make them just easy to brush past; you have to write a specific excuse in for that. And that challenge is good, because being forced to expend the effort makes you less likely to do it if it’s not worth it! So I think they are peculiarly useful villain archetypes for amateur writers like me because they force us out of our worst habits.

(I think, for instance, that one of the many problems with my own Disaster at Mot is that the villain Izdubar is slightly too pathetic. Sticking closer to the knightly aesthetic 40k establishes for Space Marines would have done me well!)

Second, I think the version of the Black Knight archetype I find personally most interesting is the one wherein they have kept their code but the ends towards which they fight are villainous none the less. This achieves a couple of things. Done well, this can be used to subtly cast doubt on apparently noble codes — what use is a system of honour, chivalry, or personal morality, if it can be consistent with this? Yet at the same time can be a source of tension within the antagonist faction by forcing points of difference between whoever is calling the shots and the Black Knight who for whatever reason has sworn fealty to them. So we get an archetype that both allows one to draw the reader’s attention to presuppositions they may have which you want to undermine, while also generating conflict among antagonists and thus prevent them from being a monolith. Another common writing sin avoided, and through a flexible story-telling tool that can do some moral heavy lifting.

(Despite just identifying as a kinda emo chap, I actually tend not to like it as much when the Black Knight internalises the tension and is themselves torn on what they do. I prefer it if they believe in the overall project of Working For Evil Empire, or at least whatever vow puts them at its emperor's disposal. But have some code that runs orthogonal enough to "just follow orders" that, despite this, there might still be tension. To my mind angsty villains are over played and tend to make the character seem less menacing, decreasing the cool factor. Confident and dutiful are where my Black Knights are at.)

The meta-point is that they fulfil a strange real-life desire. Interesting villainy. There’s a reason the Black Knight aesthetic is so often subverted, or at least made into an anti-villain rather than a straightforward evil person.

The very nature of the aesthetic is to suggest there is some connection to something good or pure here, some sort of nobility to this person even if they are now on a dark path. Or, alternately, if the apparently heroic or protagonist character has Black Knight vibes, it can suggest there is something more sinister or untoward about them than is apparent - without having to actually have them do anything to definitively cast doubt on their heroic status. This, I think, speaks to a real and deep emotional need that I have, and which perhaps others have too.

I, at least, would very much like to think that people are more complicated than any simple evil caricature would paint them. That the people and forces who do so much harm in the world have some by-their-own-lights good reason for doing so — or at least think they do, that there is some core of goodness or nobility even to them which perhaps could be appealed to. I am not sure the world always provides us with that. Sometimes the truth is more stark and horrifying and it is easy to become demoralised. I do not like the person I become when I consider my opponents as such. At least then in our fantasy and fiction let there be a nuance that can help us preserve our faith in our fellows.

My wonderful partner has agreed to do another drawing for this site, and while she's making it she asked me: how do people dress in the Sanguinary Utnapistim? What would fashion be like in a functional chaos society? This was pretty fascinating to me so I decided to try and take a more systematic approach to the question. (Also, I must admit, partly inspired by following the fashion Menswear Fashion Guy and through him getting into interesting ideas about how a society's fashion reflects its values. So read on to see my thoughts on how and why the people of the Sanguinary Utnapishtim dress as they do!

Now, first, I must admit, I have not previously put too much thought into it. So I will quickly review what I have established. First, there is a reasonably coherent style for officers of the army vs common soldiers. This is for the obvious reason that I can follow the models released by games workshop and my own painting. So the people who are officer class have tended to be vaguely 19th Century Imperial officer corp in their style:

So some things to note here. The base colours in the army are Red, Orange, and Black. Gold-trim tends to appear on broccadage for officers. I should say in my mind I have been thinking that there is some cultural association between blue and positions of command. This is because the first officer model I painted had that feature:

But now I actually gather them together it's really only there in the one. I think if I want that association to exist I am going to have to do more to actually request it when commissioning art. In any case, ok, there we have our officer class. How about the common soldiery?

Here, again following the models, I have gone for the base uniform scheme with more of a Starship Troopers style generic sci-fi soldier aesthetic:

Beyond the base colour I think we can see that the common soldiery have more of the Very Spikey aesthetic one generally associates with the 40k everything-is-an-80s-metal-album-cover-forever chaos aesthetic.

Those are, so to speak, the easy cases. But I have had at least some depictions of people who are not in the army! Unfortunately, of course, the circumstances still tend to be violent due to the nature of the setting. Still, let's see what we have:

As far as I can recall there is only one instance of me paying attention to the clothing of the people in writing, coming from this story wherein at one point I say: "[t]he logisticians, having reached the armoury, were now changing out of scribe's robes and into crude body-armour, while grabbing shivs or clubs. Fastening their spiked shoulder-pad, Parākum..." We then see such a person depicted in the accompanying art work:

Note the blue, I did want that to also indicate this is a higher ranking bureaucrat.

Finally, there was another case where even though I did not discussion the fashion I was actually thinking about it a lot and it affected how I instructed the commission artist. This was a case where I was asking for an in-universe propaganda piece depicting an extremely high ranking (arguably the second most powerful person in the Empire) in a fake-candid shot. You can see the result here:

This is meant to be extremely staged and inauthentic, while trying to appear unposed and candid. And part of what is meant to create that effect is that his soldier looks like an especially clean pressed version of the common soldier's garments, he's even somewhat absurdly wearing body armour while sitting in a safe room far behind the front-lines, and with his ornate traditional mask carefully set aside - so you know he's got it, but that he is not actually wearing it. More on all this in a moment.

Ok so that's what I have so far; what did I want it to signal about the society? There was more than no thought put into it, but I must admit often I think I am simply following the thought GW already did and retroactively being able to claim it. But here's the idea: the Sanguinary Utnapishtim is indeed a deeply inegalitarian and highly militarised expansionist Empire. They are also (by the by and in the main) pious worshippers of murder-Satan, who think that rage-fueled brutality and efficiency in mass-murder are supreme virtues. This creates a bias towards militaristic fashion -- their priestess, for instance, has clothing that emphasises religious sygils and displays of skulls and spikes; but is not fundamentally distinct from a squaddy's battledress. Likewise their police uniforms are more crude and rustic (indicative of relative funding priority) but clearly militaristic -- also designed to intimidate, since ultimately the police are here to maintain a teror state rather than actually suppress crime. Go read the story, they have a rather complex relationship with crime!

Their officers have variations on 19th century European Imperial powers uniforms as that is a neat visual cue to the real-life audience for the kind of people they are (here I am just taking from the visual language GW already created for the Imperium), and also, again tries to balance clear militarism with aesthetic flair to emphasise social distinction. This is what I imagine the role of the blue accenting is -- clearly stands out against the red/orange/black dominant colours of the uniform, without diminishing or seeming less military as a result. The reason I had the propaganda picture drawn a certain way was in fact because I guessed there might be a tension in such societies: on the one hand a sort of cult of machismo and respect for the manly brutality of frontline combat (taken to absurd extremes here; where the fact that they wear aviator-shades at all times, especially indoors, is drawn attention to) would make people want to render themselves close to common soldiers in appearance. Yet on the other hand extreme inegalitarianism and strong expectation of immediate deference to authority would render visual markers of superiority expedient. So Kidumesh Demigaur ends up wanting to convey that he does indeed have the antique-masque signalling connection to their highest traditions of authority, but also to be seen dressed for battle at all times.

Finally, civilian clothing. I have already mentioned the priestess and policewoman, but I just want to note that I took a bit of a cop-out here. The logisticians I largely have in robes, and I have rationalised this in the following way: they are conquering Imperium planets, and in canon-lore the Imperium's adepts are part of a quasi-monastic organisation and dressed as such. (They're also just flat out really poor so very simple clothing for the majority of common people is forced upon them by economic necessity.) I want one of the Big Picture jokes of the setting to be that it turns out living under rule-by-murder-Satan is actually not that different from living under the Imperium, with the main difference being that, if anything, muder-Satanists are actually more efficiently doing the same stuff; see e.g. here. It seemed to accentuate that line of thinking that if you get conquered by the Sanguinary Utnapishtim you basically just turn up at the office and keep doing exactly the same stuff as before, so the uniform change just amounts to ripping out the aquillas and sewing in Khornate sygils and that's pretty much it. I still endorse this... but I also think it means I am basically being boring, not using the opportunity to think more seriously about what alternatives might exist.

Finally, there is a big ommission in all this. There are very few depictions of slaves, despite wardum representing the majority of the population (around 75-80% in my headcanon). The child is of ambiguous status during the story they feature in (indeed the drama derives from that), and while the particular logistician I have highlighted in the composite image above is not a slave it's stated a few times that there will be slaves among the logistician corp who will be wearing the same uniform. (How do I know the one depicted is not wardum? Because it's established that the right to bear arms is traditionally reserved for non-slaves, leading to the phenomenon of the "management machete" you can see shieved at his side.) So we know a bit about how slaves or potential slaves will dress. But on the whole I have been really really unsure about what to do with this because I can't decide how the economics of this would work. I think my own worldbuilding has screwed me over here as I am imagining them as something like slaves-of-the-state something on the model of Spartan helots, but where I assume they had household production plus a small internal market to meet their needs, my chaps exist in something like a command economy subject to 8 Year Plans. What sort of capacity for expressive fashion would even exist under such a system? I am not sure and I need to think more about it.

(I realised after posting that I had missed out on something that would obviously be a very significant part of fashion in our world: fashion as expressing or accentuating sexuality. Now, I do envision this as a rather repressed and prudish society (see e.g. this drabble for a bit of in-universe officially licesned erotica) so on the whole I just think this would be less of a thing for their fashion than it is in ours. That said, they are not unaware of the motivational power of sex and sex-appeal and have been known to make use of it in their propaganda. The rather obvious thought I have had in this regard, of course, is that a Khornite society would highly eroticise violence. So in the art I have commissioned this has been what is emphasised:

I do think, just from observing social trends nowadays and reflecting on what I know of critical theory, that I have perhaps under-appreciated the degree to which sexual-hang-ups and psychodramas feature in the violent authoritarian man's mind. So even though this sort of "they mostly don't use their fashion expression for sexual attractiveness, but where they do they play up its link to violence" has guided my thought, I will probably have to do something more nuanced with this in future.)

To summarise, I think that the Sanguinary Utnapishtim is in the rather odd position of being a society religiously dedicated to a chaos god, but having interpreted that ideology in a very rigid and rationalising fashion. As such they are attempting to impose a sort of militaristic uniformity faciliated by mass production in a command economy, all overlaid on the roiling madness of Khornite chaos worship. From this I conclude that individualistic expression would be discouraged in favour of conformity to a warlike collective, and that collective would be set up to intimidate its large slave population, in addition to (given the legalised role for duelling) each individual needing to hype up how scary they are with the spikes and what not to scare off anyone who might want to challenge you for status. Yet at the same time chaos disrupts patterns, and the inegalitarian nature of the society generates a heavy premium on doing things to mark oneself out as high status since you can reap very high rewards for doing so -- hence people would find opportunities for relatively subtle status markers like flashes of blue correlating with rank, and where it is socially licensed to show off, military rank, being ostentatious in its display. These are the core social tensions of the society, and as I take the setting forward I want the fashion to reflect that.

Over on Bluesky dot com Starshine asked a series of 40k lore questions and I said I would answer! So this is me doing that. Questions in bold followed by my answers. I will try and link to sources where I can but otherwise I am just vibing.

do tyranids hold ground: so the short answer is "no" and the longer answer is "maybe sorta technically, and even then not for long, and also there is one exception". The overwhelming consistent depiction is they are modelled on a host of locusts directed by a gestalt consciousness Hive Mind - they arrive at a planet, consume all the biomas, and move on, all as directed by the General Nid Will. They only "hold" territory for as long as it takes them to strip it bare. However, there are two maybe sorta kinda exceptions to this.

The first exception concerns their strategy for taking planets wherein the Hive Mind anticipates resistance. They send out what are known as "vanguard organisms" ahead of their main fleet (sometimes many many years, even centuries, ahead) who can, through various sneaky means, infiltrate a society. They then over the coarse of generations execute an incredibly elaborate plan to put those they have either brainwashed, bred, or just convinced through (invariably deceptive) rhetoric to serve their agenda, in charge of the planet. Or at least, put themselves in a position whereby they are confident they can significantly disrupt its defences when war breaks out. When this is achieved they send out a psychic beacon to attract the Hive Mind, basically letting it know that dinner is served. (For a fun book depecting part of this general procedure see here.) So if they do go the route of actively taking over the planet through these means there is a sense in which agents of the Tyranids are "holding it" in the period between them taking over and sending out their beacon and the tyranids-proper actually turning up and eating everyone.

The other exception is the planet Ziaphoria. For some reason they didn't eat that one. It is, in universe, a mystery as to what exactly is going on with that. I personally think the Doylean explanation is a lot of the lore is written for there to always be an exception to any general rule, since that allows people to style Their Guys in the way they see fit. 40k is an extremely soft sci-fi where the overarching objective is to encourage people to buy figurines, everything is bent to that end. So, yeah, if you did for whatever reason want to build and paint a Territory Defender Tyranid Swarm now you have an excuse!

do chaos space marines enjoy a chaos astra militarium or just vague non space marine Heretics: some do, some don't! The Chaos Space Marines are splilt up into incredibly diverse groups of incredibly diverse sizes, levels of organisation, and agendas. Some are running inter-stellar empires basically exactly modelled on the Imperium, including in how they combine relatively small elite Astartes shock-troop forces with large levies of professional mortal soldiers. The Exilarchy and the Pure in the (generally excellent, like straight up just a good book,) Spear of the Emperor work like that. Likewise the Iron Warriors are consistently depicted in various media to work this way. Others are small bands of sadists barely able to hold it together and certainly not capable of levying anything like that sort of logistical force. And others are somewhere in between, for instance the Alpha Legion are often depicted as employing (and genuinely having a respectful working relationship with, oddly) small groups of elite mortal operatives. Finally, a common alternate mode of doing things (most often associated with the Word Bearers and Death Guard) is to have masses of brainwashed slave-cultists, or literal actual zombies, whose job is to die quickly expending the enemies' ammunition in so doing. The point is, again, to allow a lot of creative freedom, and in this case to do so by stressing an incredibly wide range of Antagonist Faction vibes

It's worth noting, because it's been what I based things on for this very website, that we also see things depicted the other way round. There are disciplined(ish) armies of mortals that are actually led by generals which have no particular relationship with any Astartes. The Moebian 6th from Darktide are an instance of this. There are also instances of Astartes actually working for mortal generals, as in the Blood Pact whom I based my little guys on. So it's not always mortal armies in service to chaos space marines!

does the imperium have an imperial core?: yes! The Segmentum Solar is the administrative and religious hub of the Imperium.

Okay so whats the purpose of having infantry in 40k: technology of the day allows for shielding which for-reasons-I-couldn't-explain-and-in-universe-are-literally-partly-magic-plus-in-any-case-obviously-just-exists-to-make-the-game-make-sense cannot be penetrated from space but can be shut down planetside. Such shields are also not generally sufficient to cover the whole planet, but can cover key points of interest. So if you want to control a planet and extract resources thereon there's a big premium in being able to control (or eliminate) the sites from which these shields are generated. Infantry are often useful in so doing.

does anyone in the imperium have a not bleak life?: the short answer is "yes, lots!" the longer answer is "in absolute numbers many do, by proportion of people it is overwhelmingly grim and horrible". So I have a longer essay on the general economics of the Imperium here, which I hope yinz enjoy! But the pertinent thing there is that a) due to how population density works the median person lives in the Imperium incredibly overpopulated incredibly sprawling continent-or-even-planet-sized-city known as a "hive" (no relation to the tyranid sort). And b) because of how the political-economy of this setting work most of those people are incredibly poor and oppressed. Humans are among the most populous sentient life forms in the 40k galaxy and the Imperium is where the vast vast majority of them live, so it really is just bad times for most people. There are some very rich humans in the Imperium who live decadent lives, and humans who live on planets that are not hiveworlds (which is the most by number of planets! just nowhere near the most by population) that are often depicted as poor-but-not-nightmarish. It's just the hiveworlds and all their misery basically swamp out everything else.

Of the non-human groups we get: the Eldar, space Elves, are very few. Some of them actually live rather idyllic lives of spiritually fulfilled abundant space communism but they have a vanishingly-small-in-galactic-terms population so it doesn't really make a dent in things. The Space Dwarves are also few in number; generally their lives are not depicted as nightmarish per se, but also not really lovely either. Just slightly grimy space traders. The tyranids are vast in number but more or less just fleshy robots who aren't really sentient. The Hive Mind is always either angry or hungry (relatable). The vast majority of the Necrons are barely sentient slaves, and the more sentient upper classes are canonically depicited as either losing themselves to madness or prone to a kind of debilitating body dysmorphia which is incredibly nightmarish. (This book is also one of the genuinely-actually-just-great books of 40k.) The Tau are... actually not so bad. If you have to be born into the 40k universe you probably want to be born as Tau. They are populous enough to be a small-but-noticeable interstellar and multi-species Empire, and they actually have a government that considers raising its population's living standards to be a worthwhile policy goal. Your unambiguous best outcome as a human in the 40k setting is to be born in the Tau empire, which billions are at this point. It's still an expansionist anti-democratic caste society, but, like... not the worst?

The genuinely difficult case is the Orks. The Orks of 40k are more or less biological robots built for war. The galaxy of a grimdark wargame setting is, for them, their absolute best life. They are also incredibly numerous. So there is a sense in which they sort of balance out the cosmic scales of the 40k verse by just having so much fun. However, their idea of fun is constant violence and brutality.

space marines: mechanized infantry or armored division?: yes.

(Ok ok, proper answer is: sort of both, can be skewed more heavily in a particular direction to serve different needs. They are generally depicted as a kind of shock troop, very much on the model of medieval knights, designed as much to over-awe and discourage further resistance as actually be an effective fighting force. But, again, the overriding concern of Games Workshop is to make it clear that there are myriad different variations on how to use Astartes and you, yes you, should feel free to customise them to be more or less like any real world or fantastical fighting force you can imagine. So they get all sorts of depictions in lore, and the clear intent is to encourage you to be creative; or, more carefully, to never ever discourage you from thinking that your headcanon would be a great modelling project to start buying plastic for!)

did horus have something like chaos imperial guard? also like,,,why are chaos space marines still a problem if theres only a 1000ish of them? like if space marines are like spec op organic tanks how are chaos marines performing that same function with just vague heretics as their meatshields: this one there is an answer to! So when Horus was about Space Marines worked differently; they were the main fighting force of the Imperium in the 31st millenium, and each legion of Astartes fielded huge armies across multiple planetary systems. The limitation to only having 1000 marines came after the resolution of that conflict, and was specifically to prevent any one Astartes commander being able to wield armies that might seriously threaten the entire Imperium ever again. The traitors, of course, were subject to no such limits; so the only thing impeding the size of a traitor warband is just how many people they are able to hold together and supply.

This also means, and this relates to some of the questions above, there is not any one role the chaos space marine is meant to play on the battlefield. They are not subject to any standardisation at all, and each is free to work out how their own skills are best deployed. Beyond their mainstay as either soldiers or spec-ops we see them try their hand at government, or tacticians for smaller elite strike forces as their day job but with active spiritual lives and hobbies they pursue as their main passion, or even as not especially interested in being on the battlefield and playing more of a policeman role. They adapt themselves to what their circumstances permit.

I recently watched this fun video wherein a chap and his girlfriend rank the first founding Space Marine legions. Since I found it funny and Yuzi is coming in with a similar level of 40k knowledge to what I can gather of this chap's partner (some! She has wrote a story for this very site, allowing me to expand into Warhammer Romance as I always wanted! but not huge amounts) I thought I would get Yuzi's take on the legions. So I made her a document with my own brief summary of the legion's themes and aesthetics along with some pictures to illustrate, then asked for her take. She gave me permission to share here! Where she refers to something we have seen together or an image from the document I have shared or linked here to make the context clearer. Enjoy!

Dark Angels: 9/10. Aesthetics/theming is a bit meh, but I love the secret stash of super power ultimate weapons they can bust out when narratively convenient, and the cute little unexplained xenos buddies get SO many extra points.

Alpha Legion: 8/10. I love their (very much un-sneaky) teal colour and the twin primarchs. Gotta love these sneaky bois.

World Eaters: 7.5/10. Not the best tier but they're doing pretty good. They're bloody, angry, and violent and they wear red and their faces are twisted with rage and they have glowing red eyes. They're doing great! I also think they're a good part of Warhammer world because you would most likely never encounter them because they're stuck on a planet trying to find more people to murder, but when you do encounter them, it feels like you've accidentally stepped into hell. The universe is filled with creatively nasty things that want you dead.

Ultramarines: 7/10. These guys are also doing great. Strong theming and the shade of blue is a nice one that suits them well. They are too basic for me to ever have them as my faction, but I appreciate what they're doing from afar. For ULTRAMAR!

Salamanders: 7/10. Also doing pretty good. I like the green (+ red) colour scheme and that they are lizards and everything is fire-themed. The flamethrowers are ridiculous. Otherwise, though, they seem a bit plain.

Black Legion: 7/10. Not bad. They use their colour (black) well, but overall, not super appealing to me. This is some nice art for them, though (the older pieces)!

(She actually initially gave them 5.5/10 but explained bumping them up this way "I feel like I should probably bump up the Black Legion. They're a bit plain and I didn't find their mode of operation interesting, but on the black knight aesthetic alone, probably more like 7/10." So it's a genuine bump up the rankings just on strength of John Blanche art alone. He's so great!)

Night Lords: 6.5/10. Awful and bat-themed. Love them.

Iron Warriors: 6/10. Solid look/theming, but nothing special. Are these the people that attract a fanbase of boys who would rather become iron for Father than go to therapy? They seem very functional, what with turning badass fighting skills into a practical power source, which I like. They will never win any popularity contests but they show up and I appreciate that.

White Scars: 4.5/10. I sense a lot of untapped potential here. Seems like it could be a really badass and cool chapter but stymied by the fear of going too Orientalist or Mongol apologist/fanboy with it (a legitimate fear). Aesthetic looks quite cool, though, despite it seeming a bit empty otherwise.

Raven Guard: 4.5/10. While I like the art of the two raven bois sitting in a field doing reconnaissance, I don't find much interesting going on here.

Thousand Sons: 4/10. Nice theming and I like the notion of animated suits of armour walking around. However, I think wizards are for me what elves are to you -- I never find them that interesting.

Iron Hands: 4/10. Oh wait, is THIS the chapter people are using identification with as unofficial therapy? I don't like this aesthetic as much as the Iron Warriors, which is a shame because I think AdMech are pretty cool and funny, but similar things used for a marine legion just isn't as interesting to me.

(I subsequently clarified with her that it was indeed the Iron Warriors she was thinking of, but I am keeping the confusion here cos it's wild to me that they had to come up with just 18 legions and still couldn't keep from two of them being Iron themed chaps with a desperate need for therapy.)

Death Guard: 3.5/10. Good theming and another great "the universe is filled with horrors that want to kill you" addition to the Warhammer world, but they get so low because they are gross. Sowwy. :(

Emperor's Children: 3/10. Gotta admit, most of the points awarded here are because of the incredibly bishie Fulgrim and the colour purple, but I feel like they are not living up to the awesome potential of purple.

Imperial Fists: 2.5/10. Just OK. Get a bit of a boost because of the fist logo.

Blood Angels: 2.5/10. The specifically Horus-related madness is great. But nothing else about the aesthetic is at all appealing to me.

Space Wolves: 2/10. I'm sure this is appealing to someone, but everything here is unappealing to me, and quite cheesy.

Word Bearers: 2/10. A bit all over the place and the one constant (religious fanatic theming) doesn't do much for me. I think they are lacking in sauce.

So there you have it, the legions ranked according to my partner. Thus sayeth the Lord!

I recently watched this fun video on why do people in the 40k verse turn to chaos? (Watsonian reasons, of course. The Doylean is obviously that a wargame setting needs antagonists; yeah yeah, we know -- but that's boring! The fun is the Watsonian!) It reviews what I think of as the standard answers (the first three) and a couple which are more rarely explored in the canon (the last two).

1. Sheer madness and/or arrogant fools who think they can bargain with this stuff and come out on top.
2. The Imperium is so oppressive (especially but not only for abhumans) it makes rolling the dice on anything else tempting.
3. Chaos works by magnifying the real desires we already feel anyway, so in some sense it just finds whatever within you could be used to turn
4. Sincere belief that chaos is genuinely good.
5. Family tradition; they were raised in the faith.

I'd like to think I am somewhere between (2) and (5) in most of my stories. (They put a lot of effort into propagandising, which I guess if a version of trying to persuade people of (4) - but their morality is so weird I am not even really sure that's right. I think of it more as just trying to reinforce Khornite worship's "default" status, really just a means of ensuring (5) remains powerful.) The question of why people believe is most directly addressed in-unierse via Shamatii’s Sermon and out-of-universe in the blogpost on economics. So go check those out if you're interested.

What I want to highlight here, though, is that people should not really think of this as such a different problem from one we have actually faced historically. Many many societies have done things which future generations look back on as absolutely and obviously monstrous, and been puzzled as to how their ancestors could have been ok with that. Would we really be surprised if our descendents look back on how we polluted our own atmosphere, stood by while war crimes were carried out, permitted factory farming of animals (or etc) and saw us any differently? For all the fantastical things about 40k, for all its over-the-top silliness, I actually think the fact that some people worship chaos to be among the more grounded elements of its worldbuilding.

I recently posted on Reddit to show off some new art I had commissioned for a story. A few people in the comments mentioned following this site and enjoying the account. A couple of people submitted stories to me. It made me feel really good! I am so happy that others are enjoying my little hobby passion project. That's it, that's the post.

My wonderful partner and love of my life alerting me to this wonderful podcast on the records drawn from an ancient Assyrian library. I am more or less just posting this to preserve (ha!) the thing and recommend it to others here. As will probably be apparent, I have heavily based the Sanguinary Utnapishtim's naming conventions on things from this era and region (along with some visual references to other cultures). To be honest, that was not based on any deep knowledge of the era. At most I can say I found the Epic of Gilgamesh incredibly moving when I first read it. And even then; maybe I was just primed by liking the way Picard tells it! So this was not much more than an appreciation for an aesthetic and a desire to have something that sets the place apart.

But, perhaps completely and utterly unsurprisingly, actual history is far more interesting than my shallow appropriation thereof! I absolutely could have been getting good Khornite lore from actually knowing things! Commenting on the records one scholar notes "So, they love, in The Chronicles, to say, “Oh, I crossed this river on a bridge made of the skulls of my enemy,” for example. That’d be a fairly typical Assyrian comment." Simple though it is, I obviously have not done better than that in my attempt at Khornite worldbuilding. So, yeah, check out the podcast - and if anyone has any recommendations on where I can best learn more about the Assyrian empire and political culture please tell me!

Like many people on the internet dot com I have developped a minor obsession with the film Sinners, an action-horror-comedy-musical-period-piece; as the old joke would have it, asked what genre he would like his next film to be in, writer/director Ryan Coogler simpy said "yes". It's about vampires invading a prohibition era juke joint in Mississippi. It's lots of fun, gives you plenty to think about, and is on the whole very good. Coogler pulls off a kind of maximalist sci-fi/fantasy filmmaking style that I also really enjoyed in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and since is my fandom blog I am going to talk a bit about it here. Or, rather, thoughts inspired by it - I am interested in the idea of genius, both as it appears in the film and in the broader cultural conversation going on at the moment.

Remmick, an Irish vampire, would like to gain access to the setting's juke joint in order to turn Sammy, Preacher Boy, into a vampire. If he does this he will gain access to a power Preacher Boy has, which is to revive the spirits of ancestors (and descendents too as it happens, though one gets the impression its ancestors Remmick is interested in) through music. Remmick suffers from the usual vampire weakness of needing to be invited in, and reasonably enough the remaining people in the juke joint are unwilling to do so. Alas, unfortunately, before they really understood the nature of the threat they faced they sent the patrons of aforementioned juke joint out to go home. Remmick has thus killed and turned most or all of those who were sent out. So it comes to be that, in one particularly memorable scene consequent to this, we get a rendition of Rocky Road To Dublin by the newly turned victims. Now all those former patrons are enjoying the craic with Remmick.

It has been remarked that one of the great things Sinners does is tell its story through music. And I think this is a good example of this. Because one (not the only, not even the main) thing I think the film is doing in that scene is showing us that it's not for lack of raw-talent that Remmick is unable to bring up the ancestors - it's a genuinely great rendition of Rocky Road to Dublin and I think we're meant to resonate with that; check out the comments on any internet upload of it, you'll find plenty of people joking that they'd have gone out to join the party at this. But, alas, it's not enough - the opening voiceover (repeated in the mindblowingly excellent musical number for which Rocky Road to Dublin was the dark mirror) tells us that there are some "people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future." And, welp, turns out Preacher Boy was born with the sauce, Remmick was not, that's all there is to it. Underlying the conflict of the film is a notion of genius, talent that can't be taught or faithfully emulated but whose results are clear to any fair minded observer.

So I think one of the things we're meant to be doing is understanding the film's conflict as being about how the world responds to genius. This is somewhat in line with parts of the interesting take I saw here. The KKK, the greater scope villain hovering on the edges of the film, wish to simply extinguish black genius and everyone who might appreciate it through brute force. Remmick is actually less destructive than that (in fact he shows disdain for the KKK, is the one who warns the main characters about them, and indicates his intent to go kill them later), but he's still at core exploitative. He wants to appropriate Sammy's genius and the results of his talents for his own private gain. Whereas Preacher Boy himself just loves the blues, and he wants to make music everyone can experience and gain something from. I won't go into it here but in various ways Remmick's song versus Sammy's song highlight this contrast -- and its telling that the KKK make no music at all.

Now, in part, this is just a cool thing for the film to be doing. But what made it strike me in particular is how this notion of genius is absent in a certain kind of cultural conversation. I have been talking with my partner about the role of intelligence in some people's thought (a subset of the white elitist set discussed here), the way they clearly believe in something like: society should be a meritocracy wherein rank and status is accorded to merit, which is more or less just a function of one's intelligence. (Sometimes the people we have in mind allow for conscientiousness to be an independent weighting factor that modifies this, but the emphasis is invariably upon intelligence.) And what's odd is these people never ever seem to include artistic genius in this - in fact, if anything, the people with this worldview have a surprising degree of overlap with people who obviously take glee and delight in the idea that AI art shall one day render artistic talent or achievement basically valueless, something to which no social status or economic reward is attached.

Why should that be? When I think about the achievement of, say, Sister Rosetta Tharpe it looks really really similar to instances of the sort of achivement that the people I have in mind would elsewhere celebrate. She realised a potential inherent in a relatively new technology (the electric guitar) to do new things with established genres and spaces (gospel music, emerging rhythm and blues) and generated something that many many people appreciated. She played a direct hand in fostering the career of Little Richie, and was cited by lumeries like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presely, Keith Richards, Johnny Cash... etc... as directly influencing them. It would be pat, but accurate I think, to say she "disrupted" an industry as it then existed, did so in a way that involved seeing potentialities in new technologies that had been too little appreciated prior to her, and thereby generated something that would have massive cultural and economic value by any reaasonable measure. Isn't this exactly the kind of innovation that in other circumstances the merit-is-intelligence crowd would hype up? It seems sort of like what Musk did in being an early appreciator of what PayPal could be, for instance, except if anything Tharpe actually played a more active role in the first-order work of then shaping the product.

Now I pick the case as a leading example because it makes it tempting to say that clearly racial and gender biases would get in the way of appreciating this as an instance of the type they value. But, well, I would here remind the reader that the notion of artistic genius underlying such things typically takes Mozart and Goethe to be its exemplary figures. So, I don't think it's just that the paradigm-instances of this sort of genius don't look the right way for the relevant crowd: cos, actually, they do.

None the less, though, I do think that response is right in spirit. Here is the thing that the 20th century really made clear, which Sister Tharpe herself is an instance of, and which Sinners is itself commenting on. While (if you grant that genius of the pertinent sort exists at all, which is obviously contentious) Mozart and Goethe and Shakespeare and many other white men may no doubt genuinely have this sort of genius, it's now impossible to deny that a significant number of people from disfavoured ethnic/gender groups do too. Indeed that's one of the differences between Remmick and the KKK - Coogler spoke about wanting the villain to be ancient and Irish to give him an outsider perspective on racial relations in the segregated south, and I think this is one of the ways that is showing up. Unlike the KKK, Remmick actually is capable of acknolwedging black genius, he can appreciate talent across racial lines. Rather than trying to suppress that talent, he's happy to work with it - only, on his terms. He is, in some sense, a harbringinger of the cultural change to come; black people's creative talents would become impossible to deny as pop-culture opened up in certain ways, but forward thinking members of the white world, not invested in old model segregation, found new ways to come out on top none the less.

And with that in mind it makes me realise that the sort of people who lionise an intelligence based meritocracy that pointedly leaves out artistic talent, who seem to revel in using technology to drive such talent from the face of the earth in fact, are in many ways a throwback. Regressive even relative to the murderous vampire. I think exactly what they don't like is that in the face of all the evidence of the 20th century this sort of intelligence hierarchy simply cannot plausibly be maintained as attaching only to members of the favoured racial/gender demographic anymore. If you wanted a meritocracy of talent in this way then, well, you'd have to accept that some of the people in the Elite class are going to look like Sister Rosetta Tharpe. And I think what we're seeing is that the operationalisation of meritocracy the people I have in mind are opting for is designed to rule that out. The ideology is being backfilled-in to ensure it reproduces segregation. Some are to command, others are to obey, and they already know who is who. The point now is just to find a way of understanding genius that forms the divide where they know a-priori that it ought to be. For this reason a zone of accomplishment that otherwise looks very much like one they respect must be excluded, because the world is inconveniently delivering the wrong result therein.

At least with Remmick we'd get a little jig sure.

The typical narrative role of evil is deeply tied to that of antagonism, or challenge. Antagonists, who we often term "villains" in virtue of playing that role, provide contrast with protagonists, who we often term "heroes" just in virtue of being protagonists. By differing they oppose.

This creates difficulties in settings where everyone is evil! One risks sameyness and thereby indifference on the part of the audience. For one thing, the stakes seem low if it's bad whoever wins or however the protagonist's challenge is resolved. This was in some sense the topic of my previous post. But today I am going to focus more on character motivations, because in addition to the story seeming to have no stakes any one might care about, it's also just boring to watch a bunch of clones of each other differing only in some arbitrary insignificant fashion battling it out to see... what? Which clone is left standing at the end, I guess? You don't care about the conflict in part because you don't care about them, all the worse if the naturally unpleasant nature of evil makes you dislike spending narrative time with them in the first place.

To get a handle on this, I will contrast a failed attempt to generate character diversity in a setting where everyone is fundamentally good. Star Trek: Discovery. While not literally everyone is Good Really in the Trekiverse, the clear emphasis of the show is on an optimistic and humanistic vision which leans heavily in that direction. There's a good reason Trek is often taken to be the contrast setting with that of 40k (though I personally think recent writers in the Trek franchise have lost of that, to the franchise's detriment). The writers of Discovery tried to honour that (which I do think is to their credit), but in a way that I think is interesting ultimately precisely because it failed.

Discovery inherits from certain strands of conteporary leftwing thought (again, not intrinsically a problem for them to be borrowing from leftwing ideas, perfectly appropriate given the origins of Star Trek) a kind of therapy-speak view of evil. People's "healthy" mental habits dispose them to good and mutually coooperative and beneficial behaviour, tolerant and accepting of one another. However, "trauma" of various sorts can get in the way of that, creating opposition and antagonism. But since people can be healed through various means, it is possible for them to "unlearn" whatever habits of mind lead to their antagonistic or unhelpful behaviours. The natural character arc is thus from one of oppositional or vicious behaviour to cooperative and virtuous behaviour via a process of socially supported self-work and healing.

Now, this does square the circle of getting opposition and antagonism while maintining a humanistic commitment to (almost) everyone being good really. But it does so at the expense of positing a shared end-goal to every character arc! Everyone is evolving to being the same person; a kind of emotional-sage who goes around giving therapy-speak monologues to characters at a less advanced stage of their self-work journey. They are insufferable. It's also just boring because it ends up regenerating the exact "what if everyone is the same and there's no conflict" narrative problem the trauma was meant to solve. And, in fact, the writers seem aware of that as they keep introducing new characters with their own traumas just to give them some spice... only for the same character arc to eventually render them the same emotional-sage everyone else already is.

Let's step back and think about this in slighlty more abstract terms. What went wrong here? I think it is this: diversity of characters is a good thing for narrative. A setting-constraint wherein everyone shares the same moral-alignment eliminates an axis on which one can diversify one's characters. What is more, this particular axis is the means by which antagonism is introduced into stories, so it is especially narratively damaging to be hindered on this front. To that end the writers introduced a device by which characters can be temporarily evil. But the nature of this device is it made the natural "good state" for every single character to progress into the same.

(My one political aside on this is: I think contemporary political discourse effectively hid this problem from the writers and made it harder to solve. I suspect they vociferously disagree that they failed to make the characters diverse, because after all the characters are all demographically very diverse - and in ways previous Star Trek shows hadn't managed, even. And what's more, a great many online critics of Discovery were haters who focussed on just that diversity - complaining about a black woman having so prominent a role, or the presence of trans characters. So it would seem to all involved that in ways that matter to people, the show has achieved character diversity. But I think all this is superficial - bigots are in essence fetishists, obsessed with surface properties of characters. Demographic diversity ultimately does not matter if eveyrone has the same personality. Generally what I saw in discussion around the show is a debate about "diversity" of the sort I am used to playing out among the professional middle classes of which I am a member. There are some people who think filling an environment with aesthetic variants on Educated Urbanite Professional is an interesting diversity, and they counter-posed by people who think what really matters is we do less of that and instead add some people who absolutely loathe some subset of the former to the mix. The first lot are boring and the second lot hateful, but their heated opposition to each other and collective dominance of the political spectrum makes it all seem very significant to those involved. I disagree.)

So how does 40k deal with its version of the problem in a setting where everyone is evil? I think sometimes by basically doing almost exactly the same thing. The same in that - we get a list of psychological traits which stand in for protagonist morality; check the wiki for how many Space Marine chapters are noted for putting Honour and Duty above all. They stand in huge contrast, of course, with those who put Duty and Honour first. And needless to say all value Brotherhood. Whereas chaos is treated as (or highly co-extensive with) literal insanity very often, which manifests in a stock set of contrasting character traits - villains are faithless and conniving and ever on the verge of betraying one another. (Fans talk about "the chaos insanity debuff" as being the narrative reason chaos hasn't just won in the setting as a whole.) So we get a basic contrast between the relatively morally neutral "being a reliable teammate" constrated with the definitely evil "being a back-stabbing bastard", where the latter is quite literally insane.

So like Discovery we get a pscyhological theory of good vs evil, with the evil side coded as a kind of mental-disorder, and the good side basically amounting to traits that make you a better team player. The differences are that since 40k is grimdark rather than optimistic: 1) even the good traits are very compatible with being all things considered evil, and 2) the evil people don't get better, in fact it's far more common to see the good people corrupted and become more like the bad people. Still, a cooperative mental traits theory of the good vs insanity as uncooperative behaviour theory of evil. And this allows for antagonism even in a setting where everyone is basically the same on the moral alignment chart. And I think it leads to the same problem: the protagonists are basically interchangeable, because the work of the moral-alignment chart in generating antagonism has been replaced by a psychological theory of The Good Type and why it would fight with The Bad Type... and, well, now there is a single Good Type that we are going to have spend a whole bunch of time.

(Caveats: this isn't always done badly. For one thing, quite simply not all stories do this. There are lots of Black Library stories! For another, since 40k often has one-off books or short stories, they don't run into the same issues that Discovery did about having to continually reup the characters to go through the same arc. You can just drop them and move on. For instance, the story Storm of Iron is a textbook case of what I describe in how it contrasts the protagonists and antagonists, yet it is pretty great because it can all come to a satisfying conclusion and leave (most) of the characters behind for future books. For a third thing, it is often literally just funny - albeit I am not always sure in a fashion that was intended - to have characters constantly saying "Brother! Aid me brother!" or some such absurdist pseudo-macho stuff, in a way I do not find being earnestly lectured at in online-therapy-speak funny, so it's just a bit less insufferable. And for a fourth, some of the texts in universe do what I shall recommend below - the Tau and the Necrons' especially actually allow for it, since their goals can be a bit orthogonal to the central Imperium Vs Chaos conflict. And it's no coincidence that some of the best fiction in the setting focuses on them. Finally, just for fun factor the writing of the orks often has a bit of cheeky meta-textual awareness about this, where the whole joke of their having two gods embodying their two ideal types of being Brutal, but Kunnin' versus being Kunnin', but Brutal respectively lets them play with this very fact in universe.)

The solution, I think, is inherent to this analysis of the problem. I think we should depsychologise the moral alignment chart. You need to allow for genuine diversity in theories of what would be good or evil, so you can have conflict among genuinely good/evil characters (not just where one is mistaken or unhealthy or what not) who may have associated entirely different psychological types. In my own little way I am trying that here by trying to flesh out a Khornite psychology that is nothing at all like the crazed-barbarian-bloodthirster that the canon typically portrays. What makes that possible is that the nega-utilitarian values of the Sherden Pact could be subscribed to for various reasons, all obviously evil, but all compatible with very different psychological profiles from that of the crazed-barbarian-bloodthirster. To make this possible you have to think that there are genuinely multiple ways of being good/evil - which I think might be controversial in the case of the good, but in pulp fiction everyone is evil settings like that of 40k is actually very doable.

So, even in settings where everyone is meant to share a moral alignment, an end to psychologising conflict! Bring back ideological conflict!

Despite (obviously) being a fan of Grim Dark as a genre I think I get why people complain about it. This Trope Talk captures some of the central complaints in ways that are no doubt more fun than my ramblings, so if you want just give that a listen.

My sense is there are three main complaints about grimdark, two of which are largely just about the genre often being done badly and one of which is more of a core complaint:

1. The first "frequently done badly" subtrope of grimdark is that people turn it into just misery porn. There is just nothing and no one worth rooting for in a grimdark world. If you are not careful with that it can make it easy to simply disengage with the setting -- it's not more tragic if everyone is a bastard then gets shot, it's less than it would be if some of those people were actually good people I might not want to die. Which is to say, if one is too thoroughly consistent with the premise of hopelessness then you simply ride it off a cliff, and the audience doesn't care when the bad stuff happens. And since it's only bad stuff happening in this kinda failure-mode, that really just amounts to the audience not caring about your story.

2. The second "frequently done badly" subtrope is that some authors (and this is where I think it overlaps with the edgy teen complaint you've heard) think that grimdark is somehow inherently more "serious" and realistic and grown-up than more hopeful settings. And... like... basically this is just silly. There's no actual reason to think this, at all, it's really just a childish view of the world. One has graduated from the optimism of morality tales told to infants we are trying to teach to share, and just kinda assumed that the real world must be the total opposite of them because you encountered the first bit of nuance. I have seen this attitude among (as noted, tbf, frequently younger) grimdark fans. But sometimes they grow up and start writing for previously hopeful settings, which they turn into self-serious joyless absurdities! Witness much of comics in the 90s. So I think people then find that attitude irritating, and react against the grimdark tropes they associate the attitude with.

3. The more intrinsic actual issue with grimdark is that it by its nature makes it difficult to write traditionally compelling narratives. There's a reason tropes are tropes, a reason the classics are classics. Good triumphing over evil, a satisfying pay off to the trials and tribulations characters have been through, the light at the end of the tunnel promising something better; people do, in fact, actually like that. And grimdark genuinely makes it difficult to work those things into stories, by the nature of what it means for a setting! So it's legit genuinely just harder to give audiences stuff they will generally like if you write for this genre.

So that's my take. Grimdark forces writers to make more difficult narrative choices which are not as satisfying (or, at least and more carefully/accurately: harder to make as satisfying) as many traditional plot elements. But it has also often been done poorly with some more unforced errors, in particular in ways that make it harder to invest in its characters or stakes on the one hand, and on the other generate resentment against smug nihilistic authors with fundamentally childish worldviews.

Inspired by one of my valued guest authors alerting me to an amusingly Khornite resposne to economic collapse by Trump, I decided to write a story centering on the economics of the Sanguinary Utnapishtim. If Trump's rose garden tariff regime is indeed remembered by historians as the onset of a significant economic downturn, I hope that some footnote is reserved by some literary theorist somewhere for noting that my fanfic was among the literary responses thereto. All that to say: a somewhat longer and more involved post today as I reflect on the background assumptions about the world that will make that possible. So much so that I moved it to its own page. Enjoy!

Recent discussion with a good friend has me reflecting: why Khorne? Even granted I want to play the baddies, why Satan-in-his-aspect-as-rageful-murderer rather than Satan-in-his-aspect-as-despair or Satan-in-his-aspect-as-betrayer or Satan-in-his-aspect-as-debauchery? So in this little post I am gonna say a bit more on that.

So it is maybe worth starting with why I wanted to play the bad guys: after all, the grimdark universe is replete with opportunities to cosplay as evil, why choose the worst of the worst? And the answer is -- I didn't initially! I was initially attracted to an Imperium loyalist guard faction, rather than the traitor guard of the Sanguinary Utnapishtim as I now envision them. I had in mind a more nuanced thing, wherein they were genuinely evil (because being loyal to the Imperium makes that inevitable) but more tragic figures, trying their best to do good but continually choosing to side with the worst government in history out of religious zealotry and misplaced loyalty. But, well, I found my writing chops just weren't up to that. Making them tragic but still interesting required an ability to evoke pathos that it turns out I don't have. What little creative writing talent I have is better suited to comedic writing, and it's really actually rather difficult to convey that sort of thing in a comedic tone. Not that it is impossible! I think some of the best bureaucratic comedies I discussed below, for instance Catch-22 or the filmic interpretation of Starship Troopers, are quite capable of achieving that duel-affect. But, well, turns out that ain't me. So I abandoned all pretence at subtlety and went all in on Chaos as requiring the least subtlety from me. Why, then, Khornite chaos in particular?

I think it's two-fold. First, there is sheer process of elimination. There's chaos-undivided, Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh, and Tzeetch. As for chaos undivided, I guess the idea of that was just crowded out by the World Eaters and Iron Warriors for me. I genuinely enjoy the two flavours of Chaos Undivided being - this is a sincere religion which I actually care about, or I am definitely so smart and just using chaos it's not using me no-siree, and I think there are already two canon factions that explore those ideas well. I just didn't really feel the need to add anything. The reason I have always gravitated to guard (traitor or loyalist), and if not them the Tau, is I am attracted to the idea of the normies of the universe facing up to its horrors. I generally like this in fiction, it's why I like the reddit art community Military Vs The Unknown and really enjoy Wells' more grounded battle sequences in War of the Worlds. And, well, Tzeentchy wizard boys are not really that. While they can be mortals technically, once you have access to Supreme Cosmic Power? I dunno, you stop getting my sympathy as a normie facing up to the horrors. You are, in fact, the horrors. As to Nurgle, well I don't need to cosplay being a depressive unhealthy git. I'm here for escapism not just to recreate my daily conditions of life! Plus I am easily grossed out. No thanks. Slaanesh is probably the close second to me. Now, I find decadence a bit meh as a theme. I remember when I first read Brave New World I genuinely did not pick up it was meant to be a dystopia --- ohhh noooo too much drugs and orgies but where's the deeper meaning ohhh nooo; shut up, nerd. But the other side to Slaanesh is elitism, toxic perfectionism in its personal and social expressions, and that I do find very interesting as a villain theme. So, it was a live question for me to make these chaps Slaanesh themed; why didn't I go that way?

(Well, watch this space. I do in fact think I am going to have something Slaaneshi to do with my fictional universe. There's already been a little tiny sprinkling of Slaaneshi cameos in both my own and some guest stories. And there will be more! But, ok, that aside.)

Now, this gets to the second reason for going Khorne - its match to my personal psychology. I find it easy to imagine someone who has responded to anger with introducing meditative exercises to try and let them channel that anger more efficiently. All I had to do was change what counts as an effective channel of that anger - rather than learning to forgive and direct their energy towards improving conditions in the world, they are trying to learn to hate more efficiently and ensure their violence is systematic rather than sparodic. This is an inverse of something I feel I have to do in myself, it takes something wicked about me and turns it up to 11. Whereas, well, my egalitarian beliefs are more heartfelt than my pacifist inclinations; I don't really have to channel feelings of snobbery and disdain into something healthy, I simply don't tend to feel that much snobbish disdain. But I do have to channel feelings of spite and self-righteous anger into something positive, because those sins are mine. The chipper Khornite logisticians of the Sanguinary Utnapishtim are attractive to me as a dark mirror, they are what the worst version of me would look like. A basically pleasant bureaucrat utterly dedicated to hurting everyone and everything around them, and feeling totally self-justified and even pleased with themselves as they do so. While I can enjoy Slaaneshi themes, none of them cut to the bone like that, none of them show me up for who I fear I might be.

So, yes, there's why I picked Khorne, there's why I went with the angriest lads. I found it easier to do exagerrated broad comedy if I was writing for chaos as opposed to any more nuanced faction. Of the chaotic sub-factions half the others didn't appeal to me for one reason or another. And of the two that did, Slaanesh and Khorne, it was the latter which most tapped into the worst aspects of my actual personality. Write what you know, they say, and the Sherden Pact are what I know intimately but very much wish I didn't.

I finally actually shared this website with large numbers of people; mainly strangers on Reddit and other forms of social media. I have to admit I was really nervous. I write for my own pleasure, but... I dunno, it's been years I have been writing on here, and it just would have stung a bit if the minute other people looked at it they told me it was rubbish. Fortunately, people have been very kind and supportive. It feels good, and I have been really happy to find the online community jovial and welcoming. Nice!

Because my partner and I are both huge nerds we both spend a lot of time in fandom. While neither of us are entirely gender-conforming in this regard, it's fair to say that she tends more to girl-fandoms and I to boy-fandoms. But she draws 40k fan-art and is a huge Infinite and the Divine fan and I have an Ao3 account, so we both have a bit of knowledge of what The Other Half are up to, allowing us to compare notes. And, cliché as it is to observe, we both agree: the old adage is quite simply correct that boy-fandoms, and only boy-fandoms, are obsessed with power-scaling. What is power-scaling, why the gender-gap, and how do I relate to it here?

Power-scaling is when you try and work out the answer to "who would win in a fight?" or "who is more powerful?" comparison questions in a fictional setting. Of course the nature of fictional settings is that there aren't really hard-and-fast rules, meaning there's lots of debate about this sort of thing. Since these will often involve fights that did not actually occur in the official sources about the setting, or if they did were interrupted or in some sense obviously uneven or unrepresentative in some way, there's lots of room for debate. Fandoms thus often try to create rules or principles which can be used to settle these - here's a nice guide to the sort of thing people do here, though it is not always plausible in my opinion.

Now while of course it's not like there's a 100% gender alignment in who does and does not engage in power-scaling discussions, on the whole it goes as you'd expect. Fandoms which are male dominated have far more of these conversations than fandoms that are female dominated. And on some level it is sort of obvious why boy-fandoms end up with more of this: there's a gender difference in who likes fight-y things, and power-scaling is naturally more interesting in a setting generally orientated around combat or battles or martial competition. That's true! But there's still a bit more to the gap than this, because even in fandoms which do have a lot of women and which are very combat heavy (think of a lot of young adult fantasy, or the Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones series, or even the recent She-Ra series which was a kind of pastel coloured war epic) anecdotally it seems these fandoms still do less power-scaling. So even when you have women invested in a combat-heavy fiction and its setting, in their fandom activity you don't see as much of this. Why is that?

My current guess is based on this Tumblr post. There's a kind of person (and I think it skews male) who "approaches stories as a collection of facts. To them, the way that they would relate to a story is the same way that they would relate to a dictionary.... to them, a story lives or dies on whether the facts are interesting facts. And when a story is focusing on anything else, it's wasted time." And it turns out that among the interesting facts are not just those presented by the story, but also hypotheticals or counter-factuals the story world suggests should have a determinate answer but does not actually address. This touches upon, I believe, quite deep matters in philosophy of fiction, because it involves seeing the world of the fiction as somehow more than what's on the page, as a realised location which settles matters even if they are not directly addressed and thereby establishes truths which can be discovered and known by a discerning fandom. Why, if I am right, this habit of reading and way of understanding fictional worlds skews male - I do not know. But I think it makes sense of why power-scaling seems more interesting to boy-fandoms: they're more invested in working out and coming to know the comparative power level facts, simply because they are generally more invested in coming to know all the facts.

Why do I raise this on my Warhammer 40k fansite? Well partly because 40k just is a very male-dominated fandom. Exactly how male dominated is a bit hard to get a read on: from this thing which purports to analyse website traffic I find about a 27% female - 73% male gender split for WarCom at time of me writing this post. But presumably that's not all hobbyists and will include (e.g.) parents buying stuff for their children. Whereas when I look through Reddit and forum posts of people reporting their experience in the fandom the popular guesses seem to be somewhere between 5-15% women, with most saying that in recent years there's been an increase in the proportion of women. (For what it's worth my own guess is that estimates based on fan-experience slightly under-count because women are more likely to be involved in the painting and reading section of the hobby, which by its nature is less visible than playing in public settings like tournaments or game-stores. But I would also guess that the WarCom site is getting a lot of disproportionately-women-who-do-the-birthday-present-buying visitors, so that will overcount. So put me down in the 10-20% guesstimate range I suppose.) In any case, what this all amounts to is that as a literal wargame setting with a very male fanbase you basically can't avoid power-scaling discussions in 40k, and despite not finding them intrinsically all that interesting I see a lot of them.

Not, mind you, that I am totally unintested in power-scaling. As I mention on my Themes page, I'm very interested in world-building as part of my hobbying. This requires there should, after all, be some constraints the fiction sets for that to work. I am not so far gone as to think there's a real fact about whether Superman would beat the entire Green Lantern Corps in a fight, I do think that if Superman loses a punch-up to some random mugger in Metropolis with no explanation as to why - that's immersion breaking to the point I don't know what the setting is trying to do anymore and wouldn't find it satisfying to try and build within that world. But also: while I do this far far less than what I think is normal for 40k fanfic, at least sometimes I am writing stories with fight-scenes, so I do need to have some sense of how they'd go. I'll say what I do below, then end by trying to draw out my personal lesson for how to do power-scaling.

So far I have basically tried to borrow from sources which I think are cool. Usually "official" sources, but not always; the Retributors from the excellent Astartes short are, after all, a fan homebrew project chapter that was only recently ascended just because the material was so popular. From this limited subclass of sources I gather together claims or ideas that I think can be useful heuristics for making my own scenes. So, say, from Fall of Cadia I gather that (Khornite chaos) Space Marines expect to be able to take only 1 casualty for every 50-100 Guardsmen killed, while it is pretty disastrous for them if they are losing 1 for only 30 killed. That said, if a relatively small number of guardsmen are properly equipped they can put up more of a fight; so we do see in some sources that anti-tank weapons, or, like, actual tanks, genuinely slow Space Marines down, even if the astartes can stil emerge victorious from such fights.

Whereas we get this from the excellent Spear of the Emperor: "To fight fair would see < the chaos aligned mortal human > forces crushed, but these men’s masters had fought Space Marines before. They commanded their minions to abandon the firefights and bring the Spears down through misplaced valour and sheer weight of flesh. Just as the bane of ironclad knights on Old Earth had been swarms of peasantry armed with pole-hooks dragging the men from their saddles, Space Marines too could be overwhelmed through sheer numbers. It was madness to look upon, and yet it was the only gamble that had a hope of working." By way of contrast this book also gives you a truly harrowing - one of the best combat scenes I have seen written in a 40k story - depiction of a small number of highly elite and augmented normal humans fighting a single astartes, and just how incredibly difficult this is even for them when it is very specifically what they have trained in and specialised for. (One of the (otherwise really well-written and fun) Guant's Ghost's books also does this, but I didn't find it as satisfying precisely because one felt the plot-armour of the main characters protecting them a bit too powerfully.) So Spear of the Emperor especially has inspired my take on mortals would fight Astartes, since it's so relevant to my setting. If "swarming in a mad rush" is actually the best plan available then people coked up on Khorne juice are ironically very well placed to deploy effective strategy here.

Talking of which, a number of sources make it pretty clear that one thing that really does change the odds is access to warp shenanigans. A mortal human who also happens to be a powerful psycher can more than keep up with the Alpha Legion boys in this fun story. When we see Space Marines struggle and die it's often because they are taking on beings with daemonic or chaotic-divine "blessings". Finally, one thing I took away from this interesting story (which I shall write my own review of later) is that when experienced primaris-marines fight experienced Khornite berserkers one-on-one it seems that the Khornite has a slight edge; further suggesting that, in an otherwise fairly even straight-fight, being boosted by the warp really is a significant advantage.

So there you go, that is what I use for power-scaling myself. Picking sources literally based on "what I find cool" I have a rough sense of how many Astartes a competent commander expects to lose for fights with Guardsmen, a crude strategy by which Guardsmen can try and make the most of their numerical advantage to come out on top, and some sense that warp-shenanigans can powerfully mess with the general rules of thumb here. To my mind this is the level of detail at which power-scaling is useful. There's no point in trying to exhaustively collect all the facts: because there aren't any, and in any case that might interfere with the all important rule of fun that should be the ultimate decider here. Rather than seek some consistent answer that makes sense of the entire canon (which I do not think exists) just pick themes that make sense to you as an author and allow for cool and fun scenes, and then try and work out what would interfere with these rules of thumb so that when you want to break your own rules you can do so in a principled way.

I had a conversation with Yuzi about the similarities and differences between my series of shorts and Praise the Machine Spirit, a lovely comedic 40k bureaucracy short story. (A different but equally delightful take on 40k-Bureaucracy-Humour can be found here. And here's another interviewing a Khornite day labourer!) It got me thinking: why are bureaucracies funny, and what are the sorts of comedic stories we tell with them? Here's my little attempt at a general account and then a taxonomy of ways people have played around with the general idea.

Bureaucracies are good sources of comedy because they are fertile sources of absurdity. The basic comedic impulse is to compare our expectations and hopes for the world with the actual outcomes we are able to achieve, and revel in how the latter deflates the former. Bureaucracies are a great place for doing that to the social world, as they are an attempt to organise the chaos of human coliving. Their inner logics can come very far apart from whatever purpose they might sensibly try to serve, and yet no one person is necessarily doing anything irrational in how they behave within them. So, that is my general theory, the core comedic feature of bureaucracy is absurdity.

This then gives me a four-fold taxonomy of ways I have seen people play around with that basic joke. The first we can call Kafkan Comedy, where the basic joke is that the sheer incomprehensibility of the system basically functions like a Lovecraftian horror warping reality for all who step inside. Probably the most famous example of this is Heller's Catch-22 -- which was one of my first non-Pratchett book loves, perhaps not coincidentally to me now writing these! Heller leans into an often under-explored feature of the military, which is that it is in essence a big bureaucracy dedicated to killing people, and makes hay out of the sheer madness of rationalising something so fundamentally irrational as murderous war. The absurdity in Kafkan Comedy is exaggerated and in your face, here the bureaucracy seems like an expression of an entire world that has itself become fundamentally absurd. Our association between bureaucacy and a rational(isable) world subverted.

The second type I think of as the Epistemic Comedy, and I would place Praise the Machine Spirit in this genre (its most famous instance is probably the comic strip Dilbert). Here the comedy comes from the gap between the knowledge that you the reader have about what this bureaucracy's social function is meant to be, and what the clear consequences of how it is organised will be for its actual output. Typically this will work by having some characters act as avatars for the readers' knowledge, typically low level workers who can see how to get the task done and would happily do it if left alone. But there will be rules, often embodied and enforced by a worthless middle manager, which systematically stymie the characters in simply doing the work. The gap between the theoretical ease of solving the problem and the actual difficulty of making anything happen lets comedy bloom, the association between bureaucracy and instrumental rationality subverted.

The third type I call the Depth Comedy, where the basic joke is the gap between the image of rationalised competence bureaucracies try to project versus what it is like to actually work in them. The most famous examples of this in the UK are Yes Minister and its spiritual sequel In The Thick of It (American readers might be more familiar with the excellent film In The Loop, which was basically an adaptation of the Thick of It). I would also add that in its comedic aspects this is what Man Men was doing. To set up the joke here you need a bureaucracy which has some sort of clear outward facing surface level, then a behind-the-scenes inner working. The audience should be familiar with the latter, and the humour takes place by showing you the former. Invariably we find is the rules and regularity of the surface are backed up by nothing at all if you scratch just an inch beneath. A friend of mine once described the premise of Man Men as "The people who give the things in our life meaning are making it all up" and that seems right, and for Depth Comedies to work you have to get a general sense that this process of making it up is itself absurd, or pathetic. Our association between bureaucracy and regular rule governed order subverted.

The fourth and final type is the one my own shorts most often draw upon, the Tonal Comedy. For a piece of tonal comedy to work there has to be discordance between the vibe or tone of activities within the office versus the actual thing the office does when it operates in the world. (Catch-22 is clearly also doing this.) The source of humour in Tonal Bureaucracy comedies is that the inner workings of a bureaucracy may be totally tonally opposite from the social function of the bureaucracy. Think of "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here -- this is the war room!" from Dr. Strangelove, or the incredibly sinister yet entirely benign "Division 14" from Lower Decks. So in my stories the joke is that you have people trying to do utilitarianism but for murder, and their way of achieving that is a bunch of chipper young grads running a sleek modern office complete with power-point-presentations galore, and all the while praying to Khorne that the blood may flow and skulls be piled atop the throne. Absurdity is found in the contrast between what we do and how we organise ourselves to do it. Our association between the nominal purpose of the bureaucracy and its actual operation is what is undermined.

These are, of course, not pure types to be kept forever separate. I already mentioned that Catch-22 crosses the streams. For some other examples, the British version of The Office admixes the second and fourth type -- the most common joke is a riff of the fact that Tim is a basically normal guy stymied by his boss' midlife crisis on the one hand and his absurd colleagues on the other. But also there is a running theme that even in the best of cases he and Dawn are still fundamentally wasting their lives by being here, since what the company does is itself not worth doing when compared with their aspirations to pursuing art or psychology. That is to say, the Tonal Comedy means that their inauthenticity is a source of melancholy humour. Whereas, after the first series, the American version leans more into admixing the first and second types. Jim and Pam have a similar decent-people / awful boss situation going on, but there as the series goes on it becomes a much more significant source of humour that the office place is an absurd world unto itself within which one finds joy by treating it with irony. Something to be said about the UK-US political and cultural differences behind this shift!

But even if these are not separate, I still think it helps me understand the lay of the land by thinking of these as different poles or axis around which bureaucratic comedies can be arranged. Someone should find a way to make this into a neat little 4 by 4 table!

I am starting to be able to populate this website with art I commissioned and I am basically just so happy with this. Thanks to all the amazing artists out there for being willing to do this for me, I am having so much fun!

For some reason I have found myself lately far far more invested in fic writing and world building than actually building up my little guys. It's made me realise that this generally seems to be cyclical. Sometimes my modelling and painting outpaces my writing and imagining, and then I want to catch up. I am sure that eventually I will want to start building models to correspond to the things I make up in my silly little stories. I wonder if this is a normal hobbying cycle for other people who do homebrew stuff in 40K?

I just watched this nicely done YouTube video on Khorne and his ideology. I liked it! Since my little guys are all Khornites I just thought I would link here and say why I thought it was good.

There's a persistent tendency among 40K fans to want their faction to be, actually, really, secretly, the good guys. Sure sure it's a GrimDark setting, but.... my little guys actually have very good reason for slaughtering an entire planet's worth of people! And to some extent, sure; they're your little guys, theme them as you will. More generally - this is a hobby comprised mostly of grown men playing with toy soldiers, some degree of being silly and following your imagination to your heart's content is the name of the game. But personally, for my tastes, this can all go too far and often interfere with what I like best about the setting. To me it really adds to the feel of the thing that there are no actually good factions here (there's maybe a case you can make for the Farsight Enclaves, fine. Even then it is dubious, and depends a lot on the writer!) and I wouldn't want it any other way. Just a matter of taste, of course, but this is my hobby site so my taste reigns supreme!

Whatever the merits of the argument about the setting in general, one might think that when it comes to worshipers of Satan-in-his-aspect-of-mass-murderer specifically such nuances would not arise. Surely this is about as clear cut a case as you could want, right? Well, surprisingly not! Because there is a persistent fan read of Khorne out there that actually Khorne is a bit more reasonable than one might think. He's rewarding honourable warriors in a wargame! Unlike the other Chaos gods he's not out here trying to trick you, it's pretty much what you see is what you get: do war stuff, he will make you more powerful and able to do more war stuff. You want power, he wants war stuff, win win! And so an honourable warrior champion has a pretty strong case for going Khornite, right? Maybe he's not such a bad guy!

So, yeah, I hate that. Mostly for the reasons outlined in the video, which you should listen to in full! But I will briefly summarise as: Khorne shows every sign of just wanting you to kill more people. All that honour stuff seems to be something that people who worship him tell themselves, and sometimes build up elaborate cults and ideologies around it. But Khorne himself would be just as happy if they were simple mass murderers as he is for honour duels and rules of engagement. In fact in so far as rules of engagement prevent you killing more people then he doesn't like them! About the nearest you ever get is: Khorne seems to have a preference for, like, bigger more epic combat. So if you could have had a more equal fight with a rival army but you instead chose to be sneaky and go murder an orphanage, Khorne is gonna be a bit displeased; you dodged the fight you should have had, and Khorne hates people dodging fights. But, I dunno, "small children are relatively low on his target priority list" is hardly a ringing moral endorsement!

What I will say, though, is that it does connect up with something I do like about the setting, and which I hope my murder-utilitarians of the Sanguinary Utnapishtim embody. Namely, the Chaos gods are such that you can predictably learn how to gain their blessings, favour, and disfavour. The setting only works cos lots of people do! And of all the Chaos gods Khorne is in this respect the most straightforward; he has fairly simple goals and fairly simple means of rewarding/punishing people who fall under his attention. But. None of the gods are fully transparent in why they are doing this, so it's very possible to induct the wrong rule from your own track record.

A warrior says "I dedicate this most honourable combat to Khorne" and then slays the rival clan's champion in a fair one-on-one fight. As a result he gets some sort of appreciable boost in his strength or durability. He concludes that Khorne likes his upright behaviour and martial code. So he makes sure to keep his strict code of honour and study his martial forms, which incidentally just generally makes him a better fighter and war leader more generally, leading to a cycle of getting ever more rewards from Khorne. What is more, since his martial code emphasises bravery and willingness to stand up and fight, one time he has a student run away from a fight, and Khorne visibly strikes them down for this violation of the honour code! From his point of view, it seems like he has a good theory of Khorne, because he is able to predictably attain Khorne's blessings and track Khorne's displeasure. But, of course, Khorne just likes that he is a warrior who does a lot of fighting and killing and teaches others to do the same. And he was angry at that student just for avoiding a fight, due in this case to cowardice but Khorne would have disliked it if he had avoided the fight because he felt the victims didn't deserve it. If the initial warrior had been a really successful serial killer specialising in decapitating the elderly he may well have been able to get not so dissimilar results.

This is just an instance of what philosophers call the problem of induction; for any finite set of observations there are always many mutually inconsistent theories that could explain them. I think this allows for fun theming of one's Chaos cults without having to actually make Khorne a reasonable and just god. Your little guys think so and maybe even condition their behaviour on that; but it's just an inductive failure.

Anyway my guys basically think he is an effective altruist but for stabbing, so, like, no excuse for them.

I just read quite a fun book on the Tau Empire. Certainly among the better of the 40k books, a sort of political thriller set on a world the Tau are trying to incorporate into their empire. It had lots of interesting little worldbuilding points, which I summarised in a Reddit post. Cross linking here since it is very much on theme!

Since I posted a while back about the depiction of combat in the 40kverse I thought I should give a shout out to the recent Amazon Prime TV show, Secret Level. It had an episode based upon Space Marine 2. Not exactly high art, or especially complex. But, credit where it's due, the depiction of Astartes in combat was stylistically well done. (As everyone has noted, you can really feel the influence of Syama Pedersen's style in particular, so special shout out to him.) You can watch a short clip here. What I think it does well is depict the sort of uncanny nature of Astartes - they move far too quickly and far too precisely for anything so big and bulky. It's unnerving, in just the way that I think it ought to be.

A core feature of the 40k universe (and in fact GW's other settings too) is that each of the four humours has their own evil deity that just wants to make everything terrible. There is Khorne, the god of being super angry all the time and murdering everyone about it. There is Tzeentch, the god of being super sneaky and treacherous and scheming for the sakes of changing things for the sakes of more scheming (and magic). There is Nurgle, the god of being chill to a fault, like to a never washing and accepting whatever diseases you get (loving them, in fact) and general entropic decay. And there is Slaanesh, god of excess in all its forms -- typically depicted as sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, but really can be anything taken to an extreme form, perfectionism of a certain fucked up form. Many antagonists are people who worship these gods; variously portrayed as deluded fools, flat out crazy people, desperate people who had nothing left to lose, people trying to bargain for power, or idealists who under-estimated the cost of their ambitions. Lots of ways of accidentally worshiping Satan in the 40k verse, grim dark indeed.

But since nobody has ever accused GW of excess originality, one often finds similar themes and imagery explored in other works. This got me thinking: what fictional media best portrays what-I-think-it-would-be-like to be in a cult dedicated to one of these gods? Other than in sources from GW explicitly trying to depict that... though honestly with one exception I think all of the below probably do better than any GW source even besides that. Here are my takes!

Ok most immediately what sparked this is I just watched Arcane (series 2) -- for which spoilers incoming; in fact, any media mentioned in this post will be spoiled -- and I thought it had a great depiction of Tzeentch corruption. In that show ambitious idealists think they can safely harness the power of magic to change their world for the better. Gradually they find they are embroiled in various schemes which they justify to themselves as necessary for the greater good of the change their magitek could bring, until eventually one of them goes full on creature-of-the-arcane and decides the setbacks are caused by human nature per se, which must therefore be magically perfected. The aesthetic is vibrant yet disturbingly uncanny, the motivating source is ambition and a desire for extreme change, the two magic users start off as allies but inevitably end up turning on one another, and we even get a multi-eyed bird in the final sequence for good measure. 9-fold blessings upon House Talis!

The image macro is my choice for Khorne. Immortan Joe is a roided out (... kinda, he's sorta faking it...) warlord who has started a warrior-personality-cult founded on control of the resources necessary to carry out warfare. He seems to have done this by just mishmashing together various aspects of past warrior cults and societies, and his men go into a battle fury when they think a glorious death is possible. They seem like a fairly uncomplicated bunch, fitting for an uncomplicated god. Witness these skulls!

Ok kinda cheating for Slaanesh because it's more the other way round, but... it's gotta be the Cenobites, right? Humans turned into demonic beings because they pursued sensual excess to such a point that the distinction between pain and pleasure stopped meaning anything, just the fact that it was an extreme feeling is enough? Kinda weirdly sexual but not in a sexy way, more in a horrifying way? Clearly the Hellraiser series was authored by some sort of time-travelling IP thief who saw the Slaanesh aesthetic and went and wrote it up in a just enough to be legally distinct fashion. Only explanation. They have such sesnations to show you!

So it's time for the one exception. The official Black Library book Lords of Silence actually gives a pretty interesting depiction of a Nurgle aligned group. From the outside they are horrifying, and we see the process of some poor chap becoming one of them. But we also see that from their perspective they are just preaching a kind of stoic acceptance of the universe, and it's not really out of malice - if anything they think you stand to gain from embracing their doctrine, body-horror and all. It's fun! So on this one I actually think GW are the best source. But if I had to pick from non-GW... er, it's actually pretty rare? Without it really being any particular faction therein you could kinda see the setting of the game Pathologic as a nice depiction of a place falling to Nurgle, so let's say that. Plague awaken here!

It seems like it's been a long time between updates, but actually as I get closer to sharing this place with other people I have just deleted a whole bunch of posts I wasn't happy with! This is such a very nerdy project, even for me, that I got a bit self-concious. Eek!

A common form for lore - fictions or fanworks or etc - to take, in the 40k fandom, is what people refer to as "bolter porn". This is fairly lavacious descriptions of sci fi action scenes. Lavish descriptions of bodies torn apart as the muzzle flash of bolt guns firing into them shed a near erotical light on the whole scene. To a certain extent, I get it: this is a war game, presumably people interested in it are interested in depictions of combat. It seems about as safe a presumption of common interest as the writers can make. The problem is that it is almost always incredibly boring.

This is certainly not because I am uninterested in science fiction action! I often tell people I think the trench run sequence of A New Hope is just about perfect cinema. Starship Troopers, Aliens, Terminators 1 & 2, and Predator, all rank among my favourite films. And it is not even just when visually displayed. The battle of Yonkers in the book version of World War Z is, I think, masterfully done stuff. As is the Thunderchild's engagement in War of the Worlds. And later in this post I will be able to name some examples of 40k bolter porn done well. But despite my appreciation of the genre there is no denying that the vast majority of what I read in 40k fiction is just incredibly dull. I genuinely find myself just skipping sections rather than have to put up with 10 more paragraphs of "And then Honour Capitain Bigus Dickus bravely shot a gun that went pew pew in a manly way, the lithe eldar bodies exploding around him in a shower of not-semen." I get it. So short reflections here on what makes this work well and why it usually falls flat.

Obviously part of the issue is just that most writing is bad. That's just the way of things. Most of everything is bad. Everything I do is bad, so I can hardly cast any stones here. So it goes. I do think there are issues even on top of that.

Related to the above there are also certain obvious rules of good writing that are all too frequently violated. Why, after all, do Predator or Aliens or cetera work so well? In very large part because you are attached to the characters and their situation. I often say that the lightsaber duel between Vader and Luke in Return of the Jedi is my favourite lightsaber fight in the entire Star Wars franchise. (Yes yes the hallway scene in Rogue One and parts of the duel of the fates in Phantom Menace -- come on, it drags a bit -- are also good.) Clearly it is not the most acrobatic or visually exciting, far from it. But the moment it represents -- seeing how for all Luke's training and development to this point Vader is still able to near effortlessly tear him down -- is powerful, the characters and their struggle and the narrative revelation it represents have all come together to make this more than just swords clashing. Think of Inyigo Montoya's last duel in Princess Bride! Or - and I can't believe I am saying this - Puss in Boots' final duel with the Wolf in his recent film. (Those examples might give the impression this takes a lot of work to build up but I do not think so: via some quite simple expedients both duels in The Buried Giant feel impactful, despite the characters only recently having been introduced in the first case.) All too often the 40k books fail to do this basic thing, actually make me care about the situation before throwing me into it.

I can actually think of an example of combat in 40k verse done well with this in mind. Towards the end of Valdor (mentioned below! Some spoilers following) we see one of the disaffected former soldiers of the unification wars step up to battle a newly unleashed Astartes. For obvious reasons things do not go well for him. But the brief exchange feels meaningful because you have come to understand him and his perspective up to this moment, and it even feels somewhat glorious that he should manage what he does in his futile raging against the light's fading. Likewise the last thunder-warrior's duel with Valdor himself. That book in general was much better written than is typical in these cases so perhaps it is not to be found surprising.

But while that can be interesting I feel as if the main use of combat in written media has to be setting establishing. The Battle of Yonkers contains relatively little description of, like, actual combat. But it doesn't need to in order to be thrilling. Because by telling us how the government was trying and failing to contain the crisis we are learning very important things about the setting. You see the tragedy not just as a local disaster but as the true herald of catastrophe that it is meant to be. We learn about mindsets and come to see consequences as inevitable and those are what really sustain our interest, the combat is just one means among many to do this. (It has points in common with well written sex scenes here. Of course the erotic thrill may be reward enough, but even where that is not really the focus if done well they can still be worth the read for what they tell us.) If your setting is worth learning about at all then this can be an exciting way to do that.

All too rarely this is a virtue which good 40k books manage to attain. Once again the Valdor book manages this with the doomed former soldier's recollections of first seeing a Custodian do battle. I reproduce a quote here:

Achilla even saw one of them once, from a distance. He should have been concentrating on his own fighting – advancing up the course of a dried-out irrigation canal to assault a derelict pumping station – but once you caught a glimpse of one of those golden devils, everything else seemed slightly pointless. He’d used his old augmetics to get a better view, and so from a range of almost three kilometres he’d watched the whole thing unfold.

He couldn’t even count the number of enemies that it had killed. He couldn’t even really see how it was doing it, the pace was so fast. The devil wasn’t using a gun, like anyone sensible, but some kind of electricity-wrapped spear. It was carving through solid stone, slashing through the masonry as if it weren’t there. A rusty old tank was kicked over – kicked over – and then pulled into shreds of burning metal.

Achilla found himself appalled. That level of naked power was… unfair. There could be no enjoyment in it. There was no chance that the other one might strike a lucky blow. There was no indication at all that any money was changing hands with those things, which was an aberration – fighting for its own sake, without a decent reward for services rendered, was the most perverse inclination of all.

So he’d turned the augmetic off, and got back to what he was supposed to be doing. And yet, he never forgot. In the cities, they were flying those eagle-head banners and celebrating the return of civilisation, but out there, in the deserts and the ruins, at the sharp end, monsters were being set loose. It didn’t matter that they were clad in gold and crimson, that they looked like something noble and refined, because nothing noble and refined could do those things. It was a sham, and Achilla knew all about those, because he’d been on the other end of them more often than not

Of course tastes vary and maybe the full context is needed to appreciate it, but for me this worked well. And it worked despite the fact that you get very minimal description of any actual fighting. But you don't need to, learning about Achilla's emotional reaction to what he saw, knowing as the scene emphasises that it is not as if this is a sentimental man, tells you more interesting information than any detailed blow-by-blow would. (There is a moment in Unremembered Empire wherein you see Guilleman respond to an ambush that does something similar - we get a description of the combat, but what makes it actually interesting is learning about how he thinks about the situation. There is also a haunting descent into madness rendered quasi-literal a la Heart of Darkness in the sequence wherein the protagonist fights his way back into his old home in Twice Dead King.) Good descriptions of combat can be just as character establishing and world building as descriptions of combat or conversation or architecture.

So anyway those are my somewhat basic thoughts. Of course the basics of good writing need to be in place for fight scenes to work, and all too often isn't. And yes work needs to be done to make us actually care about the people and situation at issue, and all too often isn't. But most of all I think what makes written combat interesting is that it tells us something about the setting or people therein, we actually learn something. The combat is a medium for more than just the thrill of a well described action-packed sequence of events. While I have tried to do this in my own writing for the middle chapters of The Disaster at Mot, I must admit I probably failed. But I have the excuse of being an amateur! All too often bolter porn produced by Black Library books also doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know, it feels all too much like pure filler, like the writer is being paid per word. Ironic that this should be my final complaint, given the length of this very post!

So I just finished reading Warhawk and I really liked it. In particular I found the characterisation of Khan fascinating. Two things I particularly liked about it:

1.The contrast between his outward demeanour and what we see of him when he is talking to close confidants or thinking to himself. Outsiders to the legion consistently treat the Chogorians as backwards and savages. Conversations are hampered by a language barrier, and even given that the Khan is often taciturn or brusk. But the book gives us access to his more private moments and he's actually introspective and wise, he thinks seriously about the nature of war and what martial valour must be to be separate from bloodlust, what it is they are fighting for, and even the metaphysics of the world around him. He uses the reputation for savagery strategically (e.g. to extort the Martians into building him better ships) but ultimately you get the impression of a very cultured and even somewhat jovial man.

2. He is very clear eyed about the Imperium and the Emperor. Much of the book is about ideological fights re the Imperial Truth and its role in the Great Crusade. You get the impression that Jaghatai signed up only because he realised resistance was futile and is always ultimately concerned to preserve Chogorian culture, that he foresaw the problem with trying to impose the Imperial Truth given that it was false and demonstrably so, and that he was perfectly willing to take the Chogorians and cut and run from the Imperium if it looked like they were going to try to seriously impose Terran rule upon them. Too often otherwise intelligent characters seem to just buy into the whole definitely-not-a-God-emperor-but-also-you-have-to-kill-anyone-who-defies-me-and-conquer-the-galaxy-in-my-name thing far far far too easily. So I enjoyed this.

But the most interesting aspect of the book to me is you get the sense that Chogoris had a cultural tradition of dealing with the warp but not-going-too-far that had allowed them to avoid the worst problems of Old Night while still allowing them to deploy Stormseers very effectively. But because they have a reputation as unsophisticated (the contrast is made with both the highly refined Blood Angels and also... just... Magnus) nobody takes them seriously when they try to push for their ways to be adopted. So even though I like characteristics 1 and 2 it means there is still something tragic and flawed about him. The tool he uses to keep himself distant from the Imperium and protect Chogoris from Terran domination is ultimately what stops him from being an effective ambassador on the key issue which ended up damning the whole enterprise. Given the role of religious tradition in managing the warp for the Blood Pact, I am trying to incorporate some of these ideas into stories I am writing.

So you end up with a cool character whose virtues are intertwined with vices in such a way that his enterprise is ultimately doomed. You see how you end up with 30k turning into 40k, but without having to give Jaghatai the idiotball or the magic artefact of badthink, instead making his mistakes understandable. Wish we got more like this!

If you didn't watch it when I was out I highly recommend Arcane. It was very good. Here's something that I took away from it that I would like to recreate.

One of the core plot threads of Arcane's first series follows the political shenanigans of various squabbling Higher Ups in the central location of the show, Piltover. But most of the rest of the show focuses on the strivings and aspirations of people from the under-city, an oppressed and poverty striken district neighbouring and governed by Piltover. What this allows for is something that I found very powerful: the under-city characters are obsessed with, absolutely constantly thinking about and planning around, Piltover and how it relates to them. But the Piltover political leaders? They barely care. For them it's just Tuesday. Don't get me wrong, they do sometimes discuss the under-city. But their entire framework for this is seeing them as a security threat to be contained; none of the dramas and dreams we see play out among the central caste register as anything worth caring about.

As a way of depicting oppression I found this wonderful. The people of Piltover aren't even malicious - they just don't care. They got their own thing going on, the under-city just doesn't come up in their daily lives that much, and when it does its just as a source of crime or terrorism. Nothing in their world prompts them to think about it more than this so they just kinda don't. In that way you have this wonderful city of normal, often even kind, people filled with advanced technology and strong capacity to do good existing side by side with squalor and misery; and it scarce occurs to anyone that it might be another way. (Now events of course transpire to shake this situation up but... watch the show!)

This to me is a kind of profound GrimDark, a situation that isn't hopeless but makes you lose hope in humanity precisely because despite that nothing actually gets better. I hope to explore this angle in a future story.

Just finished the above named book and it's amazing. Genuinely a higher quality of writing than I thought possible from a Warhammer book. It manages something many fail to achieve - without making Valdor and his cause entirely unsympathetic, it doesn't make the imperium "the good guys" either. It's a more tragic tale on GrimDark and I absolutely love it. Showing that it achieves GW's real purpose it even made me sympathetic to collecting Custodes! The characterisation they receive here is fascinating and deep.

Anyway if you're the kind of person who enjoys this stuff and haven't already read it I can't recommend more

After some difficult times over the holiday I am finally back to doing what I care about. Writing weird lore! I will say that the Warhammer 40k community has been very welcoming and fun community to me. I have had lovely chats about lore and the game on Reddit, and there is a WhatsApp group for people who play in my area that is nothing but good natured fun. Needless to say when I meet up with people it has been lovely too. It makes it all the more puzzling that 40k on Twitter is so contentious and sometimes, like, a bit Nazi? Something a bit off in how Twitter cultivates communities methinks.

The 40k franchise is iconically "grimdark" - in the grim darkness of the future there is only war, after all. It's a core part of what attracts many to the franchise, and generally something fans think we should fight hard to preserve. I also like that it is a bleak pessimistic universe, so I am ok with that (I am also a Star Trek fan, so this rather balances things out in my life, keeps me centred.) But I find I consistenly have a slightly different relationship to this set of genre conventions compared to many others in the fanbase.

I think there are two main reasons for this, the first of which is not so deep. This first point is just that: part of this grimdarkness has always been silly, and that tends to lower the stakes. As I mention in the backrground page, the not very self-serious comedic side of 40k is basically all my favourite parts.

The other reason though is somewhat more philosophical. Basically it comes down to what I think makes for a genuinely bleak setting. I think that relentless misery actually undermines this, that grimdark is best achieved through contrast. If things are just totally bad in every way then it lessens my capacity to see or experience something as tragic. After all if we say farewell to hope we also thereby say farewell to fear. If things are genuinely relentlessly awful no matter what then why not just shoot yourself? The characters come to seem like they are just wasting my time by going on living.

My go to example from the lore is always the Gaunt's Ghosts series - one thing I think Abnett is quite right to do is generally depict Tanith (in what little we see of it) as a generally pleasant place. Far from perfect, it was poor and a bit of a backwater with a serious criminal underworld. But also a democracy with a generally good standard of living. And far from making the series less grimdark, that makes it far more tragic! If Tanith was just another Imperium hellhole then there would be nothing to mourn in its passing, no sense of loss whatsoever. True darkness requires light by way of contrast, if only to snuff it out.

To me that is a kind of grimdark that is relatively under-explored in the 40k verse. Very often lore focuses on basically decent people crushed by systems much vaster and less caring than them, whose upper echelons tend to depraved cruelty. That can be fun! But the good thing about a Galaxy-wide setting is that it's big enough to contain all sorts, within the broad constraints of grimdark pessimism at least. And at some point I'd like to use my little corner of this galaxy to explore a tragedy that is more existential, in the sene of centered on the consequences of free human choice; a situation that could have been beautiful, but people have somehow conspired to destroy it.