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40k is crazy good
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this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Back in my misbegotten youth, I was one of those insufferable WH40K fans who thought the Imperium of Man was awesome and TOUGH MEN DOING WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE and WHOA LOOK AT THE BADASS SUPERMEN MOWING DOWN THE ALIEN SCUM THAT MUST BE EXTERMINATED. This was also how most other fans I'd met engaged with it.
Grew up, realized how gross and fashy my thinking was, and now I can't disentangle the thought of enjoying the franchise from my early views on it.
It goes back and forth with the authors. A lot of their writers have also forgotten that the imperium is a turbo-nazi nightmare empire of unlimited suffering. Like in a good amount of media these days the eugenicist ubermensch super-soldier turbo-nazi genocide marines are depicted as clear good guys.
Kinda sucks.
Really, i think a lot of it is the world has moved so far from the 200ad satire of the thatcher era, and 40k has ossified with gw refusing to advance the plot for decades. So now 40k is a satire of a world that hasn't existed since half of it's players were born. They haven't updated it to mock starmer or sunak or trump, they haven't updated it to mock the neoliberal hollowing out of the uk or the "immigrant crisis" or the new alleged king. It's just grown out of the 80s and without that grounding in political and social satire it's run in to a wall: you can't tell compelling stories when everyone is a totally unlikeable asshole with goals that are stupid and suicidal (you can, i know. Asoiaf). So they want character growth and heroism and cool shit and whatever for their cool space guys, and slowly but inexorably the turbo-nazis become portrayed as the goodies.
Still love it, though. It's so gloriously stupid.
The mechanicus is a good example of how things changed - back in the day they were an insane cult devoted to stealing and hoarding all the technology they could. Experimentation and innovation where heresies that would get you killed. They believed the machine spirits were animistic spirts that inhabited machines. When they explicitly did not know how their technology worked and could only reproduce some of it by rote using truly ancient design documents. They prized STC diagrams above everything becuase the STC stuff was complete and actually workewd - they couldn't fix anything else and would kill anyone who tried. In modern stuff all their chanting and prayers are glossed as doing actual programming and engineering but they use religious terminology. Back in the day it really was useless, unproductive, time consuming religious prayer and ritual, a direct mockery of the bigotry, ignorance, and superstitions of the church.
Modern mechanicus build all kinds of wacky sci-fi technology, they have tons of exotic weaponry, war machines, and ships, they know how to work with their tech, they research, innovate, and improve. It's a complete 180 on their previous depiction.
Yes, this saddens me the most. I really loved one snippet of flavor text I read once where a tech priest is doing a sacred annual "chant of healing" on some piece of machinery, but the canny reader might notice it's actually the phonetic pronunciation of a command to activate its self-repair systems, and the "sacred balm" he applies is just engine lubricant, and so on and so on. Then when he's done with all the steps of the 'ritual', he sticks another purity seal to this enormous mound of them where countless priests, with equally little understanding of what they were actually doing, have performed the exact same 'ritual' for thousands of years - all to keep one ancient piece of equipment of unknown, maybe useless, function, turning over deep in the bowels of a grimy, rusted-out technological hellscape. It's compelling dark science fiction!
Now as you say, they're simply (much more marketable) wacky space inventors... truly, old good, new bad ๐
I imagine the backstory was changed specifically so that the Mechanicus could have it's own armies instead of just being the weird technical class of the Imperium. It's hard to build an entire army out of fanatics who know how to make toast but think the toaster has a toast spirit inside it that only makes toast when they sing to it.
In my defense, I never read an original piece of lore, just got all my info from people secondhand and played a bit of Dawn of War.
Gw's lore sucks anyway. The bonkers community stuff is much better.
Just browsing around Lexicanum is a good substitute for reading source material.
What growing up in a diseased western society that values fascism over solidarity does to a mfer.