Warhammer 40%

Consume content, and get excited for gay content.

It was inevitable; the walls of the fortress are breached, and there are girls in the treehouse.

The dread of this inevitability is not something I empathize with, but I do understand why people feel it. Although we reject most things progressive, many of us are still progressives when it comes to entertainment. We always need something new and cannot accept a terminus for our Favorite Thing™.

I haven’t played Warhammer 40K since Seventh Edition nor bought any (new) miniatures since, mostly because every edition since has been garbage. Many older players will say that Seventh is also garbage, which is completely fair. But my point is not which edition is best, but that the changes Games Workshop has made have successively decreased my interest in anything “new” in 40K. Combined with the terrible rules changes are the terrible lore changes that tend to accompany progressive infiltration of institutions. These are not ideological changes, but genuinely just bad storytelling decisions, as we’ve seen in Star Wars and every other fantasy setting at this point. There are precursors to the actual ideological decisions, as the dilettantish nitwits of writers play out their personal fanfics in the 40K setting.

In Warhammer 40K, I will note specifically the resurrection of the Primarchs as a terrible element of writing. After their Age of Sigmar reboot of Warhammer Fantasy, it was obvious that the return of Primarchs was another attempt at rebooting a franchise after the disaster that was the Age of Sigmar reboot. This time, rather than a hard reset, they went for a soft reset by essentially rebooting back to a “30K” setting without actually retconning anything. If you have no idea what I am talking about, don’t worry, because this is the end of the 40K lore section of the article. The point is that these storytelling decisions detract from the overall narrative of the fantasy setting. It would be like a writer bringing back Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars as a villain, not because it made any sense, but just because they thought he was cool. Oh, wait, that actually happened…

Predictably, now that these buffoonish writers are finished making their bad fanfic part of the lore, it’s time to introduce Progress™ to the “fascist” Imperium of Man. Well, so what? Why do players need to care about this at all? I own all of the codices I need from the older editions of the game that contain the original, untainted lore and rules for the game. There is a massive library of novels written before Gamergate that are still accessible, if you are more interested in proper stories and not just “lore.”

Let them have their lame, incoherent wreck of a fandom while we enjoy the traditional excellence of Warhammer, and the other things. We don’t need their farce of 40K. Our 40K has such variety that even Elon Musk could not afford to purchase all of the miniatures produced before 2014. We don’t need the Fallout TV show, we don’t need House of the Dragon, and we don’t need whatever horrible nonsense they are going to do with James Bond.

It’s sad that we are in this situation. It’s not good, and we don’t have to like it, but maybe now is a good time to read some old Horus Heresy novels or get into the old Star Wars Expanded Universe. The less attachment we have for the new is for the better anyway, because when we win, their Gayhammer 40K books will be tinder for the pyre. To engage with the old takes more discipline, but with our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.