Behind the Brush

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:

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.