Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine
Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine
In order to make Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 enjoyable, Saber Interactive had to make the Space Marines less like …
That rambles on way too long, but it does make a salient point: Space Marines are weird and bad, and attempts to make them just big manly fighty dudes that grunt and fight instead of weird mutant battle-nerds suck and are bad. They shouldn't be relatable, they should barely be human, and they definitely shouldn't be "wot if ur normal soldier man was big and extra fighty?"
Not least of which because Orks already fill the niche of being big silly guys that like to fight.
I don't understand why people write like this. They've made their point in the first 3 paragraphs, and then it just goes on and on.
I think it needed better editing or organization. I just started skimming after the first page worth of text and there were some good points here and there, but it just meandered way too much. It needed to be pared down and condensed into the key points, cutting all the redundant bits and rambling.
This is why it is neigh impossible to parody fascism while making its footsoldiers protagonists. Someone will always identify with them.
Springtime For Hitler Online, maybe.
The way to satirize fascists is to make them stupid and incompetent. It's for this reason that the Nazis in the Indiana Jones movies are probably the only proper satirical portrayal of Nazis. It's that and the Three Stooges parody of Hitler and Mussolini. As we can see irl with Zionists, fascists revel in depravity. They do not give two shits that they are portrayed as inhuman because they fucking relish that shit with a shit-eating grin. But stupidity and incompetence? They hate being truthfully portrayed as the buffoons they are. Of course, space marines will never be portrayed as stupid and incompetent because who's going to blow their money buying overly priced figures of the stupid and incompetent faction?
Fascists believe in embracing contradictions, lies, and hypocrisy. They don't really believe in anything beyond base carnal urges. So it's basically impossible to criticize or mock them because they can just edit the version of reality in their brain to make them feel cool again. This is why you just need to bash them out of existence, there's no "owning" them, they just have to stop being.
I see more ironic and comedic 40K material than I see actual 40K lore these days. Fuck I made a 40K lore joke post on here not to long ago and it was received well.
My point is, while there are actual fascists attracted to 40K lore, I think the phenomenon is overplayed more than a little. Fuck there are fascists in the My Little Pony fandom, fash dorks will latch onto anything. I think most 40K fans these days are fully aware it's tongue-and-cheek nature. I really don't think people who like painting goofy miniatures of armored dudes wielding chainsaw guns are any more predisposed to fascism than anyone else.
I really don't think people who like painting goofy miniatures of armored dudes wielding chainsaw guns are any more predisposed to fascism than anyone else.
Have you actually participated in 40k games, especially ones in large shared areas with actual maps set out?
I played Orks for years in local venues. Of course not everyone was a fascist or even "ironically" a fascist (Tau players were generally cool), but it sounds like unobserved knee-jerk presumption to say that there's no difference between the general population's fascist density and that of those coming to such organized games with their SPEHS MEHREENS and telling players a table or two away that might have dyed hair or even a rainbow bracelet that they are (slurs) that should be exterminatus'd. That isn't something I've ever heard from the general population outside of such games or related online material.
As long as those chuds pretended it was "just kidding" or "just getting into the mood" the organizers wouldn't do anything. I think I saw one such fascist actually get kicked out, but that was mostly for throwing things and having a tantrum, not necessarily the part where he was telling a (slur) that they deserved to burn in holy Promethium.
Meanwhile you try any of that shit in any of the places near me and you'd be thrown out instantly and would definitely not be allowed back. I think as it is with most things it depends on where you are and what kind of community the location builds.
And yes I have played 40k on tables in game shops full of people who were probably chuds, and they kept their damn mouths shut because they just wanted to play and knew they wouldn't be allowed to if they started talking about anything other than the game.
Okay
what actual benefit is there to trying to downplay the issue? fascists aren't a target we should "lay off of". even when a space is devoid of them we should be vigilant and intolerant of their ideology and presence.
I'm all for chasing fash out of 40k, any My Little Pony, and the planet. I'm just saying I don't think there's anything inherent to 40k that makes it more attractive to fash than any other fandom. Fash are consumerist nerds, they'll glom onto anything. There are fash in the fucking Trek fandom for Christ sakes.
I continue to have no interest in WH40k
They have a space comunsit faction. They are based on anime and after they got too popular the company changed it from space comunists to it all being secret mind controll. So that is intresting a little bit. Othe than that you aren't missing much
Incredible
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Ugh, Warhammer is a friend’s special interest right now so I have to play this game with them so they won’t be suicidal.
For thr greater good tau'va
It's a cool game. No worries. I do get what the article says, though. The game does not adequately represent how awful the space marines are, even though it does show you that the empire sucks.
setting is cool and the game(s) are great, it just bothers me when people pretend it's perfect. It's cool in the way cyberpunk is cool in that you can kind of revel in the sci fi edgy fantasy vibes if you don't try to read into the lore or its implications
edit: the setting had enough in-universe support to genuinely play it without feeling like you're having your skull bashed in repeatedly with hitler propaganda, but the marketing and vibes are just bad without that context which is unfortunately the majority of people on earth
Darktide is the superior Warhammer game anyways. Who needs some dumb eight foot tall nerd wearing a tank as a business suit when you can play a 5' tall woman wearing a burlap sack, with the worst haircut you've ever seen, swinging a 6' long chainsaw around, who is diegetically too angry to die?
That's a really really long idealist article, that dosn't say much in the end and might have been much shorter if the author had a materialist perspective on fascism.
"idealism is when you dislike fascist ideas actually"
this is called vulgar materialism, don't do it. Also mentioning ideas is not the same thing as thinking the universe originated from or is dominated by ideas and is literally just not idealism
Yeah it's long but it's not the same thing
this is called vulgar materialism, don’t do it.
Can I still be vulgar while I do materialism though? I analyse better when I swear a lot.
I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that online leftists just can't help but hit a brick wall when it comes to 40k
The crux of all these satire arguments boils down to "make the satire MORE obvious, MORE cartoonish, eliminate all nuance or three dimensional character development and most importantly make it NOT FUN" and I always ask, WHY?
Yes the heroic, relatable, goofy ass space imperialists serve an evil empire that destroys whole worlds, all while quoting war poetry and the unity of humanity....and sometimes they crack jokes, there it is, we found your satire on the hypocrisy and mundane evil of imperialism, is that not obvious enough, does every character need to shout "I'm a fascist!" every other line?
Do they need to make space marines literal cannibalistic vampires who thirst for blood and eat civilians alive before the satire becomes acceptable for high culture lefties?......OH WAIT that's literally a quarter of the space marine chapters
Subversion and nuance are fine in anti-fascist satire, you don't need to drop an anvil on the setting to get the point across
Do they need to make space marines literal cannibalistic
They do canonically eat people's brains to steal their knowledge. That's canon, that's the actual lore. Space Marines literally eat people in the official lore books describing the things Space Marines do.
Yes the heroic, relatable, goofy ass space imperialists serve an evil empire that destroys whole worlds, all while quoting war poetry and the unity of humanity....and sometimes they crack jokes, there it is, we found your satire on the hypocrisy and mundane evil of imperialism, is that not obvious enough, does every character need to shout "I'm a fascist!" every other line?
this is literally the most confusing way to do satire ever and it's obvious in your literal paragraph. They aren't just making them superficially look heroic, they literally created a cosmological structure where being anything except a war criminal ends up with you either corrupted or murdered, and despite this they consistently portray space marines doing generous and heroic things despite fundamentally being little Hitler meat mechs. It is not good satire to make the people you're satirizing actually material do good in your world even if you try to counterbalance it with obscure war crimes they do no one will read (in the contrary, it makes it look apologetic of war crimes)
lmao you're just taking the worst interpretations by the chud members of the fandom at face value, the confusion arises when you let chuds relay the lore to you instead of engaging with it yourself
No, the whole "cosmological structure" argument chuds and leftists use to justify their likes and dislikes about the setting is exploded nonsense at this point, it's not 2008, the lore and storytelling has moved on
The setting has been restructured since 2017, many of the chuds were not happy about it and online culture critical leftists just never bothered to update their takes
It is not good satire to make the people you're satirizing actually material do good in your world even if you try to counterbalance it with obscure war crimes they do no one will read
No, that is good satire because it's describing how actual human beings operate and not simple caricatures, and if your concern is simply there are people who are not smart enough to get that, then that's not the satire's or your problem, stop obsessing at how chuds interpret shit and develop your own interpretation
If you wanted to make them likable, they should have been Salamanders or maybe Space Wolves. But then, I guess that makes it even harder to beat someone over the head with "fascism bad".
arguing that the Imperium are the Good Guys despite the fact they are Space Fascists because The Universe Is Just That Bad
arguing the Imperium are the Good Guys because they have Space Commissars and are therefore Communists doing Galactic War Communism, being literally ruled by Psychic Lenin's Preserved Corpse after the Horus Revisionism. Space Marines are the True Volcel Vanguard.their beef with the Tau is like a weird Sino-Soviet Split
they literally do colonialism and wealth inequality
Is good games journalism back? 👀
Shout-out to aftermath and RPS for holding it down in the meantime
Update: I played (space marine 2) with my friend, and yeah it’s a pretty solid game. I set the voices to Russian because it was silly.
dammit I didn't replace the video link in time
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