Warhammer (TV show being produced for Amazon)

Cafe Society
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The actor Henry Cavill (perhaps best known in his roles playing Superman in the movies) is a super-nerd and happy to admit it. He was a driving force in getting the Netflix series “The Witcher” made where he played the lead character. After a few years he left the show over disputes about the accuracy to the source material. Cavill very much wanted the streaming series to be as faithful as possible to the source but the directors wanted to make it something else and Cavill left (replaced by Liam Hemsworth in the role).

Cavill’s next passion project is a live action series based on the Warhammer 40k universe (a game he enjoys playing). For those not familiar Warhammer 40k describes itself as “grimdark”…a bleak future where humanity is perpetually at war with various entities and on a galactic scale (that is the very short version).

I have long wanted such a series to be made but never trusted Hollywood to be faithful re-creating that universe. They almost always want to water it down (looking at you first Judge Dredd…second was much better but still not quite there), make it tepid, put some love-story in there or teen angst plot lines or personal drama among recruits and so on.

Warhammer is much more focused because it is the nature of that universe.

So, I am glad to see that Cavill, having learned some lessons from losing control over The Witcher, is working very hard to be sure this Warhammer is true to that universe. Often to details most would not notice (but fans of the games might). It gives me hope and I think, if he pulls off the grimdark, this could be a very successful show. :crossed_fingers:

According to CNews, Henry Cavill has been working tirelessly to get the scripts right for the Warhammer 40k series and has reportedly undertaken what has been described as “lore audits,” for which he personally reviewed “more than 300 individual lines of dialogue, terminology, and world-building detail.” So passionate about the series is Cavill that he is keeping an eye on everything from the scripts to the costumes, “verifying Space Marine chapter armor color schemes, cross-checking Imperial iconography, and ensuring the correct pronunciation of notoriously dense High Gothic terms like Adeptus Astartes.” Ultimately, the actor is doing everything he can to ensure that “nothing slips through.”

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The thing about WH40K is that it depicts a universe completely devoid of hope and morality, where the only virtues are toughness, viciousness and loyalty. The games fans are divided into three groups: those who take it at face value, those who treat it as satire, and those who critique it. So what kind of show is Cavill making? Is it just going to be “The Emperor protects! Burn the heretics!” with a straight face? Is it going to be a dark comedy - the same declarations, but with a smirk? Or is it going to be a show about people who are trying to fix their world and not just kill their enemies?

Based on my experience with fans of the game, I thing this is one case where a certain amount of studio interference is warranted. Straightforward Warhammer would be unwatchable to us normies.

3

That’s definitely putting it lightly. Here’s the less short version;

15,000 years ago, the space elves got so decadently horny that they collectively willed a god of lust into existence, and its birth caused a galactic cataclysm that resulted in the collapse of human civilization, which had by that point become an interstellar superpower. 5,000 years after that, an immortal human with immense psychic power who has existed since prehistory and was probably also Jesus Christ himself reunited all of humanity under his rule as Emperor of Mankind. Unfortunately, one of the clones of himself that he created to serve him betrayed him and mortally wounded him, which was a big problem because his will was the only thing maintaining the technology that mankind uses to be able to safely travel at FTL without accidentally opening a portal into Hell (yes, Hell is real), so his servants had to strap him into a giant life support machine deep below the surface of the hollowed-out city planet that used to be Earth.

That’s where he’s remained for the last 10,000 years, where he has come to be worshipped as a god (in spite of his wishes) by a techno-cult that conducts tens of thousands of sacrifices every day to keep him from dying. The entirety of human industry and achievement is bent toward perpetual war against everything else in the universe, including aforementioned space elves, giant spacefaring insects that eat entire planets, a sapient fungus that takes the form of big green orcs, space Communists who forcibly incorporate less advanced races into their own state in the name of “the greater good”, ancient machines that want to kill everything, and the elder gods that those ancient machines were built to fight against, not to mention the other humans who have been corrupted by evil gods or who just plain aren’t fanatical enough about the Emperor.

The average human being spends their entire life on a factory world working 18 hours a day making rivets for a type of battleship that hasn’t been manufactured for a thousand years until they die of miner’s lung at the ripe old age of 24, unless you’re “lucky” enough to be subjected to dozens of extremely painful surgeries to turn you into a ten-foot-tall fighting machine which, after you “die”, will be salvaged so that your brain can be stuck into the cockpit of a mecha so you can keep fighting until the technology to make the parts that keeps you alive gets lost because the planet it’s manufactured on fell into a portal to Hell or was eaten by said giant space bugs.

It’s “war never changes” turned up to 11,000.

IMO, something along the line of the Ciaphas Cain books would be the best way to go. Ciaphas Cain, for the unaware, is a political officer in the Imperial military whose job is essentially to get himself killed by his own men while trying to force them to get themselves killed, but whom through a combination of self-preservation, cowardice, and wit, manages to instead spend a career failing upward through the ranks of the Imperial military. It’s very Blackadder-ish.

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I dunno that it is so flat and un-interesting. Lots of characters have story arcs that are much more than go here, smash that, rinse and repeat in the name of the Emperor! Eisenhorn leaps to mind.

There is also political intrigue and faction in-fighting and sometimes the Imperium fighting itself.

IIRC the first season will be about the regular, human grunts (Imperial army) in Warhammer (doubtless with an Astartes making a cameo at some point).

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I dunno. I accidentally joined a bunch of WH40K Facebook groups a while ago, and I’ve learned that if you made a Venn diagram of Warhammer fans and MAGA… well, let’s just say that the two circles share more space than they don’t. A lot of those folk get really excited by the thought of killing xenos (aliens) and heretics.

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If it makes you feel any better, Games Worshop says that if you’re a Nazi they don’t want you playing.

There are no goodies in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

None.

Especially not the Imperium of Man.

7

That might be a bit too comedic and not really competent for Warhammer.

I am thinking more like Commissar Ibram Gaunt from Gaunt’s Ghosts who was very competent but a big part of it was his unrelenting focus on the goal. The guy just would not stop. Like a terminator but not a terminator (movie Terminator terminator).

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Can’t say I’m familiar with him, but the WH40K universe is so lore-rich that it’s hard to even know where to begin. (The Horus Heresy series is 65 books long, and I’m honestly not sure if it’s finished or not.)

I do think they really need to emphasize the satirical dark comedy aspects of the universe, though, lest it become yet more bait for the kind of chuds out there who fundamentally don’t understand subtext and whose opinion of WH40K is “Space Marines are so awesome and I wish I was one”.

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FWIW it is a series of books (of which there are a lot as you have noted) by the well regarded WH40K author Dan Abnett.

Gaunt leads this force of regular (not enhanced) soldiers in a campaign. Turns out he is good at it unlike many commissars who are failed-up political hacks but, like most commissars, won’t hesitate to shoot anyone not doing their duty. Discipline is brutal.

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Thats asking a lot of people who would happily tell you that ultramarines are called that because they are from Ultramar and not because their armour is blue.

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Excuse me, we’ve just seen through the corpse-emperor’s tissue of lies… can’t look at the Imperium and accuse US of corruption.

(can you tell who I play?)

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That’s probably more of a Facebook thing than a WH40K thing. Not that there aren’t problematic fans in 40K, but the fan base is pretty siloed, and if you wander into the wrong silo, you’re going to get a distorted view of what the game is. There’s lots of fan groups out there where you’d get the impression that the overwhelming majority of 40K fans are trans women who run tyranids painted pink, blue, and white.

13

That’s actually good to know.

14

That doesn’t sound like Warhammer at all!

I think you need a cynical main character, for sure.

Warhammer Fantasy seems like it would be much easier - the various ‘good guy’ nations are all heavily flawed but much, much, much better than the Empire of Man.

Maybe the story will follow a ragtag group of misfits with a spaceship who are neutral at best towards the Empire of Man, but that doesn’t feel like a very 40k story. Maybe some kind of Rogue Trader type? They have enough leeway that if one wanted to play at being a good guy, he could (although he’d be operating within a pretty evil system regardless).

That’s my impression as well. I know about the fasci WH40K players because of all the non-fasci WH40K players who routinely call them out. Everything from “normie” 40k fans who dislike fascists Emperor glazers in their hobby to far left types who passionately hold opposing views.

/r/sigmarxism comes to mind.

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I think they need to start with more “standard” WH40K stuff but, if the series is successful, a Rogue Trader spinoff would be very cool.

As an aside, the latest Rogue Trader PC game is a lot of fun. Not the best thing ever to hit the PC but it is a lot of fun IMO. I’d say worth it if it is on sale.

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I don’t know how appealing “standard” 40k would be to the average viewer, if by “average” you mean “epic large scale battles between space Marines and Orks or Chaos or Tyranids”. (Well, that last one is basically just Starship Troopers).

It would be weird for the PoV character to be a Space Marine or similar, and average humans are just canon fodder in this setting.

I think the show needs to be, for the most part, set off of a battlefield.

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I think I read the new series will start with Imperial Soldiers (cannon fodder guys). Probably an overbearing commissar to go along with it. I have no cite for that though. I could be wrong.

I think following an Inquisitor could be interesting (e.g. Eisenhorn).

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That could work, and it could also make sense for their superiors to be as big a threat to their lives as the Orks or Chaos or whatever else they’re fighting.

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The Ciaphas Cain novels would also be a good starting point. Cain is a commissar, who, despite being a self-described coward, keeps finding himself in heroic situations where he’s responsible for saving entire sectors from the various forces bent on eradicating humanity, when he’s actually just trying to save his own ass. He’s not a “good guy,” but his self-interest is a lot easier to relate to than the religious zealots that make up most of the Empire. Having a certain level of ironic detachment between the main character and the crazy fanatics surrounding him helps give the story a bit of distance from just being pro-Imperial propaganda.

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It’s going to have to be regular humans - they’re going to want some sort of romantic subplot, and unmodified humans the only option. Everyone else is either a eunuch, a warrior-monk, some variety of asexual, or a sex-crazed rapist.

(Warhammer, being British, is terrified of sex).