I don’t know if that’s true. My experience with the vast majority of 40k players in my face-to-face interactions has been overwhelmingly positive. The CHUDs seem to thrive online but I don’t run into them in the real world save for one so far. But then I find this true of gaming in general.
I’d guess the bulk of GW’s customers on the hobby side are in their 20s and 30s. I know I really couldn’t afford to build much in the way of an army until I was in my twenties. I quit playing for about 20 years not returning until COVID left me with nothing to do.
It’s as hobby with a lot of up front costs. Not only do you have to purchase the army itself, which is expensive, you’ve got to purchase paints, brushes, and other hobby supplies. And woe to you if you learn you don’t like to paint after you buy all that stuff. I started playing again in 2022, but after about three years I quit again. I didn’t mind paying for the models (mostly), but I got sick of feeling like I was being nickel and dimed with rulebooks that were sometimes invalid before they were released and a poor online infrastructure that made building a force for a game difficult. Even though I owned the books, I used pirated sources because it was so much easier than using GW’s official online tools.
A few years ago I happened to click on a Warhammer video on YouTube. Despite or maybe because of a never ending stream of WH40K , I just get more confused.
When the Emperor of Man decided it was a good idea to create a bunch of genetic freaks to defend humanity. And by defend humanity I mean enforce the Emperor’s will. These genetic freaks, mutants if you will, are taken as children, physically altered, brainwashed, and trained to become the loyal, dutiful slabs of meat we all know and love.
You also have abhumans which are offshoots of your basic model human being. Some of them are the result of living on isolated colonies for several thousand years while others are the result of deliberate experiments and/or breeding. Some of these abhumans, like Navigators, are sanctioned by the Imperium because they’re useful, while others are condemned and hunted for being dirty, filthy mutants.
TBF, Chaos, Orks, and Tyrannids aren’t things you can negotiate with or just reach a truce with. So that sort of attitude toward Chaos, Orks, and Tyrannids makes a lot of sense. But toward Eldar, Tau, and any other not insane or primal-type xenos, the Imperium should have a much more accommodating viewpoint.
But it’s part of the 10,000 years of stagnation since the Horus Heresy, as well as a certain dose of the Emperor’s own xenophobia that lumps everything that’s not 100% toe-the-line Imperium into the other bucket of “Kill on sight”.
As far as people taking the side of the Imperium as the “good guys”, I suspect it’s pretty simple. They’re humans, we’re humans, so automatically if we’re not obviously the bad guys, then we must be the good guys, right? Never mind that the game and lore point out that none of the factions are the good guys really. Some are just situationally less awful than the rest, while some are just universally awful.
The T’au are about as close to a “good” faction in the 40k universe and even they have their problems. They are just a little “less” bad than most anything else.
ETA: In the past (thousands of years ago) I think the Imperium did come across some really friendly xenos for for a hot minute they were ok with each other but then the Imperium killed them anyway. Maybe it was a human world that had managed to do well and become advanced after the Age of Strife and just wanted to be left to do their own thing and trade when re-discovered. I forget.
Chaos is supposed to be the Archenemy of man. They are, after all, the reason the Emperor sits on a golden throne. One of the reasons I say the Imperium is their own worst enemy is because their policies and practices only strengthen Chaos. The Imperium’s brutalization of their own people feeds the demonic powers of the Immaterium given those entities the power to enter realspace. And once those demons manifest in realspace, they’re able to offer humanity an attractive alternative to the misery and drudgery of the Imperium. If the Imperium lightened up a bit Chaos likely wouldn’t be as powerful.
You can’t really negotiate with the Tyrannids though. It’s eat or be eaten with those guys.
I’m sure. Like I typed earlier, when you walk into your local game store and see all the 40k stuff it’s heroic Space Marines, sometimes heroic fetish nuns, versus evil green skins, Terminator knock offs, Alien knock offs, or demons. You don’t really see how bad the Imperium is unless you start taking a dive into the setting.
What’s so bad about the Eldar? Sure, they broke the universe a little, but that was 15,000 years ago, and there has some sort of statute of limitations involved. What are they doing so bad now, besides trying their best to survive?
The Drukhari are the living embodiments of all that is wanton and cruel in the Aeldari character. Highly intelligent and devious to the point of obsession, these piratical people revel in the physical and emotional pain of others, for feeding upon the psychic residue of suffering is the only way they can stave off the slow consumption by the Chaos GodSlaanesh of their own souls. -SOURCE
What I wanna know is why Eldar think that calling humans monkeys is such a burn. Presumably they evolved from their own planet’s equivalent of a monkey, no? It’s not like they are lizard people or something. Are they really that much further removed from space monkeys than humans are from earth monkeys?
The Old Ones created the Eldar millions of years ago, near the beginning of the War in Heaven. They were bio-engineered as a weaponized, psychic race specifically to combat the Necrons and their C’tan masters.
How many humans are there? Hundreds of trillions? Quadrillions? More ?
What percent of them become the giant armoured guys and what percentage die as a part of an endless stream of pawns on a random planet? Is military service better than being lower class on a hive world?
That’s got to be far too many. I think the canon says there are something like “over a million worlds in the Imperium.” If you had 1.5 quintillion people that would be 60 million planets at 25 billion people per planet. That is way too far “over” to make sense.
And yes, some planets may have a lot more than 25 billion but most will not. I made up 25 billion as a guess to illustrate the point.
The numbers rarely add up when you’re talking about things at this scale in fiction. I saw an analysis awhile back about Star Wars that showed that Coruscant’s canonical population means it’s less densely inhabited than Manhattan.
On the one hand, you’re either a grunt whose lifespan can probably be measured in minutes, or you’ve been painfully and traumatically transformed into an asexual transhuman killing machine that will be forced to fight until your body is physically destroyed, at which point your brain will be wired into a giant mecha so you can be forced to continue fighting until the end of time or the tech-priests forget how to repair you.
On the other hand, you’re sharing a single-room flat with 15 other people, working 18 hours a day making parts for a kind of battleship that isn’t being manufactured anymore because the bureaucracy hasn’t caught up to the fact that the shipyard planet it was made on was devoured by Tyranids 600 years ago, until you die of black lung at the ripe old age of 23 and your corpse is either ground up to make feedstock for your fellow workers or turned into a lobotomized cyborg so it can keep laboring until it’s no longer cost-efficient to keep maintaining it.
Probably the best luck you could have (outside of being born into the aristocracy) is to be born on one of the low-tech worlds that the Imperium mostly leaves alone except to extract agricultural tribute.
I dunno. I think being a part of the military (not including Astartes or other elite military orders) is tolerable. The commissars are assholes and life is tedious and brutish. Not what anyone would call “fun.” But most troops will never see combat beyond maybe some local riots.
Heck, the vast majority of people in the Imperium have never seen an Astartes in real life. They are near mythical to the vast majority of people. If you do see one chances are things are about to get very bad for everyone.
What I am unclear about is how “good” the Emperor is (was/is?).
He is, by far, the most powerful human ever (except maybe chaos powered up Horus but the emperor won that one if only by a whisker).
The emperor seemed genuinely keen on improving humanity and stopping things like religion. But it seems he had extreme xenophobia. Kill everything not human.
I’m thinking it’s very Blackadder Goes Forth - hoping and praying that you never get sent into combat, because if you do, you’re DEFINITELY not coming out the other end intact.
