No, they explicitly are not. They’re genocidal fascists. The central conceit of the setting is that there’s no “good faction,” just various competing flavors of “unbelievably fucked up.”
No, the xenophobia came straight from the Big E. Before he was stuck on the throne, he launched a galactic crusade to purge it of non-human intelligences. He’s personally responsible for literally thousands of genocides.
What he did fight against in the Imperium, and fail spectacularly, was religion. Part of his Grand Design was getting humans to “evolve” beyond the need for religion, and instead he became the focal point for more religious sentiment than any other being in the history of the galaxy.
The problem with that is that there’s a giant warp portal on Earth that’s being held shut by an act of will by the Emperor. If he dies, it snaps open and consumes every soul on Earth. This is on top of the billions of additional deaths that would be caused by the warp suddenly being unnavigable because the astronomicon shut off.
Also, this might make the Emperor ascend into a fifth chaos god, where he’d immediately pull a Slaanesh on the rest of humanity.
I thought the Big E’s goal was to re-unite human worlds after the Age of Strife. If they ran into xenos they didn’t necessarily kill them. More like, join our empire or I shoot you in the face kinda thing. Not great but also not meant to be a galactic genocide (and, of course, there were some xenos they could not purge despite trying like the Orks).
ETA: To be fair the “join or we shoot you in the face thing” was also the deal offered to recalcitrant human worlds. Join or die. That’s the offer.
No, he was full-on “This galaxy is for humans only.” Specifically, “This galaxy is for humans who recognize me as their Emperor.” He also genocided plenty of human societies during his Grand Crusade, if he decided they were too divergent to join the Empire.
People try to defend E-man by claiming that the aliens he fought were bad enough to justify the Imperium’s actions, but even if that’s true of the big species of the setting - Orks, Dark Eldar, Tyranids, etc - it’s also stated that there are thousands of worlds with unique species on them, species that aren’t important enough to get a 40k army because they don’t control thousands of worlds across the galaxy but they still exist in lore, and the Imperium wiped out those species too.
But the thing was, it used to be full of tongue-in-cheek references to other sci-fi and lots of other silly stuff. Ever notice that the Catachan Jungle Fighters (a Guard regiment) all look like little Rambos? Or that the Death Korps of Krieg look like WWI soldiers? Or all the blue collar British silliness of the Orks? Or that the Blood Angels are space vampires? Space Wolves are space Vikings? Or just the ridiculous numbers/conditions they throw around? It was always satire and absurd, at least early on.
I started with GW stuff in about 1997-1998, and kept up through about 2001, when living in Dallas and having a real job made it too difficult to keep up with my friends in Houston. I played the Dawn of War games on the PC, but that was it for a long time, only getting back into the lore and stuff with the advent of Space Marine on PC some years ago.
And there’s been a definite shift toward taking itself more seriously than there used to be.
Is that really a Warhammer thing in particular, or a general cultural shift? Superhero media takes itself a lot more seriously too, nowadays.
I was going to ask if anyone knew whether the recent movie Battleship took itself seriously or not before realizing that it is in fact nearly 15 years old.
My only recent experience with WH40k is the wonderful Mechanicus turn based game released… (checks) in 2018, and it felt like things were very much tongue in cheek and not taken very seriously.
I wonder how much of Henry Cavill’s concern is legitimate versus a promoting schtick. Warhammer fans know corporate suits will mess it up and Henry is a popular actor well known for respecting the source material (The Witcher). I think him kicking up a fuss in public about the IP will have the intended affect of more people seeing this. Either way, I am with Cavill, if this is going to suck let it suck the proper Warhammer way.
Yes. Some are more human than others, some choose to retain a lot more of their humanity, others replace so much of themselves with augmetics that they barely qualify, but being as AI is Heretek, they do HAVE to remain human (at least their brain).
Absolutely. The ONLY factions devoid of females are Astartes (males only), Orks (asexual fungus beings that act like roided-up football hooligans), and maybe Tyrannids because they are so alien it’s hard to say.
Women in 40K are generally equal in power or standing to men; in general, with as much death and destruction as there is in-universe, it has become a practically perfect meritocracy just out of necessity.
I feel like I should post this again as I see people asking if Henry Cavil is racists or sexist due to my poorly worded post even after I posted a more accurate post on the matter. As far as I know Henry seems like a genuine cool dude who geeks out over some of the same stuff I geek out over.
(Of course with my luck, tomorrow he will be revealed to be in he Epstein files and I will be a giant asshole defending the undefendable.)
I wonder if it might behoove a TV series to go back to the traditional fantasy names for the xeno races that GW used before they started wanting to trademark everything, and just call them dwarves.
